Intimacy, expressed through the feelings and sensations of the researcher, is bound up in the work of a feminist geographer. Tapping into this intimacy and including it in academic writing facilitates a grasping of the effects of power in particular places and initiates a discussion about how to access and tease out what constitutes the intimate both ethically and politically throughout the research process.
This collection provides valuable reflections about intimacy in the research process - from encounters in the field, through data analysis, to the various pieces of written work. A global and heterogeneous pool of scholars and researchers introduce personal ways of writing intimacy into feminist geography. ? As authors expand existing conceptualizations of intimacy and include their own stories, chapters explore the methodological challenges of using intimacy in research as an approach, a topic and a site of interaction.
The book is valuable reading for students and researchers of Geography, as well as anyone interested in the ethics and practicalities of feminist, critical and emotional research methodologies.
Conceptually, intimacy is emerging across various disciplines as a topic worthy of investigation, yet it has yet to be fully articulated in feminist geography, or geography more widely. This book expands the horizons of how intimacy is understood and approached in feminist geographic work. It argues that engaging with how to access and work with intimacy ethically and politically, in research design, in the field and in the write-up enriches research, and that organizing such individual work through the theme of intimacy can deepen the understandings feminists have of experience, knowledge, and power, and in their relationships to each other.
