A Methodology for the Study of Affective Policies

Abstract

While interest in the study of affects grows, there is a need for methodologies that generate new analytical perspectives on subjects such as the connection between affects and policies. Reviewing the interconnections between the literature on affect and policy, I argue that methodological developments through visual ethnography can draw them closer together. I report the methods and analysis from a visual ethnographic study that sheds light on under-recognised affective characteristics of policies. This challenges the traditional exclusion of emotions and affect from the study of policy. It calls attention to the potential within drawing methods and their particular strengths for the study of affective policies and the promotion of embodied reflective qualitative methods. Methodologies that attend to affective policies can become an important resource to better understand the way that policies operate and to increase scrutiny of the impact on people’s lives.

Introduction

The starting point for this paper was ethnographic research on children’s involvement in unpaid care work as part of their family life. Intersecting inequalities provided a backdrop to their struggles to inhabit the role of young carer, a term that was important to secure their connection to support services. These children’s everyday choices were restricted and they were living a different kind of childhood to their peers. At the same time, conditions of poverty, discrimination against their disabled family members and prejudices against minoritised families formed part of their struggle. The conditions of inequality that shaped their individual position and marked out their family circumstances were relatively silenced within domestic conversations and likewise in the data I produced as I was present as a participant observer. Yet, the vocabulary of young carers services, social work, and compulsory education asserted themselves. These terms commanded space within the domestic ‘private sphere’, already brimming with sociological interest. Children and adults within the family adjusted themselves to this policy presence, accommodated it, and felt their consequences. Affect theory became a resource for my analysis of these observations. It spoke to my own feelings as a researcher present within families that were struggling to label and explain the difficulties in their care for one another. Exploring visual ethnography for the analysis of affective policies, I provide an account of emergent connections between affect and policy within the methods and the data. I encourage reflection and debate about the under-use of drawing within visual methods and consider what its methodological marginalisation might tell us about a tendency to avoid representation of the embodied, relational, and affective nature of research.

Affective relations and policy

Affects are the experiences that are generated by relationships between bodies (Kolehmainen and Juvonen, 2018; Wetherell, 2012). The presence and consequences of relationships ripple through people’s lives, causing feelings, ones that can be quite subtle or secret. Yet, affects also galvanise people to act because they can be inspired, directed or forced to do something arising from interactions with people. Thus, affects are material and embodied, as well as ephemeral and elusive (Lynch et al., 2021). People’s capacities, by which I mean the individual and collective scope to act, are changed by the dynamics of affective relations (Seyfert, 2012). A relationship has an impact on people’s energies and abilities, providing resources or draining them. This affective nature of relationships cumulatively affects capacities.

Studying affects can help academics label and examine the capacities of those involved and the ways these are interrelated. It can also be relevant to the study of inaction and stagnation, when relationships prevent the development of capacities, effectively holding people back. Affects are part of the picture of inequality whereby some bodies are afforded capacities and resources, while others are denied them (Ahmed, 2014; Berlant, 1997). Attention to affects can lead to a new understanding of the ways that bodies are altered by relationships and the inequality of the material consequences.

Policies are seen within my work as part of affective relations, altering capacities through those relationships. With the term policies, I am referring to the laws, bureaucratic directives, and layers of public services that effect the way a society thinks about people’s needs and organises a collective response. Policy analysis has shown a limited engagement with affect theory, in line with a history of technical approaches to policy analysis that disavows an affective or emotional engagement. It remains relatively disconnected from this growing area of discussion in the social sciences (Jupp, 2021; Wetherell, 2012). However, the interdisciplinary literature already suggests connections between affects and policy. For example, it speaks to the processes that create and dismantle inequalities. It explains the different emotions that are afforded to people, based on their categorisation through ethnicity/‘race’, sex/gender and disability (Ahmed, 2014; Butler, 1993), positioning some people as worthy of intervention, while other languish without support. Social provision and welfare can connect with feelings such as safety, relief, fear and love (Anderson, 2017; Frogett, 2002). While policies can frequently appear as the backdrop and context for research, affect-informed work challenges this. While policies from some perspectives are designed and working at a distance, affect theory helps academics understand the embodied and affective entanglements. By revisiting the social separation of policy-makers and policy subjects, academics can reappraise the idea of policy at a ‘distance’ and its sociological significance.

Methodological gaps

Clarifying what it means to study affect in relation to social policy is a conceptual issue but also a methodological one. Scholarly work inspired by affect theory has a complex relationship with the development and explication of methodology. While there are rich reflections on the process of theorising and researching affect (Berlant, 1997; Blackman, 2012; Sedgwick, 2003) there is little discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of methods. Reflection and self-interrogation are rich strands within work on affect theory but the affective and embodied relationship between researcher and participant in empirical work was less clear. I offer an example through which the challenges of researching and making claims about affective policies can be discussed. I build on the insights of Bøhling (2015) that ethnographic methods fit well with the study of affect and I advocate working ethnographically and also visually.

Lindén and Singleton (2020) say that to grapple with affect and policies methodologically through ethnography, scholars need to look to the peripheries of our usual vision and the elements of discomfort. By making sense of the unsettling aspects of encounters, researchers can reach and report on ‘affective layers’ (Lindén and Singleton, 2020: 432). It is significant that affect is theoretically and methodologically troublesome, with researchers possibly struggling with or reluctant to pin affect down through the discussion of methods. The call to account for embodied relations can sit awkwardly within institutional norms of academic research and methodological writing in some disciplines. I share the challenge of proceeding with a methodology that produced insights into affect.

It is interesting to note that drawing methods are frequently overlooked in research practice. It represents a minority of visual ethnographic research, with methods such as photography more dominant and developed. This paper reflects on the discomfort of drawing as an embodied practice that implicates the researcher alongside participants within the data. While my study utilised the associations between drawing and younger age groups, its marginalisation elsewhere might indicate a stigmatisation of drawing as childish among adults, or a cultural locating of drawing within childhood, that discourages the development of drawing methods. This visual ethnographic example, using drawing, provides a point of discussion for confronting the absence of embodiment in research.

Affective policies on young carers

I work with the example of English policies on a group called young carers- young people under the age of 18 that provide unpaid care for family members because of needs relating to disability, mental health, addiction or older age. Two laws guide state action on young carers: The Care Act 2014 and the Children and Families Act 2014. These require the local government to identify young carers and undertake a process of assessment, which examines and documents their needs. Without an assessment, young carers may be disadvantaged because they are not offered supportive services and there is evidence that large numbers of young carers do indeed miss out on this option (Brimblecombe et al., 2020). On the other hand, the design of the assessment and the context of resource scarcity means that the process may direct the attention of authorities towards stigmatising care arrangements (Alexander, 2021; Olsen, 1996) and do little to alleviate conditions of poverty and housing problems (Vizard et al., 2018). Nevertheless, policies recognise children as unpaid carers and they are the intended beneficiaries of public sector and charitable sector support services.

In speaking about young carers and carrying out research with them and their families, I observed and became connected to webs of care work. Care itself is constructed in part through affective relations (Lynch et al., 2021). Children are part of these relations through their participation in care work, their receipt of care labour, and their affective presence in family life. In this context, children have particular affects because of their cultural importance as symbols of vulnerability, innocence and hope (Keith and Morris, 1995). Affects are important for a sociological study of policies on young carers because this can capture the ways that policies are instigating forms of affective labour, shaping care relations and causing shifts in capacities in the lives of young carers.

Affective methodology

From the starting point of an ethnographic approach to research with young carers and their families, I faced a challenge of developing adaptable methods that would work within different domestic spaces. I turned to drawing as a creative and collaborative practice that could support a visual ethnography. I saw the use of drawing as having methodological benefits in terms of slower, more deliberate and reflective process of production. The use of drawing can create a different pace of research interaction and address ethical concerns about visual methods (Gabb, 2008; Pink, 2001; Wiles et al., 2012). It has ethical strengths, particularly in the case of working with children, because it avoids some dilemmas of excluding photographic and identifying images or of cutting these out from the presentation and dissemination of data. ¹ The product of visual research can be shared in a different way from text, enriching the analysis and later work that follows fieldwork.

The approach to developing visual ethnographic methods was informed by accounts of visual methods used in projects with children and families, particularly the family care portrait devised by Doucet (1996). In Doucet’s method, the researcher worked collaboratively with families to create a care portrait using words, collage and drawn images. The family care portrait can elicit discussion but also provide data (Christopher, 2020; Doucet 1996). Adopting and adapting these methods, I aimed to introduce moments of creativity and new ways of relating to participants through the research process. The methods used in my study were intended to support and deepen the involvement of children in the creation of data, recognising that for some children conveying information through creative and visual methods is more comfortable, tangible, and rewarding. I also took on a role in creating data, drawing with and alongside my participants. The creativity of visual ethnography can sharpen our attention and encourage greater consideration of the detail of domestic lives (Doucet and Klostermann, 2023).

My analysis drew on Banks’ (2001) approach to exploring the content of the image but also the process of its creation and construction, thereby considering the interplay between internal and external narratives. Banks’ (2001) analytic approach to visual data situates the visual images in the context of the wider ethnographic fieldwork and the external narrative of policies on young carers. It does not capture an unfiltered voice or produce simple, accessible forms of meaning (Allan, 2012, Scherer, 2016), but adds richness and complexity.

Affective fieldwork

Visual ethnographic data were produced with five families, each of which included a child treated by public and voluntary services as a young carer ² . Drawing activities created visual ethnographic data on care, family relationships, affects, and connections to policies. In the first drawing activity devised for this visual ethnography, family members were asked to draw how they imagined caring for one another in space. This introduced discussions of care in the future and hopes for alternative care arrangements. The second drawing activity, carried out on a different occasion, was a collaboration between family members and aimed to capture the dynamics, disputes, and agreements that underpinned everyday care. I offered the family a set of personalised themes on care topics and asked them to select one. These options were selected from aspects of care work that had been raised in conversation by those families, such as a basket of clothes for washing, a table with cutlery for a meal or a plate of food, with three images presented to each family as visual options for their joint drawing. Each person was asked to draw their perspective on this topic using tracing paper, which were stacked together with their family’s drawings and overlaid the image of the central theme. This interaction between tracing paper drawings in response to a care theme initiated a conversation and the sharing of different perspectives on the experience of care and domestic work. It encouraged reflection and airing different views that cohabited within the family (Christopher, 2020). A visual prompt rather than text-based categories was intended to be more accessible for child participants as well as adults, in contrast with the Doucet (1996) method. It also introduced a visual mode of thinking about care and showed its legitimacy within the research process. This provides another approach to eliciting conversations about family care arrangements, adapting the text-based method described by Doucet (1996) to promote the involvement of younger participants and alternative narratives.

Sapphire, a 10-year old young carer, drew her family in space and labelled how they would be a ‘no fights family’ (Figure 1). Each family member is carefully described with her pen, in their imagined space suits, holding hands and smiling. The space above their heads is topped by colourful planets, the sun, and the moon. The family’s bodies associated themselves with the line of planets and the ‘no fights family’ line of text that answers the question, ‘how would you care for each other in space?’. Sapphire was scared and upset by the fights within her family and her drawing expressed hope that they would stop. The drawing’s internal narrative was one of harmony, love, safety, and peace in an untroubled place. These associations and mood communicate the power of imagination within children’s experience of being a young carer and their interest in alternative way of living with care. The visual ethnographic method created space for Sapphire to express and record the topic of violence and fear intertwined with care by representing a wish for its resolution, which had been absent within other aspects of data collection.

Figure 1.

Sapphire’s drawing of ‘No Fights Family’.

External to this drawing, public services responded to the family’s conflicts and fights with assessment processes that resulted in Sapphire being labelled as a young carer and her siblings being labelled as recipients of her care, as children with special needs. Policies encouraged the use of formal assessments and the offer of support services to young carers, while deprioritising the provision of social care services to people with care needs within the family. This created a framework, seen in Sapphire’s family, that positioned young carers as beneficiaries of services but also tied them to care roles without social care support. This framework clashed with Sapphire’s hopes and imagined scenarios of harmony and caring cohesion. The family responded by incorporating policy frameworks into their conversations, working with the message that young carers received support, while those with disabilities continued to receive their care. The visual ethnographic data from Sapphire represented the affects of young carers living in a relationship to policies structuring family conflicts over care resources.

Alia was a 15-year old girl, classified as a young carer, in recognition of her role supporting her older sister Amber. Alia’s parents, Kaya and Ben, and her sister, Amber, all took part in the same drawing activity. They selected the theme of their joint cooking when they prepared batches of meals to freeze and store. Alia, the young carer, used her drawing to capture the position of each family member at a moment of collective activity to prepare batches of food in preparation for the month (Figure 2). Her drawing details the equipment and bustle of the kitchen with herself, her mother, and father. She shows her sister Amber, apart, reading a book lying on her bed. She draws attention to her sister’s ability to be separate, and in discussions, she stated that Amber faced different expectations and was less involved with the housework. Alia, as the youngest family member and a young carer, was placed in their visual schemas as a significant participant in care work. A family narrative was shared about Amber being separate with Amber talked about herself as ‘naughty’ in avoiding the work. Their father, Ben, responding to the same prompt, drew a critical perspective on the way they shared the work, with arrangements deviated from the ‘ideal’ in relation to Amber but also himself as a lesser contributor to care work (Figure 3).

Figure 2.

Alia’s tracing paper drawing of family cooking.

Figure 3.

Ben’s tracing paper drawing showing the ‘real’ contribution of each family member alongside the ‘ideal’ (drawn with initials that have been removed by the author).

Alia’s family created drawings that showed how they grappled with the awareness that one child was a young carer and the other had special educational needs, but also the gendered parental roles that enabled unequal allocations of work. The young carer’s drawing emphasised the feeling, experience, movement and relationships that surrounded care experiences. The father’s drawing created an assessment and a conclusion of regret. Each visual interaction with the theme introduced different affects that help us understand the ways that families live in relation to policies that create and promote labels of care and disability. The design of the tracing paper exercise encouraged a process of expressing and recording affect but also recognising how this existed in the relationships between family members and with policies.

The visual data from the ‘care in space’ exercise and the tracing paper drawings support the argument that affective policies on young carers function through relationships with families. The example of the care in space drawing showed the affects within the family linked to tensions about which identity positions entailed access to support and entailed greater responsibility for care work. The tracing paper drawings showed the connections family members felt to the assessment framework and the capacity this created to question care work allocation across age, gender, and disability categories. The visual data show that affective policies are embodied and socially located in the young carers’ families. Policies are shown as a discomforting presence (Lindén and Singleton, 2020) in young carers’ families.

The visual data relate to the bodies of the people that produced it, interacting with the materials, to draw care and the affective relationships embedded within it. The drawings relate to me as the researcher because of the role I took in encouraging the process, providing materials and preserving the drawn images. It also relates to the bodies of policies and their relationship with policy subjects.

Conclusion

Visual ethnographic methods provide insights into the relationship between affect and policy and its importance in people’s lives. Drawings showed people’s experience of policies shaping their capacities to assess themselves in line with policy discourse and understand their relationships to one another in ways directed by policies, which would not have been possible without these methods. It has implications for reflections on the researcher’s presence in fieldwork, alongside participants, particularly noting an absence of material, embodied and visual data that result from the marginal status of drawing methods in research. Visual ethnography that includes children alongside siblings and parents strengthens the understanding of policy subjectivities as relational and present within both childhood and care work.