Researching the researcher: producing emotionally-sensed knowledge in migration research

Reflexivity has been central to recent debates in migration studies, focusing on how migration scholarship can become more equitable, inclusive, and attuned to the power dynamics inherent in research processes. In this article, we advance these debates by demonstrating the role of emotions as crucial tools for knowledge production. Drawing on feminist qualitative research, we introduce our emotionally-sensed approach to account for the role of emotions across the different, yet inter-related, stages of the research process. More specifically, we operationalise the processes of constructing, generating and producing emotionally-sensed knowledge and illustrate them with examples from our ethnographic research on the impact of Brexit on EU migrants in the UK. The paper makes the case for emotionally-sensed knowledge as part of the reflexive turn in migration studies and provides strategies to more consistently incorporate researchers’ emotions in processes of knowledge production.