Big Feelings in Ivory Towers: addressing emotional labour and epistemic injustice in co-production

Abstract

The Re; Minding Histories project demonstrates how shaping research around ‘Big Feelings’ – any emotion a person finds worthy of attention, from grief to joy, offers a methodological resource for co-produced mental health history research. Rather than treating emotions as obstacles to rigorous inquiry, our research team comprising lived experience researchers, academics, and clinicians developed systematic approaches for leveraging emotions as epistemic resources. Through peer-only spaces, structured emotional check-ins during meetings, and narrative interviews that honoured affective dimensions of historical experiences, we created a set of practices such that emotional vulnerability strengthened the research process. These assisted to systematise emotional engagement and valorise the emotional labour inherent in co-production. Despite institutional constraints, our findings demonstrate how emotional authenticity and lived experience can be systematically incorporated to produce knowledge of greater analytical depth and relational understanding. This approach extends co-production scholarship by developing methods of structured emotional engagement that complement competency-building approaches.