When Words Are Not Enough: Exploring Touch, Tears, and Affective Reflexivity in War-Related Storytelling

Description of Activity

Affective reflexivity has received relatively little attention within qualitative research, despite its centrality to how researchers and participants make sense of emotionally charged narratives. It has been described as the capacity to reflect on and act in response to one’s own and other people’s feelings, and as a process that shapes meaning-making for all involved in research encounters. Guided by this understanding, this presentation explores the often-unarticulated dimensions of narrative research, focusing specifically on the significance of non-verbal communication, including silence, touch, embodied gestures, and tears, in shaping participants’ stories. To illuminate the affective, I examine several conversations with participants who fought in the Yugoslav war in 1992. The research took place 30 years after the war ended and was prompted by contemporary conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, which resurfaced memories and emotions for the participants and me. Therefore, the research is situated within an understanding of the interconnectedness between self and others, particularly when researcher and participants share cultural, social, and emotional context.

My identity was shaped by the multicultural environment and the turbulent political context in which I was raised, that played a critical role in understanding and ‘feeling’ not only the stories participants chose to share with me, but also the depth of their emotional expression and the forms of non-verbal communication that emerged in our interactions. By attending closely to embodied forms of communication, such as participants offering tactile reassurance, displaying emotional vulnerability, or using silence as a form of narrative structure, I was able to reconstruct events and reinterpret memories that were not random but were made salient through our affective investment in them. As a result, this analysis reveals how non-verbal communication becomes a crucial component of narrative inquiry, enriching our understanding of participants’ lived experiences and highlighting the importance of emotional reflexivity in producing nuanced, ethically grounded qualitative research.

Period	4 Jun 2026 → 7 Jun 2026
Held at	Aarhus University, Denmark
Degree of Recognition	International