Between human and researcher: Reclaiming embodied knowledge in the academy

Abstract

This article explores the ontological conflict between two academic identities: the human as an embodied, emotional being, and the researcher as a detached intellectual operating solely through reason. We examine how social science research within neoliberal universities perpetuates this division by marginalising emotional and embodied ways of knowing, questioning whether one can authentically exist as both human and researcher within institutions that enforce knowledge production through detachment and abstraction. Despite academia’s claims of embracing anti-imperial, postcolonial, and decolonial epistemologies, these commitments remain largely theoretical, while rationalist approaches continue to dominate. Humanised research methods and emotional experiences, particularly in fieldwork, continue to be marginalised, as researchers’ discomfort routinely dismissed rather than recognised as meaningful data. Decolonial epistemologies grounded in emotional, spiritual, and embodied knowledge fundamentally challenge Northern ontologies that privilege detachment and reductionism. As students and early-career researchers, we employed collaborative autoethnography to critically examine our academic positionalities. Through three reflexive workshops (2022–2024) at the University of Cape Town and the Political Ecology Network conference in Durban, participants utilised meditation as emotional methodology, exploring which truths are negated by researcher rationalism and how these negations impede institutional transformation. Drawing on feminist epistemologies, decolonial theory, and critiques of neoliberalism, we analyse tensions in fieldwork and knowledge production, arguing that discomfort functions as a powerful site of truth-telling and catalyst for higher education transformation. Rather than silencing affective dimensions, we embrace them as transformative humanising praxis that moves beyond the harmful limitations of traditional academic approaches towards life-affirming expressions of our political potential as human beings.
Contribution: We propose a meditative practice as an emotional methodology to unmask and humanise the researcher, facilitate reflexivity and critical conversations, and develop concrete strategies for inhabiting both researcher and human subjectivities within a more humanised academic praxis.