ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on qualitative research and demonstrates the ways in which emotional encounters with participants may be understood and managed. The gendered aspect of emotion work forms an important part of the discussion and the remaining challenges to the work on emotions considered here concern how research can benefit from emotional encounters. Reflexivity has been associated with feminist research and has been used to make sense of emotional encounters. The chapter focuses on research with South Asian women and has brought attention to the management of emotions in situations when intimate information is revealed and to emotion work carried out in such an encounter. There have been many studies carried out on the suicide phenomenon, for example, by womens organisations such as the Newham Asian Womens Project and Southall Black Sisters, who state how oppressive practices such as sexual abuse, forced marriage and restrictions through surveillance lead women to escape or to control a situation through self-harm and suicide.
