God, gods, myth and facts

Blaiki, has chosen to approach her research through the processes described by Cole & Knowles (2007), which requires the researcher to develop their work inquiry using more than one art method.  When writing her poetry, she reconstructed conversations through the use of ‘cutting, pasting and eliminating text’ (Blaikie, 2009) , this allowed her produce poetry which was both sequential and logical in manner. She futher applied poetic wrting techniques in order to create the imagery which she was trying to convey.  Figure 1:, Fiona Blaikie (2009), Painting of The Black Stretch Pants. For the practical visual aspect of the research, she then combined photographs and text in order to produce a collage which was reflective of the person or subject.  These were then converted these into paintings, which are meant to be reflective of the participants. Figure 1, this is an example of one of her poetry and visual inquiry output. 

One of the relevant literatures which I have come across was an article entitled: “Poetic Inquiry as a Research and Engagement Method in Natural Resource Science”, written by three authors. In the article there was a section which discussed Poetic Analysis and the process they had adopted for their own research.  What these researchers had done was to create poetry from their qualitative data so as to observe whether or not poetic analysis would result in a new perspective or understanding of ‘social-ecological dynamics’ in a given area, which they had previously analyzed in 2012 using ‘conventional qualitative coding analysis.  They had decided to approach the writing by using a singular transcript form their interviews with their respondent to create 27 poems, which comprised solely on the respondent’s own words, mainly focusing on words which had best articulated meaning most relevant to their chosen theme. These words were then rearranged into order to create the p...

There are various ways in which a researcher could adopt the use of Poetic Inquiry in research such as writing a poem based on the qualitative data which has been gathered through interview transcripts. The researcher would then write poems based either on the research process, the participants, or collaborate with the participant to write the said poem.  According to Faulkner poetry “…embodies experience to show truths that are not usually evident”, it offers research a unique portrayal and expression of the human condition; which ultimately allows for new understanding of any given subject or theme as inquiry forces the researcher to reflect on the entire research process. (María E. Fernández-Giménez, 2018) 

Art-based Research can be described as a set of methods chiefly focused on the various divisions within the arts, such as music, visual arts etc. Therefore ABR would be involved throughout the research process, which would include “data generation, analysis, interpretation, representation, and presentation” (María E. Fernández-Giménez, 2018). 

According to Faith Wambura Ngunjiri, Living Autoethnography is a qualitative research method which based on the context and the individual so as to create an understanding between the individual and other people within the same perspective. Ngunjiri stated that this method is qualitative, self-focused and yet is still context conscious; which is something which is similar to my chosen theme as I will not be solely focused on my personal perspective but the research which I will find, while also taking the overall relation of others. She has also noted this research method also allows for the study of themes which would not be easy investigated nor explored through the use of other methods such as loss, depression, pain etc. and in my case God (Ngunjiri, 2008).   Kakali Bhattacharya, wrote about the use of qualitative methods in Art Based Research. In her paper Bhattacharya, discussed how the intersection of qualitative inquiry and poetic-inquiry grounded in arts-based rese...