The emotional labour of academic work: Critical perspectives from the study of challenging populations

See programme and a link for registration further below.

This half-day symposium centres on the concept of emotional labour as a useful means to examine critically the challenges of researching subjects who hold antithetical positions such as extremist, knowledge-resistant, sexist, and/or xenophobic views. By bringing together scholars at different career stages, the event examines how researchers navigate the affective, ethical, and methodological demands of this work, and considers what forms of support and reflection are needed to sustain it.

Programme

09.00 – 09.15 

Welcome words: Ov Cristian NOROCEL - Bringing the researcher “in” 

09.15 – 10.05 

Keynote: Ryan SWITZER - Emotional labour as ethnographic data: What we can learn about “them” by how they make “us” feel 

Reflections from fieldwork in Sweden’s far-right milieu

Decades of research on emotional labour have asked what emotion management can teach us about the gendered, racialized, and capitalist institutions which demand that labour. In this keynote on “The emotional labour of academic work,” I encourage scholars to look within but beyond the institution of the university by asking: What can a researchers’ affective encounters with challenging populations teach us about those populations themselves? I will discuss reflexive fieldnotes taken throughout participant observation work in Sweden’s far-right milieu, which provided relational insights into activists’ own strategies, meaning-making practices, and emotional motivations. Affective encounters with friendship, paranoia, and boredom in far-right free spaces revealed emotional labour as not only a cost of fieldwork but a site of knowledge production itself.

10.05 – 10.20 

Break

10.20 – 11.30 

Panel interventions – Approaching challenging populations critically

Tove LUNDBERG: This presentation examines the emotional work involved in contemporary affirmative LGBTQI psychology, framed by a historical shift in how the discipline has understood and constructed “challenging populations.” I argue that even affirmative approaches cannot avoid engaging with antagonistic discourses. Drawing the distinction between minoritizing and universalizing views, I argue research aimed at promoting LGBTQI individuals’ livability must also address its discursive “exterior” - resistant, hostile, or dismissive ideologies that shape the research context. This exterior is not peripheral but entangled with the research focus, demanding emotional work beyond the empirical work itself. I highlight examples of this and suggest strategies for navigating it, arguing for the need to recognize and support the affective dimensions of working within and against antagonistic environments, even when the “challenging population” is not the research focus per se.

Aube TOLLU: This presentation draws on ethnographic research conducted at the intersections of criminology and queer theory to reflect critically on the study of populations often deemed “challenging.” Based on fieldwork with jihadist group members and their families in various area of the world, whose lives are shaped by marginalization, criminalization, and vulnerability to violence, I consider how researchers negotiate the tension between giving voice to their own lived experiences with research and reproducing institutional or societal framings that mark these communities as “other.” This presentation advocates for an ethnographic sensibility informed by crip and queer perspectives that recognizes both the dangers, fears and the possibilities of research in such communities, and for critical perspectives that keep questions of power, representation, and knowledge production at the centre of the sociological enterprise.

Joshua FARRELL-MOLLOY: My PhD research examines two digital sites of far-right physical culture: a white nationalist bodybuilding community centred around masculinist influencers on X, and far-right groups that fuse fitness culture with ideology on Telegram. As a working-class man with a military background, I can see how these cultures promise discipline, camaraderie, humour, and a sense of belonging. This ambivalence demands what recent scholarship calls critical empathy, acknowledging why far-right narratives resonate without sliding into sympathy or normalisation. Here, I reflect on how my own positionality both insulates me from hostility and makes me part of the imagined audience, and how managing this tension constitutes a distinctive form of emotional labour in researching far-right masculinities.

Birke J. FRIEDLÄNDER: In my intervention, I will discuss my ongoing project, in which I focus on the public life of the coup attempt trial against the former president Jair Bolsonaro and his allies in Brazil. I am interested in emotions associated both with “the coup” and the punitive reactions by the Brazilian state. In this presentation I will talk about interview situations and some of the techniques that I have used in the fieldwork. It can in my experience be just as challenging interviewing judges and prosecutors as it can be interviewing people with extreme right views. I will therefore try to productively bring these different experiences into dialogue. During my presentation I will also touch upon some psychoanalytical dynamics in interviews building on other scholars’ work.

11.30 – 11.40

Short break

11.40 – 12.20 

Panel discussion w/h Q&A moderated by Lisa FLOWER

12.20 – 12.30

Conclusions: Lisa FLOWER - Critical perspectives from the study of challenging populations

Biographical notes keynote and panelists

Ryan SWITZER is a postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University’s Department of Child and Youth Studies. He is currently employed on the EU-Horizon project YOU-DARE studying the gendered dimensions of far-right youth activism in Sweden. In 2026, he will join Copenhagen University’s Department of Anthropology as a researcher on the ERC project Anger Legitimised (ANGLE).

Tove LUNDBERG is a licensed clinical psychologist, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in qualitative methodologies at the Department of Psychology. They are part of Queer Psychology in Sweden (QueerPsy) and the international SENS-project, contributing to several LGBTQI+ affirmative research initiatives across interdisciplinary fields.

Aube TOLLU is a Wallenberg postdoctoral fellow at the University of Stanford, Ethnography Lab. Their work currently looks at nervous systems and childhood as mediums and archives of war, a book project based on interviewing Jihadist group members in France, Syria, Belgium and Kenya, together with their families. Aube obtained their PhD from Lund University in 2025.

Joshua FARRELL-MOLLOY is a PhD student in Global Politics at Malmö University. His research focuses on far-right digital communities, masculinity and physical culture and is part of the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie 'VORTEX' Doctoral Network, which focuses on developing evidence-based innovative strategies to counter and radicalisation.

Birke J. FRIEDLÄNDER is a PhD student in the division of Gender Studies at the Department of Sociology, Lund University. In their project they explore state power and fascism and their relation to emotions in public life by focusing on the trial for coup attempt against Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. They draw in their work on Marxist, feminist, and abolitionist theory.

• Register here no later than 5 December

Organising team

Lisa FLOWER, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology | Coordinator for Qualitative Methods Lab.

Ov Cristian NOROCEL, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Division of Gender Studies.

We look forward to seeing you December 12^th - and do not forget to register!

Lisa & Ov Cristian

Arranged by: Lund Social Science Methods Centre