The affective labour of autism neuroscience: entangling emotions, thoughts and feelings in a scientific research practice

Fitzgerald, Des ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1899-8481 2013. The affective labour of autism neuroscience: entangling emotions, thoughts and feelings in a scientific research practice. Subjectivity 6 (2) , pp. 131-152. 10.1057/sub.2013.5

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Abstract

This paper extends discussions on the role of emotion in scientific lives, by showing how the emotional commitments of researchers (here, psychologists and neuroscientists) can play a specifically constitutive or generative role. Autism research is an area where the tricky intertwinements of subjects, thoughts, interactions and bodies can be remarkably explicit: the paper uses this case to show how researchers' emotions can actually mediate transactions between intellectual/scientific problems and more material/bodily concerns. The paper argues that autism research shows the on-going presence of affect in scientific subjectivities; in particular, it shows how scientific subjects sometimes constitute intellectual projects through a sensitivity to their own bodies and emotions. Gathering these concerns together, the paper extends recent discussions of body-work and emotion-work by Natasha Myers and Elizabeth Wilson, and also draws on the ‘emotional’ aspects of AN Whitehead’s process philosophy.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
ISSN:	1755-6341
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	08 Nov 2023 09:10
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/76659

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