Intimate Inquiry: Love as "Data" in Qualitative Research

Academics have a hard time talking about the place of "love" in social research, and the lack of a working definition for its meaning only partly explains our difficulty. The more substantial barrier is our tendency to think about "research" not as a careful exploration of specific social, intellectual, or methodological problems that bear on the everyday circumstances of real people, but as the product of observable and replicable processes, of science. Love, many would argue, has got nothing to do with this. In this article, I offer a radical counter narrative of the possibilities that a broadened view might enable. Using my own research experiences, I sketch the beginnings of an "intimate" approach to qualitative inquiry that is grounded in feminist theory, governed by an "ethic of love," and expressed in data as " love acts" for the individuals whose lives our work aims to shape.