Ethnographic Poetry and Social Research: Problematizing the Poetics/Poethics of Empathy in Transnational Cross-Cultural Collaborations

Abstract

Ethnographic poetry as a form of creative nonfiction has much to offer applied social research in general and geohumanities and sociocultural geography in particular as a refined, nuanced, and useful critical-creative communicative form of scholarship and research method. Two transnational cross-cultural collaborative research projects are used as cases to illustrate the potentials of the use of the creative arts, particularly (auto)ethnographic poetry, in disciplinal cross-fertilization, community engagement, and the researchers’ own identity integration as a reflexive practitioner. Although recognizing their importance, the article also problematizes the concept of empathy and the use of (auto)ethnographic poetry in articulating the doubts, dissonance, displacements, and disjuncture produced from inter- and intracultural differences generated from (dis)embodied and (dis)emplaced (dis)locations emerging out of the applied research experience of transnational émigré and migrant practitioners who identify with decolonization projects and (post)colonial subjects.