Poetic Inquiry II – Seeing, Caring, Understanding

This volume offers a novel collection of international works on the use of poetry in inquiry that transcends conventional disciplinary boundaries. The aim is to illustrate an ‘aesthetic move’ in social sciences and in particular in health and in education. The collection builds a bridge between the Arts and Health and Education by offering innovative exemplars of use of poetry in social science research and in the context of the many varied disciplinary contexts. An exploration of poetry within an international interdisciplinary collection in the context of education, research inquiry and health and social care with university-affiliated authors is offered. Writers include literary poets, academics and researchers in the arts, the humanities, and human and social sciences: an unusual interdisciplinary community. Authors contribute work illustrating how they are finding varied approaches to make use of the resonant power of words through poetry in their investigations. Writers’ aims span new ways to help readers resonate and connect with findings; new ways of revealing deep understandings of human experience; new ways of being in dialogue with research findings and new ways of working with people in vulnerable situations to name ‘what it is like’. As such, the collection offers examples of the foremost ways seen in the literature for poetry to appear in education, health and caring sciences, anthropology, sociology, psychology, social work and related fields.

Most qualitative research texts focus on one discipline; this text will be relevant for many postsecondary programs and courses including in education, health sciences, arts and humanities and social sciences.

Acknowledgments.- Introduction.- Section 1: Seeing: Poetry as Inquiry.- Seeing with an Unconscious Eye: The Poetic in the Work of Emily Carr.- Lean in as the Story Is Told: Vestibular Sense, Poetic Image, Instruction for Seeing.- A/R/T(herapist)-ography: Examining the Weave.- The Unpredictability of Bliss: A Grandfather’s Poetic Riffs.- Joys and Dilemmas: Documenting, Disentangling, and Understanding Experience through Poetry.- Embodied Poetics in Mother Poetry: Dialectics and Discourses of Mothering.- Resonance and Aesthetics: No Place That Does Not See You.- Section 2: Understanding: Poetry through Inquiry.- Poetics in a Capacious Landscape.- White Skin, Brown Soul: A Poetic Autoethnography.- Poems Written in Service of “Service”.- Finding Grandma: Memories, Stories, Gifts.- The Use of I Poems to Better Understand Complex Subjectivities.- What Is Good for the Poem Is Good for the Poet: An Experiment in Poetic-Psychoanalytic Therapy.- Geopoetics: An Opening of the World.- Section3: Caring: Poetry with and for Ethically Sensitive Practice.- Waking up Following Breast Surgery: An Insight from the Beats, Burroughs and the Cut-up Technique.- Making the Case for Poetic Inquiry in Health Services Research.- ‘If You Believe, If You Keep Busy, You Can Develop Yourself’: On Being a Refugee Student in a Mainstream School.- Using Autobiographical Poetry as Data to Investigate the Experience of Living with End-Stage Renal Disease: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.- Unnamed Moments, Transformation and the Doing and Making of Trauma Therapy Practices.- Poetic Inquiry, Refrigerator Magnets and Kedrick?.- Materializing the Punctum: A Poetic Study of the Washington State University Clothesline Project.- Research in Special Education: Poetic Data Anyone?.- The Stories We Tell in America: State-Sponsored Violence and “Black” Space.- Contributors.