Navigating the emotion-embodiment-language nexus in international research: Stories from a foreign researcher and local interpreter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Feminist researchers engage reflexively with questions of how power operates through intersubjective processes like building rapport, obtaining consent, and being accountable in the ‘field.’ But how do researchers build these connections across embodied and linguistic differences in interlingual research involving local interpretation? In this paper, we delve into our experiences as a foreign researcher and a local interpreter conducting interviews and group discussions with low-income women waste workers in India. We focus on our co-navigations of positionality and power with a focus on language, emotion, and embodiment in connecting with participants and reflect on how interpretation and translation processes can mediate, complicate, and enrich connection-building. We argue that emotional, embodied, and linguistic challenges and opportunities are not uniformly experienced between differently positioned team members and require space to grapple with divergent experiences, understandings, and outcomes that emerge across this nexus. We detail three research encounters, analyzing the nuances of positionality in our divergent roles; our navigations of care and refusal manifesting across the triple subjectivity of encounters; and our strategies for working across languages, embodiment, and emotion in the colonial past-present. The paper contributes to feminist, anti-colonial methodologies by providing insights into our experiences of connection-building in the ‘field’ and revealing the ‘scaffolding’ work and relations which support our processes and pursuits of ethnographic research, translation, and accountability. • A foreign researcher and local interpreter reflect on qualitative research processes in India. • Emotion, embodiment, and language provide simultaneous challenges and opportunities for connecting with participants in triply subjective research encounters. • Divergent experiences and outcomes of research encounters require space to grapple, debrief, and make meaning. • Provides insights for feminist, anticolonial research into emotional, linguistic, and embodied processes of connection-building in intercultural, interlingual research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".