| Summary: | This book critically appraises the many complex ways in which emotion management features in oral history research and its specific implications for the researcher. Uniquely, it draws on oral historians’ personal accounts of conducting sensitive research and assesses the applicability of the term emotional labour to this work. It examines how oral historians may perform emotional labour, highlighting the often-hidden emotional toll it takes on them.
It considers how the emotionally taxing implications of conducting sensitive research may be exacerbated or mitigated by the institutional relations and contexts in which the researcher works. It evaluates recommendations from related disciplinary fields for ways of supporting researchers and considers how an ethics of care can be fostered in local research environments. In developing our discussion, we engage critically with theories of emotion, conceptualisations of emotional labour, questions of power and positionality, an ethics of care and debate on the impact of neoliberal ideas and policies on the higher education sector.
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