Abstract
This is a story of six researchers who came together to make sense of the tumult triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The team centered emotion and affectivity, letting it guide research design, team meetings, and the ways we related with interviewees and each other. The project also prompted us to critically examine our habits and realize the relatively privileged ways our own strategies of self-soothing could have problematic repercussions on the collective. As such, centering compassion and emotion not only served as a method of individual co** but also served to critically reveal how we as academics are enmeshed in systems that bring trauma to bear. This chapter closes with several ideas about how we might engage in research methods during and about times of collective suffering that move beyond individual emotional release and may prompt relational work toward communal catharsis and systematic change.
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Tracy, S.J., Avalos, B.L., Martinez, L., Stanley, B.L., Town, S., Zanin, A.C. (2022). Compassion, Burnout, and Self-care During COVID-19: On the Collective Impact of Self-soothing Super Highways. In: Browning, L.D., Sørnes, JO., Svenkerud, P.J. (eds) Organizational Communication and Technology in the Time of Coronavirus. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94814-6_11
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