Embodied enquiry
Lead Innovators: Professor Les Todres and Professor Kate Galvin
Embodied Enquiry is a research approach that focuses on the role of the lived body as a way of knowing and being, and draws heavily on Eugene Gendlin’s ‘philosophy of implicit entry’. Here is a brief summary of the epistemological rationale of this approach:
Our bodily participation in life provides an important reference for the kind of knowledge that is intersubjectively meaningful. Such inclusion of the sensing body in considering the nature of knowledge, provides an aesthetic dimension to the task of understanding. In this view, understanding is grounded by the intimacy of a shared world fully of bodily textures, resonances, recognitions and moods. A key question for methodological practice is: What are the implications of ‘embodied enquiry’ for the practice of qualitative research? We are pursuing these practical implications by developing three methodological innovations:
Embodied interviewing
This approach to interviewing modifies Gendlin’s practice of ‘focusing’ in such a way as to facilitate the interviewee’s presence to her own bodily grounded meanings as a source for her verbalisations. This has implications for the interviewer: the interviewer is not just concerned with what is said but the process of how the interviewee’s words emerge from the seamless ‘more’ of the meanings that the interviewee is engaged in portraying. Embodied interviewing thus acknowledges interviewees’ struggles to be faithful to their own experience that originates ‘beyond words’.
Embodied interpretation
This innovation refers to the question of how to serve public understanding by providing interpretations of peoples’ experiences that reflect the ‘excess’ and the ‘aliveness’ of what research participants have shown to researchers. This interest in the excess and aliveness of meanings has led to a consideration of the kind of language that is adequate to this task, and further, to a more poetic sensibility in the way that findings can be interpreted and expressed. We have named this process ‘embodied interpretation’. Embodied interpretation employs more evocative forms of representation that follows an earlier phase of a phenomenological-descriptive analysis of transcribed interview text. In their interpretive work, the researchers employ a body- based hermeneutics in order to go back and forth between an embodied sense of the meanings conveyed in the text, and a search for words that can evocatively communicate these meanings. The hermeneutic process thus ‘cycles’ between language and the ‘felt sense’ of the text carried in the researcher’s body.
Embodied dissemination of research findings.
This innovation focuses on the question of how embodied understanding can be facilitated by the dissemination of qualitative research findings. Embodied understanding has been formulated as a form of understanding that is particularly relevant to judgement-based caring practices. Embodied understanding is the kind of sense-making that “draws on all our human sensitivities including our emotions----and…integrates background understandings, felt meanings of a situation, imaginative scenarios, prior experiences and perceptive awareness…… Background understandings involve…. not a set of logically ordered rules about what to do and when to do it, but (is) a holistic web of understandings about how to go about and get things done in the world” (Polkinghorne 2005 p.77 and p.84: Practice and the Human Sciences). Embodied dissemination of research findings has the potential to educate and transform practitioners and citizens ‘lived understanding’ of what human phenomena are like. Such a body-based focus for disseminations draws on contemplative and interactive strategies for engaging readers and audiences drawing on the philosophy and Focusing practices of Eugene Gendlin.
References:
Galvin, K & Todres, L (2007) The creativity of ‘unspecialisation’: a contemplative direction for integrative scholarly practice. Phenomenology and Practice 1(1). Available at http://www.phandpr.org/index.php/pandp 
