Embrace the Uncontrolled Nature of Poetry Writing: A Poetic Ethnographic Study on International Graduate Student Mothers’ Intercultural Discourses

Abstract

Through presenting a series of poetry findings from a larger poetic ethnographic study on the lived experience of 11 international graduate student first-time mothers’ learning of the “language” of motherhood during their journey of pregnancy, birth, and early years of motherhood, this article reflects on the uncontrolled nature of poetry writing in an ethnographic study and discusses the long-lasting concerns on the quality, qualification, and criteria for evaluation associated with poetic inquiry and arts-based research in general. I aim to provide methodological insights for the use and evaluation of poetic inquiry, as well as other forms of arts-based research in academia.

Incorporating Arts-Based Pedagogy: Moving Beyond Traditional Approaches to Teaching Qualitative Research

“…Guiney Yallop (2016), for example, intermixed poetry and storytelling to explore and communicate the life history of their Indigenous grandmother. Other scholars have engaged in various types of poetic methods including, but not limited to, poetic autoethnography (Zhang 2021), erasure poetry (Hare 2021), and concrete poetry (Schoone 2021).…”

Girls gone bad: An essay on “Existence” in Chytilová's Daisies

“…A poetic, dislocated style of writing was chosen to extend the “terrain of what can be expressed” (Burke, 1981, p. 303) to avoid the construction of categories, fixed subject positions, and ideals (also Fotaki et al., 2014; Vachhani, 2012, 2019). This approach follows scholars who have noted how poetic inquiry (Glesne, 1997; van Amsterdam & van Eck, 2019; Wu, 2020; Zhang, 2020) or writing differently (e.g., Gilmore et al., 2019; Katila, 2019; Pullen, 2018; Vachhani, 2019) can be used for “troubling” orders grounded in demarcation, mirroring and sameness, as well as knowledge production premised upon the exclusion of difference (Beavan, 2019; Fotaki et al., 2014; Höpfl, 2000; Phillips et al., 2014; Pullen & Rhodes, 2015b). This further aligns with Irigary's broader philosophical project, and her critique against phallogocentric forms of “rational” knowledge‐production, while also echoing Dadaism playful resistance to esthetic conformity (Thomas, 2012).…”