Feeling Bodies of Knowledge: Situating Knowledge Production Through Felt Embeddedness

Abstract

Abstract This paper argues that emotionally cognisant geographies not only write emotion into research products, but also examine emotional encounters during research as embodied and felt instantiations of scholars' entanglements in broader political geographies of communities, norms and institutions. It makes this argument by describing and analysing some of the authors' emotional experiences in the process of becoming a geographer of sexuality during PhD research. Taking felt embeddedness seriously in our writings moves us away from simply describing how research made us feel, to examining how these feelings and our negotiations of them generate more complex understandings of the impact of positionalities, political commitments and institutional situatedness on the conduct and indeed the feel of research processes. In this way, emotion does not simply liven up how we report our research, but is itself treated as a key ingredient in the production of geographical knowledge.