Centering Negative Emotional Responses: The Utility of Strategic Membership Researcher Status in Sino-German Cross-Cultural Trainings

Abstract

This article explores the utility of strategic membership researcher status in the case of Sino-German cross-cultural training courses to understand the paradoxical practices that reinforce and mitigate cross-cultural conflicts in transnational contexts. Drawing upon autoethnographic positioning analysis, I connect my own negative emotional experiences with positioning dynamics to reconstruct conflictual social events. This approach not only exposes the implicit field logic but also reveals the arrangement of social relations in an unexpected way. These findings highlight the epistemic potential of combining position-analytic and emotion-analytic reflexivity. In so doing, this article provides a practical, methodological model and furthers scholarship on the utility of autoethnography for the study of social relations.