A Personal Reflection on Negotiating Fear, Compassion and Self-Care in Research

摘要

With this paper, I discuss the unexpected, the corporeal and the emotional. I attend not only to the issues of fear and integrity in research of the ex-gay movement in North America, but also to related issues of compassion, self-care and violence. I explore my commitment to communicate empathically with and think compassionately about a group of people who are politically and ideologically quite different from me. In the process of shifting my approach, I began to doubt my ability to write critically about the topics at hand. I faced significant cognitive dissonance as I shared moments of celebration with people who had found relief in the movement. Finally, as I internalized the thousands of pages of ex-gay literature, the dozens of face-to-face interviews and the countless email and instant message exchanges, I began to seriously ponder the violence I had done to myself in the name of research.View full textDownload full textKeywordsEmotional risk, qualitative methodology, social movements, ex-gay, ethicsRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2012.664907