Embodiment in Qualitative Research: Theory & Practice Methods

[00:00:14]uh [Applause] hello uh laura hello hi hi laura and hi yvette hi ricardo hi uh so let's wait uh for people to join we have 10 more minutes left uh laura you practiced already right yes yes we did thank you hi laura and by the way i'm ricardo and i will be moderating the session wonderful thank you can you is my voice loud enough it's perfect okay okay okay okay so um uh uh do not disconnect okay uh let me think uh yeah let's just wait um for ten more minutes and we will start uh right on time okay so you may you may uh mute your microphone uh and then you are muted when we start okay okay i'm not sure how to mute it yeah you see next your name there is an icon a green icon that represents like a microphone you just uh click there or right click there and and mute um if you just click okay there you go now it's thank you very much hello everybody welcome to this presentation that is part of the qualitative methods master class webinar series which is a partnership between the international institute for qualitative methodology at university of alberta the university of georgia and atlas ti today we have dr laura ellinson professor from santa clara university who will be presenting embodiment in qualitative research a few a few words before we start the presentation your microphones are going to be muted uh during the presentation this session is being recorded so you will receive about four hours after the end of it you will receive a a a video a message with a video recording while while dr ellingson is presenting you should feel free to write down your questions using the questions section in the go to webinar control panel so you can take a look at the control panel now and you will be able to uh to practice say hello to me in fact why don't you do that because one of you is saying to me that she cannot hear my voice so i need to make sure that the rest of you can hear me and i see that monica is okay and yeah lori is fine as well so it looks like uh all this cloud and clear all right uh dr ellingson will be presented for about 40 minutes and after that we will i will read the questions that were submitted and i will also offer the microphone for you to to talk now i would like to uh offer the microphone to my colleague yvette maguire from iiqm who is going to introduce dr ellingson thank you very much ricardo dr laura ellingson is professor of communication and women and gender studies at santa clara university her passion for methodological and epistemological innovation infuses all of her research and creative work dr ellingson seeks to enlarge possibilities for spanning theoretical paradramatic and representational boundaries through her articulation of embodiment research strategies and her development of crystallization framework for re qualitative research narrative feminist and pragmatic perspectives guide her ethnographic research in communication in healthcare delivery and extended chosen families in addition to numerous articles and chapters she is the author of communicating in the clinic negotiating front stage and backstage teamwork and co-author with dr patty soteran of aunting cultural practices that sustain family and community life and where the ants are family feminism and kinship in popular culture director ellingson we're very happy to have you here with us today thank you very much yvette now i will make you a presenter and you will be able to share your computer screen with all of us dr ellingson so let's see there will be a message that will pop up saying share my screen okay yeah i just clicked on that can everyone see it yes we see it perfectly fine okay great now please go ahead thank you thanks so much for having me here today i'm really excited to get a chance to talk about embodiment and the ways in which i've been thinking and and and utilizing this perspective i am sorry i'm trying to change there we go okay um so my interest in embodiment began with having an unruly body i am an almost 30-year survivor of a form of bone cancer called osteosarcoma and i have had numerous uh what are called salvaging surgeries or reconstructive surgeries on my leg for almost 20 years before having it amputated the cancer was thankfully controlled after about a year but the orthopedic problems all the complications and infections and malfunctionings that happened to my right leg because of the cancer treatment were ultimately not able to be controlled and i ended up having an amputation about 10 years ago so this picture that you can see on the slide is a picture of one of my early prosthetic legs and you'll notice that my kittens are snuggled right up to it and having no problem accommodating the cyborg embodiment of their cat mommy i so i began my research training after i became a cancer survivor in fact a long-term cancer survivor and so at no point when as i was studying to be a researcher an interviewer an ethnographer was i able to ignore my body i had a very troublesome and painful leg for many years and then i progressed to being an amputee which is also in and of itself complicated um and um so i'd never been able to ignore my body and because i wasn't i became more and more interested in how my body was implicated in my research which then led to an awareness of how everyone's body is implicated in their research regardless of whether they have the particular kinds of limitations that i have and the kind of privileges that i have i am white i'm heterosexual and i'm a first world scholar so i live with a lot of privilege in addition to dealing with sexism and ableism so my unruly body made me interested and i became fascinated with everyone else's unruly body um as well so today i want to talk to you briefly about four aspects of embodiment in qualitative research very briefly on the legacy of the mind-body dichotomy and then again very briefly on the critiques of this mind-body dichotomy and the ways in which we have pushed back against that then why i think it's important that we consider embodiment in qualitative research specifically and then lastly some recommendations and ideas on how we can actively do bodies and do embodiment in qualitative research today so with that overview i will dive into a very brief history of a few hundred years of the mind body split the privileging of the mind over the body is deeply ingrained in our scholarship and in western cultures as a larger entity the mind-body separation posits a clear division between the mind which is equated with the self and is experienced as as proactive and unthreatening and the body which is experienced as always already potentially troublesome under the legacy of descartes rationality dictates that the higher mind and self should seek to control the body as its property preferably to the point of rendering the body absent or at least irrelevant to any knowledge production uh or project often referred this is often referred to as cartesian dualism or the mind body split such a split renders bodily knowledge oxymoronic indeed it's as though quote facts come out of our heads and fictions out of our bodies simmons in 1999 typically social science researchers conduct and represent research as though knowledge was produced without unruly bodies involved at any point the performance of disembodied researcher has been repeated so long that it functions as a set of naturalized norms that privilege a masculinist rationality oh it's the only legitimate form of knowledge um and and it's accorded only to those with sufficient social privilege to deny their feminine person of color disabled and other kinds of unrulinesses leaving our owns and others bodies unmarked in our data and reports and other representations is the privilege of the powerful journal articles and other research accounts largely reflect social science norms that frame the bodies person the researchers personality body and other sources of subjectivity as irrelevant disembodied prose appears to come from nowhere implying a disembodied author so researchers have used this power to render our bodies as essentially irrelevant and yet that is not uh widely accepted at least among the qualitative folks that i hang out this is quite a broad community obviously and not everyone agrees and i think that that is productive and good as opposed to a source of problems i'm going to talk briefly about three primary groupings of critiques um about mind bodily privilege these have come in the wake of a lot of different turns the narrative turn but also post-structuralism post-modernist delusion performative affective material feminist post-colonialist critical race and post-humanist perspectives on the ways in which our bodies and participants bodies are part of research so the first is to resist seeing the body as a container or an object that is then a possession of the self instead post structuralists and others theorize the body as quote as material and visceral set of biological components and functions that's from ash and gallagher in 2015 and ososekamoto in 2012 adds that the body is a site which a situated self is experienced thus embodiment refers to quote bodies as whole experiential beings in motion both inscribed and inscribing subjectivities that is the experiential body is both a representation of self that is a text as well as a mode of creation in progress that is a tool in addition embodiment is a state that is contingent upon the environment and the context of the body end quote that's from perry and medina in 2011.

[00:17:40]beliefs about the relationship between the mind and body point to a fundamental tension surrounding what one means when we speak of embodiment or quote the body on the one hand philosophers and scholars construct a notion of the body as a material entity whose potential meanings are cons constituted and circumscribed by culture through particular discursive systems that privilege certain sets of norms and values on the other hand bodies can also be understood as containing our essential qualities such as our emotions our gut instincts and our physical characteristics and of course our material being that is cultural meanings certainly vary and have dramatic impact on how we interpret and manifest our bodies but we cannot completely disassociate such meanings from the concrete physical and material reality of the body as a lived entity human and body is therefore mutually constitutive with the world around us and that understanding can inform qualitative research practices so that's the rejection of the body as a container or an object and and saying that the body and self are are together or a one secondly we need to move from a perspective of having a body right again as a possession to being a body and doing a body the english language and certainly cartesian perspectives render the body as the possession as itself as equated with the mind or the brain an alternative approach integrates mind body and for many people as well as spirit trin post colonialists for example says quote we do not have bodies we are bodies okay and butler and others a feminist theorists have posited that we enact our bodies in everyday self as what she calls and others have called body cells right and as we do our bodies so instead of having it we are being a body and doing a body and butler says quote the butler sorry the butler the body is not merely a matter but a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities one is not simply a body but in some very key sense one does one's body and indeed one does by one's body differently from others the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumcised circumscribed by historical convention end quote um that's the body is understood not merely as a possession of the mind nor does the self exist in the mind despite the linguistic convention of saying my body or i did something you know with my body which suggests just such an arrangement this linguistic shift to having a body self as hyphenated you know it's combined grounds researchers attention in embodied contextualized interactions accomplished in live spaces rather than in abstract meanings and i take that to mean that we do our bodies and we do embody mint as qualitative researchers regardless of where you might situate yourself on a continuum of more artistic through more social scientific qualitative research and and anywhere in the middle between those two poles um a third perspective is moving from the body to bodies in the multiple right the abstract body unfortunately as a legacy of being male and white and first world and straight and privileged in many ways there yet there is no singular body and certainly know the body as an experience intersectionality from my perspective is key to us understanding bodies and that would need to encompass a whole continuum of genders of races of attention to class and disability and sexuality and many other ways in which we can understand bodies so rather than seeking to understand a monolithic embodiment i encourage attention to a incredible multiplicity of experiences of embodiment why does this matter now why should we be paying attention to embodiment in this moment um there's a lot of reasons which again i've distilled down to a um basically six categories of reasons the first and i'm going very quickly through this and many other things i welcome your questions and i also welcome follow-up conversation the last slide will have my email address um and the citation for the book that i am drawing on when i talk about these things anyway one of the first of the six arguments is that embodiment does a does big steps towards encompassing both the material and the discursive um biological essentialism in early uh research is is very unhelpful very limiting on the other hand a purely postmodern focus on the discursive meanings of reality is also unhelpful um in putting these two things together is i argue a rich and productive way of thinking of ourselves and our research and um an embodiment perspective allows us to put these things uh together and to look at them as entangled secondly when we look at em embodiment we feature and we pay attention to the ways in which embodiment is at work in knowledge production we can look at otherwise unknowable topics many topics cannot be separated from our experience of ourselves and others bodies and that would include things like sexuality and disability but it also includes experiences of privileged experiences including being in the academy and being an academic and more complexly it has to do with the ways in which anyone's body is interacting with other bodies for example in workspaces we have to understand discourse of organizations particularly of healthcare delivery which is what i happen to study but if we really want to understand the experience of patients we also have to get into the embodiment of theirs and the healthcare delivering professions as well okay third um embodiment opens up some really rich and exciting possibilities for analysis and representation of our research um it lets us look at all kinds of multi-sensorial and ways of moving past the merely the written world in no way does it exclude the written word but it also brings in sound and visuals in some creative ways and it also pays attention to material realities that can be part of our representations um fourth uh i happen to be partial to crystallization but other kinds of ways of looking at validity as well embodiment adds another layer or another facet right um it can be added on to or incorporated into any other perspectives except for a a purely positivist perspective and i assuming that most of you wouldn't fall into that category and it definitely can fit with post-positiveness and artistic perspectives where we are thinking of validity in rich and complex ways that have to do with aesthetics or with rigor or with both okay fifth um embodiment can help us to reach out beyond the academy to multiple publics and policy makers when we think about material realities which we do as part of embodiment and about intersectional bodies that can help us to speak and to communicate in ways that are appealing to interesting to but also accessible to people outside of the academy and then lastly researcher satisfaction can be for many people enhanced with attention to embodiment as i said i've never had the luxury of ignoring my embodiment but even if i had or wanted to i find tremendous satisfaction and others do as well in looking at the ways in which the discursive and the material come together in complex ways now embodiment can also be a topic focus right it can actually be what it is you're looking at in research right um and i am all for that and actually have a chapter about some of the ways in which body studies research promotes attention to things like for example breastfeeding or having a body which has tattoos on it all of these things are important and interesting um ways of making it the focus however i'm going to talk today about the second part of this which is doing embodiment as a research practice and as part of all the processes all the way from designing all the way through various ways of making data and collecting data and through analysis and through choices about representation all of that is part of doing embodiment and that is what i am going to focus on today okay um there is a rich and really multifaceted uh vocab set of vocabularies there there are many of them um for talking about embodiment and i draw primarily on post-structuralist post-humanist and feminist materialist uh perspectives however i am also highly influenced by social constructionism um and i've also learned a lot from post-colonialist and critical race scholars so there's a lot of ways out there and i want to be very honest and own the fact that this is my eclectic approach right this is from where i come from these are seven terms that i find super helpful in trying to talk to other people about how we can not only think about embodiment but do or practice a conscious and rich engaged kind of embodiment so i've already talked about doing bodies right rather than having a body we're doing our body but i want to briefly introduce these other terms i again realize i'm going super fast here so i welcome questions on them but these are all ways in which we can um understand the body okay so the first is the sticky web of culture and i love that way of thinking about culture as something that we get stuck in it is not only something that of course we choose how to understand or use our bodies because of the influence of culture but culture actually gets inside our bodies we eat certain kinds of foods right we engage in certain kinds of movements and we can strain ourselves from other kinds of movements depending upon our cultures and our values and things that we accept the type of relationships that are promoted or forbidden and so culture is not remain a only a context but actually becomes internal to our bodies as part of how we act in the world and do our bodies secondly actins are objects non-human objects they can be both physical or material such as a desk or a lamp or the diet coke that i'm sipping on at the moment but they can also be discourses right they can be more abstract and they are things again that don't remain external to our experiences of embodiment they are both part of the culture and the spaces in which we act but they also deeply influence them i study healthcare so the actins i tend to look at are things like medications equipment for dialysis that allows filtering of the blood outside of the body i also look at the ways in which we understand the right to or not the right to in the united states to basic health care right and these kinds of discourses and objects have powerful agency not human agency but nonetheless a powerful agency that ends up being not only external to our body but internal to it i am alive today because of the actins of chemotherapy and of the various um things that allow people to do research uh sorry to do surgery such as anesthesia okay um moving right along um intersubjectivity is that we experience our bodies not as independent modernist subjects but in the context of other people's bodies right we are we we learn about our bodies um initially um even before birth really but after birth um and all the way through our lives by how other people react to our bodies how we experience our bodies through the interaction with others again this doesn't remain external but becomes very much part of our physical mental emotional sense of ourselves embodied knowing is one to me one of the most exciting aspects of embodiment and this gets at the idea that we don't just have sensations in our bodies and then make sense of them with our brain both both philosophers who've been arguing this for a very long time such as milo ponte but also neuroscientists are now arguing that we do engage in knowing in sense-making outside of our brains when we say gut instincts or gut-knowing that's actually a physical thing not only an abstract one the next concept is that of flux or the idea that bodies are always already dynamic we are constantly producing new cells our bodies do not remain exactly the same weight or composition right what we eat affects uh what's in our body at any one time and yet our research tends to present only a snapshot of bodies and to treat them as though they were stable or at least relatively stable instead of constantly and always in flux last concept is the censorium which is uh moving past and i very old and outdated model of having five senses most of us grow up thinking of sight in hearing and taste and touch as separate and yet again both philosophy and research and neuroscientific research demonstrate that our senses are highly blended that we don't experience them according to only a single organ but instead they highly they manifest together in very complex ways that cannot be fully separated out nor nor should they be um the other aspect of sensorium though of the ways in which we our senses engage in the world that i want to point out is the proprioceptive system which is not one of those five classically mentioned um systems which is how we engage in movement and where we find ourselves in or know where we are in space right how we can have balance and that proprioceptive system is something i've become instantly acquainted with as an amputee but even if you aren't right your ability to move and to be able to balance requires that so the sensorium is much bigger than just what do we tend to privilege and yet again we don't tend to show those kinds of things um in our research i'm going to briefly talk to you about how we can engage in doing bodies or doing embodiment in our research practices and there are just literally an uh an infinite number of things i'd like to talk about but i will offer instead three areas i'll talk briefly about field work about doing interviews and about engaging in analysis um the first is engaging field work and this has as i just talked briefly about the uh sensorium is having blended senses not separate and also about the proprioceptive system pink's work on sensory ethnography has been really foundational really helpful for me she's done really fascinating work on laundry of all the mundane things of the smells and the textures and the sounds and the things associated with laundry in homes um and also in um local food and in slow food um people festivals and other events that celebrate these approaches in the idea of tasting and experiencing foods and wines and cultures coming in together in complex and sensory ways that are really fascinating certainly in field work one of the things i noticed is that the smell of healthcare delivery spaces mostly hospitals but also any kind of clinic the smell of antiseptics and what i consider to be the smell of fear right of the pheromones that very ill people's bodies give off when they are worried right that that smell is a really visceral part of the experience and yet we tend to pay attention to what we see and what we hear in ethnography and so sensory ethnography tries to move past that an embodiment tries to really richly build on exciting ways in which we can try to attend to um our sensorium and to all the other concepts that i've talked to i talked about but that one in particular so one technique that i recommend something that i've experimented with um is to try to look at silence as an embodied phenomenon in my field work to look at what practices make up silence in various spaces and again i look at healthcare but i've also looked a lot at extended family and chosen family networks and the ways in which private homes and the kinds of gathering spaces um for um aunties and nieces and nephews and loved ones the ways in which silence can be part of those things as well and that they aren't just an absence of speech or an absence of noise but deeply embodied phenomenon as wide as widely advocated by feminist ethnographers we can pay attention to embodied silence as much as a form of resistance as a well as a sign of oppression traditionally of course silence has been thought of as othering but it also has a variety of functions purposes and meanings it's not merely an absence but deeply embodied howell in 2013 writes that bodies are vessels of meaning and meaning making at times empowered and loud but also bereft and silent a fundamental truth in the communication studies discipline of which i'm a part is that you cannot not communicate people always communicate in some sense of affect even if it is complacency or other kinds of very mild states there's always something being communicated silence can be powerful and interesting not just something missing but an embodied communicative practice practice and meaningful way of being with others silence can also be indicated to indicate a strength and physical or physical and emotional pain consciously attending not only to the overt activity to of a place or space but also to the spaces in between that help to give activities meaning is a really rich way of experiencing embodiment when do your participants enact silence how do an actants producing sounds for example the beeping that always seems to be part of medical equipment it's always a lot of beeping going on right how is that beeping interacting with silent people um how is it regulating other objects how is it signaling in the absence of speech or other kinds of sounds how is it signaling to healthcare providers who've been trained to hear in certain ways how do those beeps manifest in an important language in the absence of other kinds of verbal indicators for example ringing phones might move participants to speech in an office space likewise internal states might lead to sounds a participant who's frustrated for example might emphatically sigh or repeatedly tap their pen against a desk or a table when participants speak how and when do they pause and what do those pauses and silences do you can spend an entire visit in this field describing silences and noting how participants whole bodies perform silence not just their voice or lack thereof note what kind of non-verbal communication cues enact silences for example is their mouth frowning are they do they have an intense stare or a blank look are their face or shoulders relaxed and if so how can you tell are their arms tightly crossed acro in front of their chest are they making eye contact or not right are there silent tears streaming down their face or maybe very slowly dripping from their face each of these and endless combinations of various kinds of non-verbal cues or body language facial expressions those kinds of things these communicate very different embodied tones of silence into which ethnographers inquire and again that's just a one example of the many ways in which we could think of us as doing our bodies and doing embodiment in fieldwork i want to move next to talking a little bit about interviewing researchers tend to act and speak as though knowledge is produced in the mind um brady in 2011 wrote that quote this researcher's mind is typically regarded as an instrument when which is then rationalized and giving meaning as knowledge by the mind so end quote so in resisting the mind body split researchers can understand embodiment not only as actions or practices that our bodies do and that our mind subsequently makes sense of but rather as our whole mind body selves make sense of the world and has produced knowledge and again this goes back to the concept i briefly introduced of embodied knowing bodies are in complex systems that include the brain and central nervous system but which are not interpreted or not solely interpreted by them such that our consciousness is always and already sorry is always and only embodied holistically integrated into what well in 2013 calls an enfleshed subject and yet our qualitative research does not typically acknowledge or it could in many more ways acknowledge the ways in which all of our knowing is woven throughout our bodies the sense of researchers and participants bodies is apparent within the constraints of the sorry the silence of researchers and participants bodies is apparent within the traditional research report writing and consequently emits vital information and insights when the body is erased in processing of scholarships such knowledge situated within the body is unavailable in fleshed knowledge is restricted by linguistic patterns of positivist dualism mind body objective subjective that fix the body as an entity incapable of literacy and that's from spry in 2001.

[00:39:59]thus it's not only that the body makes cognitively right knowledge out of the raw or perceptive information instead the mind-body system particularly or in this case when you're doing interviews is feeling and thinking and experiencing and making sense of sensory information holistically all over our bodies so when we're doing an interview right we are having sensations of tension or not in our shoulders right our faces are smiling or perhaps crying with another our bodies are relaxing or engaging um our our stomachs feel um content and happy or perhaps become nauseated or or or feel pain right as we are making sense of in the moment what our participants and uh and we are talking about one so one thing i really recommend is that when you're doing an interview you try to not only pay attention to in your moment what is your body telling you and what do you think your participants body is telling you and to follow up on on um and checking out your interpretations of your participants body by saying um you look sad or can you tell me about the emotion you're feeling now or i noticed that your shoulders went up can you tell me um what that is experience is for you but also preparing questions ahead of time that illicit embodies experiences and in my experience many of participants have trouble trying to really reach into that interior and trying to have questions that get at embodied experiences that we don't tend to normally talk about can be really helpful to helping your participants to articulate them as by the way can be allowing silence not trying to rush your participant and letting them have embodied silence and and trying to as much as you can have your body portray that you're totally fine with waiting letting them have a moment to think um and so anyway if you form questions ahead of time that help get out not just what people see and hear but also try to form questions about touching about taste about smell about textures about temperatures right i ask uh participants how they feel about the fact that operating rooms for example are always very cold i assume that has to do with germs and things and the fact that the healthcare providers must get very warm but it is also very unpleasant if you are a patient and awaken it the textures of the sheets and the and the bandages and the um other kinds of things that you experience in a healthcare setting right if you're in an office what do offices smell like right there's interesting work on how we experience the smells in our workplaces and in our homes and in our neighborhoods very cool stuff on doing not only sound walking interviews but in looking at the smells and the textures and the and the ways in which neighborhoods have particular ways of being that can be accessed by it through attention to embodiment you can also ask people about different areas of their body ask them about their limbs ask them about their belly or their lungs ask them about their perceptions of movement how is it for example for you as a doctor or a nurse maybe walking in the clinic or standing in the clinic what about lifting or carrying something in the clinic what about sitting in the clinic what about um having to reach over the patient's body in order to um get access equipment or medications or other kinds of things right what kind of bodily practices um in both formal and informal um interviews right so ones that have been set up or ones that might happen spontaneously during field work you can respond to participants stories by asking for memories of how their bodies felt in those moments and in what part of their bodies they felt their emotions the picture that i have here for you on the screen is of a brain being connected to a gut because that's how i tend to experience my emotions i tend to experience them through pain in my stomach or like an aching or a sharp pain or through nausea also through sort of just an unsettled or fluttering kind of feeling right and in this representation the brain and the gut are are very firmly uh linked through a chord there um but there's other ways you might experience your knowing for example in your heart right or in your fingers right or in your facial um muscles right we all have different ways of understanding those things so when your participants answer about these things remember that meaning is in the nonverbal cues or body language and facial expressions as i talked about before not just in what they say so often there's more emphasis or or echo more than just emphasis or echoing of your words sometimes you can see participants shoulders slump right before they edit themselves with a cheery answer doctors see this all the time patients say they're they're fine and obviously they're not right or they smile before then giving a really ambivalent response follow up on what the participants body uh cues are right and as much as you can inquire into these things in a very open and accepting kind of way i need to skip along very briefly i want to talk about analysis as a very much a material thing we tend to think of this most of us and do it in computers now we engage in analysis um but we also can think of it as a deeply engaged bodied experience wherein we read data we listen to recordings we view photographs or maps or other images we make notes using our hands whether that's on a keyboard right we might make notes using our voices for people who don't type right we use our whole bodies to process data and we can think of an analytic analysis as an important sense a material process not only a virtual one or and certainly not only a mind one the ways in which we scribble in margins or make notes using software all of these things underlining things they it's a connection of the materiality of our data and of the entire process in which our whole bodies are engaged in sense making when we use we think of cutting and pasting which was a literal thing right we some of us like to um color on and use different kinds of pens and underline and circle things and make notations in the margins others like to use um computers to cut and baste and when we do these things right we engage in some important sense making we're able to take quotes from lots of different participants and put them in one place or connect them right that is a very powerful visual act a material act that shapes our thinking we're able to take things that happened at different times and connect them together using software or using literally cutting and pasting of pieces of papers together right we as um canopus in 2008 says we form quote a textual laboratory which has the power to shrink time and space distances between observable observable phenomena so that everything important is present and under control end quote this grouping and networking and coding and commenting on right enables researchers to visualize and to feel viscerally connections among our ideas deeply impacting our continuing construction of meaning it's not just about data collection but about analysis in some very powerful ways when we move things around we are doing things with them and i recommend that we try to harness the materiality of our analysis regardless of which kind of system you might use so if you like physical which i do if you like office supplies colored pens sticky notes folders paper right then get some of those giant flip charts which are like giant sticky notes right and hang them on your walls to surround yourselves with visual representations of connections between themes and people and acting maybe make lists of ideas and concepts and tasks or lay papers and note cards out all over a floor or a large conference table moving them around to help you make and change the connections that you are making or not seeing or not experiencing right if you have the luxury of a dedicated workspace do a little redecorating of the space to help it to reflect the processes that you're engaging in if you work wherever you can find a space which most of us tend to do get a snazzy cover for your laptop or a great computer bag or tote or messenger bag to hold your work and your supplies but but own and be aware of try to be conscious of the materiality of analysis um lastly if you are a real dedicated computer user which many people are right you can save your data files and of course back them up many many different ways in different different spaces but then make play copies of your data in which you can cut and paste and highlight and annotate to your heart's content by pointing and clicking and dragging and typing if you like being able to rearrange files and ideas when you're writing you might consider consider the scrivener software which is available online i i don't get a cut from them but i do enjoy their software right it lets you basically simultaneously see an outline of your work and all of its parts and um be working on separate sections of your work and have a what look like visual note card where you can keep notes about whatever it is you excuse me that you are writing many people like other kinds of qualitative analysis software such as atlas hyper research nudists in vivo and max q q de cuda sorry i don't know how to pronounce that one most of the software packages have capacities for linking files that let you do what's called what others have called embodied multimodal coding and analysis that is software that lets you bring together visual hyperlinking documents photos videos drawings maps and other kinds of texts and that it's with language or or transcripts right or with your own words and this visual juxtaposition and and auditory juxtaposition right may spark in try actions that would not have happened without the collapsing of time and space that can be accomplished through this very material rearranging of data not only and constituting the data in the first place but then rearranging it by bringing disparate moments together and being able to do that multiple ways and multiple times of bringing these things together the more you can make the work and the play of analysis think of it as physical work the more opportunity you have to engage your whole body self in your meaning making processes in your body of data and to imaginatively foster various kinds of interactions i am very passionate in talking about embodiment and i love being able to talk more about it my book that came out of that topic is from rutledge came out last year i also blog about being a person who lives with late effects of cancer treatment or the ongoing complexities of long-term cancer survivors at realistically ever.blog and then lastly my email here is here as well l ellingson scu.edu and i really do welcome perspectives i'm at a wonderful liberal arts school but i don't have graduate students or a lot of other colleagues locally who i can talk this uh these exciting ideas about embodiment with so i welcome hearing from other scholars and at this point i'm going to stop and open it up to your questions thank you very much so let me see we have a few people who have already written some questions and i will see if i can offer the microphone to some of them let me see here uh carnegie carlin i will i will offer you the microphone let me see just a second carlene is here okay here here you go i will unmute you so your microphone is open go ahead oh hello hello okay uh dr edington perhaps i can just say i really appreciated this i'm an educational kinesiologist and a research psychologist so this for me has been the epitome of bringing the two worlds together and i do it a lot when i do training especially with qualitative research where i try to break very abstract concepts down to physical things that people can experience and i can just say that this has been absolutely brilliant in reaffirming that the way that i do things is valid it is useful um there are people writing books about it so there's definitely something so thank you thank you yeah at the moment i don't really have any other questions but just a deep appreciation for what you have been through and what you have shared with us so thank you for that thank you very much i want to pick up on what you said about training i too find that um having when you're when you're training bringing things into concrete and physical helps people's comprehension but i i argue it does more than that it doesn't just help people to understand an abstract concept which is in and of itself really important but when you're trying to train people to do things and i do teach qualitative methods on the undergrad level and feminist methods and trying to help them have a kinesthetic experience of things really shapes not just their understanding of abstract concepts but of practices and processes and i find it sounds like you do in a very powerful way for example i have my research students um they i give them sets of blocks that are in different shapes and colors and ask them to make those into themes right how could they define a coherent theme and what different ways could they do that and that kind of physical moving and visualizing and hearing the clicking together of blocks i think is a really powerful tool absolutely i think on a neurological level this synapse interaction there is just blowing your mind it just makes connections that you otherwise would not absolutely and it raises questions right it makes connections and it shows where we can't quite make a connection i think it helps them articulate questions and things too so i'm really thrilled that that that you're appreciating this and that it's helpful to you thank you very much thank you so now we have a question from alicia and she's asking if you could repeat uh the name of that software for cutting and pasting visually oh yes it's called scrivener uh for those of you uh who may i was an english major bartleby scrivener that's where the name comes from um for anybody who may have had to read the english literature but scrivener um is uh the software and it's uh if you just google um uh that that word scrivener software it'll come right up okay thank you uh peter has a question for you and i will see if he is available to talk i'm gonna open your microphone peter go ahead peter are you there maybe his microphone does not work okay yes he just wrote that he doesn't have a microphone so okay i will i will read this out loud for you uh he wrote the following thank you for the great presentation many say the brain creates phantom limb sensation pain any thoughts on how it is embodied beyond the brain specifically i am thinking of congenitally absent limbs where there is no amputation tissue injury yeah this is fascinating and as someone who unfortunately lives with phantom limb pain i have paid a lot of attention to the research and um am uh as frustrated i think as as everyone else is they they have some ideas but they are really inconclusive about what actually causes it and the congenital um missing limb or is is particularly um powerful because it's not like it used to be there right my brain remembers it and um it's mostly very unpleasant sensations but actually i had a phantom cat lap the other day when i my kitty one of my kitties was sitting on my lap and i could feel the warmth and the pressure on my um prosthetic leg socket which was a very interesting experience as well so i think it's not just pain it's all kinds of sensations and i don't know um the the sort of the physics of how the brain does it but my argument would be is that the from everything that i have read both philosophy and neuroscience is that it's not that the brain is making it up it's that the brain and the and the central nervous system and the whole body is an integrated system um and that that whole system is doing its best to not only deal with the um sort of external uh signals and and um cues that it may be getting the sensory input that it's getting like for example somebody touching your body um but also it's imagine it's imagination right as people become aware of their bodies they become aware that other people for example have two legs or um or or have two arms or or have two hands or other things that they may not themselves have and i think that our imaginations are incredibly powerful that's what makes qualitative research so fun i mean i wouldn't do this if it wasn't i mean it's also tedious and annoying but um but it's also a great deal of fun and very satisfying and i think that's because of our imaginations and i would argue that it's the imagination as part of our body not just something that thinks about our body but that is grounded in our bodily experiences that can literally imagine a limb that was never there or that can imagine a hand um that you were born without and i know that my body is thinking about its past experiences but one of the things that's really interesting about phantom leg pain in particular for people who've had their legs amputated is that most of uh the pain that i experience is a very bad burning and very sharp uh almost like a needle kind of pain in my foot but there's no there was never anything wrong with my foot all of the surgeries that i had to reconstruct my leg were from my mid-calf up through um almost the top of my femur and which is my thigh bone um and so in through my knee right but i i and i do occasionally have phantom stabbing pain in those areas but the vast majority of the pain the pain that i take medication for was imagined by my brain because there's a lot more sense nerves in your foot there's many many senses in your feet sensors um and there's many different kinds of nerves there and that's why if you step on most people if they step on a rock can get enough information to immediately compensate for that information i can't do that if i step on a rock or stub my toe in with my prosthetic foot right but my brain nonetheless imagines pain in that remote part of my body so whether it's congenital or amputation we know that the brain is literally inventing and while i happen to find that unfortunately quite painful much of the time it's not always negative and it's always a source of um interest and i i would argue that it's imagination and that that imagination is grounded in our whole body not merely in the brain but that said i like all other researchers are merely um positing an educated guess we don't actually have any proof or not not anything conclusive thank you i will i will offer the microphone to marcella rida i wonder if you have a an open microphone it's open now hello hello yeah oh well uh first of all thank you very much for sharing this with us it's totally a new thing for me so it was like a eye-opening uh way of seeing things in research so um my question is i wonder um once you have your impressions about the participants body responses how did you how do you interpret that or how do you transfer that into your analysis um into the actual paper i'm thinking about a dissertation how do you do it yeah that's a great question um so i do that in a number of ways when i think about my participants bodily experiences i make extensive field notes about them so that's that's one way is to try to get it into a written form or some people prefer making sound files where they sort of talk out loud and try to work out their impressions that way so getting that down another thing i do is to re-listen to my recordings if i have interviews or reread my field notes or both and um try to um what one of the authors i draw on calls recentralize the experience right try to not only remember it in the sense of remembering sort of what happened or listening again to their words but try to recentralize try to think about the ways in which my body was responding with their body and then when i go to write a dissertation and and the reason i uh so it's very it can be very difficult and i always tell students you got to do whatever you got to do to get out of your program right and to get a job and to be marketable and to be uh considered valid by whatever set of rules it is that you're constrained by so never feel ashamed of that or apologize for that but that said i'm a big fan of crystallization which rethinks uh validity as something that has to do with combining both more more artistic and more um social scientific forms of knowledge because of the very issue that you bring up which is how do you show this embodied um knowing right in the participants embodied responses in a dissertation and the way i did that was to have a multi-genre dissertation i wrote a chapter that was autoethnographic i wrote a chapter that was narrative ethnography i wrote a chapter that was a fairly you know very much social constructionist but not um uh but uh but but still pretty very conventional grounded theory analysis right with with themes and categories and excerpts from from both field notes and from interviews to support those claims that i made right and rich descriptions and i could put a lot more of my participants embodied experiences into the auto ethnic auto ethnography and the narrative ethnography and then later in the book because my my committee wasn't as big on it i developed a feminist um analysis chapter as well to really deconstruct a lot of what i constructed in the other chapters um and the grounded theory and in the ground of theory you're just missing most of that it's just not there right you're missing a hundred percent of my embodied experiences and so to me the way to get that is to use different genres and some people use video or performance or um audio ethnography or there's all kinds of different ways to represent and if your committee's not into that that's okay don't feel bad about it write whatever you need to write for them or otherwise constitute your dissertation and then when you're done right you can you can do these things separately i publish separate auto ethnographic works and separate grounded theory works where i've really put that embodied sensory detail explicitly into the auto ethnography however i know that my grounded theory analysis was heavily influenced by the other kinds of sense making in which i engaged and i have published pieces that really blend art and science to try to show the ways in which for example poetic transcription can come together with grounded theory analysis to help us have a more artful and our aesthetic appreciation of participants comments so it is the short answer is it's hard to do right that's and the longer answer is i do it using multiple genres and i accept that you often have to publish or otherwise share those in separate spaces my first book communicating in the clinic which was from hampton press though i did put them all in one in one chapter it has auto ethnography and narrative ethnography feminist critique and grounded theory analysis now i gotta be honest the book did not sell very well um it freaked out the health communication won a bunch of awards ironically but it did not sell very well the um the really social science people in health communication that just couldn't make sense of it they were like what the hell is this thing with all this you know narrative and weird stuff in it but the ethnography people didn't like the grounded theory right um and they didn't like the very social science framing of the idea so it's very complicated but i really appreciate your question and i urge you to be strategic to do what you have to do at each stage of your career but to always leave open the possibility of incorporating an embodiment in more explicit ways later even if they remain implicit now they are great sense-making activities for you no matter what kind of dissertation you're producing thank you very much uh we we are coming to the end there are a few more questions that were not answered and i'm wondering if people should feel free to write to you absolutely please email me it's ellensen scu.edu and i'd be very happy to hear from people with questions or comments okay so monica you you ask a question it will not be responded because of time but feel free to write uh to dr ellison about that and um before i close i would like to offer the microphone to yvette from iiqm and she will say a few last words thank you very much dr edinson for your presentation uh yvette thanks ricardo and thank dr ellingson that was a wonderful presentation we want to thank all of you for joining us today and all the other master class webinars that are have taken place and will continue to take place our next one is august 9th and the presenter will be kelly giott and the topic will be confronting the visual and qualitative inquiry so you can go to the iiq m.u alberta.ca webpage and register for that webinar next month thank you so much for having me thank you very much uh dr ellinson and thank you very much everybody for for joining us today you will be receiving uh an email with this with the recording of this of this webinar uh in a few hours from now thank you all of you goodbye