Undermining the Sanitized Account: Violence and Emotionality in the Field in Northern Ireland

• NCJ Number: 190257
• Journal: British Journal of Criminology Volume: 41 Issue: 3 Dated: Summer 2001 Pages: 485-501
• Author(s): Sharon Pickering
• Editor(s): Geoffrey Pearson
• Date Published: 2001
• Length: 17 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom
• Note: For related articles see NCJ-190252-256, and NCJ-190258-260

Annotation

This article addressed the issue of emotionality and the central role it played in understanding the experience of researching violence, and how it had been systematically excluded from most academic work in Northern Ireland.

Abstract

The experience of researching violence is underpinned by experiences of emotionality. However, emotionality has either been systematically excluded or considered at best peripheral to the substance of violence research. This paper was interested in the ways emotionality had been so easily ignored in most criminological work and the ways it was impossible to ignore during a study of women, policing, and resistance in Northern Ireland. Examining emotionality means that we are not content to subsume the potential violence of silencing the often inherent emotionality of researching violence. It acknowledges that such silencing has significant theoretical and epistemological consequences. Emotionality was seen as helping problematize the lack of fit between lived experience and accepted interpretations of that experience. Emotionality can be a critical way of knowing, a potential source of knowledge not to be overlooked.