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Paper short abstract

This session explores ethnographic poetry as a method of knowing with. It examines how poetic form invites affective engagement, invested re-encounters, and shared interpretation – allowing findings to be felt, responded to, and taken up collectively.

Paper long abstract

Creative and arts-based methods are often judged by what new insights they yield. This session asks instead how they enable knowing with, not about, the world. Treating ethnographic poetry as method rather than representation, it explores how poetic form invites affective engagement with inquiry and reshapes how findings are encountered and taken up.

Drawing on STS, feminist and queer methodologies, and ethnographic/erasure poetry (Douglas-Jones 2018; Gugganig & Douglas-Jones 2021; Maynard 2009), I consider how poetic practice unsettles binaries between analysis and affect, intellect and emotion, and researcher and researched. Poetry is approached not as expressive add-on but as analytic condensation that foregrounds proximity, ambiguity, and the labour of interpretation.

Empirically, we focus on interview-based work and poetic re-encounters with participants. Returning with poems rather than transcripts or claims invites affective and interpretive responses, using the poem as shared material for dialogue, disagreement, and resonance.

The session also interrogates the growing pressure to be ‘creative’ in academic contexts. Using ethnographic poetry as a case, we ask how such forms can be protected as ways of knowing with others, rather than becoming tools of flashiness shaped by politics of creative legibility - particularly in STS, where work is continually negotiated against scientific and technological regimes of legitimacy.

Combining brief examples with a participatory exercise, the session treats ethnographic poetry as both method and provocation for resilient, reflexive scholarship.