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Paper short abstract:

By focusing on the online interaction, we ask how different emotions become entangled with the various phases of research process and what kind of discursive and socio-material knowing on affects does this generate in the context of academic work.

Paper long abstract:

In our project "Academic affects", we have used various methods to capture the different emotions that affect our academic work. During the COVID-19 pandemic years, we organized online meetings (Lorenzetti et al. 2016), "Affect cafés", in Zoom for researchers to share their experiences and emotions on their work. Alongside other methods, we have also performed digital ethnography (Caliandro 2018) and followed Twitter conversations concerning academic life. In our presentation, we focus on these two methods of generating understanding of affective practices. We ask how different emotions become entangled during the research process: in the interaction between researchers and participants, in the expressions aiming to mediate the emotions and in the interpretations we make in our analysis.

Both our examples differ from the traditional ethnographic fieldwork. Sitting in front of a laptop, looking and listening to participants or reading their emotions via Internet is, however, a corporeal experience that leaves different kinds of impressions on us. Looking at these affective circulations and their doings (Ahmed 2014), we focus on the ways emotions and affective practices can be both mediated, identified and scientifically written. By following Sara Ahmed (2014, 208), we understand emotions as involving “bodily processes of affecting and being affected (…) emotions are a matter of how we come into contact with objects and others.” We focus particularly on the ways narrations and online/offline bodies become entangled in the analysis and our writing, and what kind of discursive and socio-material knowing on affects does this generate.