Hauntings of Longing: A Mad Autoethnographic Poetic Transcription

This poetry collection explores my grapplings with my Mad and trans identities within the curative, diagnostic, medical model discourses of the medical industrial complex. Using an autoethnographic Mad and trans poesis, I seek to situate these grapplings within historical and present-day systems of power, privilege, and oppression, confronting the hauntings (Gordon, 2008) that arise from my simultaneous complicity in and disruption of these institutionalized structures of harm and violence that disproportionately target bodyminds that are deemed non-normative. By engaging in this process through poetic expression, I center an embodied form of knowledge production that challenges sanist notions of rationality and hetero- and cis-normativity constructed and perpetuated by white settler colonial ideologies. My unearthing of these hauntings (Gordon, 2008) and my relationship to them on an internal, interpersonal, and systemic level is merely a beginning in a life-long journey of trans and Mad becoming.

Fastest on the Playground: Four Generations of Female Sport Experience

The life sport experiences of four generations of females were explored through narrative family research and presented through research poetry. Their stories powerfully represent the transformation of sport and exercise culture across seven decades of overlapping life experiences and demonstrate the generational transmission of value for, expectation of, and experiences with sport. A poem representing each girl/woman’s story was crafted by the author, through the process of poetic transcription, and is presented alongside a photo illustrating each individual’s experiences. The generational experiences and implications of the findings are discussed within the broader sport psychology and sport sociology literature.

Knowledge of Self: Possibilities for Spoken Word Poetry, Hip Hop Pedagogy, and “Blackout Poetic Transcription” in Critical Qualitative Research

This article traces the development of Blackout Poetic Transcription (BPT) as a critical methodology for artist-scholars engaged with Hip Hop pedagogy in higher education spaces. We include Keith’s outline of the BPT method and Endsly’s first hand account of implementing the practice in an undergraduate classroom. Together, the authors grapple with mainstream and alternative identities within their Hip Hop praxis as spoken word artists and educators.

Poetic Juxtaposition, a Method for Connecting Data, Theory, and Every Day Texts

In this article, I explore an experimental form of writing I term poetic juxtaposition. Drawing from Glesne’s poetic transcription and Prendergast’s use of found poetry as literature review, I define poetic juxtaposition as the creation of research poems that artistically combine qualitative data, excerpts from theoretical texts, and words from every day and popular culture texts. To illustrate the technique, I present three poetic juxtapositions from a critical parent child autoethnography and describe the processes that lead to their creation. The three poems demonstrate how I utilized poetic juxtaposition to make sense of data, establish emergent themes, achieve crystallization of findings, and present my work to a variety of audiences. I conclude by suggesting how this technique might be taken up by others.

Poetic Transcription in the Sociology Classroom: Developing Empathy, Analytical Skills, Creativity, and Engagement

This note overviews a class activity and an assignment for engaging poetic transcription. Poetic transcription is an arts-based research method commonly employed in the analysis and representation of qualitative data. The discussion provides some background on arts-based research, poetic inquiry, and poetic transcription as research practices within the qualitative tradition. Furthermore, it shows how utilizing poetry in the classroom can help develop empathy and analytical skills as well as facilitate collaboration, creativity, and student engagement. This teaching note includes an examination of the students’ impressions using poetic transcription and links poetic transcription to critical pedagogical practices for teaching and learning sociology. I conclude with a discussion that offers considerations for future practitioners.

I Surrender to the Sacred Ways and Walk the Inner Places: Donovan’s Poem

The following is a poetic transcription presented as a 12-part poem. The author constructed the poem from an email interview conducted with “Donovan,” a 61-year-old, White, gay man. The interview was part of a larger study on the experience of LGBTQ+ identity as spiritual identity, which focused on individuals who believe their LGBTQ+ identity is imbued or imbues their life with spiritual qualities. Donovan is a monk in a tradition that blends Hinduism, Buddhism, Native American Spirituality, and Paganism and that honors the “Hayamoni,” a Pali word for Two-Spirit people. The narrative poem reflects his perspective on the experience and meaning of LGBTQ+ spiritual identity in his life. The poem is presented without a literature review in an effort to privilege Donovan’s lived experience and perspective.

Exploring poetry as method: “Representing faithfully” the narratives of African American high school students and their mothers

In this article, I reflect on my experiences using poetry as a method of data analysis and data representation from a qualitative study of seven African American high school seniors and their single mothers. By applying different techniques of narrative analysis, namely poetic transcription, a deeper understanding of both participants’ and the researcher’s lived experiences were gained. Poetic transcription techniques were used to create found poems for each participant. The poems serve as a means to honor and center the unique experiences of Black students and Black mothers. The article discusses opportunities for poetry in social work research and demonstrates using poetry as a technique for data analysis and data representation.

Translation of Qualitative Findings: Regret Sex, A Poetic Transcription

Regret sex is a phenomenon beyond feeling pressured to engage in sexual activity. Regret sex is different from rape in that no coercion or pressure precedes the act. In this study, 10 racially diverse young-adult women between the ages of 19 to 25 were interviewed for the purpose of exploring the concept of regret sex. Qualitative descriptive analysis revealed that women regret the consequences of regretted sex more so than the actual sex. In the moment, they consented and enjoyed the physicality of sex. Participants describe consent as an ongoing negotiation. Poetic transcription was used to elicit the essential story.

Revisiting Interview Data Through a Post I-Poem

A former participant in a research study on adolescent writers was invited to read and respond to a Post-I-Poem (PIP), a poetic transcription constructed from her interview data in what is now a closed study. The purpose of this investigation was to explore what could be learned from doing a PIP in the first place and what lines of inquiry this investigation could raise for why a researcher might revisit old interview data. Analysis of one student’s PIP suggests that using poetic transcription to revisit retired transcriptions offers researchers potentially new directions for further study.

Reflecting gendered experiences of student-staff partnership: A student standpoint using poetic transcription

Debates in higher education problematise the role of students in student engagement. Resisting neoliberal values and language, scholars argue that students should be positioned as ‘partners’ or ‘change agents’ rather than ‘customers’ or ‘consumers,’ but the extent to which students are able to self-author their experiences as subjects rather than objects in mainstream publications is rare. Drawing on standpoint theory, we—three students from international contexts—argue that if students are to shape higher education discourses, then students’ work needs to be more prominently represented in mainstream academic publishing. We exemplify one approach to alternate forms of conducting and sharing student-led research by exploring and representing our own experiences of gender in partnership through poetic transcription. In doing so, we hope to disrupt some of the dominant assumptions around the positioning of students as objects in research and the validity of students’ self-authored voices in higher education.