In ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness’ bell hooks (1989) exhorts us thus: ‘Marginality as a site of resistance. Enter that space.’ Responding to the 'affective turn' in social theory (Ticineto Clough, 2007), this paper has as its primary focus the question of what kind of space that might be and, moreover, what it is for researchers to affectively 'enter' it when carrying out research with those who are marginalised from education. The paper also considers what reflexive mechanisms might be employed in doing so. Mindful of a growing UK trend for research focussing on 'hearing' service user 'voices’ - particularly those of the young and marginalised - we argue that an acknowledgement of the multivalent nature of research texts generated in such settings is a necessary methodological caution prior to the transfer of this kind of research to a European context. Prompted by a discussion of 'backgrounds' in Thrift (2008) suggesting that they might be considered in the same way as 'paratexts' (Gennette, 1999) - that is, as '"invisible" forms which structure how we write the world but which generally no longer receive attention because of their unfamiliarity' (Thrift, op. cit. p 91) - we argue that the 'affective' space of researcher subjectivity might be thought of as such a background paratext and, once acknowledged, might be reclaimed as a place of meaningful researcher entry into hooks' 'site of resistance'. Using as a case study a research project based at the International Centre for Guidance Studies (iCeGS), University of Derby, during spring of 2008 our paper proposes that the spiral and polyphonic nature of multidirectional 'research conversations' needs to be disclosed and problematised. In the case in point - a study of the 'voices' of young people 'Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) - the data generated in transcription was indeed detailed and ‘luminous’ in Katz's (2002) sense. The young participants gave freely evocative and richly descriptive accounts of what it is to be a young person making transitions, evaluating options, getting by, getting through and getting on (see Putnam, 2000, cited in Kintrea et al, 2008) whilst occupying the 'margins'. Indeed, the intensity of their witness provoked consideration of the need for a new, affective, space that included us as researchers and requred us to reflect urgently on how we might yet, radically, look through our ‘I’s’ at our ‘Me’s’ in our relation to our participants. (Stronach et al, 2007)

Utilising theoretical frameworks for reflexivity (see Stronach, 2007; Woolgar, 1988; Macbeth, 2001; Bourdieu, 1992) and insights into the manifold ways in which the 'weight of the world' (Bourdieu, 1999) bears on and makes 'bare' (See Agemben 2000, cited in BRE, 2007) marginal lives, this paper considers a particular aspect of the 'listening' relationship between researchers and researched. Setting alongside each other an 'official' transcription and the unofficial 'paratext' of an email correspospondence between researchers, we consider the embodied nature of listening and its occurrence in an affective 'spatiality of feeling' (Thrift 2008) Through our parallel text we illustrate how 'to hear' - as acknowledgement of waves of sound; as physical investment in that object relation; as straining, ontological oscillation; as spatial, emotional and intellectual presence - is necessarily an affective embodied task shaping 'hearing and being heard’, ‘looking and being seen’ itself critical to research occupying hooks' 'space of radical openness'.

The core research question examined here is that of how recent research on reflexivity and affect might illuminate the relationship between researchers into education and those who are subjects of their research. The expected outcome - publication, discussion and dissemination of the research paper through EERA - will hopefully contribute to a richer, more situated understanding of the 'listening' research model which is becoming increasingly common in the UK. The specific argument is that researchers' abilities to enable and participate in 'affective, embodied listening' - as modelled in our paper - might have applicability in developing the 'radical openness' necessary in education research at Europe's contested, post-colonial margins.