Researcher as curator: Making room for the politics of emotion in leisure research

ABSTRACT

In this research note, we ask: What would it look like if researchers thought of themselves as ‘curators’ when analysing and presenting their work? What might that role shift produce? Thinking of oneself as ‘curator’ rather than ‘researcher’ fundamentally shifts the way one thinks and does data analysis and representation. We share our experiences thinking through this lens and propose that thinking of ‘researcher as curator’ is one way to guide researchers through data analysis and representation in a manner that embraces the ‘emotional turn’ (Lemmings & Brooks, 2014). This ‘role-framing’ can provide some direction for those using Creative Analytic Practice (CAP; Parry & Johnson, 2007) or arts-based methodologies in their work. But, importantly, we posit that ‘researcher as curator’ can also be useful in qualitative work that does not necessarily employ either CAP or arts-based research, but seeks to engage the emotions of leisure research.

KEYWORDS:

• Curation
• exhibition
• arts-based research
• affect
• emotion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We acknowledge that there are many important reasons why participants may choose to and need to remain anonymous in the research process. We are not arguing for rolling back anonymity or confidentiality, but instead thinking through how researchers can safely represent participant experience in a way that allows for a more direct dialogue between reader and participant. This may include more visceral representations of participant experience and different approaches to analysis and editing on the part of the researcher.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alayna Schmidt

Alayna Schmidt, M.S. (she/they), is a Ph.D. student at Clemson University and a Graduate Research Assistant in the Race, Ethnicity, Youth, and Social Equity Research Collaboratory at Clemson. Their research interests are entangled in the interconnections of social justice, youth development, leisure, arts, and the environment. They are particularly interested in community-engaged research that interrogates power and privilege and uses paradigms and methodologies that challenge hegemonic white patriarchal idea(l)s of what counts as knowledge in academia while holding space for imagining otherwise.

Callie Schultz

Callie Schultz, Ph.D. (she/her), is an Associate Professor at Western Carolina University. Her major research interests include leisure and new media, leisure and social justice, and the performance of gendered subjectivities in leisure spaces; she is particularly interested in methodologies that do “edgework,” challenging what “counts” as “research” in the field. She seeks spaces/paradigms/methodologies that produce different knowledges differently.