Doing emotions research: ethics, empathy, and engagement
A BSA Sociology of Emotions Study Group Seminar Series
10 November 2025 (1-2pm GMT)
Online
About the Event
We're pleased to share information on the first seminar of our 2025-2026 BSA Sociology of Emotions Study Group seminar series, where we'll unpack and deepen our thinking on concepts within the field.
As co-convenors of the study group, we work in very different areas but engage with many similar challenges and complexities in our research. In this online event, we will explore questions which cut across our own work, framed around the themes: ethics, empathy, and engagement in emotions research. The floor will then open for discussion with attendees.
Speakers
- Georgie Akehurst is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD thesis focused on emotional negotiation among social networks following traumatic bereavement. Her current work in critical suicide studies focuses on how meanings of suicide are culturally embedded and negotiated, and how we can explore what it means to live a ‘liveable’ life.
- Rachel Lewis is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Warwick University. In collaboration with creative practitioners, she works with police officers and (over)policed communities, using approaches such as forum theatre, spoken word, and creative writing to engage with questions around police practice, racism, authority, and safety.
- Alice Menzel is an Assistant Professor in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham. Her research examines the gendered emotional experiences of expectant fathers (as navigated across different space, and at overlapping spatial scales – from the body through to national legislation). Her recent publications explore fathers’ inter-embodied, multisensory encounters in forging anticipatory pre-parental bonds of love and intimacy with a future child, as well as the emotions embroiled in the negotiation of parental leave from work.
In our seminar, we will consider questions such as:
- how do we represent ‘participants’ in ways that capture the fullness of their experiences?
- how, as ECRs, do we understand and represent participants when working with ‘data’ we did not ourselves construct?
- how can we avoid doing harm to participants in emotionally charged research?
- how do we protect ourselves as researchers of sensitive and potentially traumatic topics?
- what does empathy do (or not do) in emotions research?
- how do we understand empathy in contexts where we may not feel a sense of solidarity with our participants?
We hope you will join us to explore these questions.
Registration
This event is free to attend but registration is required.