FIELD RESEARCH IS not what it used to be. Ethnographers, oral historians and other qualitative researchers committed to years-long fieldwork are engaged in a series of ethical and emotional compromises, from design, to write up, to publication. Field researchers juggle the demands of being a researcher and of being human – in balancing the recording of data with the emotional demands of listening to, of analysing and reporting on personal and often contradictory narratives in ways that meet and, ultimately, expand the disciplinary standards of ‘the field’ through publication. Each contributor to this book embraces the complex and contradictory humanity of those who participated in their research, as well as their own, as a matter of minimum ethical practice. Indeed, simply talking to people is a process fraught with multiple ethical and methodological concerns. These concerns matter all the more for those working in violent or conflict-affected locales (Campbell 2017; Cronin-Furman and Lake 2017; Perks and Thomson 1998; Thomson et al. 2013; Wali 2018).

The overarching theme of this book is how to balance the emotional effects of fieldwork – on the researched, researcher, assistants, intermediaries and gatekeepers, community members, and others – as a central element of ethical practice. After all, it is people who commit violence, experience violence, and who recover from its effects, as individuals and as members of local and national communities. The challenge is to recognise how, and in what ways, feelings differ from emotions, something each of the chapters that follow engage with in one way or another, with each author providing insights into how their emotions become part of the research process. Understanding emotion is a central element of a reflexive practice. Each of our authors unpack what many field researchers know, but rarely discuss openly – that building relationships, doing participant observation, generating field notes, and more – are products of emotional expressions, body language, and social dynamics. To turn these aspects of fieldwork into data requires an ability to understand and explain the wider sociopolitical context, in turn requiring the researcher to distinguish feeling from emotion, as part of their reflexive practice.