This paper extends discussions on the role of emotion in scientific lives, by showing how the emotional commitments of researchers (here, psychologists and neuroscientists) can play a specifically constitutive or generative role. Autism research is an area where the tricky intertwinements of subjects, thoughts, interactions and bodies can be remarkably explicit: the paper uses this case to show how researchers' emotions can actually mediate transactions between intellectual/scientific problems and more material/bodily concerns. The paper argues that autism research shows the on-going presence of affect in scientific subjectivities; in particular, it shows how scientific subjects sometimes constitute intellectual projects through a sensitivity to their own bodies and emotions. Gathering these concerns together, the paper extends recent discussions of body-work and emotion-work by Natasha Myers and Elizabeth Wilson, and also draws on the ‘emotional’ aspects of AN Whitehead’s process philosophy.
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