In praise of awkwardness in the field: Increasing our understanding of relational concepts by reflecting on researchers’ emotion work

Abstract

In this article, we develop a new avenue for understanding the informative value of researchers’ emotions for qualitative research by deepening our understanding of awkwardness in the field. With this, we aim to develop Arlie Hochschild's notion of ‘emotion work’ further as a methodological tool. Awkwardness concerns discrepancies in researchers’ emotions that require and reveal emotion work. The argument is that reflecting on emotion work performed by the researcher in awkward situations is a way to gain insight into what we call ‘relational concepts’: concepts designating phenomena that reside and/or emerge in relationships between at least two persons. We show what this looks like in practice by presenting cases of awkwardness from three qualitative research projects revolving around such relational concepts, namely, recognition, dependency and dignity.

Introduction

In this article, we develop a new avenue for understanding the informative value of researchers’ emotions drawing on the work of Arlie Hochschild. We argue that moments of awkwardness can reveal previously unnoticed emotion work on the part of the researcher in their relationships with research participants. Inspired by our own fieldwork experiences in three individual research projects, we show that recognising and examining this emotion work can contribute to gaining a deeper understanding of the phenomenon under study, especially when said phenomenon is relational. Hence, our suggestion is that moments of awkwardness in the field can provide valuable analytical and theoretical insights into what we call ‘relational concepts’: fundamentally intersubjective phenomena that reside and/or emerge in relationships between at least two persons. We found that what sets relational concepts apart from other objects of study is that they are developed or reproduced in the research relationship itself. In other words, the researcher can observe the workings of relational concepts not only through interactions between participants but also in their own involvement with participants in the field. We contend that awkwardness is helpful for thinking through relational concepts because it is an inherently relational experience.

Other authors have explored the prevalence of awkwardness or discomfort in fieldwork, linking it to the researchers’ complex relationship with participants embedded in physical spaces and power relations (Chadwick, 2021; Hume and Mulcock, 2004). While awkwardness is indeed rooted in these complex relationships, it becomes possible to explore the relational quality of awkwardness more fundamentally when bringing researchers’ emotions and emotion work into view. We recognised that what we depicted as awkward during fieldwork concerned discrepancies in our own emotional experiences in relation to our involvement with participants. According to Hochschild (2003), there can be differences between (1) the way we feel, (2) the way we want to feel and (3) the way we believe we ought to feel. Hochschild describes how the individual can become conscious of a moment of ‘pinch’ or discrepancy between these three elements (p. 96). Moments of ‘pinch’ are at the heart of awkwardness. In our definition, awkwardness is the uncomfortable embodied experience that lingers around a ‘pinch’ and concerns a sense of ‘I do not want to feel this’ or ‘I should not feel this’. As we will demonstrate, awkwardness can be experienced in relation to intense emotions like anger or shame and be overwhelmingly painful, or it can be less tangible and just feel like an annoying unease.

‘Emotion management’ or ‘emotion work’ refers to the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling, including the way it is expressed, to fit what is desired or deemed appropriate in a certain situation (Hochschild, 2003). In other words, it is an attempt at eliminating the pinch by realigning the three elements mentioned above: feelings experienced, feelings desired and feelings imagined to fit the situation. Our conception of awkwardness as an inherently relational experience is grounded in the symbolic interactionist tradition leading up to the work of Hochschild (see Scott, 2015). Charles Horton Cooley (1902) emphasises that: ‘the imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society’ (p. 121). Imaginations of how we should feel are an important part of emotion work. Cooley's account of the three elements of the ‘looking-glass self’ explains how our experience of ourselves is relational and includes feeling: ‘the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgement of that appearance; and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification’ (p. 184, emphasis added). Feelings are thus governed by imagining how (a community of) others see(s) and judge(s) us.

Erving Goffman (1956) ¹ similarly explains the relational quality of the uncomfortable ‘flustering’ sensations of embarrassment and shame (Scheff, 2005). For him, in any social interaction where socially defined expectations of the self are not fulfilled, the interaction is disrupted, leading to these flustering emotions for the person discredited as well for others involved (1956: 268). We follow Hochschild as she argues that Goffman's focus on immediate situations and interactions obscures the ways these social expectations come about (1979: 556). She wishes to focus on the structure or ideology that shapes social expectations in specific situations as well as corresponding emotions. To this end, Hochschild introduces ‘feeling rules’ and ‘framing rules’ (1979, 2003). Feeling rules can be understood as social guidelines that direct ‘what we imagine we should and shouldn’t feel over a range of circumstances’ (2003: 82). Framing rules are the rules according to which we ascribe definitions or meanings to situations (p. 99).

We thus define awkwardness in fieldwork as a relational experience that occurs when certain social expectations are threatened or broken in situations involving the researcher and research participants. Scott et al. (2012) refer to such situations as ‘dramaturgical dilemmas’ of fieldwork relations, in which one's performance of the ‘ideal researcher’ gets disrupted. Such moments call for and reveal emotion work. As explored in the next section, emotion work as well as awkwardness is an inherent part of the researcher's job. When emotion work is performed to meet the requirements of a job, Hochschild defines this as emotional labour (2003 [1983]). Next to emotion work or ‘deep acting’, emotional labour might consist of ‘surface acting’. In surface acting, we comport ourselves in such a way that others do not know our true emotions; however, we do not actively change our own emotions as in the case of deep acting (2003 [1983]).

By applying Hochschild's emotion work theory to ourselves as researchers, we show the potential of analysing feelings of awkwardness for gaining analytical and theoretical insight in relational concepts. In what follows, we each present a case we experienced as awkward, drawing from three individual research projects conducted in the Netherlands focused on relational concepts, respectively, recognition, dependency and dignity. These projects had an ethnographic design with the relational concept being the research topic as well as the main sensitising concept with which fieldwork and analysis were conducted (Bowen, 2006). We each set out to contribute to social-scientific theory-building by means of qualitative data collection. The concepts under study were approached inductively from a theoretical perspective that prioritises their relational quality. Recognition was understood as an experience that is acquired intersubjectively. Through relations of recognition, individuals develop a positive sense of self (Honneth, 2003). Dependency was explored as a particular type of relation arising from the asymmetry between one person's need for care and another's provision of this care (Engster, 2019; Kittay, 1999). Finally, dignity was approached as a quality that emerges in relational practices and can thus be lost or gained in social interactions (Jacobson, 2007; Leget, 2013).

In our cases of awkwardness, we show what we learned from reflecting on our emotion work in these moments and how these lessons helped us to empirically and theoretically unpack the relational concept that we were trying to understand. In the process, we aim to develop emotion work as a methodological tool to be used as part of researcher reflexivity, by further deepening our understanding of awkwardness as a relational experience in the field. First, however, we set up our contribution by discussing the ways in which researchers’ emotions and their value for qualitative research have been depicted in the literature and how we build on this work.

Researchers’ emotions in qualitative research

The idea that researchers’ emotions play a central role in fieldwork has long been established (Hume and Mulcock, 2004; Kleinman and Copp, 1993). Bergman Blix and Wettergren (2015) argue that while researchers’ emotions used to be treated mainly as a by-product to be dealt with, they are now increasingly understood as important sources of information (see also Davies and Spencer, 2010). We build on two bodies of work: one that draws specifically on Hochschild's emotion work theory as it pertains to doing qualitative research and one that does not focus on Hochschild's sociology of emotions as such but recognises memorable moments of heightened emotion during fieldwork as informative. We first use the literature that builds on emotion work theory to set a premise for our argument: emotion work is an inherent part of the researcher's job, as is awkwardness (Scott et al., 2012). We also contend that because emotion work is inherent to the job, it is important to reflect on how this impacts researchers. Second, we argue that awkwardness is one of those moments of heightened emotion of special interest to qualitative researchers. Finally, we consider two main ways in which authors found, like we did, that reflecting on emotion work is valuable in terms of gaining analytical and theoretical insight.

Qualitative research is an embodied experience, and fieldwork therefore always requires a degree of emotion work (Dickson-Swift et al., 2009). In building relationships and rapport with participants, emotions are managed, for instance, trying to display feelings through facial expressions or tone of voice that are deemed appropriate in a first fieldwork encounter (e.g. friendliness, confidence, calm), even when conflicting with the feelings actually felt (e.g. hostility, insecurity, upset), or trying not to show any feelings through facial expressions or tone of voice at all, even when experienced intensely. This emotion management might happen quite spontaneously as we try to make others and ourselves feel as comfortable as possible in the research setting, avoiding awkwardness. There is a strategic quality to this emotion work too, as it is geared towards building trust and becoming embedded in the research site. Gaining and securing access to the field is a process in which feelings of awkwardness, of the researcher and of participants, must be continuously managed, and therefore, emotion work is indispensable (Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2015; Scott et al., 2012).

Recognising that researchers always participate emotionally and perform emotion work when conducting qualitative research draws attention to how this impacts researchers themselves. Interactions affect both participant and researcher, and emotion work can be costly. Researchers may, for example, experience emotive dissonance: alienation stemming from the discrepancy between feelings experienced and feelings displayed for strategic reasons, leading to feelings of shame for being ‘fake’ (Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2015). They may also feel the ‘dramaturgical stress’ of performing an ‘ideal researcher’ role, one which is professional, competent and inscrutable (Scott et al., 2012). Additionally, authors point out that researchers might encounter emotionally disturbing situations that can lead to emotional injury or exhaustion (Dickson-Swift et al., 2009; Shaw et al., 2020). This has led many to argue for recognition of the emotion work researchers perform and the impact it can have on wellbeing. Reflection, collegial and therapeutic support as well as training students on these matters are suggested as ways to prepare and protect researchers (Carroll, 2013; Chadwick, 2021; Dickson-Swift et al., 2009; Nelson, 2020; Shaw et al., 2020).

Secondly, authors like Trigger et al. (2012) do not draw on Hochschild's emotion work theory but claim that memorable moments of heightened emotion in the field should be understood as an important source of information. Intense subjective experiences on the part of the researcher, or so-called ‘revelatory moments’, are deemed relevant for the results of the project as the disposition of the researcher and their findings are significantly reshaped in these instances. It is through reflecting on these moments that researchers can come to a richer ethnographic understanding of the field, for example, through an intense emotion such as grief (Henry, 2012), which can point at previously elusive aspects of, for example, local beliefs, culture and values, and relationship networks and dynamics. We contend that moments of awkwardness can be understood as revelatory moments, even when not accompanied by extreme emotions, although they often might be.

Chadwick (2021) argues that moments of discomfort in research are important in terms of ethical accountability and knowledge production. She requests researchers to stay and work with discomfort instead of trying to smooth over the things that do not make easy or comfortable sense. The researchers’ position is rooted in identity and status and discomfort might reveal differences and power relations regarding participants and the research setting. Dismissing this can lead the reproduction of hierarchical and dominant forms of knowing and power. Chadwick makes a crucial point here, but our aim is different. We try to better understand this discomfort and the way in which reflecting on it can yield theoretical and analytical insight. Next to the ethical reasons brought up by Chadwick, we argue that it is important not to gloss over awkwardness – even if we might be inclined to do so because of how uncomfortable it is– because it uncovers previously unnoticed emotion management performed by the researcher.

Finally, we look at two ways in which authors describe how reflecting on emotion work led to theoretical and analytical insight. Carroll (2013) and Nelson (2020) show how their emotion management affected their identity during fieldwork. Next to raising issues of researcher wellbeing, these authors demonstrate how their experiences led to new ideas regarding Hochschild's emotion work theory. Carroll (2013) recounts that in her research with IVF patients, the emotion work she performed when collecting participants’ stories demanded her ‘to unite with my own deeply private emotions and desires’ (p. 557). She argues that while Hochschild focusses on the estranging effects of emotional labour, she found that emotion work can contrarily result in the foregrounding of a researcher's own emotions and identities. Nelson (2020) shows that emotion management can change the researcher's identity in a fundamental way. Their study on LGBT+ identities as a queer researcher transformed their experience of their queerness, which led them to identifying as non-binary. Nelson adds to Hochschild's theory by showing how positive emotions in research, in this case of connection and similarity, can affect the researcher's identity.

Bergman Blix (2009) and Wettergren (2015) show that emotion work, as depicted in Hochschild's theory, can be understood as a valuable methodological tool. Information lies in the fact that researchers’ emotions can be congruent with the situation at hand to smaller or larger extent; a match as well as a mismatch of emotions is of interest (Bergman Blix, 2009). Wettergren (2015) describes how in her study on undocumented migrants and frontline workers, she experienced and participated in the emotions of the field, identifying with both groups. Through seeing resemblances and differences in the emotions experienced and the emotions (that could be) displayed by herself and the different participants, she came to understand how emotion work enacted by frontliners and migrants was conducive to their respective goals. In these accounts, participating emotionally as a researcher is a way to gain better insight into the emotions and emotion work of participants by exploring one's own feelings in comparison to theirs. In this article, we further develop emotion work as a methodological tool for researcher reflexivity, by deepening our understanding of awkwardness in the field and showing how reflecting on these moments leads to a better understanding of relational concepts.

Cases of awkwardness

We now present three cases from individual qualitative PhD projects for which we conducted fieldwork in the Netherlands between 2013 and 2018, drawing on excerpts of original fieldnotes, reflections made in the course of the research project and in the writing of this article. Our research projects concerned persons marginalised in society, respectively, young men with mild intellectual disabilities working in sheltered workshops, people with intellectual disabilities living in assisted living homes and people who have multiple socio-economic and psycho-social problems receiving various forms of care and support. Working with marginalised persons already points towards probable (power) inequalities between us as researchers and research participants (see Shaw et al., 2020). These inequalities indeed played a role in the way our complex relationships with participants became explicit in the cases. Parts of our own identities, respectively, being a researcher in a privileged position and a woman, a gay man and a person with experience as a ‘client’ of professional care and support, also play a specifically significant role. As the cases concern our individual fieldwork experiences, they are written from the perspective of the ‘I’ instead of the ‘we’ used in the remainder of this article.

Case 1: recognition

This case (MS) draws on 19 months of ethnographic fieldwork (2013–2016) in sheltered workshops for people with (mild) intellectual disabilities in the Netherlands. Sheltered workshops are workplaces for people who would not otherwise have access to the open labour market. The sheltered workshops included in this research focused on technical reparations, green maintenance and retail work. A total of 37 workers with mild intellectual disabilities and 22 professionals supporting them were included in the research. The main method of the study was participant observation. It consisted of joining workers and supervisors in their daily activities at the sheltered workshops, carrying out tasks (such as repairing things, weeding or cleaning toilets) and learning from the workers, engaging in informal conversations, drinking coffee and taking breaks together. The aim of the research was to understand in what ways young men (ages 18–30) with mild intellectual disabilities experience recognition at work.

The moment described below took place when I returned to one of the workshops after six months of fieldwork elsewhere. One of the professionals was retiring and invited me to join his farewell party at the sheltered workshop. Being the only woman at the workshop, I usually dressed as ‘masculine’ as possible on fieldwork days, with trousers, large t-shirts, and sweaters:

Summer 2015. Early morning, I am hesitating what to wear. It is a very hot day today. The reluctance of wearing trousers is too big and I decide to put on a summer dress with a hemline slightly above the knee. On arrival at the sheltered workshop, I immediately notice my outfit does something to the young men. We are listening to a band playing. Kevin sits on my left side and Marco sits a few meters further, with his body turned towards me. They both wear sunglasses and regularly burst out in laughter. Another young man, Jamal, sits on my right side and notices my discomfort. On his phone, he types ‘them look at your body’ and shows this to me. The music is too loud to talk. I nod in disbelief (LTT, 1 July 2015).

Not understanding what the young men were laughing about made me feel extremely uncomfortable. Despite Jamal's hint, I tried to convince Jamal and myself that Marco and Kevin – with whom I built an especially strong relationship over the past two years – had gotten used to my presence, including my female body, so the laughter could not be about that.

A bit later I see Kevin holding two fingers as a V-sign in front of his mouth and sticking his tongue out (symbolising oral sex). Marco can’t stop laughing when I catch him, and Kevin is grinning (LTT, 1 July 2015).

My feeling of discomfort was replaced by the feeling of worry that I was indeed the source of their laughter. The moment I saw Kevin hold up his fingers, I could no longer ignore what was happening. The discomfort and worry were replaced by a third, swift emotion of shame upon realising they were indeed referring to my bare legs, sexualising me.

It is only a matter of seconds until my anger takes over my shame, and I yell at Kevin that I ‘tolerate their obscene jokes and demeaning women's talk’, as long as they don’t involve me in it. I continue by saying that I have known them for almost two years and that ‘it is the least I expect from them’. The young men witnessing the situation are laughing and applauding Kevin for what he dared to do. Kevin is the centre of attention and, despite my anger, seems to feel elated (LTT, 1 July 2015).

My anger made explicit previously unnoticed emotion work related to my identity as a researcher and as a woman. It made me aware of all the moments I had suppressed feelings of anger and indignation about young men's misogynistic comments and actions. I engaged in such moments of deep acting because of strongly established ideas of what a researcher should and should not do (not interfere too much), as well as what a woman should and should not do. As Hochschild argues, more than men, women are expected to master their anger and aggression in service of ‘being nice’ (1983: 162). The fact that I felt shame first and only later anger, or that I suppressed my anger in multiple moments throughout the fieldwork, points at the strength of feeling rules to govern my (emotional) exchanges with my respondents, in this case, the sense that I should not openly express my anger. As I faced being sexualised, my habitual emotion work came under severe pressure, and I burst out in anger.

When I return to the sheltered workshop a few days later, I hear Kevin repeating what I said at the barbecue to one of his colleagues. He tells his colleague that I told him to not make obscene jokes about me because it hurts me. I can tell from the volume of his voice as well as his frequent glances that he wants me to hear what he is saying to his colleague (LTT, 3 July 2015).

Reflecting on my emotion work helped me unpack the relational concept of recognition I was studying. First, I experienced first-hand what it means to understand recognition as an intersubjectively shaped experience that is fundamental for developing a positive sense of self (Honneth, 2003). As a researcher I was a fundamental part – one of the ‘subjects’ – in those inter-subjective experiences of recognition in the workplace. I played an active role in fostering or denying experiences of recognition for young men, and they in turn played an active role in my experiences of (mis)recognition. My outburst of anger was interpreted by the young men as a sign of recognition. The fact that I reacted emotionally to their sexist actions communicated that I took them seriously, that I cared about them and our relationship and that I held them accountable for it too. It gave Kevin and Marco a degree of intimacy and sign of ‘special friendship’, or what Honneth would call ‘recognition as love’ (2003). This special relation of recognition enabled Kevin and Marco to develop a positive sense of self and present themselves as ‘better’ or more ‘valued’ than other workers at the sheltered workshop, not in terms of work-achievements but at least in terms of ‘exclusive’ friendships (see Sebrechts, 2018).

A second, theoretical insight that this situation taught me is that misrecognition is often enfolded in different ways and to varying degrees in everyday practices of recognition (Sebrechts et al., 2019). By daring to sexualise me, Kevin enjoyed recognition from his colleagues, but his recognition came at the expense of my misrecognition. Consequently, I started noticing this ‘ambivalence of recognition’ in other situations at the sheltered workshops too. On a daily basis, Kevin and his colleagues fail to feel valued for their work contributions. They feel ashamed of having to work at a sheltered workshop in a context where regular labour market employment is widely seen as the way for people with (intellectual) disabilities to participate in society (Sebrechts, 2018). In this context of misrecognition, the young men present alternative standards of recognition in which aggression, bullying and sexual performances are central. While theories of recognition are widely built on the assumption that recognition necessarily leads to greater social justice (e.g. Fraser and Honneth, 2003), this situation showed me that it is not unambiguously the case. For the young men I studied, recognition came at a price which can hardly be called socially just: the misrecognition of other aspects of their own lives or of other people.

Case 2: dependency

I (SvdW) carried out my ethnographic research on the meaning of dependency in the lives of people with intellectual disabilities living in assisted living homes between 2017 and 2018. In the Netherlands, these homes typically house eight to ten people, who receive around-the-clock support from a team of assistants. My principal method was shadowing: a form of participant observation in which the researcher follows a single person for an entire day, often combined with on-the-spot interviews (MacDonald and Simpson, 2014; Van der Weele and Bredewold, 2021). In this way, I joined participants in their daily routine, accompanying them at home, work, appointments, leisure activities and so on. The focus of my observations was on the relationships of dependency they maintain with their care assistants. In this way, a total of 28 residents and 13 of their assistants were shadowed one or two days. In doing so, I visited 12 group homes ran by seven care organisations.

Summer 2017. On a hot summer day in August, I was shadowing 31-year-old Josh. We spent most of the day at the supermarket where Josh works, where he showed me how to carry out his main tasks, such as filling up the shelves and cleaning up spilled goods. Afterwards, we had a coffee at the café where Josh is employed. In the café, Josh told me about an organised group holiday to Mallorca. Curious about such holidays, I asked Josh about his experience. Was he accompanied by care assistants? Josh confirmed. He told me there were three care assistants he really liked, but he did not like one of them as much. ‘Three were nice, but one… was gay’, he explained. ‘I really don’t like gays. I find that [homosexuality] horrible. So disgusting’.

For a moment, Josh's remarks shut me down completely, as I was not sure how to respond or act:

It feels like a thousand thoughts cross my mind at once. I’m gay. Some of Josh's housemates know I have a boyfriend, but does Josh, too? Is he trying to hurt me on purpose, or is he ignorant of my sexuality? He wasn’t there when I told the group, but someone else might have told him. Should I say something? Clumsily, I try to change the subject. Luckily, the waitress approaches us, who is an acquaintance of Josh's. Her conversation distracts us from what was just said. (C2, 8 August 2017)

I felt sad, angry and confused. I wanted to tell Josh his comments hurt me, but I was worried showing my emotions – or coming out to him – might ruin my rapport with him. But if I did not say anything, I would have failed to stand up for what I believe in. At the same time, I caught myself thinking: should I even feel hurt by his homophobia? It is not his fault – he is intellectually disabled. I was ashamed of this thought and tried to push it away immediately. This discrepancy between my actual feelings and how I thought I ought to have felt rendered my interaction with Josh an awkward one as we have defined it.

My impulse was to suppress my hurt, anger and shame in favour of the curiosity and sympathy I thought I should feel. But this attempt at deep acting failed as I could not help but feel upset. In the end, I simply tried to hide my feelings and force myself to assume a calm neutrality to make sure I remained on good terms with Josh. In other words, I chose a tactic of surface acting, which I believed would rescue my data. But my emotional labour came at the cost of emotional withdrawal, making it hard to properly engage with the field.

I feel absent-minded and unsafe. I have lost all sympathy for Josh. I am no longer focused and want to go home. (C2, 8 august 2017)

In the end, I decided not to bring up his comments again and neither did he. Josh and I parted on friendly terms later that day. But I was relieved to leave the group home. The emotional labour I carried out exhausted me. On my way home, I wrote in my fieldwork journal:

In earnest, I feel lousy for the remainder of the day [after the awkward moment]. I’m impatient with Josh, I’m done with my job, I want to go home. I’m just done. I don’t want to devote my attention to Josh anymore. I feel like a fraud, faking interest in his hobbies and his ambitions. All day, I had been trying hard to maintain some sense of equality between us (…). But Josh destroyed any sense of equality there was with his remark. All of a sudden, he makes me feel small. But still: as long as I don’t say anything, I still elevate myself above him by taking my position as a researcher and not as a private person, as a gay man (Research diary, 8 August 2017).

The diary entry suggests I had been engaged in surface acting long before my awkward moment with Josh, ‘trying to maintain some sense of equality’ in a relationship I assumed to be asymmetrically dependent. I believed that as researcher, I was in power, as I was the one observing and writing about Josh. Hence, I thought the onus was on me to cultivate equality through emotional labour, for instance by showing interest in Josh's life. In this way, my awkward moment with Josh hinted at the kind of emotional labour that can go into maintaining and alleviating an asymmetrical dependency relationship. Throughout my fieldwork, I found that many of the support workers I met did exactly the same: a large chunk of their energy went into mitigating (what they perceived as) the deleterious aspects of dependency. I later developed this idea under the rubric of ‘dependency work’, which consists in everything care professionals undertake to alleviate what they consider to be the ‘problem’ of dependency (Van der Weele et al., 2021). Additionally, the interaction with Josh also showed how a moment of ‘pinch’ can make that dependency work suddenly unbearable, even though it mostly happened without much conscious thought.

At the same time, the deep sense of awkwardness I felt also showed that the relationship of dependency between Josh and me was not as asymmetrical as I had imagined. My anger, shame and powerlessness in the face of Josh's remarks indicated just how dependent I was on him. The success of my fieldwork was (in my mind) dependent on his willingness to open up to me and to engage with me – in short, on how much he liked me. Of course, this form of dependency had been there all along. But I had not noticed it until a negative affect forced the reality of my dependency on Josh upon me. In this way, my awkward moment with Josh also suggested a second idea that became important for my project: that while dependency is virtually always present in relationships, it does not really allow itself to be experienced until it produces some negative affect or friction. ‘Dependency’ is the name we give to an affect we feel when our dependency on another is suddenly and painfully exposed – as it was for me when Josh expressed his disgust of homosexuality (Van der Weele et al., 2019).

Case 3: dignity

The aim of my (JS) research was to uncover experiences of (in)dignity of people with multiple socio-economic and psycho-social problems in the context of care and support from the perspectives of both service-users and social workers. In the Netherlands, this care and support is organised at the local level. A main goal of the project was to find out how to make the abstract concept ‘human dignity’ more applicable to local policy and practice. Fieldwork took place between 2016 and 2017 and consisted of three phases. In phase one, the focus was on meeting service-users directly through participant-observation at community centre activities or other locally organised events, as well as accompanying social workers on the job. The second phase consisted of formal interviews with nine service-users and 13 social workers. Finally, the third phase concerned three focus groups with service-users and social workers.

In the early stages of fieldwork, I joined weekly discussion nights at a community centre run by volunteers where about ten people would talk about issues they find relevant. There were no professionals present as the evenings revolved around exchange between peers. In my field report, I described feeling uncomfortable sitting at the discussion table each week and being notably tired afterwards. At the end of the fourth session, called ‘beyond addiction’, the following took place:

Summer 2016. I walk outside with Dolly and Ileen (both are much older than me. Ileen is here every week, and I am already fond of her. Dolly is new and just shared a personal and intense story about addiction).

We stand in the courtyard, and Dolly and Ileen are talking when Dolly turns to me:

Dolly: ‘And you said nothing the whole time’.

I hesitantly explain ‘I’m not really a participant’.

Ileen says: ‘But they (one of the organisers) did ask you to engage in the conversation last week’.

I say that this is true but that I found addiction a difficult topic to talk about. I suddenly feel bad again about my strategy not to involve myself in the discussion (D4, 8 June 2016).

The strong sense of awkwardness I experienced is not reflected in this report, but I kept remembering this moment, accompanied by a ‘pinch’, throughout my fieldwork. When Dolly confronted me with my silence that evening, I noticed the discrepancy between the embarrassment and guilt I felt and the more neutral or positive emotions I thought I should feel towards the people at the discussion nights that were now participants in my research. I was not living up to the ‘ideal researcher’ role as I had imagined it (see Scott et al., 2012).

Being an early career researcher, I was engaging in deep acting to try and feel as I imagined a professional should feel. However, as the possibility that my presence as ‘not really a participant’ could be disturbing the discussion nights began to dawn on me, my emotion work turned out to be rather unsuccessful. At the time, I could not imagine that sharing my own experiences would be of any value, not in the least because of the privilege of my life situation and experiences compared to those of the others present. I was even afraid that I might offend people. The issue was not solved; the discussion nights ended without me contributing in the way I felt was desired.

Soon, I found myself at a different site in a similar situation. I enrolled in a six-week course on (self-)stigma. The course is based on the peer-support principle where both participants and (paid) trainers share their experiences concerning (self-)stigma. This time, my role was negotiated explicitly before I started participant-observation. I was told that if I did not participate this would: ‘interfere with our collective learning process, and it would make it difficult for the participants to be open’, adding that ‘you wouldn’t get to see how it works’. Even with the awkward experience of the discussion nights freshly in mind, I still felt that my own role in a peer group could not be that relevant. However, I was forced to change my approach to be able to gain access. I proposed to participate in a ‘double role as a researcher and a participant’ and finally, I received an e-mail saying that I was welcome to join.

What the discussion nights taught me was that I needed to be decisive about what I could disclose about my personal life in such a setting, as not to freeze up in the moment. I discussed this with one of the trainers of the course and quite easily we found that like other participants I had experience as a client of professional care and support due to anxiety issues. I felt uncomfortable about the idea that I would have to talk about these experiences in the fieldwork setting, as this was not something I usually discussed at work. However, next to making the commitment to share about myself for strategic reasons, I also did not want the awkwardness experienced at the discussion nights to be repeated because it felt wrong towards other participants.

Participating in the course with a new level of self-disclosure led to a different fieldwork experience. I report that I am ‘starting to enjoy doing this course’, going home with ‘positive energy’, and ‘sharing a lot today, completely unexpectedly for myself’. With a better grasp of the framing rules of the situation beforehand, working on feeling became more successful this time around. My feelings were not only more aligned with the image of a professional researcher but also with those of a ‘good participant’ in the peer group.

Having these two different experiences contributed to my understanding of dignity violating and dignity promoting practices. The moments of awkwardness revealed the emotion management I engaged in to fit the image of a professional researcher and that of a good participant in the peer setting. In turn, this led to a better understanding of the framing and feeling rules dominant in peer-support as it relates to the larger societal context. Firstly, I found that peer support promotes the dignity of participants through sharing, recognising and legitimising experiences within a group. Service-users find peer groups to be a safe space that counters experiences of inequality (e.g. being misunderstood, being stigmatised) that are prominent in other relationships of care and support and society more generally (Schmidt et al., 2018). My presence at the discussion nights without contributing had threatened, although mildly, these mechanisms of dignity promotion.

I got to see and experience more of these mechanisms by participating in the (self-)stigma course. However, despite my efforts with self-disclosure and the common ground found, the inherent inequality of the situation remained tangible. The time I spent with this group was paid as part of my academic job to gain a qualification, while other participants usually had no stable job or financial security. This inherent inequality resembled somewhat the situation I observed between service-users and social workers. I saw that to promote the dignity of service-users, social workers attempted to make the relationship they had with service-users more equal despite its inherent inequality (in terms of resources, power and knowledge and the mere fact of having a help-seeking and help-providing party). I later clustered these activities under the term ‘equalising dignity work’ (Schmidt, 2022). Secondly, reflecting on my emotion work allowed for insight into the workings and importance of ‘equalising’ as a strategy of dignity promotion. I later understood I was performing equalising myself in an effort not to threaten but to further the dignity promoting mechanisms of the peer support group of which I was part.

Discussion

Researchers’ emotion work might largely go unnoticed as it is often spontaneous and habitual, but we contend that reflecting on it is worthwhile. Emotion work refers to the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling, including the way it is expressed, to fit what is desired or deemed appropriate in a certain situation (Hochschild, 2003). As researchers perform emotion work as part of their job anyway (Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2015; Dickson-Swift et al., 2009; Scott et al., 2012), reflection opens up avenues for it to be of value for academic projects. In this article, we present a new way to understand this value by developing emotion work further as a methodological tool to analyse moments of awkwardness. With our cases, we have shown how awkwardness concerns discrepancies in the way we feel, the way we want to feel and the way we believe we ought to feel during fieldwork, mostly vis-à-vis research participants. Such discrepancies call for emotion management on the part of the researcher that can reveal interesting aspects of the relational concept under study.

First, in case ‘recognition’, an awkward fieldwork experience helped to empirically and theoretically unpack the relational concept of recognition. The moment of awkwardness revealed previously unnoticed emotion work: anger was repeatedly suppressed, and this was guided by deeply established ideas (‘feeling rules’) of what it means to be a good researcher and a ‘nice woman’. Reflecting on the moment where anger could no longer be suppressed led to the insights that (1) getting angry at someone can be a way of recognising them (Sebrechts, 2018), and (2) misrecognition is often enfolded in different ways and to varying degrees in everyday practices of recognition (Sebrechts et al., 2019).

Second, in case ‘dependency’, an awkward fieldwork experience illuminated the efforts we frequently undertake to navigate dependency relationships. It did so by revealing the emotional labour involved in maintaining rapport in the researcher–informant relationship – itself a relationship of (mutual) dependency. This awkward moment thus helped to apprehend (1) the work that people inadvertently put into attempts to equalise or otherwise alleviate relations of dependency (later conceptualised by Van der Weele et al. (2021) as ‘dependency work’), and (2) that dependency is virtually always present in relationships but does not really allow itself to be experienced until it produces some negative affect or friction (Van der Weele et al., 2019).

Third, in case ‘dignity’, two different fieldwork experiences with peer support led to an increased understanding of the relational practices that violate or promote dignity. Moments of awkwardness revealed the emotion work engaged in to try and fit the image of ‘a professional researcher’ and ‘a good participant in the peer setting’. When carefully reflected on the framing an feeling rules at play, this allowed for grasping: (1) how peer support works to promote dignity in relation to dignity violating practices that also occur in the context of care and support (Schmidt et al., 2018), and (2) the way dignity promotion takes shape in unequal circumstances, like those between social workers and service-users, by performing what was later termed ‘equalising dignity work’ (Schmidt, 2022).

We propose that emotion work is a methodological tool for researcher reflexivity in the sense that it can aid in comparing our experiences as researchers concerning relational concepts to those we observe between others in the field. This is much like what Bergman Blix (2009) and Wettergren (2015) argue for concerning emotions. Relational concepts, like recognition, dependency and dignity, are not only observable ‘out there’ but form part of the relationship between researcher and participant. This offers an interesting opportunity to investigate the workings of such concepts through the researcher's own involvement with others in the field. Moments of awkwardness are especially relevant in this regard as they make emotion management performed by the researcher in navigating relationships with participants explicit. In particular, researchers studying concepts characterised by their relational quality, such as care, violence, equality, discrimination, friendship and belonging, are likely to benefit from this approach.

Like emotion work, experiences of awkwardness and discomfort are inherent to doing qualitative fieldwork, especially participant observation. As Hume and Mulcock (2004) state: ‘By definition, participant observers deliberately place themselves in a series of very awkward social spaces […]’ (p. xi). With their edited volume these authors aim to show that uncomfortable fieldwork is often good fieldwork, and they wish to normalise the researcher’s feelings of personal inadequacy and social failure that come with this discomfort. Looking back on our own fieldwork experiences, it would have been easy for us to dismiss our feelings of awkwardness as mere products of being young, inexperienced, or even a bit foolish. To be sure, there have been moments in which we were inclined to dismiss them as just that, but we now find that doing so would have been a waste.

By reflecting on our cases of awkwardness in the field, we also learned that the emotions involved as well as the relational concepts concerned are morally charged. Anger, shame and guilt are all moral emotions that signal something being ‘wrong’. These emotions were related to how we respectively wished to ‘recognise’ (or be ‘recognised’ by) our participants, promote the ‘dignity’ of participants and not make ‘dependency’ too explicit in interactions with participants. Looking back, we see how our own feeling and acting towards participants were motivated by notions of right and wrong with respect to the relational concept under study. We came to understand that recognition, dependency and dignity not only describe and qualify relationships and interactions between people but also evaluate them in some way. They are ‘thick’ concepts, which are descriptive and evaluative at once (Van der Weele, 2021). Hence, it makes sense that we analysed the way we managed moral emotions to learn more about the relational concepts we were trying to understand. We suspect that understanding researchers not only as affective agents but also as moral agents is worthwhile when practicing reflexivity, something that warrants further investigation. For now, this conclusion makes us think that our approach to emotion work as a methodological tool as presented in this article could be especially relevant for people working in the fields of sociology of morality (Abend, 2010) and moral anthropology (Mattingly and Throop, 2018).

How to use emotion work as a methodological tool for researcher reflexivity to better understand relational concepts? Firstly, it is important to recognise awkwardness in qualitative research. We propose that applying Hochschild's emotion work theory on ourselves as researchers combined with understanding the potential of feelings of awkwardness is key. We define awkwardness as an embodied experience of the researcher, rooted in moments of ‘pinch’ that follow from discrepancies in emotional experience (Hochschild, 2003). Awkwardness is unpleasant and we are inclined to look away from it; in the moment itself, when jotting down fieldnotes, when reading and re-reading our fieldnotes in the process of analysis and maybe even in writing up our findings. Recognising moments of awkwardness is therefore somewhat counterintuitive at first. However, it is precisely the sense of ‘I do not want to feel this’ or ‘I should not feel this’ that is of interest.

In the cases presented, we all describe a sense of awkwardness that is unpleasant and that involves keeping certain emotions at arm's length for however long possible. The cases differ in terms of degree and display of heightened emotion and, in turn, in how spontaneous or more strategic the emotion management performed by the researcher was. Case ‘recognition’ concerns the strongest display of emotions and spontaneity; case ‘dependency’ is characterised by strong but covert emotions and surface acting, and case ‘dignity’ is about more subtle emotions as well as more strategic emotion management. By discussing these different cases, we show that the issue is not so much the intensity or mode of emotion (management); each process of emotion management is relevant. As Hochschild (2003) argues, it is not the success or outcome of emotion work that is of interest; it is the effort itself. Our efforts of emotion management revealed something about the relational concepts under study.

Secondly, using emotion work as a methodological tool requires thorough reflection. The pinch at the root of awkwardness is a good starting point for further investigation. The first step is to notice which emotions are concerned, for example, anger, guilt, shame, joy and excitement. The next question is how emotions are at odds: which affects does the researcher prefer to feel and which affects are actually experienced? The final question is: where does this discrepancy stem from? Which ‘feeling rules’ and ‘framing rules’ are at play? (Hochschild, 1979, 2003). The experience of awkwardness is always located in relationships, dynamics, (power) structures and morally charged convictions and ideas in the field. The challenge is to understand what about the relational concept is revealed in the researcher's process of emotion management. This can be done by comparing the findings concerning the researcher's own involvement to what has been observed between others in the course of the project.

We contend that emotional labour is part of researcher professionalism. As demonstrated, researchers can perform both deep and surface acting when conducting fieldwork. While Hochschild discusses examples from working at universities, she does not make a sharp distinction between emotion work in private corporations versus the public sector (2003 [1983]). However, we find that researchers’ emotions are not commodified in the same way as those of people working in the for-profit services-industries. While emotion work is part of the job, researchers’ emotions are not instrumentalised by universities to sell a product. Other authors have demonstrated emotion work on the job to be more self-directed than Hochschild's theory implies as well as benefitting the worker (Rodriquez, 2014; Tolich, 1993). For researchers, this is also the case: we can to a great extent decide how to show emotion and can draw on this to benefit our projects. Moreover, as we have shown, we enter relationships with research participants and experience emotional attachments as well as moral obligations towards them. We believe it is this, and not any instrumental goal, that often triggers emotional labour. Dealing with such relational complexities is part of the profession of the academic researcher.

We could not have built the theoretical arguments we presented in this article exclusively on the basis of these particular cases; they are the fruits of much larger research projects. However, treating these experiences as part of our data had great relevance for constructing them. It is important to note, though, that researcher wellbeing should always be considered when reflecting on awkwardness. Some situations might be too painful or overwhelming to revisit, or some time will need to pass before this becomes possible. Case ‘recognition’ and case ‘dependency’ were obviously about more than awkwardness as these moments concerned sexism and homophobia. It is up to the researcher, when needed in conversation with others (peers, friends, supervisors, therapists), to decide if and when a painful awkward moment can be part of the research data. In addition, it is important to stress that not all awkward experiences are analytically fruitful (Wästerfors, 2022); attempting to redeem every awkward experience by forcibly turning it into a significant learning experience is both pointless and academically unsound.

For qualitative researchers, we believe it to be helpful to discuss awkward fieldwork experiences more regularly, especially amongst each other. Leading up to the writing of this article, we organised two workshops on awkwardness in the field at academic conferences. ² We found talking about and reflecting on awkward moments together to be very helpful as well as enjoyable at times. The peers present also expressed that this is something they would like to talk about more. Discussing awkward moments with colleagues can be an important part of the reflection process, something we experienced ourselves in conducting our PhD projects.