Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches

Book excerpt: Autoethnography is a unique discipline which steps inside and outside the self to experience, embody and express social and cultural meaning. At once a performative, political and poetic genre of research writing, it holds the potential to uncover the ‘heart of the world’, if only for a moment. The author uses theory as story and story as theory to explore her place in the world through painstaking and intimate self and social narratives to lay bare the unique challenges and rewards of autoethnography. Framed around the metaphor of ‘heartlines’, the author explores autoethnographic practice as critical feminist and decolonial work and the power it holds for not only imagining a wise, ethical and loving world, but for making such a kind place possible. Through a performative journey of the heart, we travel with the author as she unearths the power of words, of writing and not-writing, evoking in particular the work of Hélène Cixous and Virginia Woolf. This reflective, passionate and pioneering volume will be of interest and value to all those interested in autoethnography and the ways in which it can be applied as critical, ethical and political work in the social sciences.