International Critical Management Studies Conference 2025 (Manchester)
Session Abstract:
How can art help us know differently? While this is a timeless and well-worn question in its generality, I apply it here, in experimental inquiry, towards the realm of social science research praxis. This essay offers an autoethnographic exploration of what happens to an emerging research frame when its keywords are developed through poetry. The author’s original poems and the thinking that becomes possible through the act of writing them are positioned in conversation with works of five feminist/feminist-aligned artist-scholars working across themes of epistemology, ethics, and poetics in their scholarship: Gloria Anzaldúa, Hélène Cixous, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Édouard Glissant, and Joan Retallack. The essay is organized fractally, rather than linearly. Through this structuring, I explore the contingencies and permutations of my own poetic process in conversation with the cited thinkers, as well as possible permutations on the other side of their expanding boundaries, recognizing the presence of alternative knowledges that hide in the negative space of the fractal. While loosely organized around the standard research article framework of introduction–literature review–data and methods–analysis–conclusion, I interrogate these structures as the forces of art upend their certainties. In presenting this work in the context of a conference, I will invoke elements of spoken word artistic performance and the interplay of thought between presenter and audience, in a shared poetic exegesis of process.