Paper short abstract:

The paper shows how drawings can serve as a good catalyst to express positive and negative personal emotions in the field when it comes to everyday life events such as marital disputes, births, deaths, religious celebrations, marriages and gender-based violence.

Paper long abstract:

Emotions are associated with irrationality in scientific research, so it is not surprising that researchers tend to underestimate emotions in their field experiences. During fieldwork on the influences of popular television content on Moroccan women's everyday lives, the use of drawings and doodles proved to be a good catalyst for expressing personal emotions and maintaining rationality sanity when dealing with everyday life events such as marital disputes, births, deaths, religious celebrations, marriages, and gender-based violence. Ellis (2007) writes that the close and emotional study of others requires " the researcher turns the same scrutiny on herself as on others." Drawing proved to be an excellent tool for dealing with ethical issues and positive or negative emotions that arose through my experiences. The main argument I will pursue in my paper is that it is beneficial for a researcher to engage emotionally and personally with the research questions and the people being studied, especially when looking at oneself, not only for ethical and moral reasons, but also to tap into additional productive and untapped sources of knowledge that can complement more traditional methods of anthropological research. Ellis and Bochner (1996) call this "evocative autoethnography" and "emotional sociology" (1997) to suggest that personal emotions and the connotations they can trigger may appear as relevant observations. In this paper I aim to show how art, particularly drawings, can be used as a fieldwork diary to act as a personal catalyst for experiencing the field and as an untapped source of analysis.