Autoethnographic Poetry Research Articles

Place of poetry in employment tribunal: a place of healing

ABSTRACT There is a lack of research that investigates the emotional labour of making a claim to the Employment Tribunal. This article explores the experience of a self-represented claimant. The author’s experience elucidates the lack of understanding of the emotional labour that is involved in going through the Employment Tribunal process. The article has a qualitative design and is based on her autoethnographic poetry. The author used poetry to express her anxiety and psychological pain to prevent emotional dissonance. The article is evocative and analytical, because it offers an inside perspective of how turmoil and loss of control within the employment legal system, can be restored to a sense of order and balance through poetry. The purpose: of the article is to demonstrate how poetry can be used as a therapeutic tool to manage emotional labour and address the lack of presence of claimants’ voices in the debate of access to justice.

“You Guys Are Smaller!”: “Talking Back” to Microaggressions Through Poetic Inquiry

This article examines collective dialogues surrounding the confrontation of microaggressions through a unique combination of autoethnographic poetry and found poetry. Focused on my personal encounters as an Asian woman in academia, a mother of three young children, and an international employee residing in the United States, the autoethnographic poems serve as a platform for shared reflection and exploration. Following the sharing of these poems to undergraduate students, I invited their anonymous responses via a Padlet page, from which I crafted found poetry. By juxtaposing these two forms of poetic inquiry, this study aims to challenge dominant narratives, restore agency, and underscore the humanity and dignity of marginalized individuals. Furthermore, this article delves into methodological insights regarding the use of poetic inquiry as a catalyst for collective dialogic healing and transformative action. I seek to foster empathy, understanding, healing, and actionable change in the face of microaggressions.

Chronic Pain Performance and Knowledge: Toward a Process With Ecological Pain

I have lived with chronic back pain for over 20 years. My experience has shown me that my relationship to pain can resonate with what it means to relate with wider ecological pain. I reflect on Pain and I—my autobiographical dance performance that explores the rich complexities of chronic pain and asks “what can pain teach us”? I explore what chronic pain experience can reveal about having a process with pain and staying “with the trouble” of our “wounded Earth.” I draw on autoethnographic poetry, performance text, pain theory, and ecological philosophy.

Writing Through Pain: Ars Spirituality, the Black Atlantic, and the Paradox of Diasporic Belongingness

By way of autoethnographic poetry, I reflect on my personal struggles related to racial consciousness as I embarked on a journey—from America, across the Atlantic, and eventually, to the Indian Ocean off the East Coast of (mother) Africa. The story of my apparent racial crisis is viewed through multiple lenses, as I infuse the pivotal readings of The Black Atlantic, Lose Your Mother, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, and personal experiences both in autoethnographic and in poetic form.

“And I surrender to maternity”: a poetic autoethnographic inquiry into juggling roles of a doctoral student mother during the pandemic

ABSTRACT The juggling roles of doctoral student mothers have worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the whole world. While researchers have been focusing on how faculty mothers are burdened by and cope with the “new normal”, little attention has been paid to the situation of doctoral student mothers. This autoethnographic poetic inquiry presents a series of poems written when I was experiencing mother guilt for not spending enough time with my two young children during the social distancing time while trying to work on my doctoral research project. Through my autoethnographic poetry, a picture of emotions will be presented, through which I aim to connect my personal responses to a wider audience, including female doctoral students who have children and share similar experiences of being both guilty as a mother and stigmatised as a graduate student amidst the global health crisis.

The Abject Swearing at the Figure of the Stranger

In this autoethnographic poetry, I express my sense of Ulysses syndrome, reflecting upon the past 12 years since I left my motherland—China. In reading Ahmed’s work, the human “I” is conceptualized as the “the stranger,” reminiscent of the foreignness of the past, longing for an imagined life that he would live in. Yet, Kristeva’s pathologizing label of abjection horrifies its own existence of the human “I,” who cannot remember its youth and beauty, becoming an embodied Other. In his dreams, the abject “I” utters flights of poetry at the stranger by asking—how migration can be experienced as anything other than complication with all the mess, tension, and conflict it brings. In bringing the concept of abjection, it problematizes my understanding of be(com)ing the “figure of the stranger,” transforming the humanness that the human “I” represents in its wake.

The writing processes underpinning wellbeing: Insight and emotional clarity in poetic autoethnography and freewriting

Investigations of the expressive writing paradigm have shown that writing about one's experiences have positive effects on wellbeing. Understanding the writing processes facilitating self-discovery which underpin these positive outcomes is currently lacking. Prior research has suggested two writing processes that can lead to discovery: (1)Knowledge Constitutinginvolving the fast synthesis of verbal and non-verbal memory traces into text; and (2)Knowledge Transforminginvolving controlled engagement with written text for revision. Here, two genres—autoethnographic poetry and freewriting–were studied as they manifest a different pattern design forKnowledge ConstitutingandKnowledge Transforming. One hundred and seventeen, L1 English speaking participants from 3 northwestern universities in the US completed a two-stage, genre specific writing process. Participants were randomly assigned to a writing condition. Poetry writers first did aKnowledge Constitutingwriting task followed by aKnowledge Transformingtask. Freewriters repeated aKnowledge Constitutingtask. Participants completed insight and emotional clarity scales after stage one and stage two. Data was analyzed using a two-way repeated measures ANOVA with one between (writing condition) and one within subject (time of prompt) variables. Descriptive results show that it is theKnowledge Constitutingprocess which elicits high levels of insight and emotional clarity for both genres at the first time point.Knowledge Transformingat time-point 2 significantly reduced insight. WhileKnowledge Constitutingat time-point 2 significantly increased emotional clarity. The results provide initial support for the position that it is theKnowledge Constitutingwriting process which facilitates self-discovery and underpins writing-for-wellbeing outcomes.

Discovery of Existential Paralysis, Death, and Resolve in Autoethnographic Poetry of Taufiq Rafat through Poundian Image: A Study of Poetic Therapy

Poetry therapy is a very useful technique tocope with extremely unbearable emotional experiencesin the lives of poets by manoeuvring autoethnographicpoems as a form of self-therapy. It engages a process ofself-disclosure to transform the developmental changestaking place in the affective domain of humans to bringemotional equilibrium. The poetic techniques ofconjuring subjective images in superposition withobjective metaphors – Poundian Image – imply theexistential themes of loss, death, dread,meaninglessness, void, resolve, etc., to relate theotherwise inarticulable emotional states. This paperseeks to investigate Taufiq Rafat's autoethnographicpoems about loss and death in his family from hisanthology Half Moon: Poems (1979-1983) to discoverhis existential thematic dimensions – fear of death,existential paralysis, the journey towards death,existential resolve through spiritual relief, andeverlasting memories – to come to term with theultimate reality of death using Ezra Pound'stheorization of Poundian image. Moreover, the studyalso takes into account the use of ethnographic poemsas self-therapy.

Surfacing Anger and Anxiety in Graduate Research Writing: A Prose Poetic Journey

Research writing evokes feelings of anger and anxiety even among graduate students. Feelings are an inseparable part of the human lived experience and are important to learning and decision making. Research anxiety is powerful but not impossible to overcome. Various affective, cognitive, linguistic, and pedagogical mitigating strategies can be employed. By simply acknowledging its existence, we lead our students in the direction of doing just that...towards a transformational mindset to overcome research anxiety. Written qualitatively in the hermeneutic strand, this paper explores the lived experience and collective portrayals of the phenomenon of graduate research writing anxiety using prose poetry. The main forms of poetry qualitative researchers create vary from data poems or transcription poems, research poems, and autoethnographic poetry. Autoethnographic poetry is created by the author through self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experiences and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. In this paper, the author writes from an emic perspective utilizing intertextual chaining to create an autoethnographic research prose poetry. The paper describes in rich detail, the dominant feelings about research writing anxiety and anger that surfaced from participants’ narratives of their shared experience of research writing anxiety. Prose poetry is written in paragraphs rather than verse but contains the elements of poetry, such as poetic meter, language play, and a focus on images rather than narrative, plot, and character.

From Poetry to Politics: Questioning the Rhyme and Reason of Title IX Rollbacks

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities. Prior to the Trump administration, Title IX has been used as the legal framework for addressing sexual misconduct present within educational institutions. There has been an increase of sexual misconduct nationwide across college campuses further entrenching rape culture. Despite this, Betsy DeVos has rescinded the majority of Title IX protections. As a survivor of sexual assault and advocate, I use autoethnographic poetry as a means of providing counter-narrative resistance to a national epidemic of pervasive rape culture.

The Fractured “I”: An Autoethnographic Account of a Part-Time Doctoral Student’s Experience With Scholarly Identity Formation

This autoethnographic poetry collection provides an entry into the socialization of part-time doctoral students by centering the lived experience of the author, a part-time doctoral student employed full-time at the university where she studies. In the writing of this poetry collection, the author sought to enter into conversation with the doctoral socialization literature and to uncover the various parts of her fractured identity. Through an examination of her own fractured identity, the author engages with the places where scholarly identity formation is stalled in part-time doctoral students especially in comparison with their full-time peers and considers affective dimensions of the work of scholarly identity formation.

Poetic Existential: A Lyrical Autoethnography of Self, Others, and World

“Poetic Existential” is a collection of lyrical autoethnography. This body of work explores existential themes relating to globalization and the immigration/refugee humanitarian crisis, “freedom” as personal/political/geographical ideology, and my own experiences of being a situated self alongside others. Lyrical poetry coaxes a person to embody and present experience through restrained (Faulkner 52), yet evocative descriptions – without the neat folds and contextual blanketing common to many narrative approaches. The challenge of autoethnographic poetry is to perform a focused crystallization of experience via lyrical aesthetics (arrangement, word choice, rhythm, rhyme, phrase and line structure, etc.). In the accompanying artist statement, I theorize my poetic engagement with attention paid to what the lyric facilitates in my scholarly work. In this exploratory fusion of lyrical expression, autoethnography, and existentialism, I hope to summon the aesthetic powers of poetry in the service of self-reflexivity, and in relation to the plight of millions of disenfranchised others.

Poetry is Politics

Through an autoethnographic poetry manifesto, the author makes the case for poetry as political, poetry as feminist practice, poetry as social research and autoethnography, poetry as the personal that becomes the universal, and poetry as visionary activism. The use of personal poetry engages the political power of poetry to present embodied, nuanced, and myriad scenes of marginalized and stigmatized identities.

Laramie 2.0

Through autoethnographic poetry, I take the reader on a journey through my experience of moving to Laramie, Wyoming, to become faculty at the University of Wyoming. As a gay male who is still haunted by the 1998 brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, I engage in storytelling: relaying my personal experiences of living in modern-day Laramie, showing the reader my fears, obstacles, and revelations through prose.

Papá’s Lessons

Integrating autoethnographic poetry with theoretical analysis, this article explores how the political distance between settler and immigrant generations within a family shape the extent to which that understanding is possible. The use of poetry is critical in this vein, given the manner in which discussions of cultural memory and historical exploration can be made accessible. Referencing the influence of Diasporic Caribbean in the U.S. writers such as Junot Diaz and Julia Alvarez, I cite what shaped the tensions born through reflecting on my grandfather’s legacy, as my family positioned themselves in an alternative relation to the Trujillo era. Said tensions necessitate artistic and literary representation because of how the politics of imperialism and racism censor otherwise unfiltered access. “Papá’s Lessons,” discusses how cultural memory and historical exploration open the door for radical reconciliation.

S.I.P. (School Induced Psychosis)

By way of autoethnographic poetry, I reflect on my daughter's struggle to negotiate the tenuous space created by the effects of post-Brown desegregated schooling in a predominantly White district, high family expectations, and her own identity as an African American teenage female. The story of this recent family crisis is viewed through multiple lenses as an African American female, single parent, educator, and artist. It is situated within the domain of educational critical race theory and its intersections with gender and class. Critical race theories in education have provided avenues for marginal voices to be heard. Further research and writing should be aimed toward amplifying these muted voices.

Poetry and Narrative as Qualitative Data: Explorations into Existential Theory

This article explores existential principles through autoethnographic poetry and narrative reflections. The use of poetry and narrative as tools in qualitative research is explored. Poetry and narratives are shown to be valuable tools for presenting people’s lived experiences of complex existential principles and processes. The use of poetry and narrative in this research is positioned within the traditions of expressive arts and postmodern research methods.

Autoethnographic Poems and Narrative Reflections: A Qualitative Study on the Death of a Companion Animal

ABSTRACT This study explores the meaning of the death of a companion animal through autoethnographic poetry in conjunction with narrative reflections. This method expands the depth and scope of poetry in qualitative research by transforming expressive works into both the subject and product of inquiry.