No Neutral Ground

This article argues that emotional reflexivity is a critical methodological and epistemological resource in qualitative political research, particularly in repressive and eventful contexts. Drawing on fieldwork with food cooperatives in Istanbul, it examines how emotions such as discomfort, grief, and anger function as interpretive signals that enable deeper access and co-produced knowledge. Through two fieldwork vignettes, one centered on mistrust within a cooperative and another responding to the devastating February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, it demonstrates how shifting to embodied, affective co-presence transformed research relationships and analytical insight. Engaging feminist epistemology and the emotiona turn in qualitative research, it reconceptualizes objectivity as accountability rather than detachment and positionality as encompassing affective disposition alongside categorical identity. It concludes that practicing emotional reflexivity constitutes a broader epistemological orientation to knowledge production.

Accountability · Knowledge production · Objectivity (philosophy) · Politics · Qualitative property · Qualitative research · Reflexivity · Focus Groups and Qualitative Methods · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics