Practising Reflection: Empathy, Emotion and Intuition in Political Life Writing

View/ Open
Author(s)
Corbett, Jack
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2014
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Attempts to unravel the relationship between scholar and subject are common in life writing and underpin the emphasis on reflexivity in interpretive research. However, while the conceptual basis for reflexive practice is well established, there is less written on how it is actually done. In this article I reflect on how I created a collective portrait of politicians in the Pacific Islands. My rationale for describing how I produced knowledge in this project echoes the call for interpretive researchers and biographers, who wish to become reflexive, to engage in and describe reflexive practices. In doing so, I illustrate how ...
View more >Attempts to unravel the relationship between scholar and subject are common in life writing and underpin the emphasis on reflexivity in interpretive research. However, while the conceptual basis for reflexive practice is well established, there is less written on how it is actually done. In this article I reflect on how I created a collective portrait of politicians in the Pacific Islands. My rationale for describing how I produced knowledge in this project echoes the call for interpretive researchers and biographers, who wish to become reflexive, to engage in and describe reflexive practices. In doing so, I illustrate how empathy, emotion and intuition shaped my sources, analysis and writing, and argue that these non-objectivist tools, reflexively considered, have the capacity to enhance our descriptions of the lives we choose to portray.
View less >
View more >Attempts to unravel the relationship between scholar and subject are common in life writing and underpin the emphasis on reflexivity in interpretive research. However, while the conceptual basis for reflexive practice is well established, there is less written on how it is actually done. In this article I reflect on how I created a collective portrait of politicians in the Pacific Islands. My rationale for describing how I produced knowledge in this project echoes the call for interpretive researchers and biographers, who wish to become reflexive, to engage in and describe reflexive practices. In doing so, I illustrate how empathy, emotion and intuition shaped my sources, analysis and writing, and argue that these non-objectivist tools, reflexively considered, have the capacity to enhance our descriptions of the lives we choose to portray.
View less >
Journal Title
Life Writing
Volume
11
Issue
3
Copyright Statement
© 2014 Taylor & Francis. This is an electronic version of an article published in Life Writing, Vol. 11(3), 2014, pp. 349-365. Life Writing is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com with the open URL of your article.
Subject
Political science not elsewhere classified
Literary studies
Other language, communication and culture