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Writing, dancing, embodied knowing: Autoethnographic research
This introduction to the thematic section entitled "Ethnography, Performance and Imagination" explores performance as "imaginative ethnography" (Elliott and Culhane 2017), a transdisciplinary, collaborative, embodied, critical and engaged research practice that draws from anthropology and the creative arts. In particular, it focuses on the performativity of performance (an event intentionally staged for an audience) employed as both an ethnographic process (fieldwork) and a mode of ethnographic representation. It asks: can performance help us research and better understand imaginative lifeworlds as they unfold in the present moment? Can performance potentially assist us in re-envisioning what an anthropology of imagination might look like? It also inquires whether working at the intersections of anthropology, ethnography, performance and imagination could transform how we attend to ethnographic processes and products, questions of reflexivity and representation, ethnographer-participant relations and ethnographic audiences. It considers how performance employed as ethnography might help us reconceptualise public engagement and ethnographic activism, collaborative/participatory ethnography and interdisciplinary research within and beyond the academy. Finally, this introduction provides a brief overview of the contributions to this thematic section, which address these questions from a variety of theoretical, methodological and topical standpoints.
Feminist scholarship has developed a focus on articulating alternative women’s ways of knowing and validating women’s experiences. The focus of my feminist interest in epistemology began with my attempt to understand my role as knower, and to contribute to the development of multiple and alternative “knowledges”. Key critiques of Western epistemology and dualistic ontology informed the development of feminist and phenomenological understandings of embodiment and embodied ways of knowing. Feminist writing about women’s movement experiences, considering the examples of throwing a ball, climbing, long-distance running and rowing, all offered contributions to alternative knowledges. In particular, through embodied ways of knowing as a dancer, I hope to offer insights relevant to other embodied practitioners in sport, leisure and physical activity.
Exploring the relationships between performing and representing performing on the page has been and remains a labour of love for me (Barbour, 2011a, 2012a). This labour of love has led me to explore, articulate - and sometimes contribute to - emerging methods in qualitative, feminist, autoethnographic and performance research. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. All rights are reserved.
This paper tells the story of a journey of inquiry, which has turned into a journey of research, through the lens of collaborative autoethnographic work, connecting work lives, private lives, dance lives, a journey in time (nearly two decades) but also in spaces (dancefloors, universities, other organisations). It connects dance competitions with organisational life, dance performance with organisational performance, leader-follower-ship on the dancefloor with leader-follower-ship in organisations (Matzdorf 2005, Matzdorf & Sen 2005, Matzdorf & Sen 2014), but also reflection on dance with reflection on work and reflection on relationships in general (and how to make them work). The authors describe and reflect upon layers of mutual influence between work, life in organizations and dance.
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