ABSTRACT
Ethnographic fieldwork is emotional work; as Alison Rooke points out, it ‘hinges upon the ethnographer [having] a degree of emotional competence, and an ability to convey genuine interest, express care and respond appropriately if the desired outcome of establishing feelings of trust is to be achieved’ (2010: 32). A fieldwork or interview situation can also cause feelings, both in the researcher and in those participating in the research. All of these feelings play a role in the research carried out, but they rarely make it into the texts we write, both because traditional research has, to a large extent, ignored feelings and because it is often quite difficult to seize the feelings moving in a room, to interpret them and to put them on paper.
