Autoethnography and Emotion as Intellectual Resources

In contrast to many other social sciences, criminology has largely resisted the notion that qualitative inquiry has autoethnographic dimensions and remained quiet on the subject of the emotional investment required of ethnographic fieldworkers studying stigmatized and/or vulnerable “others” in settings where differential indices of power, authority, vulnerability, and despair are felt more keenly than most. Emotion appears in criminology in discussions about public sentiments, populist punitiveness, and the emotional motivations behind offending but rarely features as a lens through which one might better understand the process of doing research. This article examines the state of the field, discusses the work of a small minority of ethnographers who acknowledge the emotional content of prison studies, and tells the story of a personal research encounter that changed the author’s methodological and theoretical orientation. It argues that a more frank acknowledgment of the convergence of subject-object roles does not necessarily threaten the validity of social science, or at least, “it is a threat with a corresponding gain.”