Maguire, Emma, and Deller, Marina (2024) Affective Ambush: An Autotheoretical Approach to Understanding Emotions as Useful to the Research Process. Life Writing. (In Press)

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Abstract

This essay considers the use of emotions in life narrative research. Using autotheory the authors recount and reflect on their experiences of a phenomenon they are tentatively calling ‘affective ambush’, wherein during the course of research the researcher unexpectedly experiences significantly heightened affect—or ‘big feelings’—stimulated by research materials. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed, they position sites of affective ambush as feminist spaces of encounter that yield rich data accessible through embodied modes of enquiry such as autotheory and autocriticism. As such, in this essay they seek to trouble and problematise the dominant detached and ‘objective’ academic position, and investigate how moving outside of this paradigm has unique implications for scholars of life narrative, trauma and grief. They propose instances of ‘affective ambush’ as sources of affective information that, if integrated into the research process, can reveal new insights about the texts and subjects that we investigate as life narrative scholars.

Item ID:	82685
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1751-2964
Keywords:	feminist research methods, affective ambush, affect, life writing, life narrative, memoir, emotion, autotheory
Copyright Information:	© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Date Deposited:	07 May 2024 02:39
FoR Codes:	44 HUMAN SOCIETY > 4405 Gender studies > 440502 Feminist methodologies @ 50% 47 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE > 4705 Literary studies > 470514 Literary theory @ 30% 47 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE > 4702 Cultural studies > 470207 Cultural theory @ 20%
SEO Codes:	28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280116 Expanding knowledge in language, communication and culture @ 100%
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