Written by Hsiao-Man Cavalli and Lily Y.H. Lin.
Image credit: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times.
Studying the political in Taiwan: an emotional place to be
Successive waves of political mobilisation have taken place in Taiwan in recent years. In May and December 2024, protesters took to the streets. In 2025, the recall movement built on the forces and networks that had emerged the previous year. This year, the local electoral cycle is underway. In other words, Taiwan has witnessed a concentration of political activity in a relatively short period of time. These moments of mobilisation have brought political emotions – fear, anger, hope, frustration, and antagonism – to the fore.
An affective methodology becomes particularly useful for attending to the emotional forces that political events animate. In our chapter “Embracing Emotions in the Research Process: Early Reflections in the Context of Studying Taiwan” for the edited volume Feeling Taiwan: Emotions in Everyday Politics, Social Movements, and Research, we discuss how and why attending to emotions matters when doing (academic) research. We argue that attending to affect as both an object of inquiry and a mode of research praxis widens the space for exploring new ways of seeing, sensing, and writing the political. This departs from the conventional doxa of the researcher as a detached observer. Rather than presuming objectivity and neutrality, our central claim is that acknowledging intuitive reactions and emotions in our bodies can foster greater transparency by showing how researchers are embedded in the research process. This in itself holds transformative potential.
Our chapter demonstrates how an affective methodology can be applied across different stages of social science research, from choosing a research topic to designing fieldwork, analysing data and producing written work. In this blog post, however, we focus on how acknowledging and working through conflicted emotions towards party politics in Taiwan have initiated new ways of conceiving and practising research. As our own research in Taiwan brings us into contact with supporters of different political parties and political beliefs, the conflicts we witness are, in fact, not confined to the people we meet during fieldwork. As we wrote this chapter together, we found that these tensions also surfaced between us as co-authors, highlighting how our situated experiences shape how we interpret and respond to political difference.
Overcoming our felt tensions: when unpacking affects broadens narratives on party politics.
By affective methodology, we mean an approach that takes seriously researchers’ own felt, embodied experience as part of the research process. In doing so, it draws on the tradition of autoethnography, particularly in treating the self as a source of insight into the social. After all, while our research gaze may be directed outward toward the empirical world, we ourselves remain part of that world and, likewise, constitute a site of inquiry. While the chapter discusses this in depth across each stage of the research process, here we focus on one particularly tense moment that emerged as we grappled with partisan politics during this writing project. The tension did not arise from disagreements over which political party we personally supported, but from those over how Taiwan’s politics is talked about.
Before taking on this writing project together, party politics had often entered our conversations indirectly. Rather than being openly discussed, we became aware of the tensions through the defensiveness in how we spoke to one another. The source of the tensions, as we later learned, was implicit assumptions about what each party had come to be associated with, for instance, the DPP with being pro-democracy and the KMT with being pro-China (whatever “China” might mean here). Reiterated and reinforced across media coverage, political discourse, and academic writing, these associations have, in a distinct Baudrillardian fashion, accumulated meanings and affective tractions. The frustration arising in us was a response to the lack of nuance these associations introduced into discussions about politics in Taiwan, often narrowing how its political realities could be understood.
At the peak of our disagreements, we could have simply ended and avoided these uncomfortable conversations. Instead, we found a way to work through it. We learned to sit with our emotions and unpack them, alone and together: every time a manifestation of annoyance, frustration, or anger arose, we would pause the discussion and instead focus on the reaction itself. We would try to understand where it was coming from. How are you feeling right now? How would you describe it? Does this feeling remind you of any other thoughts, memories, or sensations? By staying with these tensions, we slowly reached the emotions lying beneath the defensiveness – fear, tiredness, anger, confusion, disappointment, and grief – that fuel them. The other person would listen and wait for what remained unspoken to come out. The practice of vulnerable expression and active witnessing would help us move inward, drawing closer to the intimate self, while also tracing the histories and experiences that shape it.
This process allowed us to clearly name our feelings towards party politics in Taiwan. Expressing our emotions out loud helped us clarify what we were reacting to. We realised we were affected by the logics of exclusion and intolerance, and our judgment about party politics speaks to how it would make us feel. We wished to resist these dynamics -specifically, we did not want to extend these lenses to our own research. Instead, we vouch for other ways to narrate Taiwan politics – with more softness, more care, and more inclusivity. An affective methodology precisely allows the coexistence of different narratives and viewpoints rather than opposing them to each other. In this sense, this practice appears to us as a powerful foundation for broadening possibilities for what the study of Taiwan could look like and how Taiwan can be understood and discussed.
Tending beyond the self: affective methodologies, an invitation for collective changes?
At the end of this piece, we push this intimate form of knowing further. Much of our discussion has focused on the self, on how attending to our embodied and affective responses can lead to a renewed grappling with our positionality and its politics. This willingness to orient the self beyond its own knowing opens the possibility of revisiting what can be perceived, interpreted, and represented. We see this, however, as a starting point rather than an endpoint. The question we want to raise in our concluding thoughts is what becomes possible when the embodied and situated forms of knowing cultivated through affective methodology do not end with the self but become a basis for encountering and relating to others. Moving in this direction begins with a practice of responsiveness.
Recognising our own situatedness makes claims to universality harder to sustain because it confronts us with the limits of our own ways of knowing. Yet this limitation need not be understood as a constraint. It can also become an opening toward others. Embodied knowing allows us to better locate ourselves in relation to the people and environments we encounter, and its transformative potential lies in what we choose to do from that situated position. It is here, in the movement from locating ourselves to reaching beyond ourselves, that we see the possibility for affective methodology to foster collective dialogues. Responsiveness, in this sense, is an active relational practice of meeting others without subsuming their worlds into our own ways of knowing.
While the current ongoing political events in Taiwan have generated deeply opposing views, we find hope in the fact that people who may never have seen themselves as political actors are actively participating in political life. Yet, participation alone does not resolve the differences that animate politics in the first place, nor bring people closer to understanding one another. It is precisely for this reason that we find it necessary to ask how we might remain present to emotions and experiences that differ from our own. Reconnecting to one’s core emotions is far from an individual practice: as our wounds and longings echo broader societal dynamics, practising embodiment leads the way to collective change.
Hsiao-Man Cavalli (馬曉曼) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Rennes 2 and the Catholic University of Paris. Their PhD project focuses on the KMT’s new generations’ perception of the nation and the State in today’s Taiwan. Their work takes place in the studies of senses of belonging, with a special interest in affects as both object of inquiry and research methodology.
Lily Y.H. Lin is a doctoral candidate at the University of Copenhagen, where she is pursuing a PhD in political science. Supported by funding from the Department of Political Science, her research centres on the security practices of non-state actors. She is interested in contributing to the ongoing discussions on liminal insecurities in international relations and Taiwan studies.
Both authors have contributed equally to this blog piece.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Feeling Taiwan’.