Catherine Ayres and David Bissell
John shifts uncomfortably in his seat, tapping his coffee cup, and tells Catherine he can’t do overnight hikes anymore, because his wife is ill. Catherine skips over this revelation with the callous speed that comes with research interview performance anxiety. She hastily directs John back to the ‘research topic’ at hand – national parks in Australia.
This interview encounter took place in 2013 as part of Catherine’s doctoral research. Throughout the intervening years (and likely well into the future) Catherine regrets her anxious impatience to get back to a more ‘relevant’ line of discussion; this still feels like a missed opportunity to respond more caringly and attentively to such a delicate moment of vulnerability and trust. Many of us engaged in qualitative research have surely had similar experiences of regret. These intensities, however, are silenced, or at least muffled, in research outputs that omit these moments in favour of juicy narrative quotes that serve as evidence in support of arguments or findings. And yet these are the sticky moments that, although rarely acknowledged, slice into our research practices and into our lives.
We introduce the concept of ‘suspending’ here to highlight how the multiple durations that comprise interviews are a significant dimension of the research encounter that is often overlooked across a range of disciplines in the social sciences, with analytical attention instead devoted to the symbolic and rhetorical dimensions of what was said. Different durations resonate at different times, sometimes immediately, and sometimes years after the initial encounter. Following Ingold’s (1993) observations about the multiple co-existent temporalities of landscapes, we want to suggest how the interview ‘landscape’ is steeped in the pasts and possible futures of researcher and researched alike, a site in which trajectories converge and transform. We want to revisit the interview event between Catherine and John to draw out ‘suspending’ as a methodological intervention filled with theoretical, practical and ethical possibilities for thinking empirical encounters.
In the context of qualitative interviews, researchers might feel compelled to adhere to core methodological tenets, such as generating ‘valid’ and ‘relevant’ data, and ensuring participants are informed and comfortable (Pitts and Miller-Day 2007). These are undoubtedly important considerations, but these, and other research conventions, may also inadvertently give rise to regrets such as the interview encounter with John. We argue that ‘suspending’ some assumptions to do with the performance of research interviews enables new research practices, new ways of sensing the multiple durations of interview encounters, and new forms of knowledge around the ethical considerations to which we researchers attend.
A common refrain in qualitative research literature is around the necessity to steer or guide unstructured or semi-structured interviews along the lines of preconceived research problems1 and this ability to guide the research interview is often seen as a core research skill, where staying on track is the researcher’s responsibility (Sarantakos 2013). Such persistent focus on the authority and skill of the researcher, however, reduces the importance of the singular twists and turns that might happen during the encounter itself. When we are steadfast in our notions of the research topic, defined by predefined research questions or problems, the illness of John’s wife seems tangential, a disruption to the proper task of researching national parks. But suspending some of these assumptions of relevance to research topics enables more sensitive consideration of these little escapes. Something happened within John that moved attention in a different direction. Attending to what precipitated this change of direction calls into question the infinitesimal, imperceptible, or ‘molecular’ processes ‘through which attention takes place’ (McCormack 2007: 365). What transitions had occurred within John for him to deviate from discussion of national parks to such an intimate revelation? And crucially, how might attending to these molecular modulations enable new understandings of complex formations of identities, values or politics?
Paying attention to such molecular transitions might require different modes of communication than researchers have traditionally utilized in research encounters. Indeed, one reason for rushing over John’s mention of his wife was Catherine’s discomfort with such sudden intimacy that disrupted what she envisioned as a ‘normal’ mode of engagement between a researcher and a participant. Paul Harrison has gestured towards the significance of such instances in testimony, which ‘confound, resist or simply withdraw from such engagement’ (2010: 162). While we might usually see disruptive or unexpected instances as failures on the part of the researcher – for example, a failure of the researcher to engage the participant fully in the research topic – Harrison invites us to consider how these instances are, in fact, important constitutive elements of testimony. Paying attention to how and when such instances take place might, for example, require suspending the desire to adhere to norms that determine ‘appropriate’ modes of conversation that allow for smooth or easy communication.
Brian Massumi’s writing on the energetics of events helps us to think about the multilayeredness of what is actually going on as we talk with someone in an interview. On one hand, there are the symbolic dimensions of expression. So, in our case, this would be the content of the talk that happens in interviews – the wordy sentences that end up as our interview transcripts, and the sorts of conventional meanings that often end up being ascribed to them. On the other hand, he points out that we are also affected at a much more immediate bodily level. This is the strength or duration of the effect of the expression of those spoken words on the bodies present. This is the dimension that can often be overlooked when we are trawling through the words in our transcripts, perhaps long after the interview itself took place. Massumi refers to this as its intensity.
Intensity has a felt dimension. What is so significant about this is that while there is a relationship between content and intensity, it is absolutely not predictable. The content, or what is being talked about, might amplify or dampen the intensity, for instance. But this felt intensity is much more unruly. As Massumi points out, this is because ‘[i]ntensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback which momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future’ (2002: 26, emphasis added). For instance, a long-forgotten memory might involuntarily cut in at an unexpected moment, perhaps ushered in by the precise words being spoken, or the manner in which they are said, adding something new to this present moment. As the intensity changes, our expectations about what might come next are destabilized.
The key point here is that it is not that we as researchers should be making a conscious choice to suspend the linear shape of a narrative. Suspending, in this sense, is not something that we force on a situation. Suspending is about being sensitive to the way that intensities can catch us off guard, surprising us, and changing the course of events. It is the intensity of the event itself through the precise playing out of talk as content and expression that, as Massumi says, creates a ‘state of suspense, potentially of disruption’ (2002: 26) from where it might be difficult to imagine what could happen next. So, if there is a skill here to be developed, we suggest that it is about cultivating our responsiveness to the singular moments that bead all encounters. Analytically, what this might mean is that rather than focusing on just the content of interviews in the vain hope of stitching together a coherent narrative, acknowledging the interview’s intensities reminds us that such coherence is really just a fragile semblance made up of countless little suspensions.
To return to Catherine’s interview encounter with John in this light demonstrates how heavily researchers rely on expectations of how a research interview can, or should, be performed. But adhering to habitual conventions of speech could reduce our openness to move with the subtle singularities each interview participant might offer. In this case, John offered something special, a complex signal that his body had moved from the topic at hand, revealing his own unique connection with the topic of national parks in Australia. Although Catherine tried to steer the discussion back to the topic, in doing so she could not help but feel she missed an opportunity to move with John, to be guided by him and his unique contribution as a research participant. Perhaps in this case Catherine might have remained silent, allowing John the option of elaborating further, or she could have suspended her own discomfort and directly inquired into the reasons why John connected the research topic and his wife, or offered an equally intimate connection. Or perhaps Catherine could have balanced her images of interview practices with an ethos of trying to notice ‘different kinds of things that might be happening, or things that might be happening differently’ (Coleman and Ringrose 2013: 4).
Catherine’s reluctance to move with John was also shaped by an uncertainty over whether, indeed, John’s revelation about his wife’s illness should be treated as data. Of course, as Davies and Davies have put it, there are ‘multiple possible trajectories in the tales that we, and our research participants, tell in the process of “generating data”’ (Davies and Davies 2007: 1140). This particular trajectory, over time, became the richest and most profound moment in Catherine’s doctoral research. John’s mention of his wife’s illness was pivotal in an argument around the complexities of how people connect to national parks. But Catherine had considerable qualms about utilizing this revelation in her research; after all, her information sheet and consent form – developed as part of a human research ethics application – said nothing about John’s wife. To develop this moment into a full and rich empirical illustration, Catherine had to suspend her imagination of what, precisely, constitutes data and how it can be put to work. This moment also points to broader ethical concerns over what it is to conceptualize a person – with all their vulnerabilities and peculiarities – as a source of data for research outputs and how this utilitarian attitude can affect both participants and researchers in different and unforeseeable ways.
The temporal arcs of such ethical considerations can be unpredictable, with research encounters following us into our futures and leaping to mind, unbidden, with surprising intensity. Gail Lewis, for example, has outlined how her intense (yet secret) hatred of one of her interview participants has endured for 15 years, though her thinking around this event has transformed (Lewis 2010). These ‘slow creep’ (Bissell 2014) intensities of research encounters reveal the need for thinking about the multiple durations of research – the speeds, slownesses, and transformations through time. Deploying ‘suspending’ as a conceptual and methodological lure points towards the importance of these enduring capacities of empirical research to affect us in myriad ways far beyond the immediate interview, observation or ethnography. Suspending judgements on how and when research encounters are important requires us to be more open to uncertainties of research and perhaps calls for more nuanced evaluations of research ethics that accommodate the possibilities of such uncertainty.
The interview moment discussed here was pivotal in thinking about the complexity of people’s relations to national parks. John revealed but one example of how these relations are steeped in complex, infinite assemblages of memories, ideas and practices that cannot (and, perhaps, should not) be easily reduced to the kind of ring-fenced ideas that Catherine was initially trying to explore in her research, which framed her initial sense of what ‘relevant’ lines of conversation would be for her interview with John. In this sense ‘suspending’ is not only a useful orientation for how to engage and interact in a research interview, but also a mode through which the multiple temporalities of such assemblages can be allowed to bloom. Suspending, we suggest, is therefore an orientation for attending to the multiple temporalities of research processes. Collecting, interpreting, analysing and presenting research materials, for example, each present opportunities for experimenting with ‘suspending’ as a methodological sensibility.
Introducing ‘suspending’ as part of a researcher’s toolkit might enable radically different practices, politics and ethics of research. But doing so also, in some ways, demands more of researchers. Although the imperative of research ethics is around minimizing harm by increasing the comfort of participants at all costs, this risk-averse strategy risks closing off political possibilities afforded by moments of discomfort (Ahmed 2006). Catherine’s encounter with John illustrates the importance of discomfort in research interviews. It was precisely this moment, this uncomfortable moment, which opened out into a fruitful illustration of the complexity of research encounters. The concern of research ethics in this case, then, is not to shut down or minimize the chance of discomfort, but rather, calls on researchers to employ strategies such as those we have suggested here in their navigation of these moments. Ethical decisions then become decisions about how to treat these moments with the care and consideration they deserve. But to move towards this mode of navigation, we must suspend our assumptions around how we can perform research interviews, and attend more carefully to how those encounters might endure in multiple ways.
1 Although some ‘grounded theory’ research claims to elide this convention, researchers in this area presumably do have at least a general field of inquiry in mind.
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