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Paper short abstract:

How does an ethnographic process change when face-to-face discussions happen online? With the sensitive topic on academic affects, a mutual trust is needed. We will focus on the ways trust becomes generated in technically defined space and how affect theory participates in analysing this becoming.

Paper long abstract:

In the ongoing project on ‘Ethnography of Academic affects’ our aim is to understand how research strategies affect the ways academic professionals experience their work in Finnish universities. When designing the project, our aim was to conduct ethnography by interviewing and observing both in the corridors of universities and in social media. One of our designed methods were “learning cafés” that are based on peer discussions about everyday life and emotions in the academic world. During autumn 2020, the covid-19 changed our plan to arrange these cafés as physical meeting places for researchers, drastically. So we organized these get-togethers online in Zoom.

In our presentation, we will analyse how the methodological change from offline to online encounters influences both the movements of affects and our ethnographic process of participant observation and our analyses. We do this through opening the process of our shared data sessions on the recorded Zoom-cafés where we analyse how mutual trust becomes generated in the discussions. Trust is crucial since the topic of emotions and affects in academia is quite sensitive, and we will especially consider the affordances of this particular technology in the generation of trust. By following Sara Ahmed’s (2004) idea on affect as movements and as agents, we further discuss the “doings” of affects in a shared virtual space that is entangled with our separate material embodied places. Finally, we reflect on whether the process of analysing affects will orient our research to a new direction.