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Trigger Warnings, Feeling Rules and Other Lessons from the Inside: The Emotional Labour of Qualitative Prison Research

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Qualitative Research in Criminology

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    W2B students earn college or university course credits and tuition fees are covered by the school. W2B engages students’ whole selves (i.e. body, mind, emotions and spirit) and differs from the parent program in a few key ways (Davis, 2013, p. 259). Reflecting the sociopolitical, economic and cultural differences in Canada, including a much smaller prisoner population, shorter average sentences and a disproportionate number of Indigenous prisoners, W2B’s pedagogical approach integrates Indigenous teachings into the training and pedagogy. W2B also works with community-based alumni groups who participate in workshops and training and engages in advocacy related to prisoner justice, access to education, employment, housing and community re-entry (Davis, 2013; Fayter, 2016; Pollack, 2019). For more information about W2B, see www.wallstobridges.ca

  2. 2.

    The Feeling the Carceral project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Grant Funding reference number 435-2019-1152.

  3. 3.

    The vast majority of the CC literature has been produced by men; this chapter helps fill a gap in this literature by providing women’s voices in this field.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Jennifer M. Kilty & Rachel Fayter

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  1. Jennifer M. Kilty
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  2. Rachel Fayter
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Correspondence to Jennifer M. Kilty .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminology, Interdisciplinary Research Center on Crime Justice and Security, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Rita Faria

  2. School of Public Affairs, Program in Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA

    Mary Dodge

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Kilty, J.M., Fayter, R. (2023). Trigger Warnings, Feeling Rules and Other Lessons from the Inside: The Emotional Labour of Qualitative Prison Research. In: Faria, R., Dodge, M. (eds) Qualitative Research in Criminology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18401-7_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18401-7_7

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