The right distance. Emotional labour and researcher positioning in qualitative research

Introduction

This article arises from a dialogue between two ethnographers with divergent yet converging research paths. One of us has examined the intersections between academic precarity and motherhood (Russo, 2024); the other has focused on far-right social movements, particularly the recent cultural turn shaping their collective action (Grippo, 2024a; Gaugele and Grippo, 2025). The paper was collaboratively developed through a sustained dialogue between the authors on what it means to practice ethnography, starting from our shared understanding of research as grounded in lived encounters and narratives rather than abstract theorizing.

We hold that the foundations of qualitative research lie in the encounter with real people's worlds: fluid, multidimensional, and often unpredictable, shaped by both harmony and conflict. To understand the meanings individuals ascribe to their own actions, research must go beyond procedural rigour and engage in the relational and affective space where understanding is co-created. It demands the researcher's deep involvement with participants’ lived experiences and a willingness to inhabit emotionally charged territories that may evoke discomfort, resonance, or unexpected connections (Hubbard et al., 2001; Schmidt et al., 2024; Zahora, 2025). As Ferrarotti (2011: 12) reminds us, the encounter with the Other is ‘essentially an inter-voice, an inter-dialogue’, and to be genuine and produce ‘significant human truths’, ‘interlocutors must place themselves on an equal footing, establishing genuine two-way communication’. This perspective foregrounds research as a relational practice grounded in reciprocity rather than extraction, as ‘researchers are always inside, never outside, of the research […] themselves also a researched being’ (Ferrarotti, 2003: 4).

Drawing on these premises, this article explores the emotional labour that unfolds within the research relationship through the analysis of two sharply contrasting empirical cases: a study with precarious academic mothers, an experience personally shared by the researcher during the fieldwork, and an ethnography conducted within a far-right movement, characterized by value distance and affective resistance. These two contexts represent opposite poles of the research relationship: on the one hand, experiential proximity generating self-identification; on the other, value distance, which demands a sustained effort to maintain both analytical openness and empathic understanding. Nevertheless, as we will show in the paper, in both cases, moments of simultaneous ‘similarity and difference’ emerge (Ezzy, 2010), requiring the researcher to constantly negotiate the ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild, 2012) that regulate which emotions can be expressed, contained, or silenced (Bergman Blix & Wettergren, 2015).

These negotiations embody an epistemological tension between proximity and distance within the research relationship, shaping how research interests, knowledge production, and understanding are interwoven and co-constructed in the field. Understanding the other can be conceived as a detour towards self-understanding, while fieldwork itself unfolds as a temporal process of mutual discovery in which the possibility of understanding presupposes both similarity and dissimilarity (Crapanzano, 1980). Thus, the notion of the right distance invoked in the title captures an enduring tension between empathy and detachment, involvement and analytical clarity. Perfect knowledge of the other is unattainable, yet ethnographic understanding depends precisely on navigating that impossibility with tact, reflexivity, and respect for alterity.

From this perspective, we explore the ethnographic encounter not only in terms of distance and positionality (Blee, 2007; Dickson-Swift et al., 2009; Toscano, 2019), but also in terms of the emotional labour it entails (Berger, 2013; Boler, 2018; Hochschild, 2012; Zahora, 2025).

Both empirical cases – the study with precariously employed academic mothers and the ethnography conducted within a far-right milieu – highlight the tension between the emotions experienced by researchers and those by the subjects, and the methodological and ethical expectations that define what is considered appropriate to feel or display during fieldwork (Bergman Blix & Wettergren, 2015). As a result, we focus on the handling of emotions (Bloch, 2016) that such friction produces: the practices and negotiations through which bonding and micro-power dynamics develop and are maintained within the ethnographic encounter. By engaging our experiences in dialogue, we suggest that emotional reflexivity can function as an epistemological resource. Recognizing, processing, and integrating emotions within methodological practice is not a threat to scientific rigour but a vital step towards a more situated and reflexive understanding of the social world (Halpin, 2026).

The article unfolds as follows. The first section offers a brief background to situate the discussion. The next two sections introduce the empirical cases separately, each offering a distinct experience of proximity and distance within the ethnographic encounter. The final section brings these two experiences into dialogue, revisiting them through the epistemological lenses outlined earlier.

Before proceeding, a brief note on voice is necessary. Readers will observe a shift between the first-person singular and the first-person plural. This alternation is intentional. The use of I signifies the moment of fieldwork – the time when each of us, individually, confronted the emotional, ethical, and interpretive challenges of our own research encounter. As Crapanzano (1980) states, it is both stylistically and psychologically challenging to separate the moment of encounter from that of writing. Recognizing this continuity enables us to highlight the subjective and affective aspects of fieldwork rather than conceal them behind a neutral voice. Conversely, the use of we marks the shift into dialogue between the two researchers co-authoring this paper: when these solitary experiences were brought together, collectively reflected upon, and transformed into the shared reflections that sustain this article. In this sense, our writing practice resonates with Lonzi's insight that ‘dialogue offers a knowledge of oneself and of the other that becomes a key to understanding reality, which is made of many selves’ (Lonzi, 1980: 115). The dialogical space between us thus becomes an epistemological one – a site where individual experiences are not dissolved into abstraction but intertwined and re-elaborated into collective understanding.

Emotions, reflexivity, and the epistemology of the right distance

Feminist epistemologies have long challenged the notion of a detached observer, asserting that knowledge is situated, embodied, and emotionally mediated (Haraway, 2008; Shesterinina, 2019; Zahora, 2025). From this viewpoint, emotions are not barriers to understanding but forms of knowing – indicators of our positionality and traces of the relationships that enable knowledge. Interpretive and phenomenological approaches have likewise highlighted relationality and empathy as essential to understanding social experience (Davidsen, 2013; De Coning, 2023). The affective turn has further developed these insights, emphasizing emotions as both cognitive and methodological tools (Ahmed, 2004; Clough and Halley, 2007; Coplan, 2011; Wetherell, 2012).

Boler's (2018) critique of rationalist epistemologies further sharpens this point by illustrating how affect links our thoughts to our modes of thinking, highlighting the emotional textures shaping perception and interpretation. Hochschild's (2012) concepts of feeling rules, expression rules, and emotion management then illuminate the social regulation of affect – the ways in which internal states and external performances are coordinated according to situational norms. When applied to ethnography, these frameworks reveal tensions between felt and displayed emotions, and the effort required to maintain ethical engagement and analytical composure in contexts already marked by power asymmetries and intimacy. McQueeney and Lavelle (2017) unify these ideas by viewing emotional labour as fundamental to ethnographic practice and by defining emotional reflexivity as the process through which emotions become epistemic resources rather than private burdens. They identify three interconnected dimensions: situating emotions within wider social structures; using affect to reveal power relations during research interactions; and connecting emotional responses to the researcher's personal and positional history.

Such an approach transforms emotions from private, confessional experiences into analytical resources through which power and meaning are negotiated in the field. It situates emotional labour within the broader moral and political tensions of critical ethnography – particularly the challenge of balancing empathy with critical distance, and social justice commitments with faithful representation of participants (Avishai et al., 2013). The emotional labour of fieldwork, therefore, involves both surface and deep acting – managing one's feelings to fit situational norms – within relational contexts marked by asymmetries of power, intimacy, and moral distance (Berger, 2013; Holmes, 2010).

While this body of literature convincingly establishes emotions as epistemic resources, it leaves a key methodological dilemma unresolved: how can researchers convey their emotions into ethnographic writing without ‘writing for oneself and about oneself’? As Atkinson (2008: 218) warns, ‘It is far too easy to arrive at a position that effectively says that one's emotional responses to fieldwork and to “others” is what really counts’. The core issue, therefore, is not whether emotions should be incorporated into ethnographic research, but how their epistemic potential can be reflexively managed throughout all stages of the research process, including writing. In our own work, this tension became evident through the analytical dialogue between our two cases. Reflecting on our fieldwork, we repeatedly returned to a set of questions that gradually gained methodological rather than purely personal significance: where did proximity enhance understanding, and when did distance become necessary? When did emotional engagement prove analytically beneficial rather than overwhelming? And, importantly, where in the writing process does the researcher position themselves – how can one situate one's own presence not only in relation to the other but also to oneself?

Reflexive proximities: precarity, motherhood, and the transformative potential of research

During the pandemic, while holding a postdoctoral fellowship focused on the relationship between precarious employment and psychosocial well-being, I, like many others, found myself needing to recalibrate my research design. The physical confinement imposed by lockdown measures rendered my original project unfeasible. At that time, I had already been a precariously employed researcher for several years and a mother for just over a year. As is often the case for those working in the field of social inquiry, I had engaged extensively with the academic literature on precarity – particularly in relation to gender and labour – and motherhood had recently led me to Miller's Making Sense of Motherhood (2005). Her work prompted me to consider how motherhood reshapes the self, not only in experiential terms but also in relation to broader structures and narratives of identity. Confined within the walls of my home, with a crib beside my desk, the idea of investigating the intersection between academic precarity and motherhood – and how such conditions affect not only well-being but also fertility decision-making – became increasingly compelling. The existing literature on gender in academia had long focused on how institutional structures impact women's careers, with well-documented concepts such as the ‘glass ceiling’ and the ‘maternal wall’ (Gill, 2009; Williams, 2005). Yet I was struck by how little attention had been paid to two questions that, in that moment, felt particularly urgent: first, how does academic precarity shape fertility choices? And second – echoing Miller's insights – how might becoming a mother reconfigure early career researchers’ sense of self, and their relation to their academic trajectories?

The conditions of confinement during the pandemic required a methodological shift: the ethnographic encounter, as I had long conceived it, had to take place through a screen. ICT-mediated interviews became the primary means of both recruitment and interaction (Russo, 2022, 2024). I circulated an open call on social media, targeting online communities of Italian researchers. I aimed to reach precariously employed academic women, or those who had recently transitioned to stable positions and were willing to reflect on their earlier experiences of precarity. While the recruitment process posed certain challenges, two elements worked in my favour. As a precarious academic and mother myself, I had privileged access to these digital communities – not only in logistical terms but also through shared cultural codes that enabled me to appeal to potential participants’ interests and availability. The response was striking: many women came forward, eager to take part in the study. The shared condition of lockdown likely played a role in this willingness – the scarcity of social interaction rendered even a long conversation with a stranger an appealing opportunity. But the question lingered: was I, in fact, a stranger to these women?

I use the term ‘stranger’ here in the sense evoked by Packer (2011), where the paradoxical coexistence of proximity and distance within the research relationship makes the stranger a privileged recipient of confidence, since it allows one to ask questions that an insider may not. However, the term stranger conflates two meanings: someone unknown and a foreigner. While I was certainly unknown to my interlocutors, I was by no means foreign. My digital identity made visible at least two salient points of commonality: like them, I was a precarious academic; like them, I was a mother. These shared traits unsettled the boundaries of otherness and lent a particular texture to the emotional and epistemological dynamics of our encounter.

To study a group while being part of it means being at once a spectator in the audience and a participant on the stage (Berger, 2013). It means embracing a dual identity: I was at once the observer and the observed in my relationship with each interlocutor. Therefore, my first grasp at the right distance concept was that I had to constantly navigate the tension between personal involvement and the necessary detachment not only to analyze the data gathered during the interviews, but also to avoid projecting my own experience onto theirs, experiences that could be – and had every right to be – profoundly different from my own.

Moreover, if at first, I interpreted my interlocutors’ eagerness to participate in my study as a response to pandemic loneliness, during the interviews, I came to realize that something else was at play: a shared sense of solidarity. Several participants explicitly expressed a desire to support a ‘precarious sister’ – myself – in achieving her research goals. They were, quite literally, showing up for me. Some of them took an interest in reading the publications that emerged from the project; others wrote to me years later to let me know they had finally secured the tenured positions they had long aspired to. One wrote to congratulate me when I obtained my permanent position, while another, who had been struggling with the idea of having a second child, later wrote to tell me she had indeed made that choice.

The care and trust that many of these otherwise unknown interlocutors extended to me was striking – not in sentimental terms, but because of the nature of what they chose to share. They allowed a stranger into what was often both intimate – their relationship to motherhood – and personally difficult – stories of emotional abuse, institutional neglect, and professional humiliation. This openness placed a clear ethical responsibility on me as a researcher, especially in ensuring the full anonymization of the material they entrusted me with, given the potential risks many of their accounts carried within the academic contexts in which they were embedded. At the same time, their narratives echoed aspects of my own experience in ways that could not be ignored. As I listened to them, and later analyzed their stories, I found myself re-encountering personal struggles – with precarity, with motherhood, with the ambivalent attachment to academic labour. This resonance required a continuous effort to maintain a productive analytical distance: one that did not deny the emotional entanglement shaping the research encounter, but rather acknowledged it as epistemologically relevant. As Boler (2018: 192) reminds us, understanding emotions entails ‘calling together what we think with how we think’ – a task that in ethnographic research demands not the bracketing of emotion, but its critical incorporation.

As mentioned earlier in this paragraph, one of the key questions I sought to explore was how academic precarity shaped decisions around motherhood. Because this focus was clearly outlined in the call for participants, several women in the self-selected sample had experienced what Billari (2005) terms late and latest-late fertility. As a result, many interviews included accounts of difficulties with conception and/or experiences of miscarriage, often accompanied by moments of visible emotion. These were undoubtedly the most demanding situations for me in terms of emotional labour during the fieldwork – in the sense described by Hochschild (2012) – as I found myself negotiating what to do with my own experiences: should I share them? Should I remain silent? Would disclosure serve the conversation or distort it?

One particularly charged interview involved a woman of my generation whose fragmented academic trajectory closely mirrored my own. Shortly after relocating for a postdoctoral position, she discovered she was pregnant. The revelation plunged her into crisis: she feared the pregnancy would derail the kind of academic work she aspired to do, and the recent move left her unsure she had the social networks to shoulder motherhood. After deciding with her partner to continue, she suffered a miscarriage a few weeks later; she described being overwhelmed by guilt, as if her earlier ambivalence and the weight she had given to her career had somehow caused the loss. In that moment of acute vulnerability, I chose to meet her on the same ground and to draw on Ferrarotti's notion of creative empathy – an empathy premised on reciprocity, the recognition of the other, and a shared human participation that moves beyond the isolated self (Ferrarotti, 2011). Our mutual reflection on guilt – considered both as a self-conscious emotion and as a gendered response to institutional pressures (Iacono Lobo, 2015) – proved transformative for both the interviewee and myself. It allowed me to reframe guilt (both hers and mine) from a private pathology into a collectively meaningful expression of the tensions produced by precarious academic life, and open a dialogic space that challenges the managerial, individualized logics of contemporary academia (Gannon et al., 2019).

Navigating these tensions during the interviews meant inhabiting an uncomfortable position by continually shifting between emic and etic perspectives (Eppley, 2006). Because the researcher's stance is fluid, I adopted different postures at different moments: sometimes I deliberately stepped back – listening without personal disclosure – when silence felt both sufficient and ethically appropriate. On other occasions, restraint would have been inadequate; resisting Crapanzano's (1980) critique of the ‘miserliness’ of social research, I enacted a measured reciprocity – as in the episode described above – selectively sharing elements of my own trajectory not to centre myself, but to honour the vulnerability entrusted to me and to acknowledge the ethical responsibilities such disclosure entailed.

Thus, it was precisely through the emotional texture of the interviews – through how experiences were narrated, paused over, and sometimes broken by tears or silences – that I was able to access the depth of meaning my interlocutors ascribed to their journeys through motherhood and academic precarity. What might appear, at first glance, as least amenable to sociocultural analysis proved to be the very ground upon which meaning was negotiated, identity was reconfigured, and agency was articulated. Interviewing this group of academic mothers at that specific juncture of my life had a profound impact, not only on the development of my academic trajectory (Russo, 2024; Russo and Minello, 2021), but also on the way I came to revisit the second epistemological question introduced earlier in this paragraph: how might becoming a mother reconfigure early career researchers’ sense of self, and their relation to their academic trajectories?

In this sense, the research process became a site of mutual transformation – a space in which understanding others’ experiences inevitably reshaped my own perspective, as both a researcher and a mother. Motherhood, as vividly emerged from my interlocutors’ stories, sets in motion a profound reworking of one's sense of self and one's orientation in the world. What this research made clear to me is that such processes of understanding are never unidirectional: the work of interpretation always involves detours through the lives of others, and along those detours, the self is constantly being refigured.

Feeling the distance: emotional reflexivity in far-right ethnography

The shop door is closed. A small bell next to the entrance is the only means of establishing an initial form of contact with those inside – a gesture that, in this case, amounts to a request for access. The slightly reflective glass prevents one from seeing inside and forces the visitor to confront their own reflection, remaining in a state of suspension. It is impossible to tell whether anyone is present or whether the wait is futile. It is late morning in the capital of a region in eastern Germany; at that hour, when lunch is usually taken early, the shop might well be closed for a break. The fear that no one was there – and that my field preparation had been in vain – was interrupted by a click: permission to enter had been granted.

Yet the closed door persisted even once I was inside. Symbolically, it represented the need to protect both goods and staff from potential attacks by political opponents who had previously defaced the shop with paint. That same closure was reflected in the wary gaze of Karl – the pseudonym I use to protect his identity – who had allowed me in. After a quick look around, I approached the counter to introduce myself. As usual, I identified myself and offered my hand, hoping that physical contact might facilitate the negotiation of access: the chance to explain my research intentions and transform my image from that of an unfamiliar – perhaps intrusive – stranger into that of a researcher.

In this case, the first negotiation appeared relatively straightforward. Access to the field had already been arranged by email with one of the store managers, whose name, mentioned aloud, partially eased the initial tension. The door was now slightly ajar. Gatekeepers play a crucial role in opening the way for the researcher, particularly in stigmatized contexts such as the far right (Toscano, 2019; Grippo, 2024b). Members of such groups usually grant limited access and tend to protect the in-group (Crowley, 2007). As academics are often perceived as unreliable or hostile figures linked to the very power system they seek to oppose (Blee, 2007; Esseveld and Eyerman, 1992).

The gatekeeper had announced my arrival, and Karl knew who I was and that I was visiting similar shops across several German cities. ¹ Paradoxically, this legitimacy triggered new barriers: the friendly smile provoked by the recognition of a shared contact was immediately followed by a contrary gesture – the zipping up of his hoodie to conceal tattoos banned under German law. His evasive gaze, clasped hands, measured words, and the counter between us all functioned as protective barriers: access to the public space had been granted, but the personal sphere remained closed.

Nevertheless, I was permitted to stay in the shop, observe interactions with customers, and, only after transactions were completed, invite them for an interview. My visible gratitude for this unexpected opportunity sparked a long discussion about my academic work and the motivations sustaining an academic career despite its precarity. This exchange, conducted on a relatively equal footing, created an intersubjective space that reduced the distance between us. It was not an artificial strategy but a process of genuine mirroring that enabled not only access to the field but also Karl's willingness to speak more freely. The discussions about why each of us pursued our respective work offered an opportunity to clarify my research approach. Although I did not explicitly state that the study concerned the far right, but rather the commercial sector in which the business operated, our dialogue soon expanded into a critical discussion of the Weberian principle of value neutrality and the delicate balance between personal interests, research interests, and the knowledge produced. The explicit articulation of this approach helped consolidate the research relationship, as it revealed my intention to conduct an inquiry grounded in reciprocity and transparency, rather than in an extractive logic – the kind that enters, takes, and leaves. In doing so, it did not completely eliminate, but at least mitigated, the suspicion that my interest was directed not toward the mere collection of information but toward a shared understanding of the social world under study. This clarification likely marked an important threshold in the field relationship.

During the first day spent together – approximately 6 hours – the relationship nevertheless remained unbalanced: I was the one explaining and disclosing more than Karl. Furthermore, a tension emerged between the field's relational demands and my own value positioning. Gaining access to Karl's interpretations required openness and reciprocity on my part, including a degree of personal disclosure that could sustain trust. Yet this sustained openness brought into focus a form of value dissonance. Striving to engage someone whose political commitments I did not share required a continuous reflexive effort to remain present without suspending critical awareness. This placed me in an uncomfortable position where openness to understanding coexisted with awareness of the distance structuring the encounter.

In the following days, the relationship evolved into a process of gradual mutual openness. My constant yet discreet presence – from opening time until late afternoon on the agreed days – and my adherence to the shared rules, such as interacting with customers only after transactions were completed, were explicitly acknowledged as indicators of coherence and reliability, reinforcing my legitimacy as a researcher within the field. Prolonged interaction also revealed shared interests, such as black metal music and The Lord of the Rings – examples of the broader corpus of cultural materials that have been strategically appropriated and hatejacked by the far right (Benton and Peterka-Benton, 2020; Gaugele & Grippo, 2025). During fieldwork, this process eroded the common assumption that ‘when dealing with extremes, one is dealing with the cultlike, the exotic, and the enclosed … Extremists are supposed to be like exotic others, living with their own cosmologies and self-enclosed senses of the real’ (Marcus 1997: 103), radically different from ‘us’.

Discussions about bands, concerts, and favourite characters from the saga gradually eased our interaction: clasped hands and evasive glances gave way to friendlier smiles; the counter was abandoned for walks around the shop and conversations in the small courtyard at the back, surrounded by red-brick buildings.

Reflections on broader social processes intertwined with personal stories rooted in Karl's social background: widespread unemployment, poor services, decaying infrastructure, and a general sense of powerlessness in the face of change. These narratives, which also resonated with some of my own experiences, generated a significant emotional dissonance: I was not sharing personal details merely to ‘open the door’ to the field, but because that dialogue with Karl produced an authentic, transformative intersubjective space – one that connected two worlds, the researcher's and the actor's, without dissolving or merging them, but recognizing their partiality and irreducibility.

Careful observation suggested that a similar process was unfolding for him. Signs such as unzipping his hoodie to reveal political symbols, maintaining direct eye contact, and disclosing intimate and controversial aspects – from banned tattoos to troubled legal and family histories – indicated a shift from a relationship between strangers to one of growing trust. The diffidence of our first encounters was replaced by an empathetic exchange, an inter-dialogue that, as Ferrarotti (2003: 4) writes, can yield ‘significant human truths’ only when founded on ‘a plane of equality, on two-way communication’.

Such shifts are not unusual in ethnographic research on far-right movements, where relationships often evolve through everyday interactions that slowly transform guarded encounters into workable forms of trust and empathy. As Pilkington (2016: 21–22) observes, the ethnographic relationship ‘is rooted in a range of emotional and sensory experiences that generate affective bonds regardless of whether the researcher shares beliefs, values or behaviors with respondents’. It is therefore unsurprising that Ezekiel (1995: 63), driving to Detroit to meet with Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi members, asked himself: ‘What am I doing, worrying about a Nazi?’.

I found myself asking a similar question when the range of negative emotions I initially experienced in the field – fear, anxiety, discomfort – gradually gave way to positive ones: trust, care, mutual recognition, and even joy. Among these, empathy – the capacity to feel with the other – generated emotional warmth and a sense of human closeness.

This proximity was not without discomfort. Moments of recognition coexisted with episodes of moral friction, revealing the fragile balance required to remain open without collapsing into complicity.

I did not treat these emotions as mere side effects. Rather, I employed methodological reflexivity (Berger 2013; Holmes 2010) to develop a deeper understanding of Karl's actions and motivations, situating them within the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they took shape.

In practice, this involved three interrelated steps. First, I treated my emotional reactions – fear, discomfort, and later empathy – not as private experiences but as data indicating moments. Second, I systematically revisited these reactions through fieldnotes written immediately after interactions, asking what had triggered them and what they revealed about the relational dynamics at play. Third, I compared these affective responses with Karl's narratives and broader contextual information in order to situate them within social and biographical processes. If the Weberian principle of value neutrality allows ‘facts to be distinguished from values or values to be treated as facts’ (Weber, 1919: 15), the reflexive work following fieldwork, understood through the lens of right distance, allows facts to be distinguished from emotions, or emotions to be treated as facts. Through the re-elaboration and contextualization of both positive and negative emotions, and through a careful process of reflection ‘in the field and behind the desk’ (McQueeney and Lavelle, 2017), I used methodological reflexivity to better understand Karl's worlds and the motivations that led him to join the far-right movement despite the social and political stigma attached to it.

If we do not consider emotional labour as merely the subjective mode through which researchers experience fieldwork, or as a ‘confessional tale’ (Van Maanen, 1988), then, as McQueeney and Lavelle (2017: 83) argue, ‘researchers must use their emotional reflexivity to comprehend the meanings that subjects attribute to their actions’ – even though ‘it is challenging (and difficult) to manage emotional involvement and the need for detachment when reporting research findings’ (Toscano and Di Nunzio, 2019: 100).

I thus interpreted Karl's openness not as the result of mismanagement of the research relationship, but as a product of his biographical context and processes of primary and secondary socialization. His willingness to share stemmed not only from the trust developed through our interaction but also from his recognition that my interest in him was genuine and from the possibility – relatively new to him – of being attentively listened to. This insight shed light on the deeper reasons for his adherence to the far right: the early abandonment by his mother, who, like his father, had been involved in the movement's violent fringes; his youthful imprisonment, during which he reinforced his militancy and marked his body with increasingly extreme tattoos; and, more broadly, the loneliness, contextual deprivation, and traumatic experiences – familial and otherwise – that had made far-right activism a form of symbolic and affective compensation. These interpretations emerged from repeated conversations, biographical accounts he shared across multiple encounters, and triangulation with observational notes and contextual knowledge of similar trajectories documented in the literature.

In this sense, practicing listening on a plane of equality – an approach grounded in what we later conceptualized as the right distance – meant sustaining a difficult position between openness and differentiation: remaining close enough for understanding to emerge, while reflexively maintaining the analytical distinction necessary to interpret rather than merge with the other's world. For Karl, accustomed to feeling marginalized and stigmatized, this created a rare space in which he encountered someone genuinely interested in his worldview. The door was open.

Beyond the field: the second life of emotional labour

Leaving the field does not mark the end of emotional labour; rather, it inaugurates a second, less visible phase in which the affects generated in the encounter are reactivated and reworked ‘behind the desk’.The relationships and tensions experienced in the field persist in the act of writing, where meaning is reassembled rather than reported. In both our studies, the dialogical space opened with participants did not close with the last interview or the final day of observation; it continued to resonate as we re-read notes, listened to recordings, and wrote.

At this stage, the inter-dialogue with our interlocutors folds into a second dialogue that takes place in the solitude of analysis, this time between us as researchers and writers. As Nin (1976) suggests, writing allows us to ‘live’ an experience a second time, revisiting it in retrospect as we work through our notes, recordings, and memories. This reflective space becomes not merely an existential insight but a methodological practice: a deliberate act of revisiting the encounter, allowing the other's voice to resonate within our interpretive frameworks, and examining how these echoes reshape both understanding and self-understanding. For the researcher working with precarious academic mothers, the analysis involved retracing her own biographical journey as reflected in her interviewees’ narratives, allowing their stories to reawaken latent memories and unresolved conflicts around precarity, motherhood, and both academic and maternal guilt. For the researcher studying the far right, the surprise lay in recognizing how the life histories of activists resonated with his own experiences, creating a disconcerting but fertile sense of proximity to those initially perceived as distant.

In both cases, returning to transcripts and fieldnotes involved re-experiencing the emotional states encountered in situ, to inhabit an uncomfortable position again, now within a liminal space shared by both the researcher and the research subjects. It is an emergent relational space, brought into being through the encounter itself: a terrain that is neither exclusively theirs nor ours, yet paradoxically upheld by both. In this shared yet unowned space, experience reemerges in its raw form, prior to settling into the fixed boundaries of an I or a they, allowing emotions to be revisited not as private residues but as traces of a co-constructed process of meaning-making.

This renewed intersubjective and transformative space requires that we not bracket our own subjectivity when we write, nor silence the wound opened by the encounter with the other (Gruber, 2014). We understand this wound not as something to be neutralized but as a fertile point of reflection. Like a ‘wound-slit’ Carotenuto's (1998), it sharpens our gaze, enabling us to see more clearly what might otherwise remain obscured ‘a tiny opening that allows you to keep an eye on your inner world, to scrutinize and explore the most mysterious and secret part of yourself’, and that ‘becomes the matrix of the way we relate to the world’. It is precisely by allowing the other's world to resonate within this opening that we can situate our emotional responses, connect them to our broader experiential constellation, and ultimately deepen our understanding of the encounter. In analytical practice, the right distance approach involves viewing our emotional perturbations not as noise to be eradicated but as embodied signals that if I touch, I am touched – that knowledge is always situated and relational.

This process finds a partial and provisional resolution in writing, where such moments can be acknowledged, situated, and made analytically productive. Yet this resolution is never complete: it does not offer a stable answer on whether these emergent truths should be returned to the research subject, framed as potential analytical bias, or embraced as part of the interpretive process. Instead, writing becomes the space in which these tensions are held and negotiated, often more clearly after leaving the field, but always in ways that remain contingent, situated, and intersubjective rather than definitive. In this sense, ethnographic writing should not be understood as a solipsistic exercise. Alterity remains present within it: the ‘other’ is not only the person encountered in the field, but also the imagined interlocutor to whom the text is addressed.

Analysis, then, is not the neutral passage from ‘data’ to concepts, but the tentative act of lingering at that threshold – wide enough to let the encounter breathe, yet fragile enough to unsettle us – without fortifying it through defensive objectification or being swept away by the current of the other's world. We become with others in ways that reshape our own position while leaving room for difference (Haraway 2008). The emotions that flow from field dialogue into scientific discourse are not impurities to be eliminated but remnants of mutual exposure, embodying a subjectivity that is always already incarnate. To transform those traces into analytical insight requires a mode of engagement that refuses both closure and certitude, remaining instead open to the unfinished and the indeterminate. It involves a patient, sometimes an unsettling effort to track the movements of meaning as they develop in the intersubjective space of research and continue to evolve during analysis. Emotions in qualitative research provide a window into the researcher's own transformation – both personal and professional – while also shaping the field's evolving understanding (Thajib et al., 2019). Yet raw emotions must be engaged reflexively (Atkinson, 2008): they enrich and shed light on the study of social organization, action, and interaction only when interpreted with care and analytical attentiveness. In this way, emotional engagement becomes both a tool and a responsibility, enabling the researcher to approach the interpretive phase with sensitivity while upholding the disciplined rigour necessary to make the complexity of social life comprehensible.

Conclusions: towards a precarious form of truth

Any genuine movement towards the other requires stepping into uncertainty, a willingness to embrace the mystery and vulnerability inherent in every encounter. Such a step is never without risk, yet it is precisely this risk that opens up the possibility of understanding. This dynamic of exposure and emergent understanding also shapes the epistemic positions articulated in this article. Three distinct yet interconnected subject positions structure the text. The I signifies the solitary moment of fieldwork, when each of us confronted the ethical, emotional, and interpretive demands of our respective ethnographic situations. The they indicates the interlocutors whose worlds drew us in, challenging assumptions and inviting forms of understanding that could not be achieved from a distance. The we represents the shift into dialogue between us as researchers: the shared analytical space where these solitary encounters were reassembled and rethought.

The dialogue between our two empirical cases developed from a sustained process of analytical exchange. Through repeated conversations, we revisited key moments from our fieldwork, compared situations of emotional tension, explored moments of care for our very different interlocutors, and the ways we came to inhabit uncomfortable positions in the field, ultimately challenging each other's interpretations of key concepts such as methodological reflexivity, emotional labour and positionality. Beyond the specifics of our research settings, we came to recognize the epistemic value of emotions also as crucial resources in the processes of reflection, interpretation, and meaning-making carried out behind the desk.

At the same time, the dialogical dimension discussed in this article extends beyond our exchanges as co-authors, since the concept of right distance operates across multiple relational planes. The distance we calibrate as right is intended to lie between the researcher and the research subject encountered in the field; between the self who writes and the self who once lived those emotions; and, ultimately, between the writing self and the imagined reader. It is within this relational practice that writing opens itself to a shared horizon of interpretation – the implicit we through which the reflections developed in this article seek to become communicable and analytically meaningful.

In this triangulation, understanding does not settle into a fixed narrative voice; instead, it circulates across these positions, echoing the shared yet unowned space that emerged in our discussions. It is within this shifting plane – between I, they, and we – that the concept of right distance becomes not only possible but epistemologically generative.

The right distance between I, they, and we illuminates what our two ethnographic experiences, positioned at opposite ends of the proximity–distance spectrum, ultimately share: an ongoing process of handling emotions (Bloch, 2016) that is never stable, linear, or complete. Proximity and distance do not serve as fixed methodological stances but appear as shifting relational dynamics, continuously recalibrated through the frictions and affinities of fieldwork. In the study with precarious academic mothers, proximity provided trust, resonance, and access, while requiring careful reflexivity to prevent the analytical space from collapsing into identification. In the far-right fieldwork, conversely, the challenge was to maintain a space of understanding despite value dissonance – transforming empathy from a moral sentiment into an epistemic tool capable of generating insight without normalizing or legitimizing harmful ideas.

Across these divergent contexts, a shared ethical burden becomes evident: engaging with others’ vulnerabilities – whether rooted in structural precarity or in the stigma of marginal political identities – requires a commitment to reciprocity and care. These are not gestures of benevolence but conditions of rigourous inquiry. They remind us that emotions are not intrusions to be minimized, but the very medium through which understanding takes shape. Seen from this angle, emotional labour is not a secondary effect of qualitative research but one of its organizing principles. The emotions encountered in the field – discomfort, empathy, indignation, compassion, ambivalence – are not merely personal disturbances; they are interpretive signals that reveal the moral frameworks, social asymmetries, and affective tensions structuring the encounter. When critically examined, these emotions sharpen our understanding of others’ worlds while illuminating our own interpretive positions.

Leaving the field does not dissolve these dynamics; it transforms them. Behind the desk, the inter-dialogue persists as a second dialogue in which affects resurface and are re-examined within a different order of reality. Meaning continues to shift and unfold as fieldnotes are reread, recordings revisited, and writing takes form. It is here that the right distance must be continuously produced as a reflexive and epistemological stance: an affective equilibrium that neither seals off alterity through defensive detachment nor loses itself in identification. This balance is precarious, and intentionally so. It requires an epistemological approach that considers emotions as epistemic resources – neither as raw data to be accepted uncritically nor as impurities to be eliminated, but as generative traces of the encounter that can deepen interpretation when engaged with care. Rigour, in this context, is not about suppressing emotions but about disciplined reflexivity: the capacity to remain open to uncertainty, to inhabit ambivalence, and to let the encounter with the other reshape one's understanding. To take this stance seriously implies rethinking methodological training itself. Cultivating emotional reflexivity is not an individual sensibility but a collective responsibility within the social sciences. It asks us to build spaces where researchers can confront the ethical and affective dimensions of their work without reducing them to methodological noise.

Ultimately, what holds these reflections together is the recognition that ethnographic knowledge – situated between I, they, and we – can only ever aspire to a precarious truth: one that lives in the tension between closeness and distance, between exposure and interpretation, between feeling and analysis. A truth that is approached, never possessed; sustained, never completed (Ferrarotti, 2011). A truth made possible by the fragile, generative space between self and Other, in which understanding takes shape not through certainty but through care, attention, and the courage to remain unsettled.