Paper short abstract:

Employing autoethnography, this paper explores the overlaps and dissonances between researching friendship and researching friends.

Paper long abstract:

Employing autoethnography, this paper explores the overlaps and dissonances between researching friendship and researching friends. To do this, I parse through my experiences of two different research projects. Over the past few years, I have been working with colleagues on researching friendship – we have examined the connections between feminist movement building and friendships, published a popular anthology on friendship by South Asian women and queer folx, and we are now editing an academic anthology on friendship. Initiated during the pandemic, this collaborative project was the source of much joy and solace. Simultaneously, I have also been working on my doctoral research. Based on in-depth interviews with Indian doctoral scholars enrolled in Women’s Studies and allied disciplines in universities in the US whose research fields are in India, it examines how coloniality structures the knowledge thus produced. Some of the interlocutors of this research were my friends and colleagues within academia. Unlike researching friendships, researching friends was characterised not by a sense of emotional closeness between researcher and researched but by friction and discomfort. In reading these experiences through one another, this paper attempts to unpack the affective elements of centring friendships and friends in academic research.