Creative writing as critical fieldwork methodology

Abstract

This article examines creative writing (CW) as a place-based methodology for doing and analysing fieldwork. Drawing insights from CW scholarship and workshops as part of a collaborative project, we contribute new empirically-informed insights from peer researchers about the significance of leveraging emotional connections, detailed attention to lived experiences, and the researcher's experiences in executing and reporting fieldwork. While attending to tensions between ‘academic’ and ‘creative’ writing, we examine how adopting different and alternative writing approaches can express diverse complexities of the field research process. We contribute to an understanding of CW as a dialectical catalyst, serving as a mode for reflecting on the relationships between the researcher and the researched within the field as well as a mode for analysing and disseminating fieldwork findings. By doing so, our study presents opportunities and limitations of CW as a critical methodology for generating situated knowledges about the field and for reimagining fieldwork.