Bodily Landscape Perceptions: Activating Relational Methods to Study Forced Migration

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Issues of Representation in Qualitative Research

Abstract

This conceptual paper discusses how research and inquiry focusing on bodies and bodywork (in the context of forced migration) can offer more active, situational, and relational research approaches to study traumatic educational experiences. Bodily methodologies and bodywork enable scholars to investigate sensed and material connections which actively situate participants in their bodily and material spaces, historical and shifting time contexts, and within various affective spaces. Perceptions through bodily touch and material landscape perceptions allow participants and researchers see, sense, and relate to others and difference in our socio-political contexts multiple and different ways. More specifically, we draw conceptual and methodological examples from a sensory and body-based study investigating forced migration among university students in Ukraine.

Authors

• Mariia Vitrukh, Arizona State University

• Mirka E. Koro, Arizona State University