A Carefully Engaged Researcher’s Body

It may seem trivial to state that the researcher’s body is the main connection between field and analysis, but still little attention has been put to this fact. To address this, a new vocabulary of how work-life qualitative researchers engage with the field in the entire research process is needed. We suggest a specific way for work-life researchers to engage carefully with all actors in a workplace is needed, and we offer a way to do so in both empirical and analytical phases. The suggestion is to conceptualize the researcher as an assembly: The Phantom. The Phantom is a human body and nonhuman actors assembled to create the researcher’s ability to engage carefully with diverse actors in the field. By this enhanced engagement, the researcher’s body becomes radically alert and open to impressions from actors in the field that are otherwise difficult to hear. The chapter suggests that this careful engagement should continue during the analytical process to create knowledge which takes all kinds of actors into account. This points to the importance of the researcher’s body as vehicle for impressions from the field work into the analysis. The chapter demonstrates that careful engagement connects the researcher and the field in multiple and bodily ways and shows how researchers may prolong this engagement into the analytical process and produce knowledge informed by the messy entanglement of materiality, senses, and emotions from a workplace.