Beyond prose: Review of 'Poetic Inquiry for the Humanities and Social Sciences: Voices from the South and the North'

McKenna, Sioux

Title: Beyond prose: Review of 'Poetic Inquiry for the Humanities and Social Sciences: Voices from the South and the North'
Creator: McKenna, Sioux
Subject: To be catalogued
Date Issued: 2025
Date: 2025
Type: text
Type: article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/480817
Identifier: vital:78479
Identifier: https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-sajsci-v121-n3-a11
Description: The 54 authors of this book reflect on the use of poetic inquiry at a time when feminist, decolonial, and post-humanist researchers are raising concerns about the ways in which qualitative data collection and dissemination can silence some and reduce the experiences of others by adhering to the often-arbitrary restrictions of academic texts. Poetic inquiry, the authors of this book argue, should be welcoming, invite new perspectives, and make possible alternative interpretations of the social world. Sadly, as Pithouse-Morgan indicates, poetry is often associated with negative rather than positive educational experiences (p.201). For many of us, poetry is about mysterious meanings that our schoolteachers berated us for being too dense to access. While my own interest in poetic inquiry is in how we can use it to create and disseminate research, many authors in this book, such as Hough, Peté and Ndlovu, suggest that poetry can also be used “to teach complex topics from different points of view, make people more self-aware, encourage dialogue and empathy, grow social awareness, and raise ethical questions” (p.169). Badenhorst and McLeod point out that this can be challenging when working in neoliberal universities that turn us into human capital in service of competition and efficiency over social justice and equity. They suggest that poetry can help us to shift to a world “of senses and feeling [that] can provide a way to resist the tendrils of neoliberalism” (p.126).
Format: 2 page
Format: pdf
Language: English
Relation: South African Journal of Science
Relation: McKenna, S., 2025. Beyond prose: Review of 'Poetic Inquiry for the Humanities and Social Sciences: Voices from the South and the North'
Relation: South African Journal of Science volume 121 number 1 2 2025 1996-7489
Rights: Publisher
Rights: Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Sabinet Terms and Conditions Statement (https://www.sabinet.co.za/terms-conditions)

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