TALKING OUR WAY TO MEANINGFUL EXPLANATIONS 149its interpersonal (and ethical) sense of how we relate to the people we encounter in our research projects.
Here as elsewhere, my concern is research practice rather than epistemology per se.
- I find it implausible to treat researcher emotion per se as inimical to good social science. Presumably,
we all feel something for the people and issues we spend our lives studying. And presumably, one does not
need to feel neutral about genocidal killing in order to study the Rwandan genocide in a manner that merits
esteem from social scientists. When we try to police the boundaries of social science by dismissing any study
in which the researcher’s emotions are evident, we risk equating the good social scientist with an automaton
or sociopath.