Based on my political opposition to neoliberal policies, I elected to conduct dissertation research on a World Bank-funded land policy in Guatemala. This paper explores emotional aspects of this work. Specifically, I describe my fear that research subjects would accuse me of being a spy. I then describe my efforts to cope with these fears and the ways that fear and coping influenced my meaning-making work.
During my doctoral field work I studied the practices of policy-makers as they implemented a World Bank-funded land policy in Guatemala. As an interested foreign researcher, I was welcomed within the policy-making circles, and I became a quasi-insider in a world of technocrats, economists, planners, and surveyors. However, during the research process I often felt unnerved. As a “lefty” academic, I was uncomfortable engaging on a daily basis with the authors of this neoliberal policy. This discomfort manifested in the form of anxiety. Specifically, I feared that I would be called out as a spy by the people whose research practices I was studying. To reduce my anxieties, I engaged a range of coping mechanisms and techniques. This paper describes my fears, the coping mechanisms I used, and how these efforts helped constitute the knowledge I produced through my dissertation.
This paper contributes to the growing literature on how researchers’ emotions influence the process of knowledge production (Jaggar, 1989, Laurier and Parr, 2000, Widdowfield, 2000, Bondi, 2005a, Holland, 2007 and Bennett, 2009). This study differs from others that focus on fear and meaning-making in that my emphasis is not on the debilitating, even paralyzing effects of fear with respect to the research process (Widdowfield, 2000, Laurier and Parr, 2000, Wilkins, 1993, England, 1994 and Bondi, 2005b). While fear can have this effect, this essay emphasizes how fear—and my efforts to cope—led me in new research directions and to new possibilities. But this paper not only describes my efforts to cope with (manage) emotion (Hochschild, 1998 and Hubbard et al., 2001). It also describes how new meaning-making possibilities emerged through unexpected encounters with research subjects with their own emotional lives. Finally, my approach to the study of fear is inspired by recent scholarship that characterizes fear as a multi-layered range of inter-related feelings rather than a narrowly defined emotional response or clinically-determined symptom (Saville, 2008 and Pain, 2009).
This study also contributes to an interdisciplinary literature focused on the relationship between social science and spying. This literature includes surveys of scholarly participation in the gathering of military intelligence (Fluehr-Lobban, 2003, Price, 2004 and Barnes and Farish, 2006), as well as studies by researchers who reflect on occasions when they were suspected of being spies (Herbert, 2001, Owens, 2003, Simmons, 2007 and Sallaz, 2008). My investigation represents a modest new direction: I seek to address the meaning-making work set in motion when researchers fear they will be accused of spying by their research subjects. This is, I contend, a relevant issue given that many scholars express concerns about it.1
When I began my dissertation research I feared that the policymakers whose practices I studied would condemn me as a spy. This paper describes these fears, traces my efforts to cope with them,
and explores how fear and coping influenced my work. Throughout my dissertation research, fear and my meaning-making work were mutually constituted. As I began my field work, my feeling that I was ‘‘behind enemy lines” caused me anxiety and led me to frame my research in binary terms. I coped by developing more informal, personal relations with policy-makers, finding spaces of refuge from ‘‘neoliberal” institutions, and talking with distant friends and family. Policy-makers responded to me by reaching out, sometimes by teasing me, calling me a spy. As I developed more fulfilling relations with research subjects, my fear of being accused of spying subsided, and I began to feel more comfortable. At the same time, I developed a research position which allowed me to view the policy process as more complex and contradictory. While the anxiety and the binary research frameworks were the conditions of possibility for my later more nuanced emotions and research, the latter work was most useful to me. I value this work because its complexity presents more possibilities for transforming the policy
process. It also serves as a starting point for examining how the interwoven and emotional lives of geographers and their research subjects constitute knowledges about neoliberal policies.
