Poetic Reflexivity. Walking to Inform Poetry as a Response to Disembodied Research During a Pandemic

Abstract

Poetry can be used as an adjunct to interviews in social science to build relationships and share meaning to create an artefact that provokes dialogue between the researcher and research study participants. Describing the sensemaking of researcher identity as a narrative walk, Datawalking is extended as an embodied post-data qualitative research method to inform autoethnography and poetry. These methods articulate the ways to support researcher wellbeing to counter the loneliness of remote research which can be heightened by external factors such as the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. We illustrate two poems used alongside phenomenological interviewing to inform reflexive knowledge in educational research. By exploring poetic techniques including meter, alliteration, and enjambment we seek to advance the understanding of evocative autoethnography as a polyphonic form of expressive scholarship to instantiate dialogue in social research. This approach, centred on identity and praxis, has uses for organisational studies in education.