Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method and Practice examines the use of poetry as a form of qualitative research, representation, and method used by researchers, practitioners, and students from across the social sciences and humanities. It serves as a practical manual for using poetry in qualitative research through the presentation of varied examples of Poetic Inquiry. It provides how-to exercises for developing and using poetry as a qualitative research method. The book begins by mapping out what doing and critiquing Poetic Inquiry entails via a discussion of the power of poetry, poets’, and researchers’ goals for the use of poetry, and the kinds of projects that are best suited for Poetic Inquiry. It also provides descriptions of the process and craft of creating Poetic Inquiry, and suggestions for how to evaluate and engage with Poetic Inquiry. The book further contends with questions of method, process, and craft from poets’ and researchers’ perspectives. It shows the implications for the aesthetic and epistemic concerns in poetry, and furthers transdisciplinary dialogues between the humanities and social sciences. Faulkner shows the importance of considering the form and function of Poetic Inquiry in qualitative research through discussions of poetry as research method, poetry as qualitative analysis and representation, and Poetic Inquiry as a powerful research tool.

In the tradition of a decade of bi-annual gatherings of the International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry, this volume serves as the fifth refereed symposium anthology. Enchantment of Place celebrates poetry and poetic voices—theorizing and exploring poetic inquiry as an approach, methodology, and/or method for use in contemporary research practices. Poetic inquiry has increased in prominence as a legitimate means by which to collect, assimilate, analyze, and share the results of research across many disciplines. With this collection, we hope to continue to lay the groundwork internationally, for researchers, scholars, graduate students, and the larger community to take up poetic inquiry as a way to approach knowledge generation, learning, and sharing. This volume specifically works to draw attention to the ancient connection between poetry and the natural world with attention to broadening the ecological scope and impact of the work of poetic inquirers.

Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences, co-edited by Monica Prendergast, Carl Leggo and Pauline Sameshima, features many of the foremost scholars working worldwide in aesthetic ways through poetry.

This edited volume illustrates various definitions and uses of poetry in research and scholarship, both across disciplines and across the world. The collection offers a worldview of the capacity of poetic inquiry to enhance research and scholarship by showcasing rigorous poetics (which [re]present epistemology and aesthetics as synergistic) in action. Each chapter is intended to highlight diverse perspectives and uses of poetic inquiry, thereby highlighting commonalities and differences in praxis, that include: - Critical discussion around poetry and its uses in each poet-scholar’s diverse practices (e.g., research, writing, personal development, healthcare, mental health, ecology and/or scholarship). - An example of poetry that showcases their approach(es) in action. - Insights into the crafting of their poetry (i.e., what choices were made? why were specific choices made?)
- An exploration of how their poetic work links to the vast rhizomatic array of poetic inquiry. This volume is well-suited for new scholars, looking for ways to integrate poetry into their praxis, and experienced scholars who wish to further their understanding of the capaciousness of poetic inquiry as a valuable method, methodology, tool and/or approach. It also holds insights for those interested in the power of poetry as it relates to mental health, health care, ecology, teaching, qualitative research and identity work.

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.

This book offers a phenomenologically-inspired approach to sharing stories via ‘poetic inquiry’, a research approach that is rapidly gaining popularity within psychology and the wider social sciences. Owton begins by framing how poetry can appeal to all of the senses, how it can offer readers a shared experience of the world and why poetry should be used as a research approach. Chapters explore various aspects of poetic inquiry including poetry as data, turning data into poetry, poetry as literature review and poetry as reflective writing. The final chapters consider how one might draw on characterising traits to judge poetic inquiry, and how poetry might resonate with audiences to effect wider dissemination of research. This interdisciplinary exploration will be of interest to scholars in psychology, sociology, social work, and literature, as well as to medical and sports practitioners.

This volume speaks to the use of poetry in critical qualitative research and practice focused on social justice. In this collection, poetry is a response, a call to action, agitation, and a frame for future social justice work. The authors engage with poetry’s potential for connectivity, political power, and evocation through methodological, theoretical, performative, and empirical work. The poet-researchers consider questions of how poetry and Poetic Inquiry can be a response to political and social events, be used as a pedagogical tool to critique inequitable social structures, and how Poetic Inquiry speaks to our local identities and politics. The authors answer the question: “What spaces can poetry create for dialogue about critical awareness, social justice, and re-visioning of social, cultural, and political worlds?” This volume adds to the growing body of Poetic Inquiry through the demonstration of poetry as political action, response, and reflective practice. We hope this collection inspires you to write and engage with political poetry to realize the power of poetry as political action, response, and reflective practice.

This book describes the practice of poetic inquiry and takes the reader through the process of translating lived experience into poetry that attends to the lives of others. Using her own writing—from early drafts to published poems—Apol demonstrates elements of poetic inquiry that both give it strength and make it complicated: the importance of craft (the aesthetic); the imperative of accuracy and reliability (the investigative); the significance of ethical responsibility that leads to action (witness); and the centrality of relational connectedness and accountability (withness). Apol raises questions about what it means for poems to function as both research and art, and illustrates what happens when there are irresolvable conflicts between the demands of the poem and a commitment to relationship. Throughout, Apol addresses her white privilege, as well as the dominant white/colonial narrative that often seeps into arts-based work unless it is overtly and critically addressed. The book goes beyond arts-based research, speaking as well to other forms of cross-national, cross-cultural research. It is a call for relational scholarship that moves toward action, a heart-rending teaching, a post-traumatic aesthetic map laid down with clear and poignant theory and praxis to extend, serve and guide.

This book identifies and describes facets of poetic inquiry, a research method/methodology/tool that uses poetry in the research process (information gathering, analysis and/or dissemination). Specifically, this book explores how and why it is in use, provides revelations around its unparalleled function(s) in research, and presents an exemplification of a close reading approach, trialled in the study framed in the book, that can draw further knowledge from the products of poetic inquiry studies. Poetic inquiry studies are somewhat established, and their findings are being published in academic journals and books however, poetic inquiry is currently undertheorized and noticeably missing from notable research methods textbooks and publications that discuss the merits of arts-based research. This may have the negative result of knowledge being lost or overlooked that could hold answers to previously unanswered questions that exist across the disciplines. In response to this problem, this book (drawing from the doctoral research study therein), highlights poetic inquiry’s theoretical underpinnings and pragmatic uses in research and scholarship that can be adopted and adapted by new and established scholars. This is done using the tenets of poetic inquiry as a frame and includes in-depth literature review and an exploration of the findings of interview with four notable poetic inquiry scholars in education in Canada. Detailed profiles for each participant have been created to analyze and emphasize their distinctive poetics and approaches to scholarship. Lastly, this book considers ways that poetic inquiry can inform teaching practices, as poetry is seen to permeate the participants’ lives and influence their approaches to teaching at the post-secondary level. This book is written for both early career and well-established scholars who have an interest in exploring ways that poetic inquiry (which marries art and epistemology) can enhance their research and teaching practices.

This volume takes up themes emergent from the 7th International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry (ISPI) which invited participants to reflect on the United Nations Declaration of 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. In this refereed collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors use poetic inquiry to explore the importance of their ancestral languages and lands, and consider the Indigenous languages and peoples of the lands where they live. Situated in diverse global contexts, poet-researchers examine the intersectionality of their languages, their lands, and their sense of belonging. They offer relational understandings of, and articulate obligations for, their environment and communities. Through stories of shared generational pain and renewal, each author brings the reader into their world of learning and growth. They do this through discourses of belonging and relational responsibilities that tie them to a place, a genealogy. As a method of study that incorporates poetry into academic research, poetic inquiry is concerned with particularity, complexity, and transformations. Making research more visceral and evocative, it invites researchers to examine and engage with the knowledge they seek through a continual process of questioning, welcoming, and awareness. In this volume, poetic inquiry helps to honor languages and histories taken for granted; it allows looking back in order to reexamine, redefine, and make sense of the present and its shortcomings while reimagining a different future. This work seeks to reclaim, through poetic inquiry, wisdom of language, land, and belonging.