Am I vulnerable? Researcher positionality and affect in research on gendered vulnerabilities

In this article, I draw on arts-based approaches and new materialist affect theory in order to explore possibilities to attune research outputs to researcher vulnerability. These approaches and theorisations challenge conventional research practices geared toward creating distance between the researcher and their research, and work towards dissolving hierarchical distinctions between assumedly invulnerable researchers and vulnerable participants. In doing so, they pave the way for attuning research work to the complex interplay of difference and sameness as it unfolds and surfaces in the process of researching gendered vulnerabilities. By presenting a piece of poetic writing that engages with research encounters within a project on sexual harassment and young people, I tap into the troubled affect, the constant interplay of difference, shifting alignments, and ultimate entwinements between the researcher, the phenomenon of sexual harassment, and the research participants and other involved actors. Based on my inquiry, I propose attending to vulnerability through affect theory as an encompassing and dynamic state of being affected and affecting others, both in violent ways and in ways that aim to build solidarity and empathy.

I was affectively pulled toward this call for papers for a Special Issue on "unsettling vulnerabilities."It seemed to speak directly to my recent engagements with vulnerability, both as a characterisation of my state of being and doing and as the topic of my current inquiry-sexual harassment among young people.Such an affective pull, and more broadly the role of affect as a vulnerabilising force in research, is what I focus on in this paper.I specifically discuss researcher vulnerability and argue that attending to it is vital for research on vulnerabilities, such as gendered patterns in sexual harassment and violence.To illustrate this, I use poetic writing that taps into my researcher experiences, with a specific focus on the challenges I encountered in my attempts to collect research materials for the aforementioned research on sexual harassment and young people in Finland.I attune to these vulnerabilities as a woman researcher who inhabits several privileged positions, being for instance cisgendered, able-bodied, White, and highly educated.These privileged positions make reflexive engagements with researcher vulnerability and positionality all the more important, I suggest, because they tend to be associated with invulnerability, and thus may lead to ignorance regarding vulnerability.
Gendered vulnerabilities produced, sustained, and exacerbated through sexual harassment constitute a contested issue that has been highlighted in both public discourse and research around the globe in recent years.The #MeToo movement and several other social media campaigns have made sexual harassment increasingly visible, yet simultaneously it has been noted that the vulnerabilities recognised with the help of such campaigns tend to be those of already privileged groups of women-such as celebrities and White, middle-class women (Mendes et al., 2018).Furthermore, feminist efforts to expose and resist women's vulnerability regarding sexual harassment continue to face opposition, which, in turn, works to silence and dispute it.Such opposition constitutes what has become known as rape culture (Sills et al., 2016), based on the minimisation, normalisation, and justification of gendered patterns of sexual harassment and violence (Gavey, 2019).Other parallel discourses and practices that draw attention away from a consideration of gendered patterns in vulnerability and power include individualistic and pathologising trauma discourses used for making sense of the effects of sexual harassment and violence (Gavey & Schmidt, 2011;Thompson, 2021).Postfeminism, as a widely adopted set of contemporary assumptions that highlight women's empowerment at the cost of downplaying the significance of remaining gendered and intersectional power imbalances, has also been noted to powerfully work against sensitive engagements with gendered vulnerability (Baker, 2010;Jackson, 2018).
According to Lisa Lazard (2020), dichotomous understandings of agency and empowerment on the one hand, and victimhood and vulnerability on the other, have often prevailed in discourses on sexual harassment.Feminist views and resistance of sexual harassment have often highlighted the copresence of agency and vulnerability, instead of viewing them as mutually exclusive (Lazard, 2020).This article builds on a similar view that highlights complexity in understandings and experiences of vulnerability both regarding sexual harassment and social relations in general.My purpose is to extend the field of application for these views by specifically focusing on researcher vulnerability, which frequently has played a lesser role in discussions on both sexual harassment as well as gendered vulnerability and violence in a broader sense.My focus on researcher vulnerability is motivated by an attempt to disrupt positionings of researchers as unaffected by the gendered vulnerabilities into which they inquire.I claim that disrupting such positionings is a useful and even necessary move that troubles prevailing tendencies to devalue vulnerability and enact hierarchical distinctions between vulnerability and agency both in general cultural imaginaries as well as in research encounters.

Weaving a web of connections across fields to approach vulnerability
Attending to researcher vulnerability is by no means new for feminist research.Several feminist scholars have highlighted the roles of vulnerability and affects in the personal and epistemological paths into feminist research (e.g., Ahmed, 2018;Hemmings, 2012).Sara Ahmed (2018) has written about experiences that expose one's vulnerability as often forming a basis for a feminist orientation in research and activism.This is a form of situated and embodied knowing (Haraway, 1998) through vulnerability that may makes us, feminists, more adept at recognising the effects of structures and their power to sustain inequalities.According to Ahmed (2018), such knowledge emerges in unison with a sense of wrongness evoked in encounters that have generated knowledge on vulnerability and its structural patterns.Living through institutionalised forms of inequalising practices therefore creates experiences of vulnerability, which in turn allow for insight into the workings of structures, such as those maintaining the relative legitimacy and invisibility of gender-based violence (see also Thompson, 2021).
On a partially different note, some feminist researchers have also written about vulnerability as a constructive condition for ethical research.Here, vulnerability means remaining open and receptive when conducting research on gender and power (Koivunen et al., 2008;Page, 2017).As I elaborate in the following section, this notion is in line with the emphasis on relationality in new materialist and affect theorisations that I draw upon in this paper (e.g., Ringrose & Renold, 2014).Vulnerability in the sense of relationality and openness plays a key role particularly in the work of Bronwyn Davies (2010Davies ( , 2014Davies ( , 2016)), which has in many ways revolutionalised my thinking about human relationality.
In addition to influences from new materialist and affect theory, in this paper I draw on methodological literature on autoethnography (Ellington & Ellis, 2008;Lapadat, 2017), creative writing as a means of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005), and arts-based research (e.g., Chamberlain et al., 2018;Leavy, 2015).Arts-based research encompasses a broad array of approaches that combine research and creative arts "to create new ways to see, think, and communicate" (Leavy, 2017, p. 3).This also applies to autoethnography, an approach that engages with researcher experience by drawing on arts such as creative writing, and in doing so "bridges the creative arts-most notably, literary and experimental writingwith the social and cultural in order to teach us about the work of life" (Adams & Holman Jones, 2017, p. 142).In this article, I enter the field of autoethnographic arts-based research by experimenting with and taking inspiration from poetic inquiry, which, according to Sandra L. Faulkner (2018, p. 210), uses poetry "as/in/for inquiry; poetic inquiry is both a method and product of research activity."Arts-based, reflexive forms of creating and sharing knowledge have the capacity to evoke embodied, affective knowing in ways that undermine the dichotomy between rationality and knowledge versus irrationality and affect.Furthermore, arts-based methods allow for tapping into vulnerability in ways that disrupt the common tendencies to keep it at bay by associating it merely with others, such as research participants (cf.Rice et al., 2021).In this article, then, engaging with researcher vulnerability is closely connected with embracing affect as an inherent part of reflexive and methodologically creative feminist knowledge production (cf.Lazard & McAvoy, 2020).
With these theoretical and epistemological engagements, the paper aligns with recent efforts in qualitative and critical psychology to draw influences from outside (critical, qualitative, and feminist) psychology for the purpose of developing new ways of attending analytically to affect, embodiment, and experience (Martinussen & Wetherell, 2019;Moreno-Gabriel & Johnson, 2020;Wetherell, 2012), and to forge dialogues with research streams such as postqualitative approaches (Gough, 2021;Monforte & Smith, 2021; for an introduction to postqualitative approaches, see e.g., St. Pierre, 2011).In many of these dialogues, the more conventional approaches are not abandoned but rather complemented with a plurality of perspectives that may challenge but also resonate with the approaches more commonly adopted within feminist and critical psychologies.This is similar to my efforts; the paper works in between the approaches mentioned above-a space imbued with potential for new forms of thinking and doing.This involves working with the tension between autoethnographic engagement with researcher experience on one hand, and feminist poststructural, and postqualitative efforts to decenter individual subjectivities and to trouble assumptions of the researcher as a coherent subject of knowledge referred to with the pronoun "I," on the other (e.g., Davies, 2010;Gannon, 2006;Ringrose & Zarabadi, 2018).I see such tension as productively enabling a double move toward engaging with the situatedness of experiences and knowing while simultaneously embracing fluidity, multiplicity, and movement in any subjects' positionings (cf.Tseris, 2015).
In the next section, I provide an overview of the theoretical premises the paper builds on, with a focus on how these perspectives enable engagements with vulnerability and affect.I then put these ideas into practice by first discussing how they enable tracing affect in my efforts to enter the field in the research project on sexual harassment.This is followed by a piece of poetic (or, as I will discuss later, poem-like, i.e., poemish) writing that aims to mobilise affect in research encounters, and hence make researcher vulnerability more tangible.This is then followed by a reflection on the possibilities and challenges in recognising researcher vulnerability.I conclude by suggesting that recognising researcher vulnerability should be seen and adopted as resistant practice that disrupts the reification of hierarchical differences between invulnerable researchers and vulnerable research participants and topics.

The affected and affecting researcher as a part of research assemblages
In this section, I elaborate on what it means to view researcher vulnerability as an ontological and epistemological status and as a part of research practices.To do this, I draw on new materialist and affect theorisation, with a particular focus on discussions regarding their applicability in social science research.New materialism can be considered as an extension of feminist poststructuralism which draws heavily on the thinking of theorists such as Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari (Davies, 2018).In the following quote, Davies (2020, p. 1) succinctly describes the key aspects in new materialist thinking that are relevant for research practices and their ontological and epistemological premises: New materialisms bring ethics, ontology and epistemology together in such a way that the concept-matter mix is never free of questions of responsibility and response ability.Being is relational and never fixed; our responses matter; they have material affects and effects.Discourse and bodies affect each other, not in the sense of one shaping the other, but in intra-action; discourse and materiality each contribute to the conditions of possibility of the other.
Hence, new materialism emphasises relationality both in terms of ontology and epistemology.The reality and ways of knowing, or matter and discourse, are seen as inseparable; they are constantly taking shape in relational processes where each component influences the shaping of the other.Such thinking guides researchers towards the recognition of all actors'-human and inhuman, the latter including for instance ideas and conceptualisations-capacity to have an impact on each other.In an approach labelled by Davies (2016) as emergent listening, this idea forms the basis for ethical research practices that are attentive to "responsibility and response ability," referring to the importance of considering the impact of our responses and actions on others.The approach emphasises openness in research encounters, based on suspending a reliance on predetermined knowledge on a phenomenon or the identities of the groups one studies.Instead, the researcher is encouraged to attend sensitively-that is, with all their senses-to what appears to emerge in various research encounters.This includes both the patterns one might expect for instance on the basis of feminist knowledge on structures of domination and the fissures and particularities in such patterns.Due to these emphases, the approach also has affinity with what has been labelled a reparative reading based on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work (Moreno-Gabriel & Johnson, 2020).
New materialist conceptualisation of affect refers precisely to these relational dynamics that Davies encourages researchers to notice.Affect is seen as an intensity that crosses embodied boundaries and undermines notions of separate individuals by highlighting humans' (and nonhumans') capacity to affect and be affected by each other (Blackman & Cromby, 2007;Ringrose & Renold, 2014).Blackman and Cromby (2007, p. 6) have elaborated on this by noting that "affects do not refer to a 'thing' or substance, but rather the processes that produce bodies as always open to others, human and non-human, and as unfinished rather than stable entities."This description highlights the key feature in new materialist and affect theorisations' ontology: the nature of being and beings are not seen as fixed, but the world and its more-than-human and human actors, such as researchers, are seen as mutable in entwined interaction with each other.Attending analytically to affect understood through these lenses is an effort to trace what appear as intangible elements in various encounters (Ringrose & Zarabadi, 2018), elements that connect and run through both human bodies and their environments, and which therefore are not properties of either, but rather forces that arrange their ways of relating to and affecting each other.This can be done, for instance, by attending to researchers' emotions and embodied sensations, even though affect in new materialist thinking is a much broader and more abstract concept than emotions (see Wetherell, 2012).
Given the divisive intensities (in the sense of affect theory) that circulate among discussions on affect and its relations with discourse (for an extensive account, see Wetherell, 2012), it is important to note that even though affect is seen in these approaches as intensities or flows of energy, its capacity to move humans is not conceptualised (at least need not be) as separate from discourses.These approaches do, however, differ from discursively oriented ones because they do not give empirical priority to discursive practices or meanings but rather conceptualise them as one of the many elements that come together in the onto-epistemological entanglements that emerge in research processes.Davies (2014, p. 735) encapsulates this idea, for instance, with these words: "we, as researchers, are part of, and encounter, already entangled matter and meanings that affect us and that we affect in an ongoing, always changing set of movements."Hence, meanings and matter are seen as entwined, and it is their entwinements that create affect.
In sum, the positions opened up for researchers in new materialist and affect perspectives, such as Davies's work, are based on vulnerability and its recognition.Researchers are not separate from the world their inquiries attempt to shed light on, rather they are equally impacted by that world as they themselves contribute to shaping it.Furthermore, instead of attempting to fit the world into preexisting frames, researchers are encouraged to open up to epistemological vulnerability by adopting sensitive and open-ended practices of knowing such as emergent listening.In essence, this means letting go of attempts to occupy positions of security and authority that we, as researchers, tend to try so hard to gain.
In Davies's (2000) work, methodology is understood as thinking and doing enabled by certain theorisations and concepts, such as those made available by new materialism.This is a view also shared in postqualitative approaches (e.g., St. Pierre, 2011), where the inseparability of theory and methodology guides toward the development of creative research practices, including creative forms of writing (Davies, 2020, p. 3).In the latter parts of this paper, I gradually translate these ideas into practice by first engaging in reflections on my research encounters from an affect perspective, followed by a piece of poetic writing.

Is the "I" getting lost (enough)? Obstructed entering into the field
The reflections on researcher vulnerability I engage with next are a part of a research project that focuses on ways in which intersecting differences and positionalities, and shifting discursive and material sociocultural practices, shape the meanings of sexual harassment among young people.In my project, I approach young people's views and experiences from the position of an outsider, separated from them specifically due to representing a different generation.However, as I illustrate below, the research process has also led me to view my positionality as more complexly connected to the vulnerabilities that the project aims to shed light on.
The process of collecting research materials for the project began in the autumn of 2020, and coincided with the deterioration of the Covid-19 situation, resulting in a period of lockdown.This change disrupted my plans to collect materials by visiting the facilities of various municipal youth services, and led to delays in all the phases of the process, starting from attaining research permits and establishing contacts for data collection.In the end, it made me turn to social media as a key channel for finding participants and to use an anonymous online form to enable an alternative way for young people to participate.Despite this, finding participants for the research proved challenging.
These challenges took me partially by surprise, even though I had prepared for a potentially long and winding process.Far from complete silence around sexual harassment, in recent years it has been raised on several occasions as a topic for public discussion in Finland.In addition to the more or less sustained attention given to the global #MeToo movement, local social media campaigns, such as an Instagram campaign #PunksToo that addressed sexual harassment specifically within the punk music scene in the summer of 2021, have periodically revitalised public discussion on sexual harassment both in traditional and social media.The results of a nation-wide school health promotion study also gained vast media attention in the autumn of 2021.The study indicated high prevalence of sexual harassment among young people, with approximately 50% of girls and 8% of boys (15 to 16 years old) reporting experiences of harassment (Helakorpi & Kivimäki, 2021).Similar results from the same survey 2 years before were also brought up by many representatives of youth organisations as a rationale for viewing the topic of my study as important.
Simultaneously, however, these potentialities for addressing the issue of sexual harassment meet up with a long history of silencing gender-based violence.In Finland, such silencing is routinely accomplished through circulating notions of high levels of gender equality having been already reached in comparison to many other countries (Ronkainen & Näre, 2008).Such notions of equality work on multiple levels, including diminishing young people's possibilities to name their experiences as sexual harassment and, as such, as an issue of social justice (Aaltonen, 2017;Baker, 2010).This history of silencing may also diminish possibilities to successfully study the topic, and in doing so may add another layer of vulnerability to the position of a feminist researcher aspiring to inquire into the topic, such as myself.
From the theoretical perspectives on affect outlined in the previous section, these dynamics can be conceptualised as affective forces attached to sexual harassment that tie together the past, present, and future both in terms of collective cultures and personal life trajectories.The interplay of normative and resistant discourses on sexual harassment participates in the intensification of affect around the issue.This can create ambivalent views and experiences around it for all parties.Both researchers and other actors might get caught up in the ambivalent mixture of a conviction in the political imperative of attending to the issue on one hand, and uncertainty, fear, and discomfort with rocking the boat by exposing the related injustices and vulnerabilities on the other.In my reading, such ambivalences appear to be present, for instance, in the responses I often received from representatives of organisations working with young people to my requests to distribute information about my study.The responses frequently included utterances following the format "the topic is important, but…," and ended with the contact person declining my invitation to collaborate.Here, two opposing discourses (at least) are at play: the one recognising the imperative and the current force of the momentum created by social mobilisation around the phenomenon of sexual harassment (such as via #MeToo) on the one hand, and the more traditional, diminishing, and distancing discourses that lean away from addressing the issue on the other.
Having come face to face with various forms of normalised sexual harassment during my lifetime-the kinds that have not been seen as worthy of attention but rather treated as part of typical everyday life-the way my invitations to collaborate were responded to resonated with my knowledge on the mundane workings of social practices that silence harassment and suppress efforts to tackle it.This reinforced, accumulated, and embodied knowledge emerged inseparably from the affective flows of energy that ambivalently strengthened my connectedness to the study and the phenomenon it addresses while also throwing in doubt, desperation, and worry over my chances of seeing it through.Looking at the process of data collection with an even broader view on the material forces at play, the affective landscape shaping these interactions can be also seen as affected by the ongoing ebb and flow of the Covid-19 situation getting more and less severe, its isolating and exhausting effects, and the sense of uncertainty it created, likely for all actors involved.My own experiences with these affective intensities included a touch of desperation present in research encounters such as those described above, and the underlining frustration created through what appeared as repeated obstructions to entering the field and the difficulties in reaching out to young people.Ahmed's (2018) views on resistance toward feminist exposures of vulnerability enable a further reading of these felt obstructions, where I as a researcher of sexual harassment come to stand for the problem itself due to being associated with it.By giving presence to the problem of sexual harassment and inviting others to enact openings for addressing it, it can be argued that I become subject to the routine practices of silence.In terms of my responses to this potentiality, the positions of familiarity with such silencing that I had already inhabited in my life resonate with and shape the affective force of this troubled positioning.This is where histories, both personal and cultural, meet and entwine, and shape the present and future trajectories and emotional experiences in all their multiplicity and open-endedness (Walkerdine et al., 2013).
In line with postqualitative critiques directed at traditional, rather limited notions of what constitutes "data" in qualitative research (Koro-Ljungberg & MacLure, 2013;Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005;St. Pierre, 2011), the research encounters reflected on above can be seen as sources of "data."By enabling insight into the conditions of possibility to address the topic of sexual harassment, and especially their limiting effects, reflection on such encounters helps with generating new questions and avenues to be explored in subsequent research encounters.Akin to the process of feminist poststructural knowing characterised by Patti Lather (2007) as "getting lost," this embodied knowledge should be oriented to without an urge toward certainty and fixity.Rather, it is knowing that emerges as a part of particular kinds of encounters that are partial and fragmented, and so is the knowledge they enable.As I have illustrated in this section, affect can be seen as a central component in gaining such knowledge.I elaborate further on this with the following piece of poemish writing and a discussion on resistant and vulnerable knowledge production.

Entering an arts-based mode of expression as a means of plugging in (to) the researcher experience
In this section, I present a piece of poetic writing that taps into the affective forces running through my research project.With this piece, I hope to make some of the experiences of, and with, vulnerability in research viscerally known, thereby allowing affect to continue to travel through bodies.This is what arts-based research approaches (e.g., Chamberlain et al., 2018;Leavy, 2015Leavy, , 2017;;Rogers, 2019) fruitfully allow for.The process of writing the piece was also intensely affective, and not premeditated but rather open-ended from start to finish.In many ways, the piece of text seemed to write itself (actually, during walks in a forest, for the most part), pouring down as affect that runs through my body down to my typing hands, not beginning or ending within or from it.
As someone who (occasionally) writes poems for their own benefit and seldom exposes them to other people's eyes, and whose familiarity with poetic conventions is mainly based on English philology classes more than a decade and a half ago, I hesitate to claim having produced authentically poetic writing.While taking many liberties, what I have produced has drawn inspiration from poetic inquiry, and is guided by a similar pursuit of using language as a creative vehicle for affect and to tap into embodied experience through its travels (see e.g., Faulkner, 2018).Therefore, instead of referring to the piece as a poem, it is more accurate to describe it as poemish (Lahman et al., 2019)-a piece of creative writing inspired by poetic inquiry but which does not strictly follow its conventions.
Writing this poemish piece was a way for me to reflect on affectively intense moments of interaction during the research process: moments which had stuck in my mind, which had aroused affective, embodied reactions in me, and which appeared central in my efforts to make sense of what was going on in the research.The initial round of writing was free in form, and this was followed by rounds of editing that aimed to concentrate affect in the text.I tried to do this by using words and their resonances to accentuate affect and to engage imaginatively with the interplay of theory and practice related to my research project.The writing took inspiration from poetic inquiry practices (e.g., Lahman et al., 2019) in the form of playing with sounds and word ordering, and by creating rhythm and emphasis with, for instance, repetition, metaphors, and punctuation.In many places I have used line breaks specifically to give weight to words that sang to me, Recentering or decentering the "I"?The terrifying business of writing my self into the research Following new materialist thought, the poemish piece of writing above can be seen as doing things; it is both discursive and material in its effect and nature (cf.Davies, 2020, pp. 12-13)-it is an animated and animating element in a research assemblage that moves the process of research forward and contributes to shaping its course.It is simultaneously a form of knowing, doing, and being.As mentioned above, what the poemish piece specifically aims to do is to make researcher vulnerability known and felt by exposing its affective aspects.In doing this, it also highlights the vulnerability of knowledge produced in research on vulnerability, that is, its affective and contingent nature.In this section, I continue reflecting on researcher positionality in relation to vulnerability by extending the focus to the regulatory research practices that work against recognising vulnerability.I then relate this layer of vulnerability to its other forms and layers, and by doing so engage with differences and connectedness in ways vulnerability shapes lives and is manifested.
To reflect on the process of poetic reflection presented above, writing both the poemish piece and this paper as a whole has involved not only plunging into alternative modes of expression but also constant self-censoring.This resonates with Eva Bendix Petersen's (2008) description of movement forwards and backwards taking place in writing, deleting, rewriting, editing, and, most centrally, worrying over the performance of academic identities that one's writing enables or hinders.It appears to me that the regulatory force of gendered shame-incurred through revealing one's vulnerability-is very much present in these moments of writing.The affect that runs through the discourses of emotionality (see e.g., Wetherell, 2012) gives them force to restrict especially women's, and especially women researchers', actions, in the fear of losing the position of a legitimate knower and actor in the field of science.Hence, written exposures of researcher vulnerability can, I suggest, be also seen as political acts of resistance against the gendering force of discourses that separate affect and reason and thereby work to maintain the normative image of researchers as invulnerable, rational, and unaffected.Through an attempt to recognise vulnerability, an attempt is also made to redirect and intervene in the affective intensities tied to those divisive discourses.
In other words, what seems to haunt me in these moments of writing is the typical collapsing of the binary rational-emotional onto the related binary objective-subjective in not only Western thought in general but also in the hierarchies that are formed within academic scholarship (Ellington & Ellis, 2008).Overall, autoethnographic writing that taps into researcher experience, for the purpose of showing the presence of culture in them, is always a risky business that renders the researcher vulnerable, due to them exposing experiences that would commonly be considered as private (Lapadat, 2017).We could say that it is the fear of being labelled and ridiculed (as a researcher) as emotional on which the vulnerabilising effects of autoethnographic, arts-based, and feminist research centrally rest, especially in research on gendered vulnerabilities such as those attached to sexual harassment.Such a fear is also related to the affective potential carried by a risk of being accused of self-centredness.Such accusations have become familiar from critiques against auto-ethnography in methodological literature, where they productively point toward dilemmas to be dealt with in determining the extent to which self-disclosure is beneficial in research (Lapadat, 2017;Lazard & McAvoy, 2020).Less productively, such accusations are also a part of common claims of feminists as selfishly being obsessed with their own hurt feelings (Ahmed, 2018), which work toward positioning feminists as irrational and unscientific, thereby undermining the value of feminist scholarly work.
It is important to recognise that the new layers (albeit related) of vulnerabilities mobilised and potentially resisted through arts-based engagements with researcher vulnerability are filtered through and enacted in interaction with the privilege attached to the position of an academic researcher, of which there are various gradations dependent on researchers' other, intersectional positionings.In other words, vulnerabilities such as these should not be confounded with those that I try to engage with in my research on young people, for instance, where quite a different set of vulnerabilising effects are at play.And yet, these interlocking layers of vulnerabilities are not completely separate, and what is more, they become united in the ways in which research processes, such as the current one, unfold.We could, for instance, see the same systems of heterosexualising and gendering affective and discursive patterns as affecting these processes, systems that regulate both research and researcher subjectivities as well as sexual harassment and its silencing through the reproduction of the normatively shaped (classed, cisnormative, and racialised) category "woman" as the opposite to rational, detached, and invulnerable subjects both within and without academia (cf.Shildrick, 2002;Young & Hegarty, 2019).
New materialist theorisations on affect (e.g., Davies, 2016Davies, , 2020) ) emphasise the state of becoming, where people's social positions, identities, and experiences are in constant flux.As I have aimed to illustrate throughout this paper, this has theoretical, methodological, and ethical implications for research on vulnerability.The most crucial is these theorisations' potential to avoid the reification of the identities of researchers and participants into positions that highlight either their difference or sameness, or enable seeing vulnerability only in one and not the other.In other words, attending to the simultaneity and the open-endedness of the interplay between difference and connectedness is what makes new materialist approaches ethically response-able.Instead of glossing over asymmetries in vulnerability (Rice et al., 2021), then, an approach to researcher vulnerability inspired by new materialism instigates constant engagement with the various ways in which both difference and connectedness emerge.
In order to move toward ethically sensitive recognising and dealing with difference and sameness in vulnerability, I propose that it might be useful to closely engage with the following questions: To what extent does it serve empowerment to attach vulnerability to certain identities and experiences?When have we crossed the vague line between protection on one hand and silencing trouble and traumatic pasts on the other (cf.Thompson, 2021)?To what extent should we address our own (multiple forms of) vulnerabilities as they come into play in our research on vulnerabilities?What kind of work, and under what kind of conditions, does such addressing do, and how might this take us closer to ethical practice?
Creative research practices help renew the imaginaries we draw on in assuming positions in research, and renewed imaginaries may help to dissolve hierarchical distinctions between researchers and participants while also sensitising researchers to notice difference.They work towards uniting the personal and particular with the political and general, and thereby can provide insight into affective elements of gendered vulnerabilities that can be partially shared and partially particular.They can add nuance to our, researchers', understanding by showing the many faces of vulnerability.In my case, both thinking with affect theory and experimenting with poemish writing have enabled me to gain an expanded understanding of vulnerability, which might serve some others who explore gendered violations as well.Here and now, I sense (instead of see) vulnerability as an encompassing and dynamic state of being affected and affecting others, both in violent ways and in ways that aim to build solidarity and empathy.

Concluding thoughts
In this article, I have envisioned a feminist knowing of vulnerability that is multifaceted, unpredictable, and yet continuous.It is a knowing that runs deep, it is affective and embodied, and it ties together the past, present, and future.It is where vulnerability as an ontological state, vulnerability as an epistemological lens, and vulnerability as an ethical and methodological practice become conjoined.It is, or can be, painful and suffocating, and can be met with silencing and other forms of oppression, but can also be resistant and empowering.It holds specific potential for resisting stabilising forces, such as the shame linked to vulnerability, and thereby opens up possibilities for new subjectivities and practices, both in research and beyond it.Vulnerability and owning up to it is, hence, resistance, also to the institutionalised and disciplined logics that regulate research.
The recognition of vulnerability can be seen as productive and agentic both in the sense of researchers' openness and response-ability toward others and as a means to expose the harmful effects of dominant practices that silence vulnerabilities such as those created by sexual harassment.I suggest that specifically in research on gendered violence and harassment, feminist researchers need to engage with vulnerability in both of these senses: as the topic of our inquiries in the latter sense as well as a target of our reflections on the relationality of researcher positionality.Creative methodologies such as arts-based approaches allow for recognising vulnerability in ways that subvert traditional research practices implicitly based on idealising researcher invulnerability.By doing so, they enable disruption of the reification of hierarchical difference between assumedly invulnerable researchers and vulnerable participants, and pave the way for attuning to the complex interplay of difference and sameness as it unfolds and surfaces in the process of research.
s wanting got to do with it?Alas, we meet again the honourable Silence, of Sexism, I presume?we go way back.How self-centred this rendezvous with my sensations relations in present past raving about me, not you this is not what I promised to do. and yet there it is, already, the pierce the bloated researcher ego's surface like a thorn thrust into a balloon its confidence evaporating into the air shrinking, almost vanishing condensing in its meaning into a seed, of ethicality, perhaps.And I really thought it might be different now, after me too Was I wrong?But look, they are coming in, the responses, yes, there's another one, and another!There is Sarah, saying "In town some old man shouted that I have good boobs" and June, saying "I have been pressured to have sex, boobs and ass been groped, shouted at inappropriately, slapped on ass" and Jan saying "Commenting on another person's body is really wrong!" and Amelia, and many others, saying "It's sick, every woman experiences it and it's not talked about" and Andy saying "I hear too much about how men are laughed at if they have been like raped or something" And I listen close, intimately to let subjectivities emerge to spill over the frames I inevitably try to impose And I think I hear you knowing filtered through me too shaping me and then detached so as to see DIFFERENCE witnessing its torment, suffocation and impregnation at the hands of indifference always in dialogue, never in isolation connected through change we are.