Victoria J Brown
Understanding and Communicating Blight
Future Fear: Present Grief
Emotion has recently been recognised as crucial for successful adaptation and how we relate to the environment and climate change. There has however been little implementation of emotional methods to explore these relationships and the geographies of hope and futurity. In recent research I have utilised art, poetry and reflection to investigate loss and emotional blockage in eroding coastal villages, and the manifestation of future fears in the present as blight accelerates and augments its effects. Art and creative methodologies are vital as therapy and counselling towards envisaging new positive futures and coping with, and adjusting to the loss of what is. Moreover, along with employing methodologies sensitive to the emotional situation as a researcher I myself reflected upon the mood and repeated themes in the field immersing myself in the situation. To fully understand the villagers reactions and aim to help them see new possibilities for the future it was impossible to be the objective detached researcher. Indeed it would have hindered the research as in order to comment upon the loss of home and village, that could well be the outcome of this continued and accelerating erosion, one must as the common adage says 'walk a mile in their shoes'.
Terry Smyth
The autumn and winter of 1945 witnessed the return of 38,000 British servicemen from three and a half years of incarceration as prisoners of war (POWs) in the Far East. My father was one of these POWs. In my research I examine the consequences for the families of this ‘forgotten’ chapter of World War Two, in particular how the return of the POWs affected the children. Childhood, for some, was coloured by overt physical or psychological trauma; for others, what passed as a ‘normal’ upbringing led much later in life to a pressing desire to discover more about their fathers’ wartime histories. By engaging with ideas of intergenerational transmission, postmemory, memory practices, and reconciliation, I trace how the displacements and sequelae of prisoner of war existence reverberate down the decades, and how the children’s early experiences continue to trickle, or burst, through into the present.
In this presentation, I set out to convey the drive and urgency of those children as they - and I - struggle to make sense of our pasts in the present. Drawing on material from in-depth psychosocial interviews, and my research journals and autoethnographic reflections, I aim to adopt a ‘show, don’t tell’ approach, suffusing my presentation with the lived, emotional experience of the research process. For me at least, this will be an experimental and risky mode of presentation, but one which I hope will be a creative response to your invitation to reflect on the direction of ‘emotionally-charged social science research’.
Junfan Lin
The Emotions and Food Geographies among Hakka People in China: An Inquiry about Methods
Emotions in food need to be carefully examined in terms of feelings and experience in everyday dietary practice. The emotional aspects of food are critical to an understanding of the relationship between the material and immaterial in the food domain; they help to clarify the interaction, translation and negotiation between the material and immaterial. In particular, the Hakka group can be said to be characterised by an emphasis on traditional domestic diet, food events celebrating education milestones and an abiding concern for family and clan history. It is argued that the examination of the visceral experiencing and the collective and individual emotions in terms of the sensory experience of food (taste, smell, sight, touch, etc.) is necessary for the topic. The methods include the visceral experience of food (Hayes-Conroy and Martin, 2010), Dance Movement Therapy (McCormack, 2003) and semi-structured interviews. The expected results are that emotions and food are mutually constructed and material food activities may act as representations of emotions, with the visceral experience functioning as the intermediary or catalyst in these processes. However, I want to ask some questions: how to do the visceral research? I want to know the comparisons between emotional methodologies related to this topic. What are the do's and don'ts we have to notice? What are the relations and reflection between the emotions and the material? What is the difference or connection between the emotion and the immaterial? How is the connection from the emotions to the identity/belonging?
Understanding and Communicating Blight
Future Fear: Present Grief
Emotion has recently been recognised as crucial for successful adaptation and how we relate to the environment and climate change. There has however been little implementation of emotional methods to explore these relationships and the geographies of hope and futurity. In recent research I have utilised art, poetry and reflection to investigate loss and emotional blockage in eroding coastal villages, and the manifestation of future fears in the present as blight accelerates and augments its effects. Art and creative methodologies are vital as therapy and counselling towards envisaging new positive futures and coping with, and adjusting to the loss of what is. Moreover, along with employing methodologies sensitive to the emotional situation as a researcher I myself reflected upon the mood and repeated themes in the field immersing myself in the situation. To fully understand the villagers reactions and aim to help them see new possibilities for the future it was impossible to be the objective detached researcher. Indeed it would have hindered the research as in order to comment upon the loss of home and village, that could well be the outcome of this continued and accelerating erosion, one must as the common adage says 'walk a mile in their shoes'.
Terry Smyth
The autumn and winter of 1945 witnessed the return of 38,000 British servicemen from three and a half years of incarceration as prisoners of war (POWs) in the Far East. My father was one of these POWs. In my research I examine the consequences for the families of this ‘forgotten’ chapter of World War Two, in particular how the return of the POWs affected the children. Childhood, for some, was coloured by overt physical or psychological trauma; for others, what passed as a ‘normal’ upbringing led much later in life to a pressing desire to discover more about their fathers’ wartime histories. By engaging with ideas of intergenerational transmission, postmemory, memory practices, and reconciliation, I trace how the displacements and sequelae of prisoner of war existence reverberate down the decades, and how the children’s early experiences continue to trickle, or burst, through into the present.
In this presentation, I set out to convey the drive and urgency of those children as they - and I - struggle to make sense of our pasts in the present. Drawing on material from in-depth psychosocial interviews, and my research journals and autoethnographic reflections, I aim to adopt a ‘show, don’t tell’ approach, suffusing my presentation with the lived, emotional experience of the research process. For me at least, this will be an experimental and risky mode of presentation, but one which I hope will be a creative response to your invitation to reflect on the direction of ‘emotionally-charged social science research’.
Junfan Lin
The Emotions and Food Geographies among Hakka People in China: An Inquiry about Methods
Emotions in food need to be carefully examined in terms of feelings and experience in everyday dietary practice. The emotional aspects of food are critical to an understanding of the relationship between the material and immaterial in the food domain; they help to clarify the interaction, translation and negotiation between the material and immaterial. In particular, the Hakka group can be said to be characterised by an emphasis on traditional domestic diet, food events celebrating education milestones and an abiding concern for family and clan history. It is argued that the examination of the visceral experiencing and the collective and individual emotions in terms of the sensory experience of food (taste, smell, sight, touch, etc.) is necessary for the topic. The methods include the visceral experience of food (Hayes-Conroy and Martin, 2010), Dance Movement Therapy (McCormack, 2003) and semi-structured interviews. The expected results are that emotions and food are mutually constructed and material food activities may act as representations of emotions, with the visceral experience functioning as the intermediary or catalyst in these processes. However, I want to ask some questions: how to do the visceral research? I want to know the comparisons between emotional methodologies related to this topic. What are the do's and don'ts we have to notice? What are the relations and reflection between the emotions and the material? What is the difference or connection between the emotion and the immaterial? How is the connection from the emotions to the identity/belonging?