Trigger warnings, feeling rules and other lessons from the inside: The emotional labour of qualitative prison research

Abstract

Convict criminology (CC) teaches us that it is essential for critical prison studies to foreground the voices, views and lived experiences of those who have endured criminalization and incarceration, for without access to the experiential, we are unable to accurately conceptualize or understand the pains of imprisonment. Critical criminologists, both those who identify as formerly incarcerated and as 'noncons' or prisoner allies (for example, see 'Qualities of a Prisoner Ally' information sheet created by prisoners of the Prisoner's Justice Day Committee, Vancouver, BC. Available at: https://penalpress.com), have taken up this charge primarily via qualitative research that incorporates fieldwork, interviews, observation and autoethnography - and where possible, ethnography. Following the edict 'nothing about us, without us', convict criminology advances a critical approach to prison research that centres notions of justice, diversity and inclusivity as primary research values. We situate this chapter within a CC perspective to help us unpack the emotional labour involved in doing critical prison research. Given the traumatic nature and long-lasting effects of incarceration, we showcase how this kind of inclusion and representation in critical prison research can take different emotional tolls on formerly incarcerated scholars. Using the second author's lived experience of incarceration and her participation in a large-scale qualitative research project on the emotional geography of the Canadian federal penal landscape as the primary object lesson, we also outline the advantages of inclusive research team membership for the project and those who are involved in it, namely, the differently located research team members as well as the participants. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of some of the ways that allied prison researchers can support their research assistants, graduate students and colleagues with criminal histories as they cope with the emotional labour of conducting critical prison research and outline a series of possible coping strategies for researchers who are exposed to and who may be struggling with the emotional toll of the research topic and content, including the intense and oftentimes emotional participant interactions and observations they witness while in the field.