Learning to Affect and to be Affected: Articulating Self and World in Empirical Research

In this chapter, I develop an account of empirical research as a process in which researchers acquire novel capacities to affect and to be affected. I juxtapose more theoretical accounts with empirical vignettes, in which I reflexively highlight how I myself became (affectively) entangled in my own research on bodyweight narratives in everyday life and in a laboratory study of two biomedical research groups. Through revisiting my own studies, I aim to contribute to a reflexive theorization of how we become and build words through and in our research practices.