Abstract
Finally, a methods textbook to resonate with, is what I felt, when I saw the title.
‘To find out what an embodied method can do, we must never stop asking what bodies can do’ (p. 143). With this sentence, Thanem and Knights conclude their new book, beautifully capturing the books’ main call to consider the body’s actual involvement in the conduct of academic research and its potential to participate in scholarly knowledge production. The authors address to a wide scholarly audience and offer several embodied methodological tools that enable shifting understanding of academic research as a disembodied process imposing on bodies abstract discourse to a lively process with flesh and bones that unveils bodies’ potential to construct their own discourse.
In the preface, the authors draw on diverse understandings of the body as an objectifier of its own subject, a means of sense-making, reflexivity, subjectivity development and an instrument of political resistance, to argue for the unavoidable role of the body in any form of social experience. They stress the importance of mixing our researcher bodies with the bodies of the subjects that we study to understand ‘how our small, embodied lives are tied up with big political problems’ (p. 9). The authors raise ontological, epistemological and ethical questions around embodied research methods which they seriously attempt to answer in the remaining chapters.
Chapter 1 raises concerns about the disembodied ontological, epistemological and methodological heritage left behind by thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Durkheim. The authors call for the need to understand affective bodies’ potential to subvert and re-create the disembodied discourses that most current academic methods’ textbooks develop to constitute them, making them objects rather than subjects of these discourses.
Engaging largely with diverse research traditions such as phenomenology and feminism, in Chapter 2, Thanem and Knights ponder the ontological, epistemological and methodological challenges surrounding embodied research methods. They discuss Shusterman’s notion of somatic consciousness which builds upon Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the pre-reflective body to propose the possibility of bodily feelings, thoughts and experiences to be represented and known at the epistemological level. They argue for the importance of putting the body in the centre of experiential research approaches such as ethnography to allow it to guide representations and knowledge around social experience, while considering ethical issues involved in the research process.
In Chapter 3, Thanem and Knights disclose personal embodied accounts on their gendered and professional insecurities to convey the embodied sensation of ‘itching’ surrounding the choice of a research topic. Without completely rejecting it, the authors challenge the traditional linear research approach emphasizing researchers’ cognition and intellect. Discussing the social and political nature of personal experience, they argue that the choice of research topics is triggered by the embodied experiences that emerge as a result of researchers’ participation in the social world.
In Chapter 4, the authors argue for the impossibility of getting rich field insights without embodied involvement in ethnographic fieldwork, given its dependence on the researcher’s physical presence. Instead of offering a step-by-step methodology, the authors rather generously share embodied diaries of their ethnographic experiences to reflect the challenges, opportunities, paradoxes, messiness, ethical concerns, as well as the labour, feelings and sensations associated with embodied research techniques. Namely, they discuss the usefulness of shadowing in navigating and making sense of the field to unveil its richness.
In Chapter 5, the authors discuss the embodied aspect of interviews and conversations stressing that it is not only about what but also how we ask questions. They point to the under-estimated importance of non-verbal, body language and propose ideas on how such material can be methodologically used, treated, integrated and written about in ways that bring forward the affective richness accompanying verbal content. In so doing, they offer a constructive critique to more conventional qualitative research approaches but also usefully complement them.
In Chapter 6, the authors discuss the opportunities, limitations, risks and ethical concerns associated with capturing embodied experience through visual methods such as photos or videos, as well as through biographical material like diaries or memoires. They propose useful ways in which such material can be integrated in social research and stress the complementary role of our fallible memory in keeping the affective experience of embodied research alive.
I am now almost half-way to the end and reading through some of the proposals and examples so far, I am left wondering whether capturing participants’ embodied accounts requires a constant bodily discipline on the part of the researcher that might lead to the researcher’s disembodied rather than embodied participation in the research field. Given the book’s main purpose to show how ‘research and writing are connected to the researcher’s own body’’ (p. 123), a more elaborate discussion of how this is accounted for in the proposed research techniques would have probably been useful. Hoping for this to be uncovered in the next pages, I continue . . .
In Chapter 7, inspired by Deleuze, Thanem and Knights offer the creatively provocative notion of ‘analytical buggering’ (p. 113) as a counterproposal to the ‘anatomical logic’ (p. 111) characterizing current disembodied approaches to data analysis. They suggest analytical buggering as an embodied analysis process that considers the liveliness, messiness and untidiness of field material in conjunction with the personal and embodied interventions of the researcher in the analysis process. The authors use personal examples and offer a ‘hands-on’ (p. 116) practical guide stressing the need for more affective and physically proximal rather than technology-mediated encounters with our lived data.
In Chapter 8, the authors discuss our bodies ability to ‘exceed the categories that we seek to understand them through’ (p. 132) to challenge understandings of academic writing as a taken for granted part of the research methodology. They rather propose an embodied scriptology (Rhodes, 2018), which accounts for the physical, intellectual, social and embodied nature of academic writing and co-writing as well as the constraints and opportunities related to publishing and ‘disseminating’ academic work. I particularly appreciated and related to Thanem’s honest description of his embodied feelings after Alison Pullen’s seminar on academic writing. Also, highly resonant and useful to my view is the authors’ open sharing around the collaboration issues that they faced as co-authors of this book, their writers’ blocks in their attempts to engage with ‘écriture feminine’ (Cixous, 1976) as males, and their coming to terms with the idea of their writing as a ‘buggered assemblage’ (p. 123) of feminine and masculine forms of writing.
Finally, engaging in a review of neoliberal, communist and right-wing politics and drawing inspiration from Merleau-Ponty and Spinoza, in Chapter 9 the authors discuss the politics of embodied research. They argue for the body’s ability to drive corporeally informed knowledge of actual struggles and mobilize different bodies into political collectives to ‘advance the social and economic conditions of democratic life’ (p. 139).
Overall, by engaging with embodied forms of writing and sharing personal embodied research experiences on topics such as transvestism and masculinity, in this book, Thanem and Knights actually ‘walk the talk’ and to a large extent accommodate my above-mentioned doubt. They do not only talk about the importance of considering the body’s involvement in the different steps of the research process, but they actually do so, in a very accessible and sophisticated manner. This book constructively challenges and complements conventional research methods’ textbooks and serves as a harmonic continuation of the authors’ various contributions to organizational literature. Informed by such vulnerable and humanly possible forms of writing, this book cannot but trigger equally embodied responses on the part of the reader and hopefully inspire future researchers to involve more of their embodied selves in their research work.
Now towards the end I tried to discipline my body to read more slowly; for the book to last longer . . . But I didn’t manage! It was a fully embodied reading, much like the writing that triggered it . . .
