Keele Research Repository

In this short report, I discuss how public health research, its assessment, and its dissemination outside the academy are produced, in part, through emotional circumstances. Using current debates on e-cigarettes as an example, I show that researchers find themselves uncomfortably positioned in complicated moral and affective landscapes, often making it difficult to represent the nuance of their research. I draw from the experiences and discussions of early career researchers to argue that this pressure can be intensified by the influence of senior colleagues, research communities and wider publics. While the social construction of knowledge has been acknowledged within much disciplinary introspection, the emotional and affective dimensions of knowledge production are perhaps under-appreciated and it is those dimensions that this report seeks to foreground.