Emotional Labour, Feeling Powerless, and Researcher Vulnerability: Reflections on Ethnography with Team UK Invictus 2023

In any field of work, neither researchers nor participants enter as empty vessels. We bring with us our histories, traumas, assumptions, stories, and meanings associated with certain labels or people. We experienced this first hand in our ethnographic work with Team UK for the Invictus Games 2023. The Invictus Games are a pathway to recovery through sport for injured and ill military personnel that have retired, been discharged, or currently serve in the armed forces. Team UK competitors began their Invictus journeys bearing labels medically- and/or personally- applied; ‘PTSD- sufferer’, ‘broken’, ‘failure’, ‘EX- military’, ‘undeserving’. Our introduction to the team also labelled us. Standing in front of competitors in a lecture theatre, we were presented as ‘academics’ doing research ON the Invictus Games experience. Immediately, with Team UK sitting arms folded, we were assigned labels of ‘smelly civis’, ‘ivory tower dwellers’, ‘super-woke’, ‘self-superior’, ‘outsiders’, and ‘parasites’. The labels were felt and tangible, and reflective of a historical relational hierarchy where we (researchers) held power over the researched (competitors). However, this did not represent how we felt as researchers. With no military experience among us and a (perceived) potential chasm between our and competitors’ life experiences, how would we meaningfully co-produce an authentic representation of recovery through the Invictus Games? We were powerless without competitors. Thus, researchers and competitors both felt the ‘other’ group held ‘the power’ in the relationship. We reflect on how over 6 months of fieldwork we became not only vulnerable
observers’ (Baher, 1996), but vulnerable participants as ‘part of’ Team UK seeking to earn the trust of competitors. Drawing upon our reflective diaries, observations, and interviews with competitors, we explore how the perceived hierarchy between ‘researchers’ and ‘researched’ was steadily dismantled together through (1) sharing our transparent selves, (2) being a grunt, (3) (re)interpreting ‘ethical’ rules, and (4) being ‘broken just like us!’. Yet the emotional labour and vulnerability the team felt continue to weigh heavy physically and emotionally, but signal deep engagement with competitors.