Bad feelings in queer and trans participatory research

In schools, educators commonly accept that messiness is part of our work. Yet, researchers are often trained to see feelings as things to be excised. When engaging in participatory research with students and educators, mess is an inescapable part of the process. Participatory researchers navigate competing interests, conflicting schedules, gaps in knowledge, and complex power dynamics. In this duoethnographic paper, we, two participatory researchers, draw on examples of feeling badly while facilitating our respective studies—one a critical participatory action research study with trans and gender nonconforming preservice teachers, the other an arts-based participatory-informed study with femme youth and educators—to argue for the usefulness of bad feelings as an analytic. We suggest that researchers’ honestly naming and analyzing their experiences of feeling badly in PAR (or other “liberatory” models) might cultivate greater transparency, humility, curiosity, and criticality that can deconstruct the ways (negative) emotions are sometimes positioned as counter to rigour.