Journalism and Embodied Knowledge Conceptualizing Affective Epistemology and Epistemic Affordances of Emotions and Affect Across News Beats

This conceptual paper aims to theorize the role of journalists’ bodies in knowledge-making practices by focusing on affects and emotions as a mediatrix of biological, social, and political bodies. It does so by developing the concepts of journalists’ “affective epistemology” and “epistemic affordances” of emotions and affect that, altogether, aim to provide journalism researchers with a conceptual toolkit for studying the role of emotions and affect in journalistic epistemology. The notion of affective epistemology is based on (1) relevant empirical research on journalism, emotions, and affect, (2) Feminist Standpoint Epistemology, and (3) selected philosophical, sociological, and anthropological theories of emotions and embodied knowledge. The paper also identifies five epistemic affordances of emotions and affect in journalism, i.e., ways how they can be illuminating as well as blinding in journalists’ knowledge-building and fact-finding practices: motivational, methodological-analytical, ontological-narrative, collaborative-innovative, and phatic-interactional. Examples illustrating these affordances come from existing research on various journalism beats, from lifestyle and cultural journalism to conflict reporting. In conclusion, I ask how journalists can integrate emotions in knowledge-building practices in a way that makes emotions rather illuminating than blinding. I suggest that a productive use of emotions/affects requires maximum reflexivity, virtue responsibility, and emotional literacy.