Poetry as method – trying to see the world differently

Elizabeth Chapman Hoult,Helen Mort,Kate Pahl,Zanib Rasool

doi:10.18546/rfa.04.1.07

Abstract

Research with communities, even co-produced research with a commitment to social justice, can be limited by its expression in conventional disciplinary language and format. Vibrant, warm and sometimes complex encounters with community partners become contained through the gesture of representation. In this sense, 'writing up' can actually become a kind of slow violence towards participants, projects and ourselves. As a less conventional and containable form of expression, poetry offers an alternative to the power games of researching 'on' communities and writing it up. It is excessive in the sense that it goes beyond the cycles of reduction and representation, allowing the expression of subjective (and perhaps sometimes even contradictory) impressions from participants. In this cowritten paper we explore poetry as a social research method through subjective testimony and in the light of our Connected Communities-funded projects (Imagine, Threads of Time and Taking Yourself Seriously), where poetry as method came to the fore as a way of hearing and representing voices differently.

Highlights

In this article we exemplify and explore the purposes of poetry in relation to social research in general and co-produced research with communities in particular
Kate and Zanib together were the lead researchers on the communityoriented Imagine project in Rotherham (Rasool, 2017; Campbell et al, 2018)
Elizabeth conducted a study of science fiction in a prison for the Imagine project, and has explored literary analysis as social research method in her published work (Hoult, 2012)

Summary

Introduction

In this article we exemplify and explore the purposes of poetry in relation to social research in general and co-produced research with communities in particular. Nagar, writing with Susan Geiger, challenges the demand for reflexive academic writers who collaborate with community partners to give in to the demands to ‘uncover ourselves in specific ways for academic consumption’, partly, they point out, because of the inequitable demands for feminist researchers who work in collaborative partnerships with participants to ‘uncover’ in ways that other researchers operating in other paradigms do not (Nagar and Geiger, 2014: 84); but, perhaps more fundamentally, because ‘uncovering ourselves in these terms contradicts the purpose of problematizing the essentialist nature of social categories, which are, in reality, created, enacted and transformed’ (ibid.) It should be noted, for example, that an earlier iteration of this article included a fourth undulation that was a raw and direct response from Elizabeth to Hafsah Wahid’s (2017) beautiful poem ‘Lily’, quoted below. Collecting research data from a feminist epistemology through creative writing and poetry enables us to go deeper into the lives of women on the margins of society, to capture their personal experiences through their descriptions of their feelings and emotions’ (Crotty, 1998) In this way, we can begin to understand the realities of being the ‘other’. Our practice is embodied, happening beside a park, in a conversation and across continents, as well as within particular sites and spaces

Conclusions

Notes on the contributors