(Dis)embodied encounters between art and academic writing amid a pandemic

Abstract

The current account recounts the authors’ artistic virtual interactions during the COVID‐19 period of quarantine to discuss how connections between art, writing, humans’ embodied struggles and technologies can enable forms of feminist writing, as a cyborg practice, which have the political potential to meaningfully voice embodied experiences of inter‐sectionality and vulnerability that remain increasingly under‐expressed, in a neoliberal world of pandemic. Presented in a creative prose, whereby theory interweaves with artistic performances, poetry and extracts of the authors’ virtual exchanges, this account reflects how hybrid, non‐conventional, cyborg writing explorations can connect different bodies in an academic text even when these bodies are physically kept apart. By invoking hybridity that counters the masculine conventions of academic writing, this text aspires to produce academic knowledge that writes and speaks of embodied experiences of othering that urgently seek expression under the COVID‐19 pandemic. The current account builds on the burgeoning stream of organizational literature on writing differently and especially feminist forms of writing integrating genre‐blurring prose, poetry and art‐based research.

Opening Constructive Dialogues Between Business Ethics Research and the Sociology of Morality: Introduction to the Thematic Symposium

“…Another debate to which research on the new sociology of morality can make a meaningful impact is, what we call, the corporeal turn in business ethics. Feminist researchers in the field have increasingly recognized that ethics is an embodied phenomenon—and, as such, it cannot be divorced from social experience (Mandalaki and Daou 2020 ; Prasad 2014 ; Prasad et al 2020 ; Pullen and Rhodes 2014 ). These researchers have offered empirical evidence to substantiate this position.…”

Author‐ize me to write: Going back to writing with ourfingers

“…In attempting this fingering experiment, I wish to position these lines within recent autoethnographic feminist accounts calling for putting more of our embodied, sensorial, fleshed, naked (D. N. Brewis & Williams, 2019; Mandalaki & Perézts, 2020; van Amsterdam, 2015), poetic (Beavan, 2019; Mandalaki & Daou, 2020; van Amsterdam, 2020), and vulnerable female selves (Helin, 2019; Mandalaki, 2020; Pullen, 2018) in our scholarly work. Doing so creatively challenges the masculine fraternity, which overshadows our academic experiences, research methods, and academic writing practices (Ahonen et al, 2020; Höpfl, 2007; Phillips, Pullen, & Rhodes, 2014; Pullen et al, 2020; Pullen & Rhodes, 2008; Vachhani, 2019).…”

Searching for “home,” writing to find it: A reflective account on experiences of othering in life and academia in times of generalized crises

“…Now during the COVID‐19 pandemic, we just continue in this pattern in an accelerated manner, in academia and social life broadly (Mandalaki & Daou, 2020; Plotnikof et al, 2020). We do not question much anymore, we become senseless, not even touching each other anymore.…”

“…). I need to put my body and anger in my text to charge it with knowledge and energy (Ahmed, 2009), to create a space where being different might matter (Mandalaki & Daou, 2020; Pullen et al, 2020). I remember Cixous (1993) when she says that the only writing that is worth performing is the one that “we don't have the courage or strength to write,” the one “that hurts us, that makes us tremble, redden and bleed,” “a combat against ourselves” (p. 32).…”