Workshop with Mercator Fellow Ana Gaitán: Conducting (Feminist) Research on Gender, Intersectionality and Emotions/Affects

This workshop is an offer for members of the research training group.

Instructor: Ana Cecilia Gaitán (National University of San Martín, Argentina)

Feminist studies have long emphasized the crucial need to recognize and situate researchers as integral to the subjects of our reflection, thereby rejecting the rigid dichotomy between the political and the personal, or between thought and emotion.

This workshop will explore how emotions operate as epistemological tools—as a lens through which we can gain insight into social relationships. Building upon personal reflections on our own emotional experiences during research, we will foster a space for collective debate. This discussion will focus on how emotions enable us to reassess our positions in the process of knowledge construction and introduce novel questions regarding the segment of the social world we aim to understand.

Over the two sessions, the affective dimension will take center stage. We will re-engage with key feminist discussions on affect and intersectionality, as well as anthropological debates concerning emotions and reflexivity. Furthermore, we will share experiences, processes, and pressing questions from our own research projects on doing transitions. As social scientists in Latin America often put it: we will be opening the doors of our cocinas de la investigación (research kitchens).