Working in multidisciplinary research settings often contributes to raising questions around one’s own research practice and disciplinary traditions and habits. Why do we do things the way we do and how may an ethnological perspective contribute to seeing and understanding things in a different way than in other disciplines? This presentation will start from a multidisciplinary project on higher education, where researchers from journalism, Swedish and ethnology cooperate in collecting and analyzing material and also write articles together. The focus of the research project is undergraduate supervision, and in particular how the idea and ideal of student independence, expressed for instance in the Swedish Higher Education Ordinance, is understood and handled by supervisors in journalism and teacher education.

In my presentation I will concentrate on one of the types of material we have collected within the project, namely recorded supervision sessions, and how this material may be used to examine the role of emotions in undergraduate supervision, particularly in relation to the ideal of student independence. The analysis of the material is based in a theoretical framework centered on the concepts affective practices, anticipated emotions and anticipatory emotions, and focuses on how the participating supervisors handled students’ expressions of fear and anxiety, joy and relief, as well as on how anticipated emotions could be used by the supervisors during the supervision. In the discussion I will also put my ethnological perspective in relation to how researchers from the other disciplines within the project approach the same material.