Liminal Lives: Navigating the Spaces Between (Poet and Scholar)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the importance of narrative beginnings to narrative inquiry, arguing that an examination of narrative beginnings is essential to positioning the researcher within the research. Through a series of personal poems, I unpack the significance of my own autobiographical beginnings from a narrative perspective, and from my proposed research on life and learning on the edges of community. In this paper, I also highlight the efficacy of employing poetic representation within a narrative inquiry. Through poetic representation, I demonstrate the liminal nature of understanding field texts and interim field texts as determined by the context of the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, encompassing temporality, sociality, and place. Keywords: narrative inquiry; poetic representation; poetic inquiry; three-dimensional narrative inquiry space; marginalization; community; identity