Footnotes Poetry: Moving Family Into the Text

• In Event: Family in/as Fieldwork: Challenges and Possibilities of Researching (With) One's Own Family

Abstract

With this collection of ethnographic poetry, I explore affective and dialogic ways to include family in the qualitative research process - from design and data collection to analysis and data presentation. I consider how my family members - living and dead - were part of my research on pregnancy and prenatal care interactions. In such interactions, family stories and their meaning-making intersections become part of health communication and practices in everyday ways - not as formal advice, but as a bid for belonging and care. Making stories' creative and connecting prowess as a part of the research design, I conducted this project as a story-telling one, explicitly including tales of my own family while interviewing, thinking through and analyzing others’ stories, and writing a research text that straddles prose and poetry. I moved my family into the text before the text was written, a pre-text that became poetry. Here, I perform and discuss possibilities and challenges of such an approach in the context of critical health communication and narrative medicine. I propose a model for the use of feminist methodologies, particularly scientificity and “getting lost” (Lather, 2012), in health communication research and practices. Inspired by transnational and critical feminists, such as Anzaldúa and Lorde, this project focuses on the challenges and possibilities of including the multiplicity of selves and histories in research. Furthermore, it explores the limitations of such an approach in a field (health care) that is, still, markedly dominated by post-positivistic and objectivistic orientations to research.

Author

• Liliana Herakova, Western New England U