Embodied Thinking in the Practice of Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

With this mixed media collage I explore embodiment in the practice of qualitative inquiry. In my doctoral research, I study anticipation in climate-wise farming and sometimes I tend to struggle with Words. Writing about someone else’s futures is a delicate matter and the feelings of getting nowhere often embrace me. As I am sitting in front of my desk, staring outside of the window, trying to conceive how, (and sometimes why), I see the coniferous green, typical Finnish forest growing around our house. There is a need for me to get out, to come and go. I need to re-work the pattern of working as typing with stillness. To have a move and a movement to extend what can be thought as researching. What can be thought as working? Could I wander-around-wonder? I put on my rubber boots and went outside, looking for mushrooms. The first modest attempt to somehow let myself to be immersed rapidly flourished into joyfully thinking with the forest. I was what I found, the embodied personal anticipations right there in the existence and the golden yellow chantarelle (Cantharellus cibarius) popping through the mass of moss like insights. It felt right. So, this piece emerged from the need to do differently. It works as an opening to the process of thinking with movement, to allow and appreciate bodily acts (more-than-typing) as integral to thinking and writing science. What is it to think with drawing, handwriting, walking, ice swimming, visualizing, watching skateboarders, with the forest, on the road, in the airport? Creating the collage of layered materials with my sister auto-manifests that thinking with is dynamic, and I keep on moving to stay again. With my acts I anticipate, and become as what I already am.

Intro: All life is Anticipatory

In performing qualitative inquiry, I move to think. I study climate-wise farming by thinking farmer interviews with theory of anticipation (Poli 2017) and process-relational perspective (Darnhofer 2020). With farmer interviews as performative accounts I am thresholding for becoming-questions (Jackson and Mazzei 2022). The diffractions and entanglements (Barad 2007) with theories and performative accounts keep challenging me. I am constantly entangled, diffracted by temporalities and passings. It is messy and unpredictable to be in the middle of it all, sensing and anticipating while sensing and anticipating. A self-referential loop of becoming with what I am. What is it that I anticipate of all this work?

::::: kysy-nevä/::::: ask-able (2023). Collage, mixed media

All Action is Interaction: Afterwords

This collage is composed of a cumulative body of material that I have been collecting over the years. The oldest pieces of paper have been with me through life and several apartments from 2007 when I was in senior high school. Some of them are even older than me: one piece has been picked up by my grandmother, say in the 60s, and then by me when cleaning up her apartment after moving. Another one is an old tapestry from a vintage cabinet we bought few years back. The funny thing is that some of the pieces are now back in the house they were originally collected when I was a teenager. I work in the room that used to belong to my little sister, who is now accompanying me to embody what research could be. With these momentary layers the movement is made up in me, the anticipations for thinking with.