The right distance. Emotional labour and researcher positioning in qualitative research

This article examines the emotional labour that unfolds within ethnographic encounters by drawing on two contrasting fieldwork experiences: a study with precariously employed academic mothers, a condition personally shared by the researcher, and an ethnography inside a far-right movement marked by value distance and affective resistance. The purpose is to explore how proximity and distance shape not only relationships in the field but also the interpretive processes through which understanding is produced. Our findings show that experiential closeness and value distance generate distinct emotional tensions, requiring researchers to navigate shifting ‘feeling rules’, negotiate micro-power dynamics, and balance empathy with analytical clarity. Across both cases, emotions emerge not as methodological noise but as constitutive elements of knowledge production, revealing the moral and relational conditions that structure the encounter. We conclude that right distance unfolds during the writing process behind the desk as a reflexive practice in which tensions between proximity, distance, and care are negotiated rather than resolved, within a situated and intersubjective process that keeps alterity present beyond the field.