‘Such Cold, Dispassionate Terms Fail Us’: ReadingHansardas an ‘Archive of Feelings”

Abstract

This article proposes a distinctly affective methodological approach to Hansard transcripts using feminist affect theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive methodologies. Expanding the ‘toolkit’ of analysis available to parliamentary and legislative researchers to understand the political worlds we inhabit, I contend scholarship engaging with Hansard is shaped—but not limited—by the format and editorial decisions that inform its publication. Feminist scholarship on affect enables both (i) generative methodological approaches to so-called limitations of Hansard, and (ii) empowers a critical advancement of how researchers can engage Hansard as data. Considering the Hansard corpus as a process (rather than a thing) enables analyses to begin not with the question of can affect and emotion be present in transcripts, but rather how can emotion and affect proliferate throughout a genre designed and mediated in such a way as to occlude these emotional and affective speech patterns. I conclude by offering methodological strategies through an exploration of research vignettes drawn from my work with Canadian provincial Hansards.