The sound of violets: the ethnographic potency of poetry?

Abstract

This paper takes the form of a dialogue between the two authors, and is in two halves, the first half discursive and propositional, and the second half exemplifying the rhetorical, epistemological and metaphysical affordances of poetry in critically scrutinising the rhetoric, epistemology and metaphysics of educational management discourse.

The authors explore, through ideas and poems, how poetry can interrupt and/or illuminate dominant values in education and in educational research methods, such as:

• alternatives to the military metaphors – targets, strategies and the like – that dominate the soundscape of education;

• the kinds and qualities of the cognitive and feeling spaces that might be opened up by the shifting of methodological boundaries;

• the considerable work done in ethnography on the use of the poetic: anthropologists have long used poetry as a medium for expressing their sense of empathic connection to their field and their subjects, particularly in considering the creativity and meaning-making that characterise all human societies in different ways; and

• the particular rhetorical affordances of poetry, as a discipline, as a practice, as an art, as patterned breath; its capacity to shift phonemic, and therewith methodological, authority; its offering of redress to linear and reductive attempts at scripting social life, as always already given and without alternative.

Keywords:

• poetry
• ethnography
• educational research
• education policy
• violets

Notes

1. Wood, M. 2003. What Henry Knew. London Review of Books, December 18, 21.

2. Edward Tomas, Adlestrop.

3. William Wordsworth, Daffodils.

4. T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men.

5. Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus.