Poetic Entanglements: Sutured Spaces for Exploring Difference(s)

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Poetic Inquiry to Excavate Curricula, Conflict, and the Poetic Event

Abstract

Informed by Barad’s (2014) theoretical discussion of “cutting together-apart,” the authors poetically sutured – writing poems tofromwithagainstfor each other. This raw vulnerability of exploring differences, entangling in (re)connecting, and sharing, as both pain and hope – was indexed by what the poems contained as we completed and shared them, but also by the ways that our experiences were “out of joint” with one another, breaking “apart in different directions…each moment an infinite multiplicity” (p. 169). In this mutual offering – of both weakness and reckoning – we created a “relational space” (Kuby & Christ, 2017) of vulnerability and creativity, asking the question, “What does writing poetry in this way – reflectively and in community – do, especially in how educational researchers understand and practice their identities?”

Authors

• Carlson Coogler, The University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa

• Shelly Melchior, University of Alabama

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, University of Alabama