The Matter of Tears: Translucent Entanglements With/In Counselling Encounters

Abstract

In this essay, I propose a reconceptualising of counsellor-in-training tears from dominant ideas of tears as a personal, emotional response to tears as intra-active cultural, political, social, material and affective phenomena. This reconceptualization is stimulated by (and in the context of) the social practice of counselling and, within that, the process of becoming a counsellor. I draw on data analysis performed in my doctoral research, where I worked with a diverse group of eight counsellors-in-training over the period of one year, in Aotearoa New Zealand, using a collective biography methodology. Turning to Karen Barad's feminist new materialist framework of agential realism for data analysis entailed an entangled process of thinking data with theory, in which the material and affective flows of research participant (counsellor-intraining) tears began to 'glow' as a matter for further analysis. The aim of this essay is not to present a data analysis, rather it is to outline an intra-active research process of coming to 'see' tears as an analytic object, to conceptualise them as intra-active phenomena, and to outline the potential of the poem as performative analytic device. Ultimately, I re-present a collective biography of participants' tears through the analytic device of the poem, where the entanglements of matter and meaning, and the agency and mystery of tears, are enacted through the poem's affective and discursive forces.