Unsanitized writing practices: Attending to affect and embodiment throughout the research process (original) (raw)

2021, Gender, Work & Organization

Using examples from an ethnographic study of aircraft cleaning, we discuss and illustrate how "writing differently" can be performed throughout the research process-in the literature review, data collection, data analysis, and writing up. We argue that writing differently is an ongoing methodological tool in order to rethink/refeel research practices in ways that generate affective, embodied and caring accounts of empirical organizational contexts, particularly when marginalization is key such as in cleaning work. We turn to poetry to better understand and portray the affective and embodied intensities in different phases in the research project. Furthermore, instead of presenting a sanitized authoritative account of writing so that it becomes recognizable as academic knowledge, we leave in the messiness, struggles, and insecurities in "doing" writing differently. K E Y W O R D S affect cleaning work, embodiment poetry, writing differently and then we get stuck our heads split open one part being there, engaging with the other trying to make sense This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.