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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".