Embodied Knowledge: A Reflexive Account of Negotiating and Integrating Insider–Researcher–Practitioner Identities During a Bereavement Study

Abstract

Embodied knowledge and grief are often unaddressed in academic training and education. This article presents a reflexive and critical account of the author’s experience conducting a qualitative study on bereavement accommodation as an insider, researcher, and practitioner. Approaching herself as an object of inquiry, she considers the way her identities engage with the knowledge being generated, and the discrepancy between the values she was promoting in her work and the pressures to replicate ideologies about productivity and autonomy. The author outlines a methodological approach that applies feminist ethics beyond the data to account for the researcher and research process. The implications of placing care at the center of the labor process are discussed, including: (a) attending to embodied knowledge, interdependence, responsibilities, and invisible labor, (b) developing, implementing, and evaluating a care plan, (c) distinguishing participant and researcher voices, and (d) contributing to collective efforts to enhance bereavement care and education.

Keywords

embodied knowledge feminist ethics insider practitioner grief < bereavement

Knowledge production in social research is generated by individuals with subjectivities, leading to a responsibility and need for critical, reflexive approaches (Brennan & Letherby, 2017; Letherby, 2013). Rather than subjectivity being viewed as something lesser or a hinderance (Letherby, 2013), a researcher's reflexivity and “creative presence” in a study can be approached as an object of inquiry and resource in analysis (Eakin & Gladstone, 2020). Reflexivity can be defined as an active awareness of how personal histories, contexts, and standpoints play a critical role in shaping research processes and data (Mauthner & Doucet, 1998). In the data analysis process, “we are confronted with ourselves, and with our own central role in shaping the outcome” (Mauthner & Doucet, 1998, p. 122). Every researcher has a “sense-making apparatus” (Gladstone, 2020a), or an internal processing device that filters and interprets data in particular ways linked to the researcher's tacit knowledge, embodied experiences, context, and conceptual and/or theoretical lens. Although “unconscious” filters are incredibly difficult to access and acknowledging the self exposes researchers to criticism (Mauthner & Doucet, 1998), it is an ethical responsibility to account for how the self informs knowledge production and power is managed throughout the process.

Aiming to respond to calls for understanding the emotional impact of insider research (Kinitz, 2022; Ross, 2017), I present a reflexive and critical account of my experience conducting a qualitative study on bereavement accommodation as an insider, researcher, and practitioner. I conducted a critical qualitative health study on bereavement accommodation for workers in precarious employment in Canada (Joy, 2023). After experiencing significant health issues following data collection, I could no longer neglect my embodied knowledge. As I was trained to understand that a reflexive exploration of my presence in the research is an analytic tool and advantage (Eakin & Gladstone, 2020), I approached myself as an object of inquiry and considered the way that my presence in the research was engaging with the knowledge being generated. Therefore, I begin by offering a brief overview of my study and theoretical framework for contextual information. I share an account of how I experienced a reckoning with my embodied knowledge in the data collection phase, which led to a reflexive integration of the parts of me that were activated during this research. Then, I discuss the methodological approach I developed that applies feminist ethics (FE) beyond the data to account for the researcher and research process. Researchers experiencing embodied reactions or managing insider status may benefit from this approach as it can enhance reflexivity, coherence, and strategies to work in a sustainable way.

Context of the Bereavement Study

Impetus for the Research

After a sudden death in 2008, I felt compelled to respond to the unfolding chaos. In shock, I contacted my employer about time off from my contract job. Although compassionate about my situation, they could not accommodate a leave, so I felt I had no choice but to quit my job. In the moment, I did not have the capacity to think clearly or consider the consequences for my career. I was helping with funeral plans, answering phone calls, preparing meals, doing laundry, changing bedding, and performing general cleaning tasks.

In the following months, I began questioning the invisibility of death and bereavement in society and how unprepared I was for bereavement. For as long as humans have been living, we have been dying, so how is it possible that we are so unprepared for bereavement? None of my previous mental health training seemed relevant in the moment—anything I was trained to say seemed trite and insufficient. My assumptions about reality were shattered, driving me to learn about death and grief in professional practice and higher education.

I began volunteering and working at bereavement agencies to gain insight and better prepare for responding to death and bereavement. In doing so, I witnessed how underfunded and overburdened these agencies are, and the challenges individuals and families experience navigating death and bereavement systems. I completed a master's degree in social work in 2013, where I focused my studies on the bereavement literature and began conceptualizing the context of grief experiences in Canada. I started connecting what I was reading to what I was experiencing and witnessing in professional practice, familiarizing myself with the challenges of and barriers to grief experiences and supporting bereavement. I was curious about how some of the most painful bereavement stories I would hear went beyond the pain of grief itself and pointed to devastating complications and influences from social and economic systems, which the literature said little about at the time. These experiences informed my commitment to understanding the structural limits of bereavement care and the advocacy for grief and bereavement to be conceptualized as public health issues.

The analytic strategy of “making things strange” can be defined as identifying what is common sense or unproblematic about a phenomenon or concept and then using one's own “surprise, wonderment, or horror” to move beyond the status quo to consider the conditions of possibility for this phenomenon to exist (Gladstone, 2020b). In reflection, I can see how, over the last 15 years, I have been actively exploring the concept of grief and making bereavement “strange.” I was struck with a “different sense of the given,” which “opened up something already understood” (Jardine, 1992, p. 55). Despite having been formally trained in the therapeutic processes of grief support, following the death I was confronted by the stark reality that not only did my prior psychological grief knowledge seem irrelevant, but no organized security, support, or process was in place to help me move forward in my bereavement context. Instead of accepting these circumstances, I chose to take a posture of curiosity and problematize them.

Given that death is a condition of existence, I found it striking how our culture, systems, and policies could be so neglectful of and callous towards bereaved individuals experiencing major transitions. In professional practice, I attended to how bereaved workers must navigate policies, pressures, care pathways, cultural norms, and social dynamics. In my doctoral research, I narrowed my focus to workers in precarious employment, as it is a growing labor sector (Salter et al., 2023), a gap in the literature, and connected to my personal and professional experiences. This choice was made for feasibility and not intended to suggest that those in standard employment have positive bereavement experiences. I was specifically curious about what was happening for bereaved workers in precarious employment with limited financial or job security, and how they navigated the transitions following loss in the current Canadian context.

In the process of designing my study, I needed a methodological approach that could generate multi-level (i.e., micro, meso, macro) knowledge on the everyday experiences of bereaved workers in precarious employment. To meet that objective, this research employed critical qualitative research (CQR) using interviews and policy analysis methods. I built on the work of Macdonald et al. (2015), who first critically examined Canadian bereavement legislation. I combined CQR, policy analysis, and interviews to explore the daily experiences of bereaved workers in precarious employment in Canada and the impact of Canadian systems and labor policies. For data generation and analysis, I incorporated Feminist Ethics (FE). I was particularly drawn to FE for its ontology about interdependence and relationality, which proposes that our lives are woven together (Tronto, 1993). FE offers a lens for examining how grief impacts our capacity for care and work. It is well suited to exploring grief, as the loss of attachments, in light of interdependent relationality, impact mental and physical health, including the capacity to return to work. This approach enabled me to explore a complex phenomenon and thereby address a significant gap in the literature (Joy, 2023).

Feminist Ethics

At its foundation, FE promotes a corrective approach to dominant androcentric ethics, which are ahistorical, rational, and idealized (Liaschenko & Peter, 2006; Lindemann, 2006). Ethics can be broadly defined as the study of morality with a goal of understanding, critiquing, and correcting moral beliefs and practices (Lindemann, 2006). Traditional Anglo-European philosophical ethics generally excluded women and were produced by elite men, leading to a gender bias (Walker, 2007). Contemporary critical approaches to FE are grounded in an understanding that individual identities cannot be simplified into gender categories but are created and reinforced by complex and interlocking systems of power (Hankivsky, 2014; Liaschenko & Peter, 2006).

I focus on FE as employed by Tronto (1993, 2011, 2013, 2014a, 2014b) given her work's relevance to my topic. As a political scientist, Tronto problematizes care labor and relationality, which brings attention to not only grief and human interdependence, but also how society organizes and responds to care responsibilities for bereaved individuals, and the social, economic, and political mechanisms that function to devalue the care responsibilities associated with bereavement. Care is the central concept in her approach as she argues it underlies all human activity that functions to perpetuate existence (Tronto, 1993). Care is defined according to Fisher and Tronto (1991, as cited in Tronto, 1993, p. 103):

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.

In Moral Boundaries (1993), Tronto outlines four interconnected but analytically distinct phases of care, and then in Caring Democracy (2013) she adds a fifth phase. Each phase is associated with a moral quality of an ethic of care:

Caring about involves the recognition of unmet needs that require care, influenced by socio-cultural factors. This phase is associated with the moral quality of attentiveness, which requires a suspension of personal self-interest in order to perceive the other's perspective of their need. This capacity also applies to one's ability to be attentive to personal needs.

Taking care of describes a level of ownership and agency for meeting the need for care so that the best course of action can be assessed. If someone finds the problem too overwhelming or determines nothing can be done, the caring process ends. It is associated with the moral quality of responsibility whereby someone or a group has assumed the duty of responding to the need.

In the caregiving phase, physical work is involved to address the need. While giving money may be conceived as a way of caregiving, it still requires that someone else will have to do the physical work; therefore, there the giver and receiver of care are commonly in direct contact. This phase is associated with competence, or the judgment to know if one has adequate ability to meet the need.

Care-receiving involves an active awareness of the object of care's response to the care that was received, to assess if the need was met. Though care needs can be perceived, they may be inadequately addressed, creating further dilemmas and harm the object of care. This phase is associated with the moral quality of responsiveness, which is the capacity to acknowledge and assess the response from the object of care to determine if one has adequately met the need.

Caring with specifies that the care approach is aligned with the “democratic commitments to justice, equality, and freedom for all” (Tronto, 2013, p. 23). This phase is associated with the moral qualities of plurality, communication, trust, respect, and solidarity, which aims to capture the necessary ethics for collective relationality and responsibility in a caring society.

Tronto (2013) argues that society is caught in a vicious, toxic cycle where dependence on needing money overrides democracy and the “common good,” and fosters fear and insecurity in the population. She insists that at every level of life we need to focus on the best ways we can build capacity to care with each other. Rather than suggesting that we ignore economic production, Tronto (2013) challenges how the language of economics has taken over politics, and argues that to work towards freedom, we need to rethink our social, economic, and political systems and practices democratically, as we all benefit from respecting our care work and relationships. Neoliberalism has devalued care by creating an intolerable situation of limited work leaves, less job security, less time, increasing workloads, and commodification of daily living (Robinson, 2015). Tronto (2013) puts forward that care and the responsibilities for caring—not economics—must become the center of a democratic political society.

Embodied Knowledge

Mind–body distinctions have been critiqued in academia for decades (e.g., Glover, 2024; Leigh & Brown, 2021; Snowber, 2018; Tantia, 2019). Though terms like “embodied” or “embodiment” are considered contentious in their definitions, the common assumption between different perspectives is that the body and mind are inseparable (Leigh & Brown, 2021). Snowber (2016, 2018) advocates that the body can be conceptualized as a place of inquiry, intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom. Through the influence of methodologies such as autoethnography and phenomenology scholars have worked to generate space to discuss how the body lives and feels in research (Snowber, 2018). A researcher's body may be immersed in contexts that require the researcher to live “…what is new, unexplored, and not understood at this point,” transforming them through being involved in the research (Leigh & Brown, 2021, p. 23). Attending to embodied knowledge may be particularly significant for researchers with insider status.

In this way, while generating reflexive memos throughout the research, I noted that in the midst of data collection I experienced an unexpected emotional and physical reaction. According to university requirements, I was extremely capable and prepared to do this study: at the time I had been in the bereavement field for 15 years and the mental health sector for 17 years; I am a registered social worker who has engaged with countless bereaved clients; I excelled academically, which included qualitative methodological training; and I received ethics approval, which required planning the practicalities of the research and thinking through mitigating the risks and harms to myself and the participants. However, much like the onset and initiation of motherhood, I could not have anticipated the emotional and physical impact on my body of interviewing so many participants with heavy, resonating stories, and how I would be required to negotiate my identities in the interview process.

Initially, I did not connect my physical health to the research. In late December 2019, I experienced intense abdominal pain, and felt incredibly nauseous and fatigued, hardly able to get up or out of bed. Then, on January 6, 2020, I was in so much pain that I admitted myself to a hospital's Emergency Department—an ordeal that led to knowing I was not in imminent danger. None of the tests or blood work led to any obvious conclusions at the time. I assumed I was dealing with a purely physical issue; however, a few days after going to the hospital, I realized that the loss that initiated my journey in this field and research topic occurred on that same day in 2008. Struck by this realization, I paused and reflected more deeply: How do my identities engage in particular ways with the knowledge being generated?

I situate myself as a mixed-race, settler, and cis-gender woman who grew up in a conservative setting in Alberta, Canada, where women took on traditional caregiving roles and invisible labor. Consistent with mixed-race scholarship (e.g., Albuja et al., 2018; Wagner, 2015), I navigate the identities and tensions of being a mixed-race researcher, never certain of how I will be perceived or categorized. Although I am different from my participants in age, race, type of loss experienced, and socioeconomic status, I have insider status, or membership with the research group (Finefter-Rosenbluh, 2017), given that I share the experience of being a bereaved worker and caregiver in precarious employment. While I remained attentive to power dynamics, insider status did seem to create a foundational level of rapport (Kinitz, 2022). Participants understood that I am on the side of bereaved workers, with a strong sense of desiring a more just society that is better equipped to respond to loss, which impacts how I direct my attention and interpret data. When the participants were in tears expressing grief and pain, my empathy—the part of me that shares similar feelings—was activated in an embodied physiological way. Not only did I hear participants’ words, but my body physically remembered a depth of longing for the deceased, a sense of helplessness from losing a loved one, the state of shock that can last for months, unfair pressures to make premature and difficult life decisions, feeling out of control from riding a physical and emotional rollercoaster while attempting to return to regular functioning, and anger at the lack of support. While I had not experienced the death of a child, I am a parent, meaning that I have embodied knowledge and an instinctual fear of losing a child, which became activated when I listened to participant stories of child loss.

In addition, I am a registered social worker and therapist who specializes in trauma and grief in my private practice. I adhere to a code of ethics from my professional college and have been trained to hear and respond to human needs expressed verbally and non-verbally. With this orientation, I was in a position to make quick moral and ethical decisions during participant interviews as I navigated a fine line between being a researcher and therapist. I was fine-tuned to the nuances of participant experiences and expressions because I could draw on my embodied knowledge, practice experience, and both my theoretical and conceptual knowledge of the field to inform my responses in the interviews. I had one participant at the end of the session say, “I should be paying you” as she had been in therapy for years and recognized the supportive nature of my attention and approach. In my head, a part of me understood she had a point as those skills were active in the session, although not included in the formal conceptions of data collection. What made this situation particularly complex for me was oscillating between ensuring I asked the necessary questions to do my research, offering appropriate and caring responses, and responding with physical and emotional resonance from being an insider.

Although I had read literature on researchers undertaking interviews on sensitive topics (Cain, 2012; Dickson-Swift et al., 2007), there was little mention of the implications of being a researcher-practitioner with insider status in my training. Kinitz (2022) highlights the importance of embodied reflexivity, access to methodological training, and institutional support for researchers with insider status. Although I have a great support system in place (e.g., regular counseling, a solid health team, a loving partner, and a supportive supervisor and committee), I felt pulled in different directions as I engaged in the emotional labor of managing my multiple roles. Initially developed by Hochschild (1983), the concept of emotional labor is used to describe the commonly invisible work of managing internal emotions and the emotions of others, although it tends not to be applied to researchers as it is a point of ambivalence whether researchers should engage with participant emotions (Cain, 2012; Dickson-Swift et al., 2007). However, given the nature of my topic, emotions were assumed to be inevitable and shared in ethical ways (Cain, 2012). Due to feeling rules, or implicit social norms governing emotions in specific social situations (Cain, 2012), emotions are often suppressed due to the stigma around grief. This applies to the participants’ bereavement stories as well as my emotional responses to their stories, as a part of professionalism is to delay emotional reactions as they may not be appropriate with participants and/or clients—a form of emotional labor. Maintaining confidentiality is a high ethical priority, although carrying the weight of what is protected as confidential can be understood as another form of emotional labor. Further, my participants’ stories have led to me reassessing aspects of my own bereavement story and life, which connects to what Jardine (1992) writes about the process of interpretation shifting self-understanding. The knowledge that participants have shared both complements and expands my own working knowledge of death and bereavement, especially as an insider. I found myself angry about new aspects of my bereavement story, which prompted me to get my affairs in order with a lawyer and triggered more active death anxiety—even before the pandemic.

Jardine (1992) and Freeman (2014) discuss how the aim of hermeneutic analysis is to propel us into new ways of seeing what is taken for granted. In this way, my strong reaction to this work is a form of data and shifted my understanding of the interviews. In my research process, which is focused on a framework of problematizing care, I took a step back to see that I was replicating the dominant ideologies and norms in the way I was functioning—the same ideologies and norms that I was advocating against in my research. FE was directing my attention to embodiment, care, human interdependence, how society organizes and responds to care responsibilities for bereaved individuals, and the social, political, and economic mechanisms that devalue care responsibilities associated with bereavement. Despite this theoretical awareness, I felt the pressure to operate according to the dominant capitalist norms about autonomy, productivity, and labor. I was functioning as an autonomous being capable of endless productivity, greatly underestimating the invisible emotional labor I had taken on and its impact on my body and my mental and emotional health. I was nearly derailed from completing this research countless times: as a new mother losing childcare and saturated in death counts and media stories during the pandemic while writing about grief and death, not to mention as a caregiver navigating the stress of caring for multiple family members experiencing COVID-19, my own health issues, and two deaths in the family.

I came to see a parallel between being a bereaved PhD student in precarious labor and generating knowledge with my participants about their bereavement experiences navigating precarious employment and invisible labor. I was a bereaved worker in precarious employment while grieving and gathering data on precarious employment in bereavement during a global pandemic. After my own physical reaction, I gained a new appreciation for why our socio-political systems neglect emotionality and attending to bereavement, as my reaction did require me to pause my productivity. In my therapeutic work I have supported numerous bereaved individuals; however, this research moves beyond supporting grief, as I managed multiple roles, immersed myself in death and grief data, and analyzed the failures and dysfunction in the bereavement system.

The implications of these insights highlighted conceptual and embodied shifts in my research process. For one, differentiating between my voice as the researcher and what the participants are expressing needs careful attention and has ethical implications (Eakin & Gladstone, 2020; Mauthner & Doucet, 1998). Being an insider does not create a direct pathway to knowledge (Doucet & Mauthner, 2006); I used my power as a researcher to be conscious of not collapsing participant data with my interpretations and experiences. To put this into practice, I employed Mauthner and Doucet (1998)'s Voice-Centered Relational Method (VCRM) as an approach to early readings of my interview data as it facilitates linking data to interpretation, upholding the value of distinguishing researcher and participant voices, and delaying reductionistic thematic analysis (Joy, 2023). The VCRM involves four readings of the data (Mauthner & Doucet, 1998). In the first reading, the analyst reads for the plot while simultaneously reading for their own emotional and intellectual responses to the data. Second, analysts can read for the participants’ voice of “I,” how they speak about themselves through multiple voices, and their sense of reality, with attention to social location. Third, analysts can read for interpersonal relationships and dynamics in the text. Finally, analysts can read for participants’ experiences in specific social, cultural, and political contexts. My understanding of the phenomenon was reconceptualized by these early engagements with interview data, through the thoughtful and careful linkages of text to interpretation, generating a more transparent analysis.

Further, my embodied experiences demanded care and attention, and to be a part of the inquiry. I had to resist doing the work from the perspective of dominant capitalist ideologies, like an autonomous object of productivity, immune to emotions or endless invisible labor. I continued to practice defining my position, presence, and assumptions in the research process, facilitating an awareness of myself as the research instrument and of the evolution of my interpretation and analysis. As I immersed myself in analysis through the lens of FE, I recognized a need to evolve my thinking and approach to be more aligned with my theoretical framework. In part due to a crisis related to being able to respond to my caregiving responsibilities, I finally clearly realized that I was not adequately caring for myself.

Application of Feminist Ethics to My Self and Research Process

As Tronto's (1993) work is aligned with critical reflexive approaches, it is necessary to convey how I was confronted by the limits of my training and understanding of myself as a research tool, and the need to evolve my approach to be able to complete this work from a position of care and wellbeing. As an insider, I could identify and resonate with participant experiences and the need for care. As a practitioner, I assessed that my grief and embodied needs were activated, and that my current approach to functioning was not sustainable. In a moment of creativity, I felt compelled to apply Tronto's (1993) phases of care to myself and my process.

Initially, I assessed that I did not pass phase one to the extent that I was not even able to view myself as something to care about. In my previous thinking, I considered myself to be doing what PhD students are expected to do: to focus on one's ethical responsibilities to one's participants and to complete the work regardless of its personal effects. My attention was on my responsibilities to my participants, clients, and family. There was limited room to consider my needs. In my academic training, there were only superficial discourses suggesting students or social workers should “self-care” or that their mental health matters; it is still treated as an individual responsibility. Meanwhile, grief and stress were wreaking havoc on my physical health. When the global pandemic hit, I was managing grief on unprecedented levels. My body in its wisdom started increasingly screaming “stop.”

After the trip to the Emergency Department, my realization crystallized about how absurd it was that I was doing this work without engaging with the spirit or meaning of my theoretical framework in my own life. Therefore, I recognized the need for care and moved to the phase of taking care of with my supervisor's and department's support. Taking responsibility to address what was within my control, I attended to my situation and devised a plan for meeting my needs. I needed to slow down, reflect, and manage unpaid, invisible, and domestic labor. I took a leave of absence to care for my then toddler. I started somatic and trauma-specific therapies to work directly to calm my body and nervous system. I created boundaries around my capacity to work, understanding my interdependence with all those depending on me to show up with presence. FE had awakened me to new levels of consciousness about the organization and minutiae of the labor in which I was participating, so I could name and better renegotiate it with my partner.

I then engaged in an iterative process of caregiving and care-receiving. Becoming an object of care, I was able to try different strategies to address my grief and needs while judging if they were more adequately met. Often this stage of assessment is missed. I had to implement and evaluate my care plan, assessing if my strategies were effective. There were phases of trial and effort as I practiced radical honesty as to whether my strategies were offering relief. I was conscious of staying responsive to any time my body communicated my grief or any time my stress levels were rising and the strategies I could use to respond. In this phase, I created a system to judge whether I was in the green, yellow, or red zone of functioning. The green zone included when I was operating in optimal functioning with health and wellness. The red zone was when my body and nervous system were dysregulated and not in a position to work. For example, sometimes I was so overwhelmed and anxious in the pandemic with my daughter at home and the rising death counts that I could not focus. Pushing myself to work in a state of fear and overwhelm was unproductive and harmful. Once I sensed I was starting to notice my grief, dysregulation, or movement towards collapse (the yellow zone), I learned strategies to pay attention and stop my production, even if I only had brief moments to cry in the shower. Abiding with grief became a regular practice, noticing and allowing the waves to pass. As a care receiver, riding or allowing the grief waves instead of resisting them or distracting myself was a far more effective strategy for regaining my balance in the long run. I also worked in my private practice to encourage my clients to expect the waves and allow them, which was a practice that elicited positive feedback. I can now clearly distinguish when grief is present in my body and make space to experience and honor it. It is utterly painful and uncomfortable, but grief works its magic, and I am transformed yet again. I was also dependent on a team of supervisors (e.g., a PhD supervisor and two clinical supervisors) and practitioners to offer guidance and strategies in a complicated time when planning ahead felt futile.

Aligned with Tronto's fifth stage, I was increasingly aware that I was engaging in a process that was working toward collective democratic justice and freedom—moving toward “care with” each other (Tronto, 2013). Rather than viewing caring for myself as a contained, individual-level process that ends the caring, I saw myself operating in multiple caring processes that engaged with collective healing. I was conscious that there is no honor or benefit in continuing to neglect my health and suffer burnout for the greater good. Ignoring my trauma and embodied needs only shrunk my capacity to function. While caring for myself was a privileged activity, I argue that my gains in wellbeing only added to my sense of responsibility to work towards collective equity, healing, and justice. In order to engage in justice work ethically and with integrity, I had to create a sustainable path and strategies to work harmoniously and attentively with my grieving body, as well as take responsibility for what was within my control while so much felt outside of my control during the pandemic. From a place of grounded embodied wellness, as someone accounted for in caring activities, I experienced more internal space and freedom to engage with the grief of others and observe what was happening to the collective on more macro political levels in the unfolding events of the pandemic. I was able to read and resonate with my participant data on a deeper level. I was able to think more clearly about my analysis. I was a more capable therapist, student, educator, and mother. This approach expanded the possibilities of sustainable practice. Further, from this position I could work to participate in collective efforts to enhance bereavement care. I am now a member of the International Working Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement, where I collaborate with scholars from around the world to brainstorm how to address issues in the field. I also developed and launched the Grief Education Program in 2021 at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Informed by FE, I sought to enhance grief literacy through an educational approach that encourages learners to connect and reflexively engage with grief, the bereavement literature, and macro forces impacting grief.

Deeply engaged with FE, I recognized that my body demanded attention. It demanded acknowledgement of the interdependent web of relations and labor I was participating in. From this approach, I became more attentive and flexible to my body's signals. Instead of forcing and pushing, I began respecting that staring at a computer screen, especially in the early pandemic, did not produce creative energy. Since the shift, to engage my creative capacities, I would wander into a nearby forest to let other parts of my consciousness take over. I would dance, sing, garden, and sit in silence, dialoging with the data. Whenever I got frustrated or stuck, I would surrender, leave, and then come back with more refreshed energy. I would allow myself space and time to stay in the wordless energy, equipped with strategies to return to the green zone in my functioning, and then witness if more ideas crystallized. In a non-linear, fluid process, I developed a new relationship with my grieving body and capacity to work.

Conclusion

Despite the pressure to be productive as a seemingly autonomous worker, this journey has led me to the conclusion that how I work matters. The presence and energy I brought to my productivity mattered in my research process and analysis, especially when navigating a sensitive topic during a pandemic. Ethically, I was required to show up to the participant interviews in a good way to create supportive containers for building trust during data collection. I also needed mental space and a calm nervous system for tending to the data with care and creativity. I recognize the relevance of these realizations as they relate to the larger context of how bereaved workers can return to work and productivity. To echo my study's research findings (Joy, 2023), bereaved workers would benefit from being given the space and support to attend to their internal wellbeing and assess their grief so that they can best engage with their labor and productivity.

A methodological contribution emerged from how I negotiated and engaged my identities as an insider, practitioner, and researcher, evolving my research process through the application of FE. While studying FE, I grappled with how I was replicating dominant ideologies and norms about productivity, labor, and autonomy in my research process, despite grieving during a pandemic and engaging in precarious labor. To enhance the integrity of my study, I applied my theoretical framework not only to the participant data, but to myself and the research process. At the time, I did not pass phase one to view myself as requiring care and attention. It seemed counterintuitive to produce research on supporting wellbeing while I was experiencing grief, the stress of being a student, and compromised mental and physical health. Taking responsibility to address what was within my control, I began applying each phase of care to myself, devised and implemented a plan for meeting my needs, and then evaluated whether the needs were met. It became increasingly clear that the energy and presence that I brought to my productivity mattered, as I experienced the benefits of placing care at the center of my labor process, which expanded my capacity to focus, create, and continue to work. The implications of placing care at the center of the labor process included: (a) attending to embodied knowledge, interdependence, responsibilities, and invisible labor, (b) developing, implementing, and evaluating a care plan, (c) distinguishing participant and researcher voices, and (d) contributing to collective efforts to enhance bereavement care and education. Researchers who are managing multiple identities, including insider status, and experiencing embodied reactions, may consider this approach as a guide to evaluating how one is fairing, and creating supportive and sustainable strategies for work while experiencing grief.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholarship.

ORCID iD

Karima Joy

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