Torn Many Ways [electronic resource] : Politics, Conflict and Emotion in Research /

Introduction -- Intercultural misunderstandings: An Indian-Dutch research project in the early 1970s -- Messy Tales from fieldwork for design -- Becoming an activist, becoming a researcher -- Another rant about technology -- Minutes to deportation: Confronting danger and threat in the levant -- “Would you say, I can get my money back?” -- Taking ethics seriously -- Designing AI tools to address power imbalances in digital labor platforms -- Breaking new ground: Stories from the wild -- Researching dark voices within the Veil of the Academy -- Designing with, for and without communities -- Becoming western: Reflections and stories of being in Western Academia.

This edited collection brings together a range of experiences from the field, largely in the context of CSCW and HCI. It focuses specifically on the experiences of people who have worked in difficult, tense, delicate and sometimes conflictual and dangerous settings. The tensions faced by researchers and, more importantly, how they manage to deal with them are often under-remarked. Unlike the bulk of published ethnographic work, the chapters in this book deal more explicitly with the various practical problems that researchers with varying degrees of experience face. Our aim in this book is to give a voice to researchers who have sometimes contended with unexpected issues and who sometimes have had to face them on their own. We explore incidents which may entail emotional conflict, embarrassment and shame, feelings of isolation, arguments with other members of a team, political pressures, and ideological confusions, to name but a few. Senior figures in research laboratories andelsewhere may provide intellectual direction and support but may not always recognise the personal and problematic nature of qualitative enquiry undertaken by relatively inexperienced researchers. The chapters examine feelings of isolation, the difficulty of ‘taking sides’, the negotiation of personal, ethical, and political pressures in the field, and dealing with conflicting visions of what the research should be about. The book is a resource for those embarking on the challenges of working in unfamiliar or difficult settings and moreover should act as a reminder to academics who might have forgotten the practical issues that researchers can face and how they deal with them.