Emotional entanglements in tourism research

• Emotional reflexivity in tourism research.
• Hermeneutic philosophy.
• Poetry as a way to therapeutically emote entanglements.
• Questions of representation, authority, power and balance of voice.

A scarcity of emotional reflexive research accounts exists within the field of tourism studies, whereby the embodied and emotional researcher is epistemologically accepted as intersecting with the entire research process. This paper seeks to address this gap by exploring one researcher’s emotional entanglements with her research project, within the context of return from long term travel. These entanglements are discussed in terms of their effect on the researcher personally (including her ‘unravelling’ of the entanglements through poetry) and their effect on the research process itself, particularly regarding issues of representation, authority, power and balance of voice. A call for putting emotion at the centre of reflexivity follows, with suggestions of potentially relevant emotionally reflexive research questions.