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.

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:

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.