I Need These Stories to Remind Me That There Is Hope

Abstract

This article uses poetic representation to describe 7 participants’ experiences living in Israel, where political violence is ongoing. The poems are derived from the participants’ spoken and written accounts of their daily lives in Israel during a 5-month period of the Al Aqsa Intifada of 2000-2004. Poetic representation of data allows the voices of participants to be heard on their own terms and provides an alternative to conventional social science research in which the perspective of the researcher is often privileged over that of the participants. Additionally, the perpetrators of terrorism and their acts are frequently made the object of media and public attention, but the voices of those whose lives are affected the most are typically unheard.