Unsanitized writing practices: Attending to affect and embodiment throughout the research process

Abstract

Using 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.

Breaking the plaster: Making do with the fragility of the body

“…Such is the power of art‐making, poetry, messy and non‐linear feminist readings and writings when integrated in our academic practices (Biehl‐Missal, 2015). They are experienced and understood as feminist practices with transformative potential offering the agency to shake social and epistemic norms and conventions (Beavan et al., 2021; Faulkner, 2018; van Eck, van Amsterdam and van den Brink, 2021). They generate the means to write our fr‐agile bodies into fr‐agile words ; to ‘stand on our feet’ again, literally and symbolically, to reclaim our fr‐agile existences as sites of knowing.…”

Tread lightly: Liminality and Covid‐19 reflections

“…I reflect on the gendered impact of the pandemic; I reflect on systemic inequalities, and I reflect on my own experience in the pandemic. I do so by drawing on feminist methods of writing differently (Biehl-Missal, 2015;Clancy, 2020;Gilmore et al, 2019;Grey & Sinclair, 2006;Handforth & Taylor, 2016;Lykke, 2014;Mandalaki, 2020;Pullen, 2018;van Eck et al, 2021), and so my voice, though at times overshadowed by my societal reflections, is present. I write emotionally, and at times my voice is at a distance.…”

The Persistence of Sexism and Racism at Universities: Exploring the Imperceptibility and Unspeakability of Workplace Harassment and Discrimination in Academia

“…Rhodes, 2019). Often subsumed under the idea of 'writing differently', scholars have developed a myriad of ways of exploring the creative and critical potential of writing research in ways that deviate from usual forms of academic text in structure, wording, form, and tone (Burø, 2020;Gilmore et al, 2019;Grey & Sinclair, 2006;Helin, 2019;Parker, 2014;Pullen, 2006;Pullen & Rhodes, 2015;van Eck et al, 2021;Weatherall, 2018).…”

“…Scholars employ forms of writing differently, for instance, to include and foreground emotions in their writing (Kara, 2013;Page, 2017;Weatherall, 2018), to explore the transformational potential of their work (K. L. Harris, 2016;Vachhani, 2015), or to highlight the need for more pleasurable writing and reading experiences in academic research (Grey & Sinclair, 2006). From a feminist perspective, it has been paramount to use 'writing differently' as a practice of opposing dominant masculine norms of writing that privilege (seemingly) rational, orderly, and disembodied text (M. Phillips et al, 2014;Pullen, 2018;Pullen & Rhodes, 2015;Vachhani, 2019;van Eck et al, 2021;Weatherall, 2018). Instead, feminist scholars highlight the need to write with/through/about emotions, embodiment, fluidity, and messiness, which mirrors the aims of embodied queer listening in research and echoes the need for writing to engage with felt and lived experience.…”

“…Some bits developed in dreadful, slow writing sessions at the home office during yet another Covid lockdown in 2020 and 2021, while other parts flowed onto the page this year, not seldom after having read poems that made me angry, sad, or excited. This is to say: I do not have one writing style, or inRhodes' (2019, p. 35) words, at least "I cannot 'know' my own scriptology", I can only comment on my writing practice.One important comment on my scriptology is that while I have explored creative ways of writing -in form of 'found poetry' (van Eck et al, 2021), original poems, and embodied analytical vignettes that aim to capture "all the other things that happen in interviews -things that may not be expressed verbally but expressed and experienced nonetheless"(Thanem & Knights, 2019, p. 79) -I always considered how the words I use and the style in which I write relate to the experiences the interviewees shared with me and the overall topics of my dissertation. At points, I feared that writing about other people's experiences of harassment and discrimination in form of poems and embodied vignettes would risk resulting in 'misery porn' or making a spectacle of their pain, a questionable (to say the least) way for me as the writer and my readers to empathize and an unethical approach vis-à-vis the interviewees who trusted me with their accounts.Therefore, I refrained from writing 'too vividly' at points, which then again made me question if what I was writing was 'different enough'.…”