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Chapter 1: Researcher Positioning as Embodied Experience

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Embodied Performance as Applied Research, Art and Pedagogy

Part of the book series: Creativity, Education and the Arts ((CEA))

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Abstract

This chapter introduces critical autoethnography as a research methodology and maps how storytellers and audiences struggle together to co-create identity, meaning, and reality through performing personal narratives in interpersonal interactions, creative nonfiction writing, and staged performances. Drawing upon theories of performance, phenomenology, and disability studies, the author tells personal stories of living through a body marked as “disabled” to reveal storytelling performance as visceral (embodied and emotional), collaborative (inescapably shared), and susceptible (discursive, forever open to revision and reinterpretation). Storytelling offers a means to overcome personal and cultural fears that compel us to stigmatize and reject bodies that remind us of our own inescapable physical and social vulnerability, opening spaces to pursue connection, empathy, and social justice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I considered using the term “vulnerable” here. I chose “susceptible” because it comes from the root susceptibilis, meaning “can be received.” Vulnerable comes from vulnerabilis, meaning “wounded.” Wounds can be productive—as Miller (2006) asserts, they can “let light in” to our “broken bodies”—but in this book, I wish to emphasize the openness to receive, respond, and adapt to varying stimuli. Storytelling and culture are always in a state of revision .

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC, USA

    Julie-Ann Scott

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  1. Julie-Ann Scott
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Scott, JA. (2018). Chapter 1: Researcher Positioning as Embodied Experience. In: Embodied Performance as Applied Research, Art and Pedagogy. Creativity, Education and the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63661-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63661-0_1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63660-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63661-0

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