7 - Object-work as a creative approach to data analysis in Embodied Inquiry

Summary

Introduction

In introducing my contribution to this edited collection, I feel I need to outline my background and what has brought me to where I am now. I have always been interested in the details of how research is carried out, especially in settings that may not allow for conventional research approaches and methods. As such, I have always engaged deeply with questions of power, hierarchy, and ownership as well as the location and generation of knowledge. Research for me became a process of active doing and making in collaboration with participants with the aim to foster social justice and pursue activist work. It is this philosophical outlook on research that has led to my substantive research relating to the lived experience of disabled, chronically ill, and/ or neurodivergent staff and students in higher education, predominantly in the UK. It is also this philosophical outlook that has led me to focus on objectwork in the context of analysis.

The methodological and theoretical framing for my work is Embodied Inquiry (Leigh and Brown, 2021), an approach to research that foregrounds the role of the body and seeks to transcend the body– mind dualism. As such, Embodied Inquiry may focus on any or all of the following four typologies (pp 22–6):

• 1. the lived experience

• 2. the researcher's body in the field

• 3. the body as communicator

• 4. the body in interaction

The exploration of these research foci draws on phenomenology and hermeneutics, thereby recognising knowledge as produced and relational, contextual, and multimodal (pp 39– 40). Embodied Inquiry is based on the principle that human language is insufficient and inexact, that human understanding is embodied and that therefore human communication relies on metaphors (pp 28– 31). Consequently, analysis within Embodied Inquiry requires engagement with data that goes beyond conventional coding and theme finding in order to account for embodiment within analysis. For researchers to be able to make sense of data and generate knowledge as active agents Embodied Inquiry asks that they attend to their bodies.