Rewilding Bodymemories in Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Expansive Ways of Knowing and Researching (Table 5)

Abstract

Post-qualitative, process, and new/materialist philosophies have foregrounded the importance of living and wild thinking. Accordingly, we engaged with rewilding bodymemories, a concept combining scholarship on embodied/body memory, collective memory work, and a rewilding memory study using autistic memory work. Seeking to decenter neurotypicality in academia, we experimented with entanglements between researchers, vibrant objects, memories, and ecologies while exploring these acts of relating during interview and transcription processes. By designing methods that include open (to all senses) interviews with vibrant objects and transcription techniques that match the modes of communication used, bodymemories were perceived in multiple ways and through, sometimes unexpected, connections. Rewilding bodymemories offers methodological possibilities for social transformation that is also deeply integrated into the natural world.

Authors

• Anani M. Vasquez, Neurodiversity Education Research Center

• Mirka E. Koro, Arizona State University

• Christie Byers, George Mason University