Original Research

Between human and researcher: Reclaiming embodied knowledge in the academy

Jennifer Whittingham, Sthembile Ndwandwe, Jessica Lavelle, Jessica Fortes

Received: 28 Feb. 2025; Accepted: 31 May 2025; Published: 01 Dec. 2025

Copyright: © 2025. The Author(s). Licensee: AOSIS.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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.

Keywords: emotions; humanising; academia; transformation; emotional methodologies; research; collaborative autoethnography; embodied methodology.

Introduction

A growing body of scholarship examines the role of emotions in academic institutions and research processes, with emotional geographies (Anderson & Smith 2001; Davidson & Milligan 2004; Wright 2012) providing crucial insights into how feelings and spaces intersect in knowledge production. This work challenges the dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity and moves beyond imperial knowledge production methodologies (Askins & Blazek 2017; Barclay 2021; Widdowfield 2000). Imperial knowledge production refers to research practices that reduce complex and diverse worlds into simplified, extractive structures and systems that sustain colonisation and coloniality (Subramaniam 2024). Drawing on decolonial theory, feminist epistemologies and critiques of neoliberalism, this article argues that emotions and emotional methodological processes should not only be recognised as valid epistemic tools in social science research but must also be actively engaged with by both researchers and institutions. However, this recognition poses a fundamental challenge to the neoliberal university, which has historically produced knowledge systems serving imperial, oppressive and capitalist interests – an entanglement further entrenched by higher education’s neoliberal turn (Badat 2024; Heller 2016; Hlatshwayo & Moloi 2024; Tight 2019).

The neoliberal academy refers to institutions’ tendency to prioritise financial exigencies, value humans primarily as labour rather than as agents of social change, and promote competition by incentivising maximum productivity and visibility, often at the expense of justice-oriented goals (McKenna 2024; Museus & Sasaki 2002; Slaughter & Rhoades 2004). Critics of the neoliberal academy argue that, despite claims of transformation, anti-racism, and equity, the university prioritises economic growth over social justice (Vally 2020). Market-driven logics instrumentalise progressive values while resisting meaningful structural change (Giroux 2010; Lacy & Rome 2017; Lorenz 2012). Fraser and Jaeggi (2018) describe this contradiction as ‘progressive neoliberalism’, a political alliance integrating social justice discourses into neoliberal market imperatives. This creates the illusion of inclusivity while leaving systemic inequalities untouched, allowing universities to claim commitments to justice while reinforcing the capitalist and colonial frameworks that sustain epistemic hierarchies.

These contradictions are particularly fraught for scholars engaged in political ecology and decolonial research, fields that critically examine capitalism and colonialism yet remain embedded within neoliberal institutions. The neoliberal university, as a dehumanised space, prioritises rankings, grants and bureaucratic efficiency over ethical, human-centred research (Ismail & Aljunied 2024; Steynberg, Grundling & Venter 2024). Within this context, researcher positionality and emotional discomfort are often co-opted into institutional narratives of neoliberal social justice (Cowen 2021), where emotions are selectively incorporated to create a veneer of ethicality without fundamentally altering power structures of knowledge production.

The academy does not uniformly suppress emotions; rather, it strategically disciplines them through emotional regimes (Reddy 2001), institutionalised structures that regulate which emotions are permissible within academic spaces (Askins & Blazek 2017; Barclay 2021). Certain emotions, such as self-fulfilment, ambition and anxiety, are encouraged because they sustain competition, individualism and productivity. Others, including grief, rage, and discomfort are marginalised or weaponised against particular bodies, particularly women and scholars from marginalised backgrounds (Askins & Blazek 2017). These emotional hierarchies reinforce academic subjectivities conforming to neoliberal ideals while obscuring the academy’s structural violence.

This study investigates pathways for incorporating emotions as legitimate components for humanising both the researcher and the research process within the academy. We explore emotional methodologies, systematic approaches engaging with affective experiences as legitimate data and analytical tools. The article examines how early career researchers navigate the tension between human and researcher subjectivities within South African neoliberal universities, using collaborative autoethnography to develop concrete pathways towards more humanised academic practice.

The article presents three sections: firstly, methodologies for integrating uncomfortable emotions into research practice; secondly, collaborative autoethnography by scholar-activists examining emotions as truth-tellers about institutional conditions and thirdly, implications for transforming academic institutions to accommodate humanised research approaches.

Theoretical framework: Synthesising decolonial, feminist and anti-neoliberal perspectives

Our theoretical contribution lies in synthesising feminist epistemologies, decolonial theory and critiques of neoliberalism to provide a comprehensive analysis of knowledge production within the South African university context. While each framework offers valuable insights, they contain blind spots when applied in isolation. By bringing these into dialogue, we develop a nuanced understanding of how the South African neoliberal university operates as a site where colonial knowledge hierarchies, neoliberal imperatives and patriarchal academic norms converge to marginalise emotional and embodied ways of knowing.

Decolonial scholars expose how the Westernised university, rooted in colonial logics of objectivity and rationality, constructs itself as the home of rational thought while relegating African and other majority world epistemologies to categories of the primitive or illegitimate (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo 2011; Thambinathan & Kinsella 2021). This Eurocentric paradigm, exemplified in claims such as ‘reason is Greek’, ‘emotion is African’ (Adie & Effenji 2018), bifurcates human society into civilisation and primitivism, reinforcing colonial knowledge hierarchies (Quijano 2007).

Feminist epistemologies complement these insights by challenging the Kantian ideal of the rational, autonomous man and critiquing Descartes’ mind–body dualism, which positioned rational thought as masculine while relegating emotion and embodiment to the feminine (Haraway 1985; Braidotti 1994; Bordo 1997). Feminist scholarship foregrounds emotions’ epistemic value, arguing they are essential for generating critical insights into justice and lived experience (Ahmed 2004; Code 1991; Lorde 1994). This understanding aligns with emotional geographers’ work on affect as lived, embodied experiences shaping knowledge production (Anderson & Smith 2001).

Feminist thought also explores the ethics of care in knowledge-making, emphasising the emotional dimension of research (Edwards & Mauthner 2002; O’Riordan et al. 2023). This challenges Western philosophical traditions that construct humans as disembodied, rational knowers, and instead promotes a more relational, embodied existence where knowledge emerges through relationships rather than detachment (Barad 2007). The relational turn disrupts the public or private divide that has relegated women’s everyday knowledge to the margins of legitimate inquiry. Magoqwana, Magadla and Masola (2024) demonstrate this by centralising African women’s ordinary, everyday knowledge as fundamental to African ways of knowing, transforming what has been dismissed as private into legitimate sources of systematic knowledge. In doing so, they have ‘imagined new ways of being human’ (Lewis & Baderoon 2021:3) that fundamentally revise what constitutes authoritative knowledge. Reconceptualising ‘the human’ transforms emotion from a dismissed, feminised trait into a legitimate site of knowledge production, challenging hierarchies that determine which ways of knowing are deemed valuable.

Reimagining ‘the human’ echoes Wynter’s (2003) critique of the Western concept of ‘Man’ as a colonial construct, calling for a plural, decolonial redefinition of the human. This reconceptualisation points towards research as humanising praxis that actively affirms rather than negates collective humanity. Following Kronenberg’s (2018) understanding of being human as political potentiality existing along an ‘oppression-liberation continuum’, knowledge production enacts either harmful negations or salutogenic affirmations of humanity.

Feminist and decolonial scholars argue that discomfort is not a barrier to knowledge, but a site of knowing, revealing power structures and the limits of dominant epistemologies. Ahmed (2004) demonstrates how discomfort exposes hidden structures shaping institutional belonging, while Boler (1999) frames discomfort as central to transformative learning. Anzaldúa (2025) describes discomfort as a liminal space of becoming where contradiction generates new ways of knowing. Tuck and Yang (2012) insist that decolonisation must be unsettling, rejecting attempts to erase discomfort in pursuit of feel-good reconciliation. Across these perspectives, discomfort invites deeper engagement with histories and structures, challenging dominant ways of knowing within the neoliberal academy.

Emotional epistemologies as method

We developed emotional epistemologies through meditation as an embodied practice, creating reflective space for students and ECRs, including ourselves as authors, to navigate the tensions of being both human and researcher within the university. This approach positions the body as an active research tool with potential to generate knowledge both individually and collectively (Spatz 2017; Woodyer 2008). Within geography, political ecology and post-materialist traditions, embodied methodologies increasingly challenge claims of objectivity by recognising the body as a site of knowing embedded in material and immaterial research fields, where affect operates as a productive force revealing transformations and connections between bodies (Greco & Stenner 2013). We see embodiment as a means of fostering deeper, more empathetic engagement with research participants while acknowledging the fluidity and instability of researcher positionality (Charles et al. 2024).

Our emotional epistemologies enact critical reflexivity, a core principle in decolonial and feminist scholarship (Anzaldúa 2025; Denscombe 2024; Moosavi 2023; Nadarajah et al. 2022). Engaging with one’s own bodily experiences heightens awareness of how subjectivity, presence and affective responses shape inquiry and knowledge production. Reflexivity thus strengthens both the ethical and methodological integrity of research, offering a counterpoint to the detachment often privileged in academic inquiry (Denscombe 2024; Nadarajah et al. 2022).

Meditation as emotional epistemology

As part of this practice, we incorporated meditation (modelled and prototyped in this tool: https://youtu.be/M8c6ywLAUlY), not as a spiritual or religious exercise, but as an embodied method for surfacing and critically reflecting on the emotions encountered in fieldwork and throughout the research process. This reflexive approach was undertaken both collectively, with a group of ECRs engaged in political ecology research, and individually, through autoethnographic assessments of our (the authors) positionalities. While all research is necessarily embodied, the body is often treated as ‘transparent or secondary, a necessary condition of research but not an area of investigation in its own right’ (Spatz 2017:4). By exploring emotion as part of embodied practice, we positioned the body not as a passive object but as a central epistemic agent, one that provides direct, situated experience of the world (Csordas 2002).

The development of this tool emerged from informal conversations among us as students, in which we acknowledged the difficult and often isolating emotional experiences of fieldwork. Though experienced individually, discomfort in the field was a shared reality, one that unsettled us, not only because of its prevalence but also because of the lack of institutional tools to recognise and engage with it. We sought to create an exercise that could support students and ECRs in acknowledging and working through these emotions, not as obstacles to research but as integral to a more humanising and reflexive research praxis.

We chose meditation for its embodied nature and its ability to engage researchers in a visceral experience. Traditional field notes, while reflective, often remain detached from the body, reinforcing research paradigms rooted in rationality and objectivity. This aligns with the affective turn, which has shifted scholarly focus away from text and discourse as primary theoretical anchors and towards a vital re-centring of the body (Gregg & Siegworth 2010). Meditation requires full presence in the body, to exist as both a feeling and thinking being, embracing the fullness of human experience in research.

This practice was developed for a Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) conference in June 2023 in Durban, South Africa. The workshop brought together students, ECRs and researchers from institutions across the Global North and South. The tool is available in both audio format and as a written guide, designed to facilitate reflection on positionality and emotions in research.

The meditation aimed to bring feelings of discomfort into the space, inviting researchers to sit with them, embody them, reflect on them and – if they felt comfortable to – share them with others. It began with guided attention to breath and body, grounding participants in their physical presence and drawing them away from purely rational thought into a state of embodied awareness. Researchers were then asked to recall a moment from their fieldwork, immersing themselves in the sensory details, the smells, sounds and textures of that experience. From there, they were guided to a specific moment of discomfort, one in which they were not passive observers but active participants. They were encouraged to fully engage with this discomfort, tracing its origins, how it shaped their experience and how it differed from their expectations of fieldwork. Crucially, the meditation provided space and time for researchers to sit in silence with these emotions, resisting the instinct to quickly rationalise or suppress them. They were reminded that the feeling of research is always present, both in the field and beyond, and that the boundaries between these spaces are often blurred. This exercise served as an invitation to acknowledge those emotions, allowing them to surface and guide deeper reflection on the affective dimensions of research. At the same time, reflecting on oneself as an emotive, relational agent in the field affirms that we are human beings as well as researchers. As such, the process of embodied practice is also a process of unmasking the researcher.

Collaborative autoethnography

Following the meditation, researchers were introduced to the wheel of emotions (Figure 1) as a tool for articulating emergent feelings, providing a foundation for collaborative autoethnography (CAE). Collaborative autoethnography represents our primary methodological approach, building upon autoethnographic principles to create collective meaning-making processes. Autoethnography is a relational research approach where, as Hernandez and Ngunjiri (2013:264) note, stories are understood as ‘self- and/or with-others.’ This method centres on reflecting upon our position as individuals in relation to others within specific social settings (Hernandez & Ngunjiri 2013). Chang, Ngunjiri and Hernandez (2013) envision CAE as:

[A] group of researchers pooling their stories to find some commonalities and differences and then wrestling with these stories to discover the meanings of the stories in relation to their sociocultural contexts. (p. 17)

FIGURE 1: Wheel of emotions.

Collaborative autoethnography’s collaborative dimension distinguishes it from individual autoethnographic practice. Through community examination, each researcher’s voice gains depth as others’ questions and probing reveal layers of personal experience that might remain hidden in solitary reflection. Chang et al. (2013:24) argue that ‘the combination of multiple voices to interrogate social phenomenon creates a unique synergy and harmony that autoethnographers cannot attain in social isolation’. This collective interrogation transforms individual reflection into shared knowledge production. Hernandez, Ngunjiri, and Chang (2015) highlight the divergence and convergence involved in CAE. Divergence occurs in the introspective, personal aspect of the process, while convergence emerges through the sharing of space and experiences with colleagues, allowing common narratives to form.

The autoethnographic foundation of CAE situates researchers as both subject and analyst (Ellis, Adams & Bochner 2011; Lapadat 2017), transforming reflexivity from a methodological tool into a central framework for meaning-making. This approach addresses a fundamental ethical problem in traditional research: as Butz and Besio (2004:354) observe, no matter how sensitive we are as field researchers, we cannot seem to get around the fundamental problem that our job is to represent our research subjects, and that representing something inevitably establishes or enacts a power relationship; that is (to paraphrase Foucault 2000:340), the act of representing someone acts upon – or intervenes in – their ‘possible or actual future or present actions’. Autoethnographic researchers aim to transcend this researcher or participant divide by recognising their personal experiences as valuable sources for societal understanding, leveraging unrestricted access to their own sociocultural contexts (Allen, Adams & Jones 2015; Chang 2021).

However, autoethnography offers more than just a methodological solution to representational power dynamics. Butz and Besio (2004) argue that engaging with autoethnographic approaches enables researchers to better recognise and honour the knowledge and agency of those they study, fostering more authentic relationships across cultural boundaries. This sensitivity transforms research practice itself, moving beyond extractive approaches towards what we conceptualise as humanising praxis. By acknowledging our own vulnerabilities, emotions and positionalities through autoethnographic reflection, we develop greater capacity to recognise the full humanity and knowledge systems of those we research with. Rather than treating reflexivity as peripheral, autoethnography foregrounds lived experience as a legitimate form of inquiry, emphasising the moral, relational, and ethical dimensions of both research and selfhood (Denzin 2003). Within our CAE framework, these individual autoethnographic insights become collectively examined and contextualised, creating shared knowledge while fostering this humanising transformation of research practice (Wallin 2023).

In conjunction with meditation, our CAE approach offers a way to both feel and critically reflect collectively, fostering embodied reflexivity and heightening awareness of research’s affective dimensions. By engaging in this process together, researchers acknowledged and gave form to emotions often overlooked in academic discourse. This created shared accounts of the personal and often unspoken emotional realities of research, reinforcing the human dimension of scholarly work.

The following section presents two collaborative autoethnographies emerging from this process, offering deeper insight into the affective experiences that shape research but are rarely acknowledged within the academy.

Ethical considerations

Ethical clearance to conduct this study was obtained from the University of Cape Town Faculty of Science Research Ethics Committee (FSREC101-2021).

Results: Doing emotional work

The first collaborative autoethnography, conducted at the POLLEN workshop, revealed a widespread perception that discomfort and the need to manage difficult emotions in isolation are inherent to the fieldwork process (see Figure 2). Participants from both the Global North and South expressed that their respective institutions provided no formal space to acknowledge or engage with these emotions. The friction between being human and being a researcher in the field emerged as a central tension, raising the critical question: Can one fully inhabit both subjectivities within the neoliberal academy?

FIGURE 2: The wall of emotions.

Participants articulated a strong desire for emotional reflexivity to be recognised as an integral part of research rather than dismissed as a personal burden. Many felt that the institutional model disproportionately supports those who can successfully compartmentalise their emotional and intellectual selves – privileging researchers who maintain detachment over those who engage deeply and emotionally with their work. This reinforces an academic culture that values disembodied, rational scholarship over affective, meaningful and relational research.

There was also a shared critique of dominant academic success metrics, which prioritise publication output and conference presentations over meaningful engagement with research communities. Participants emphasised that being a better researcher should not mean publishing more papers or presenting at more conferences but becoming connected to the research process, to the participants or informants and to engage in less extractive, slower, more humanising research. This discussion highlights the paradox within academia: while institutions promote transformation and inclusivity, they simultaneously reinforce an epistemic hierarchy that devalues embodied and affective ways of knowing.

In the following section, we present our collaborative autoethnographies, where we apply the meditation-reflexive tool to critically engage with our own uncomfortable fieldwork experiences. The meditation is an effective embodied methodology for the surfacing of emotions, while a collaborative autoethnography facilitates the identification of collective humanity critical for transformation. Through this process, we explored the emotions that surfaced, analysed their impact on our roles as researchers and as embodied, affective beings, and examined the extent to which these emotions belong within the neoliberal university.

From author collaborative-ethnography

We write while affiliated with the University of Cape Town, South Africa, a place shaped by its complex history and ongoing legacies of colonialism and apartheid. As researchers working within the broad field of political ecology, we share a common intellectual grounding, yet we occupy different positionalities shaped by race, language and nationality. While we have all encountered discomfort in the field, we acknowledge that our experiences are not homogeneous. The origins and weight of these experiences are shaped by how our individual positionalities intersect with the broader histories and power structures that continue to define knowledge production in South Africa and beyond. We chose to publish as an act of self-reflection, aiming for our embodied and emotional narratives to deepen our understanding of the world and, importantly, inform and reshape our academic practice.

The placelessness of our emotions as early-career political ecologists, situated in both the Global North and South, stems from the historical and structural contexts of the neoliberal university that dehumanises research. Our collaborative autoethnographies also reflect a context of dehumanised African landscapes and peoples reclaiming their humanity through various resistant articulations. These articulations include tea harvesters showing discomfort with being photographed (Sthembile), traditional knowledge holders challenging colonial epistemologies (Jennifer) and rural dwellers claiming benefits from research (Jessica Fortes; Jessica Lavelle).

Jessica Fortes

I am conducting interviews for the first time in rural KwaZulu-Natal. The dry sand crunches under my shoes as I walk towards a man sitting on a chair outside a small house. There are chickens all around breaking the silence with sounds of scratching and clucking. Under my arm, I clutch a plastic folder filled with notes and my interview questions. In my hands is a plate of slightly melted biscuits.

The interview was messy: the chickens were so loud that I worried my microphone would not capture my interviewee’s voice, so I kept moving it closer or asking him to speak louder. The recording felt like it brought attention towards the fact that this was for research. It made the interaction feel less authentic and genuine, like I was there to take information. I wanted to switch it off, but because he was speaking isiZulu, I needed the recording to capture his exact words, as I had been instructed. I could see a reluctance forming.

After the interview, he asked what he would get in exchange for his information. He asked for fencing. I felt confronted, I felt stressed, I felt extractive. I looked towards my translator – a young lady from the area. She shrugged and said do not worry we explained already that this was for research. He asked what benefit he would get from my research. I had to say that this was a Master’s project and although I planned to share my research and make it accessible to those who may use it to guide projects and policies, it was unlikely that he would directly experience any benefits. I offered some seeds I had brought. He accepted.

As we left, there was a silence between the three of us (a friend, the translator and myself). I felt shame. I felt inadequate and guilty. I felt like I was what I tried not to be – an extractive researcher – and although I came in with an optimistic vision of creating deep bonds, co-creating knowledge and using decolonial research methods. I felt like I had failed. I did not know how to write my thesis without falling into an interview format nor was I able to offer anything of true value to my interviewees to help with their basic immediate needs.

I felt the discomfort of this interaction in my chest as an ache and in my gut as a sinking feeling. I felt guilty, I felt powerless yet that I should have power, I felt uncomfortable, I felt selfish, I felt sad and out of my depth.

Sthembile Ndwandwe

My fieldwork took place in a remote commercial farming region in South Africa, where the sounds of trucks, footsteps, worker shouts and machinery filled the air. The scenery was beautiful, with stunning sunsets and landscapes, yet it was contrasted by the stark display of ongoing economic and spatial apartheid in the country.

A moment that stands out for me is when I joined a harvesting team on a farm for four days. Although there were several uncomfortable moments, the most notable was when I ‘had to’ take images of the landscape, farm, honeybush and harvesters. I hesitated on the first day, as I generally feel uneasy about photographing people, especially marginalised individuals, due to concerns over coerced consent. This discomfort also stemmed from the thought that those in the photos could easily be my parents or people I know. Despite the harvesting team leader’s encouragement and consent to document their work, I still felt uncomfortable.

On the second day, I reluctantly took photos, knowing they were often required for my thesis, reports and presentations, despite my awareness that people generally dislike being photographed by researchers. I took a photo of harvested honeybush on the ground, and when reviewing it, I noticed one of the harvesters had tried to hide their face. This image made me uncomfortable, as it highlighted the ethical conflict I was facing. Despite opposing the practice of photographing harvesters, the pressures of academia led me to proceed. The harvester’s attempt to hide their face confirmed that what I was doing was wrong, leaving me with feelings of shame, disappointment and also a sense of validation for advocating against such practices.

The shame and guilt lingered throughout the weekend, and when I asked a colleague if she noticed that the harvesters were uncomfortable with being photographed, she confirmed it. Taking photos in the field remained one of the most uncomfortable and conflicted aspects of my experience. It became even more challenging after fieldwork, when I was asked to present the images and ‘make everything pretty’, making me feel as though my data was being undermined. The most troubling aspect was that in my research group and office, images of people we work with, as well as depictions of their.

‘Traditional’ or ‘Indigenous’ livelihoods, were the norm – something that had always made me uncomfortable. The unsettling thing about these displays is that they are never a white farmer, a CEO, or people who benefit from top positions in NGOs that work with marginalised people in the political ecology space.

Jennifer Whittingham

I close my eyes, steady my breath and return to that moment in the field. It was morning in a busy Durban market, where I had come to interview traditional healers about their connections to the ocean. My interpreter, familiar with the traders, introduced me to an elderly man, Themba. I was nervous and distracted, a recent breakup, my mind elsewhere. Overcompensating, I smile over enthusiastically and overpronounce my words, to try and compensate for my lack of isiZulu. Working in KZN as a research site emerged late in the research process, which was heavily disrupted by the corona virus (Covid-19) pandemic, so I had no time to properly learn but in the moment this did not matter.

Before the interview could deepen, a passerby interrupted: ‘What are you telling this white lady? She’s here to steal our knowledge’. It was not a joke but a valid question. I already felt misplaced, my whiteness, my lack of language, my lack of ties to this particular place. I am brought to the phrase, ‘you may come in peace, but you don’t only bring peace’. I carried with me the weight of my positionality, my whiteness, my institutional affiliation, my foreignness, my privilege. The weight of my positionality settled heavily. While I had told myself I sat within a research camp that aims to be decolonial, theory melts away in a moment like this. Relying on an interpreter meant there was no way of knowing if they had accurately represented my intentions and to the fullness that I would have wanted – or the long, uncertain arc towards some imagined reciprocity. What remained was how I appeared, an outsider, observing, extracting. And in that moment, I was not sure I could argue otherwise. The field is never neutral. It is relational, weighted and emotional.

Reflecting on my time in Durban, a kaleidoscope of feelings comes into focus: anxiety, inadequacy, guilt. Each shaped my understanding of what it means to research in spaces not my own. Anxiety churned before every encounter; would I ask the right questions? Would I offend? In the market’s chaos, I felt unmoored, hyper-aware of my outsider status. Inadequacy sharpened in moments of miscommunication, my lack of isiZulu and cultural knowledge making me feel unqualified, and the power dynamics embedded in the research process making my presence suspect. Guilt sat heavily, a reminder of the extractive histories tied to researchers like me. I hesitated before asking questions, overcompensated with politeness, trying to soften what could never be soft.

These emotions blurred the lines between researcher and human, between self and field. And that, perhaps, is the most significant lesson, research is as much about feeling as it is about thinking. Emotions carry messages, we have to learn to listen and respond accordingly.

Jessica Lavelle

I was with a community I had a long-standing relationship of over a decade with. It had been a good morning. I had gone to the river with several women and two fishermen to learn about the use of traditional fish traps and harvest water lilies. It was beautiful down at the river, with a breeze that shook the reeds and took the edge off the heat. I loved the contrast of the shitenges against the brown landscape, and I felt very privileged as an outsider to witness the women adeptly harvest this traditional wild food while singing and chatting. My joy in that moment was authentic, and I deeply appreciated what was being shared with me. At the same time, I was filming clips with my camera on a tripod, and I felt very white and wealthy. It did not matter that my intentions were genuine to shine a light on culturally important species that had been overlooked in conservation projects; my camera was expensive, intrusive and extractive. I felt uneasy recognising the power asymmetries at play that enabled me as a researcher to be there, and there was a discomfort in knowing I would soon return to Cape Town, taking my research with me. It was not place based at all.

Later, the women were seated on reed mats and about to start cleaning the lilies. A chair had been brought and placed in front of the women, and I was asked to sit. I always cringed at being given a chair when others were on the floor, but I politely obliged. One of the women spoke, and the young fisherman who had been helping with interpretation translated for me. ‘She wants to know what you will give the women in exchange for their time going to the river and preparing the meal? It is many hours, and they have other things they could be doing’. I burned up inside. I felt ashamed. How could I have got this so wrong? I had really sought to do things the ‘right way’, repeatedly asking for guidance from my local assistants. I had asked and reiterated voluntary participation and deliberately refocused my research to honour community values. I felt confused as I thought this was something they wanted to do, not felt they had to do. But this was not about wants, it was about needs that I had failed to prioritise. I stuttered and gave some long-winded responses about university policy and insufficient funds. Both were true, but other truths spoke louder. I realised being there, doing this research was not my place. I needed to confront my complicity and take on the real discomfort of unsettling whiteness within my own community.

After discomfort?

These different articulations of discomfort are telling of ongoing injustices buried within research practice. Acknowledging them challenges us to consider if research can ever truly be decolonial and non-extractive – particularly at the postgraduate and ECR level – where time and resources are limited. We follow Ahmed (2010:66) in asking ‘if anger discomfort could be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way?’ And we follow Kronenberg (2018) in exploring how the act of acknowledging emotions in humanising academia might be a form of ‘enacting humanity affirmations’ for both the researcher and the research ‘participants’ of the Global South, who inhabit and are affected by racialised, colonised and everyday healing-violent relations. To unpack this, we ask how our departments or institutions support or do not support these tensions and discomforts associated with doing research? How do the experiences diverge or converge? How would we like to see our departments better support this discomfort? What are the implications of this on funding, timelines, publishing, burden on supervisors, etc.?

The meditation and collaborative autoethnography revealed the importance of acknowledging ourselves and study ‘participants’ as humans in research and demonstrated the methodological value of humanising the researcher. Our methods enabled us to recognise ourselves as human rather than merely researcher through engaging with feelings of discomfort. However, it was not simply the presence of discomfort that mattered, but our ability to trace these feelings back to our lived experiences as human researchers through guided internal reflection. This process transformed discomfort from an obstacle into a pathway for deeper understanding of our humanity within the research encounter.

Discussion and recommendations

The emotional epistemologies revealed an array of feelings of discomfort that emerged during fieldwork, highlighting similar emotional responses despite vastly different contexts. These responses indicated that the cues we were encountering were signalling the same underlying issues. Our positions as decolonial scholars and scholar activists were continually challenged, especially when we were confronted with the tension of not being able to fully express ourselves as human beings. The divide between the human and the researcher was visible and visceral, as we were often forced to wear the ‘researcher mask’ and suppress our humanity. We were acutely aware of the ethical contradictions we faced, knowing better, yet feeling compelled to ignore that knowledge and to recognise the extractive nature of our research while being unable to act otherwise. This led us to question how we could reconcile our dual roles as both researchers and humans in these complex, uncomfortable situations and how such reconciliation could humanise research and our institutions.

Our theoretical contribution lies in synthesising feminist epistemologies, decolonial theory and critiques of neoliberalism to provide a more comprehensive analysis of knowledge production within the South African university context. While each theoretical framework offers valuable insights, they also contain blind spots when applied in isolation. Feminist scholarship on emotional epistemologies illuminates the marginalisation of affective ways of knowing but may not fully account for colonial legacies in knowledge systems. Decolonial theory exposes the persistence of colonial epistemic violence but can underemphasise the specific mechanisms through which neoliberalism shapes contemporary academic practice. Critiques of neoliberalism reveal how market logics transform higher education but may not adequately address how these processes intersect with ongoing colonial power relations in postcolonial contexts.

By bringing these frameworks into dialogue, we develop a more nuanced understanding of how the South African neoliberal university operates as a site where colonial knowledge hierarchies, neoliberal imperatives and patriarchal academic norms converge to marginalise emotional and embodied ways of knowing. This synthesis reveals how the unique history of South African higher education, marked by apartheid legacies, post-apartheid transformation rhetoric and neoliberal restructuring, creates particular conditions for the human or researcher divide we experienced.

During the POLLEN session with ECRs from around the world, we observed that Southern researchers bore a disproportionate burden of ethical and emotional labour. This was accompanied by unequal access to resources between the Global North and Global South. Despite the Global South being a frequent site of political ecology research, much of the theoretical work on ethics and emotions in research continues to be dominated by Northern scholars. This highlights the urgent need to contextualise these theoretical conversations within Southern epistemological frameworks rather than merely applying Northern theories to Southern contexts (Connell 2007; Muñoz-García, Lira & Loncón 2022).

Our findings advocate for the recognition of discomfort as a form of truth telling within this specific institutional context. In our context, discomfort serves as a means to navigate pathways toward emancipatory transformations within a progressive neoliberal academy that is designed to performatively enact transformative change. However, we found no spaces within the university or our departments that integrated emotions into ethical researcher reflexivity. Nor were there provisions to support the well-being of researchers grappling with feelings such as shame and anxiety.

Kronenberg et al. (2015) frame transformation as a process of humanising and healing society by interrupting cycles of dehumanisation and enacting affirmations of humanity – a process that demands a radical reconfiguration of the dominant historical rationalities governing various spheres of society. This conceptualisation of transformation stands in stark contrast to the nature of the neoliberal university. The lack of institutional support for emotional reflexivity that enables researchers to work as full human beings reveals that South African universities’ commitment to transformation is largely performative and shaped by the post-apartheid turn to neoliberalism (Vally 2020). The institutions often maintain colonial knowledge hierarchies while adopting the language of decolonisation, thereby embodying the posture of a silencing progressive neoliberal academy (Fraser & Jaeggi 2018). The absence of institutional support for humanised research practices is compounded by the academy’s focus on transforming visible, physical spaces while ignoring the complex, invisible dimensions of change, such as discomforts that expose the fallacy and performativity of institutional transformation.

We also engage critically with debates about the politics of emotion in academia. Following Robinson (1999), we caution against the complete dismantling of academic conventions that regulate emotions, arguing that openly expressing emotional insecurities may not always be healing and could create new vulnerabilities. Acknowledging these concerns, we advocate, with Askins and Blazek (2017) for a politics of care that thoughtfully integrates emotions into academia without fostering unchecked emotional expression or reinforcing existing power dynamics, a particularly crucial consideration within the complex power relations of the South African academic context.

Our article is derived from an iterative and ongoing process, and therefore, we conclude with non-conclusive recommendations informed by these collective autoethnographic experiences:

• Reconsider the financial aspects of research, including the feedback budget and time allocation. This requires humanising the budget to allow for ‘slow research’, which challenges the constraints imposed by neoliberal institutions.
• Integrate reflexivity into the research journey, with a formalised space within the transformation office, where researchers can engage in critical self-reflection and assessment of their research practices.
• Revise the ethics course and research forms to encourage a deeper engagement with ethical considerations, especially those related to power and positionality dynamics and the broader impact of research.
• Provide fieldwork training and cultivate a culture of care in supervisory support. Training should be provided to prepare researchers for the field, incorporating spaces within their theses to reflect on emotions as part of positionality, limitations and the ethical implications of their work. Supervisors should be encouraged to actively support these reflective processes.
• Interrogate and make explicit the unspoken criteria that define what is considered ‘good research’. Researchers should be encouraged to critically engage with and reflect on the in-between spaces of fieldwork, where contradictions, discomfort and ethical dilemmas often arise.
• Develop alternative research metrics that encourage slow(er), more ethical, reciprocal, and research methods that embraces indigenous and relational ontologies (Chilisa, Major & Khudu-Petersen 2017; Magoqwana & Maseko 2023). Acknowledging the emotional burden of research is vital, particularly when researchers feel forced to engage in extractive practices that they know are not ideal. This ties into the broader academia, where emotional labour is often overlooked or undervalued.

Conclusion

In this article, we aligned with decolonial and feminist scholars in arguing for the incorporation of discomfort as a truth-telling mechanism to navigate transformation in higher education, which remains deeply entangled with the tools of the neoliberal academy. Writing from an interdisciplinary context as political ecologists, scholar-activists, and geographers, we developed emotional epistemologies through meditation as an embodied practice to show how such approaches enable more humanising research. We assert that failing to acknowledge emotions prevents researchers—who seek to move beyond the extractive, objective methodologies that have long characterised the social sciences within the neoliberal university—from meaningfully engaging in humanising research. Our emotional epistemologies provided pathways for recognising and engaging with discomfort as legitimate knowledge, transforming what are typically dismissed as methodological obstacles into valuable sources of insight. Ignoring these intuitive moments of discomfort, which signal that something is wrong, prevents us from fostering a truly transformative research environment. Being attuned to the emotional dimensions of research through these embodied methods enhances its quality, validates both the researcher and the researched as human and ultimately humanises academia by affirming our shared humanity through scholarly practice.

Acknowledgements

We extend our gratitude to the Early Career Researchers (ECRs) who participated in the POLLEN conference workshop, from which we derived valuable insights for advancing this work. We thank the students from the department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town for allowing us to explore ideas together, drawing on their research experiences. Additionally, we thank the SARChI Chair of Social and Environmental Dimensions of the Bioeconomy for ongoing support of this work.

The authors reported that they received funding from the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Innovation and the National Research Foundation of South Africa. The authors have disclosed those interests fully and has implemented an approved plan for managing any potential conflicts arising from their involvement. The terms of these funding arrangements have been reviewed and approved by the affiliated university in accordance with its policy on objectivity in research.

J.W., S.N., and J.L. were responsible for the conceptualisation, methodology, data collection, writing of the original draft, as well as reviewing and editing the manuscript. J.F. contributed to the methodology, data collection, original draft writing, and review and editing processes. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript. Contributions were made equally where applicable.

This work is based on the research supported by the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Innovation and the National Research Foundation of South Africa.

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its references.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and are the product of professional research. They do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency, or that of the publisher. The authors are responsible for this article’s results, findings, and content.

References