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Abstract: As a space of emotional liminality, ambivalence is often considered an anxious and undesirable position, marked by the failure of indecision. However, feminist qualitative researchers have pointed to the specific epistemological value of ambivalence. In this talk, I’ll share insights from a co-authored paper on the ambivalence threading through the mentoring relationships on a multi-method, multi-disciplinary, and multi-site qualitative research team. Many of the young, racialized, queer, and first-generation student research assistants on this team are asking non-normative research questions, pursuing emerging subfields, or aligned with historically excluded identities and experiences. We explore how to ease the expectation that young, racialized, queer, and first-generation students, mentees, and trainees demonstrate a commitment to institutions and disciplines about which they may be profoundly and rightfully ambivalent. We consider also how feminist qualitative researchers can notice and learn from the ambivalence of the students and mentees we support, trusting that their ambivalence signals a meaningful engagement with the aims, practices, and outcomes of feminist qualitative research and mentorship amid intersecting experiences of, among other things, race, age, and power. 

Bio: Jessica Fields is a sociologist in the University of Toronto Scarborough Department of Health & Society and a member of the University of Toronto graduate faculties in Sociology and Sexual Diversity Studies. Fields considers the ways sexuality education routinely exacerbates the struggles of already disadvantaged groups—young people, low-income students, students of color, and sexual nonconformists—while enfranchising the more privileged. Fields is co-PI on 4theRecord, a study of risk in the lives of queer and racialized young women in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, funded by the Canadian Tri-Council New Frontiers in Research Fund (PI: Sarah Flicker, York University).