Abstract
AbstractUsing examples from an ethnographic study of aircraft cleaning, we discuss and illustrate how “writing differently” can be performed throughout the research process—in the literature review, data collection, data analysis, and writing up. We argue that writing differently is an ongoing methodological tool in order to rethink/refeel research practices in ways that generate affective, embodied and caring accounts of empirical organizational contexts, particularly when marginalization is key such as in cleaning work. We turn to poetry to better understand and portray the affective and embodied intensities in different phases in the research project. Furthermore, instead of presenting a sanitized authoritative account of writing so that it becomes recognizable as academic knowledge, we leave in the messiness, struggles, and insecurities in “doing” writing differently.
Highlights
Writing it down our fingers get stuck hoovering above the keyboard they will not be disciplined to tell these stories in academese |to soften these experiences into disembodied abstractions by using all the “right” kinds of words to understand the not‐yet known we become unruly, resistant un‐stuck finding words that will stick the right ones for the heart the wrong ones for this type of paper? producing paper cuts, inflicted by the sharpness of our poetic endeavors bleeding our words into the readers' hearts, bodies and minds warning! writing differently may hurt
In this methodological paper we want to address the limitations of conventional masculine academic research and writing practices for producing embodied and affective accounts. This echoes the work of scholars who have engaged in “writing differently” in order to voice marginalized perspectives in Management and Organization Studies (e.g., Mandalaki, 2020; Phillips et al, 2014; Pullen, 2018; Pullen et al, 2020; Pullen & Rhodes, 2015) and who have successfully opened up space to write about experiences that are usually silenced in academia, such as those around motherhood (Boncori & Smith, 2019; Van Amsterdam, 2015), transsexuality (O'Shea, 2018), religion (Jamjoom, 2020), and race/ethnicity (Anthym, 2018). Many of these papers are written in resistance to academic conventions that tend to colonize the experiences of marginalized people through the value placed on authority, linearity, and productivity
We do not give a comprehensive overview or analysis of this fieldwork. We use this empirical research to exemplify what writing differently can offer if applied as a methodological tool throughout different phases of the research process—in the literature review, data collection, data analysis and writing up
Summary
Writing it down our fingers get stuck hoovering above the keyboard they will not be disciplined to tell these stories in academese |to soften these experiences into disembodied abstractions by using all the “right” kinds of words to understand the not‐yet known we become unruly, resistant un‐stuck finding words that will stick the right ones for the heart the wrong ones for this type of paper? producing paper cuts, inflicted by the sharpness of our poetic endeavors bleeding our words into the readers' hearts, bodies and minds warning! writing differently may hurt. KEYWORDS affect cleaning work, embodiment poetry, writing differently and we get stuck our heads split open one part being there, engaging with the other trying to make sense
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