Conference Agenda

This joint symposium, proposed by Network 19 “Ethnography” and Network 21 “Education and Psychoanalysis”, explores how researchers in education are deeply affected by their research topics, and how this involvement shapes both inquiry processes and knowledge production. Drawing on ethnographic and psychoanalytic traditions, the symposium examines the researcher–topic relationship not as a bias to be eliminated, but as a constitutive dimension of research.

Building on critical ethnographic insights (Fitzpatrick 2022), it foregrounds the ethical and representational challenges inherent in research that deeply involves the researcher. As Palmer and Caldas (2017) emphasize, knowledge must be constructed from the vantage point of marginalized voices, while Madison (2006) cautions against overly self-referential autoethnography that neglects relational context. Conquergood’s (1985) critique of unethical ethnographic stances—ranging from commodification to exoticization—highlights the importance of dialogical and relational approaches that embrace multiple voices. Similarly, Ortner (1995) warns against romanticized or reductive accounts that sanitize culture or diminish agency, emphasizing attention to complex relationalities. Recent work in new materialism and posthumanism (Barad, 2007; MacLure, 2013) decouples knowledge production from the human subject, framing it instead as an entangled, dynamic assemblage of people, discourses, and materialities. Across these perspectives, ethical representation involves reflexivity, multivocality, and openness to uncertainty, situating the researcher within the research as a co-constitutive participant while maintaining rigorous attention to power, politics, and complexity.

In psychoanalytically oriented research in education, the researcher’s implication is viewed as central material for knowledge production, on condition that it is worked through and elaborated. This perspective is rooted in the psychoanalytically informed clinical approach in educational research, which emphasizes the researcher’s “transferential participation” (Britzman & Pitt, 2004) in the situations under study and the need to analyse its effects rather than pretend to erase them. Far from aiming at an illusory externality, this kind of research requires the researcher to undergo their own psychic work (personal analysis, supervision, reflexive writing) in order to sustain a “reflexive” implication that articulates affect, theory, and ethics. As a result, the research posture is defined by a clinical engagement with educational action, in which the subject‑researcher, with his or her transferences, resistances, and limits, becomes a privileged pathway for understanding the processes at work in education and training practices.

This symposium brings together four papers (two from each network) that investigate how affects, transferential dynamics, biographical resonances and institutional conditions enter into the production of data, interpretation and writing.

This joint symposium is the result of discussions, initially informal, between the convenors of networks 19 and 21. It aims to stimulate epistemological and methodological reflection on how to take into account the links between researcher and research subject in research. While respecting the respective approaches, the identification of commonalities and differences between them aims to better characterise the specificities of each approach. The aim is not to pit the two approaches against each other in order to rank them, but rather to open up a space for dialogue so that both sides can benefit from these scientific exchanges. Across these four contributions, the symposium will address shared questions: How do autoethnographic (Adams, 2022 ; Anteliz, Mulligan & Danaher, 2023) and psychoanalytic (Bollas, 1987 ; Frosh, 2013) approaches conceptualise the place of the researcher in relation to the research topic? What forms of reflexivity and clinical work are required to take seriously affects, vulnerability and unconscious processes without abandoning scientific rigor? How can singular, situated narratives (autoethnographic or clinical) be articulated with broader theoretical and political issues in education? The discussant will open a dialogue on possible cross‑fertilisations between the two networks, including the development of joint methodological workshops, co‑inquiries and collective writing projects.

This presentation offers an autoethnographic analysis of student mentoring during the thesis-writing process, building on findings from mentoring research, employing a care-ethical framework for mentoring, and drawing on autoethnography as a method. In mentoring research, relationship quality is consistently identified as one of the most robust predictors of positive mentoring outcomes (Eby et al., 2013; Maxwell et al., 2024), with care functioning as a central marker of this quality (Dominguez & Kochan, 2020; Eller et al., 2014). However, relationship quality in mentoring cannot be achieved through predefined templates of effectiveness. Mentoring relationships are shaped by the situated interplay of mentees’ personal and professional goals and mentors’ skills, experiences, and motivations (Clutterbuck et al., 2017), which requires ongoing alignment of expectations (McAlpine & McKinnon, 2013), adjustment of feedback to students’ needs, and navigation between multiple roles (Bergmark et al., 2024). Rather than a purely technical or instructional activity, mentoring therefore emerges as an artful form of care work, in which navigating the mentoring relationship constitutes a highly context-dependent professional skill that must be reflectively developed (Parker et al., 2018). Drawing on a care-ethical framework, this paper explores care in student mentoring by conceptualising care as a practice comprising five interrelated elements (Wieser & Skøtt Nielsen, 2026): (1) developing attentiveness to students’ expressed and perceived needs; (2) taking responsibility for addressing those needs; (3) responding to students’ needs within mentoring interactions; (4) evaluating students’ responses to mentoring support; and (5) fostering supportive networks for students. Using autoethnography, I examine how these elements of care are enacted in my mentoring practice, how I navigate different mentor roles, and how I make sense of students’ needs related to minoritised positions and neurodiversity. Autoethnography was chosen as the research approach because it provides methodological principles for drawing on the researcher’s personal experience as primary data (Chang, 2022). To articulate and analyse these experiences, I engage in ethnographic writing as an analytic practice, drawing on self-reflections and self-observations, as well as mentoring documents, notes, and photographs from 36 mentoring meetings with four master’s students writing their theses during the spring term of 2026. The analysis follows a systematic and iterative process of revisiting and interpreting the material over time, with the aim of identifying and illustrating the challenges, dilemmas, and constraints involved in providing care in mentoring non-traditional students during the master’s thesis process.

Bergmark, U., & Viklund, S. (2024). Leading with care: Four mentor metaphors in collaboration between teachers and researchers. Educational Action Research, 32(3), 475-492. Chang, H. (2022). Individual and Collaborative Autoethnography for Social Science Research. In T. E. Adams, Handbook of autoethnography. Routledge. Dominguez, N., & Kochan, F. (2020). Defining Mentoring: An Elusive Search for Meaning and a Path for the Future. In B. Irby, The Wiley Handbook of Mentoring. Wiley & Sons. Eby, L., Allen, T., & Evans, S. (2013). An interdisciplinary meta-analysis of the potential antecedents, correlates, and consequences of protégé perceptions of mentoring. Psychological Bulletin, 139(2), 441-476. Eller, L., Lev, E., & Feurer, A. (2014). Key components of an effective mentoring relationship: A qualitative study. Nurse Education Today, 34(5), 815–820. Maxwell, B., & Hotham, E. (2024). Effective mentor training, education and development: A qualitative multilevel meta-synthesis. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 13(4), 422–440. McAlpine, L. (2013). Supervision – the most variable of variables. Studies in Continuing Education, 35(3), 265–280. Parker, P., & Kram, K. (2018). Peer Coaching at Work: Principles and Practices. Stanford University Press. Wieser, C., & Skøtt Nielsen, N. (2026). Omsorgsetiske strategier for mentoring af ikke-traditionelle studerende. Dansk Universitetspædagogisk Tidsskrift.

In this paper, focused on a methodological issue, we will present how some French researchers engaged in an approach linking education and psychoanalysis suggest using their counter-transferential elaborations as a tool for research. The researcher's counter-transference refers to the feelings experienced in response to the research material. We will present the concept of counter-transference and its origins. In the field of psychoanalysis, the “counter-transference refers to the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the transference of the patient, including the feelings projected onto the analyst by the patient” (Geissmann, 2005, 349). Sigmund Freud (1910) introduced this concept, and its definition has not changed much ever since. There have been significant developments in the use of counter-transference by analysts. While Freud considered that analysts should be cautious about counter-transference, it was not until Paula Heimann (1950) and the British school of psychoanalysis that the use and handling of counter-transference came to be seen as a tool for therapy. Following Chaussecourte’s work (2017), we will next describe how this concept has been applied from psychoanalysis to the human and social sciences, under the influence of Devereux (1967). In educational sciences in France, the use of researcher counter-transference and its visibility became standard practice in the 2000s (Blanchard-Laville et al., 2005). The idea is to report to the reader a part of “counter-transferential researcher elaborations” (Blanchard-Laville, 2009 b, p. 158) in order to “try to share how [we] discovered what [we] found” (idem, p. 161). Finally, we will present an example of how this concept was used to analyse a clinical research interview conducted during a PhD research (Villemont, 2025). This research focuses on nursing students' training in France. The interview is conducted with a young nurse who graduated a year ago. She explains how difficult her first year on the job was and how it made her ill. She concludes by expressing her hope that her story will become public in order to highlight the difficult situation of nurses in France. The researcher hypothesizes that the nurse became militant because the interview reawakened in her a feeling of revolt that she had felt at the beginning of her research and that reminded her of her own experiences as a student. She wonders about the effects that this militant sentiment may have on her research. We will show how this hypothesis is constructed by the researcher by using her counter-transference elaborations.

Blanchard-Laville, C. (2009). Du côté des recherches cliniques d’orientation psychanalytique en sciences de l’éducation. Dans Vergnioux, A. (Dir.) Quarante ans des sciences de l’éducation (p. 153-162). Presses universitaires de Caen. Blanchard-Laville, C. & Chaussecourte, P. (2012). A Psychoanalytically Orientated Clinical Approach in Education Science. In Bainbridge, A. & West, L. (Eds). Minding a Gap (p. 61-63). Karnac. Devereux, G. (1967). From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. Mouton. Chaussecourte, P. (2017). Autour de la question du « contre transfert du chercheur » dans les recherches cliniques d’orientation psychanalytique en sciences de l’éducation. Cliopsy, 17, 107-127. Freud, S. (1910). The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy. in S. Freud. (1957). Standard Edition, t. XI (p. 141-151). The Hogarth Press. Geissman, C. (2005). Counter-transference. In A. de Mijolla (Ed). International Dictionnary of Psychoanalysis (p. 349-351). Macmillan. Heimann, P. (1950). On Counter-transference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 31, 81-84. Jullien-Villemont, S. (2025). La formation des étudiant·es en soins infirmiers : une adolescence professionnelle ? Approche clinique d’orientation psychanalytique [thèse de doctorat inédite]. Université Paris Cité.

This paper explores how embodied and emotional experiences shape the study of educational inequalities in classrooms, focusing on authority, relationality, and reflexive engagement. While ethnographic research increasingly emphasizes reflexivity, the subtle ways in which researchers’ own feelings and bodily experiences influence observation and interpretation remain underexamined (Hordge-Freemann, 2018; Alfandari & Weitkämper, 2026). Neglecting these embodied experiences risks overlooking how power, authority, and relational dynamics are felt and enacted in the classroom. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in socially diverse urban schools (Weitkämper, 2019), the paper attends to moments of unease and uncertainty that emerged particularly in early encounters with the field. These affective responses often accompanied situations in which roles, expectations, and authority relations were unclear or contested. Rather than treating such moments as methodological disturbances, they are approached as analytically meaningful for understanding relational and structural dynamics in classrooms. Individual reflection often proved insufficient to account for the ambiguity and relational complexity of these encounters, motivating the use of a dialogical, embodied approach. Methodologically, the paper uses the concept of the bodily dialogue (Alfandari & Weitkämper, 2026), situated at the intersection of autoethnography and arts-based research (hooks, 1994; Boal, 2002). Through dialogical re-narration of field experiences, the bodily dialogue allows emotional responses to become visible and discussable, without reducing them to purely individual or subjective phenomena. Emotional reactions are understood as relationally produced within concrete research encounters and institutional settings. In this sense, the approach resonates with psychoanalytic perspectives that conceptualise affect as intersubjective and informative of power relations. It invites reflection on how discomfort, surprise, and relational tension can function as analytic data, aligning with relational and interpersonal psychoanalytic approaches to affect and countertransference (Devereux, 1967). By moving beyond individual reflexivity toward shared, intersubjective reflection, the bodily dialogue opens a space for collective sense-making. It highlights how researchers’ biographies, institutional positions, and vulnerabilities shape both access to the field and analytic interpretations. While the insights remain provisional, they suggest that the bodily dialogue may offer a modest, ethically attentive tool for exploring how authority, relationality, and inequality are experienced and negotiated in educational contexts.

Boal, A. (2002). Games for actors and non-actors. Routledge. Devereux, D. (1967). From anxiety to method in the behavioral sciences. Mouton. Fitzpatrick, K. (2022). Critical ethnography and education: Theory, methodology, and ethics. Routledge. Hordge-Freemann, E. (2018). “Bringing your whole self to research”: The power of the researcher’s body, emotions, and identities in ethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 17(1), 1–9. Hooks, D. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge. Alfandari, N. & Weitkämper, F. (2026, forthcoming). The Body of the Researcher: Producing Emotional Knowledge through Situated Bodily Dialogue. In: Weitkämper, F., Alfandari, N., Chamakalayil, L., & Frank, M. (eds)(2025) Ethnography and Emotions, Special Issue in Ethnography and Education. Weitkämper, F. (2019). Lehrkräfte und soziale Ungleichheit: Eine ethnographische Studie zum un/doing authority in Grundschulen. Springer.

This contribution will explore the possibility to use objects as methodology (Rose, 2016), as a medium to reflect on the self in the research process, both from the perspective of participants and of the researcher. Objects will be considered as active agents in the act of researching, as ‘thing-power’, following the work of feminist new materialism (Bennet, 2010; Cole & Frost, 2010) and of agentic realism (Barad, 2007). The role of objects in research will also be explored from a psychoanalytical perspective thinking with the work of Christopher Bollas (2018) and of Winniccott (1969), as a playful metaphor for the interaction and intra-action between researcher, participants and the act of researching, considered as a rhizomatic and entangled becoming. In this exploration, there will be a questioning of the role of the ‘I’, the researcher in the encounter with alternative ontological and epistemological paradigms to mainstream qualitative approaches in Education and in Mental Health Studies, shifting the conception of knowledge, the knower, the known and above all the act of knowing in the research process (Barad, 2007). Drawing from Posthumanism (Braidotti, 2011, 2013), this contribution will also discuss the function of cartographies to explore the drawing, rather than the writing, of the self in the research process, as a non-linear exploration where boundaries between researcher-researched-researching will be questioned, as well as the notion of human identity and subjectivity, and challenging binary positions of opposed dualities to generate knowledge differently, crossing borders, disciplines and practices. Examples will be discussed from a couple of research projects in the field of Education and Mental Health Studies where both objects and cartographies have been used as methodologies to challenge the notion of self in research. Through the use of mundane objects the notion of data is also destabilized, not considered as something out there waiting to be collected, but as lived, embodied and vibrant intra-actions (Barad, 2007) between researcher, researched and researching. The researcher’s own personal cartography will also be considered as data, entangled with those of the participants in a collaboratively act through which research is embraced as embodied and as an assemblage of collective voices, deconstructing the dichotomy between researcher and researched and between theory and practice.

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