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Reflexively considering one's position when undertaking research has become commonplace in geographic research and writing. This phenomenon is linked to the increasingly prevalent view that research is a co-constituted process that involves the participant and researcher both constructing meaning. Yet, curiously, there has been relatively limited discussion around the role that sexual experiences play in the research process. In this article we draw on three experiences to illustrate the complex ways in which unwanted sexual encounters with research participants can affect the research process. Through these stories we show how sexual encounters shaped the research process, unsettled the way we understood and performed our own gendered sexuality, and challenged our understandings of what it means to be 'good researchers' . We aim to initiate a wider discussion around how we can best prepare emerging researchers for, and support in the wake of, unexpected encounters of desire in the field.

Between 2010 and 2017, the New Zealand Government undertook a range of subtle yet disturbing tactics to create a legislative environment that enabled deep sea oil exploration. This included forms of public endorsement, policy documents and legislative change that prioritised further oil development in the country to create a certain common-sense around increased fossil fuel extraction. In response, a range of communities and autonomous Oil Free groups have emerged to contest both the legislative changes and this underlying common-sense. We draw on this example to respond to calls within geography and political science literature to situate analysis of contemporary politics in empirical contexts. We use Rancière’s thought combined with the frames of politicisation, depoliticisation and repoliticisation to explore the entangled nature of government and oil industry actions, and community climate change activism. We argue that while there were clearly attempts by government and the oil industry to close down spaces of dissent and limit debate around fossil fuel development to technocratic questions of health and safety, the effects of attempts at closure are paradoxical. Such attempts at closure are always incomplete and at times, mobilise people to contestatory action. We show how activists have strategically drawn on certain discourses to exert claims of, and for, equality in public debates around the pressing issue of climate change.

Much recent work on climate justice and activism focuses on the broader sociopolitical economic contexts in which contestation occurs. These contestatory spaces in neoliberalised economies are frequently depoliticised through a variety of processes, strategies, practices, and actors. Recently this has been framed as the post-politicalwhereby dissent is legitimised as "democratic" only when it does not challenge the status quo of business-as-usual. Most of the analysis and commentary on the post-political has focused on policy or democratic decisionmaking processes and conflict at relatively broad scales, rather than nuanced empirical case studies. In this paper we draw on an empirical case study to explore how processes of delegitimisation affect climate justice activists in emotional and personal ways. We argue that while the political subjectivities of climate justice activists are fragile achievements, a key aspect that sustains them is an ethic of care for humans and non-humans, both near and more distant, who are affected by climate change. Fostering this ethic of care is one key way for climate activists to continue enacting responsibility for climate justice in a way that contests depoliticising and delegitimisation processes.