Artful Engagement with the Concept of Identity: Using Poetic Transcription to Reimagine Participant Voices

Abstract

In this article, the primary author explores the use of poetic transcriptions as a method to enhance evaluation and social impact assessment data analysis and dissemination. The construction of the poetic transcriptions and the artful method of analysis allows for a more explicit acknowledgment of the researchers’ entanglements with both the data and the program being evaluated. Using a specific lens of identity, the authors posit that a culturally responsive approach to evaluation using arts-based analyses may reveal methodological and empirical insights overlooked in previous engagements with qualitative evaluation data.

Keywords

poetic transcription evaluation entanglement arts-based methods

“Epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies all begin as embodiments within a local mind. Self is the site of such research, and embodiments of the modern and postmodern selves are its data. Not the self in abstract but the self in its living, breathing, reconstituting body.” (Rolling, 2004, p. 877)

Arts-based methods have a long history within the study of identity as a means to portray personal and intimate subjects (Furman et al., 2007; Muncey, 2005). Poetry, used as a documentation of social phenomena, can help communicate about the multiple truths within the human experience, disclosing sources of knowledge not often consulted within the positivist, objectivist paradigm (Furman et al., 2007). According to Freeman (2016), “poetical thinking… is felt experience; the experience of being in the whirlpool of sensuous flow that we are as experiencing beings” (p. 72, emphasis original). Poetical thinking represents a shift from an epistemological and representational way of knowing to an ontological, non-representative way of thinking (Freeman, 2016). Poised as an alternative to linear modes of thinking, poetical thinking and analysis offers a “multidimensional and insightful form of social science writing to engage more diverse audiences” (Cahnmann-Taylor, 2008, p. 639). Engaging in poetical research reflects a core phenomenological process and conceptualization of experience, seeking to “reveal experience as it is experienced, not as it is thought” (Freeman, 2016, p. 75).

Data used in the current study was collected as part of an evaluation of a community-based health promotion project in the state of Georgia. The study focus was to elucidate the concept of identity related to this project (Healthier Together [HT]) funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. The HT project aims to increase healthy food availability and consumption as well as physical activity opportunities in five rural Georgia counties where obesity affects more than 40% of the local population. The project is community-directed through community coalitions, which are groups of individuals who come together to achieve a common goal and have decision-making power within a community-based initiative (Christens & Inzeo, 2015). Coalition effectiveness is impacted by the cohesiveness, diversity, and structure of a group (Zakocs & Edwards, 2006) and by a community’s social, cultural, and historical context (Kegler et al., 2010). The current study represents a reengagement with data originally collected for evaluation purposes, to determine to what extent evaluators and researchers can further explore participants’ lived experiences within their communities, which are a focal point for the evaluation effort. To more appropriately engage the data in a culturally responsive manner, the first author oriented the work around the concept of identity in an effort to enhance communication and engagement with community members by external project collaborators. The concept of identity guides the research inquiry more broadly, and the current manuscript explores the potential of poetic transcription to disrupt previous conceptualizations of identity present within the data from a traditional coding analytic practice. By focusing on common patterns and moving toward an analytic practice using MacLure’s (2013a, 2013b) concept of wonder combined with an arts-based approach allowed for an exploration into participants’ individual experiences and narrative expressions of identity within the community-based project.

The overall purpose of the line of research inquiry, related to but separate from the evaluation of the HT project, was to develop a conceptualization of the influence of cultural identity within the HT project to inform public health and community development practice using community-based program evaluation. Following the work of Fine (1994) and Wagle and Cantaffa (2008), who encourage researchers to explore the ways lived experiences of participants are taken up within qualitative research, the current study investigates identity relations within community-based evaluation and research, attending to how arts-based analyses allow researchers to engage with data in new ways. Specifically, the authors responded to Wagle and Cantaffa’s (2008) exploration of:

...how [their] research projects are situated within the context of [their] identities and how [their] identities have shifted throughout [the] research processes in relation to the identities of [their] participants [...and] how all of this matters to our projects in terms of connections with and access to our research sites and participants (p. 136).

Primarily, this work aims to emphasize how identity is perceived and how the HT project either supports or negates the community’s collective and individual identities. Identity as a holistic concept, especially collective or community identity, is understudied within public health research. The authors hope to conceptualize identity within a community-directed public health initiative in order to educate professionals engaged in program development and evaluation to consider identity when engaging with communities. Often, collecting demographic data suffices to cover the representation required to determine if a study is impacting the anticipated target groups. However, as outsiders tasked with allocating funding from community outreach or public health organizations, we come into a community and try to use best practices for change while not attending to whether we are destroying a critical piece of the community with our initiatives (Rogers, 2010). Through combining arts-based approaches, such as poetical analysis, with evaluation, which is traditionally situated within a positivist paradigm (Kaholokula et al., 2018; Parker, 2004), the authors hope to encourage practitioners to consider the concept of identity in their work by connecting with their work in a more deeply personal way, demonstrating how the aesthetics of poetry and science research can be blended and blurred to carve out space for new ways of knowing and engaging with lived experience (Lahman et al., 2019).

Evaluation, Social Impact, and the Inclusion of Identity

Evaluation research aims to more holistically explore social impacts which affect people’s physical, political, interpersonal, and intrapersonal lives (Borron et al., 2019; Jones et al., 2017). Research methodologies addressing and analyzing social impacts may act as an entry point into program evaluation and community engagement in a way that promotes parity and integrity on behalf of participants (Borron et al., 2019; Gust & Jordan, 2006; Srinivas et al., 2015). Broadly defined, social impact refers to the effect of a program or entity on the well-being of a specific population or community (Borron et al., 2019; Franz et al., 2014). Social impacts relate to conceptualizations of identity, both individual and collective, and culture, as social constructions are key to cultural orientations of how humans view themselves and their environment (Burdge & Vanclay, 1996). A social impact approach to evaluation represents a transition from an external to internal frame of reference with community-engaged research (Borron et al., 2019). Using social impact as a starting point, conceptualizing what identity means to a particular community may limit the use of evaluation as a compliance-oriented profession (Symonette, 2004) and move toward a culturally responsive method of community-engaged practice (Howard et al., 2020). Identity here not only refers to the identities of those being evaluated; rather, using a lens of identity should encourage researchers to engage in critically reflexive practice to understand how their own identity influences their interactions with others (Gross, 2000; Pon, 2009). Researcher reflexivity and entanglement with the evaluation process may further be enhanced by arts-based approaches to disseminating evaluation data (Clough, 2002; Johnson et al., 2013). Using arts-based methods to explore the social impacts of community-based health promotion interventions, rather than relying on objective, positivist, data-driven methods for evaluation, allows a disruption of the boundary between researcher and researched through an affective methodology.

The original definition of identity used in the current line of research inquiry, of which this study is a part, referred to the dialectical and dialogical process between the individual and the collective, shaped by the interconnected web of histories, social structures, and power relations in which a person’s or group’s sense of self is formed (Dutta, 2008; Weir, 2009; Wodak & Meyer, 2015). Part of the current approach to understanding identity is integrating history and a place-based approach, as “the longer a person stays in a place the greater the likelihood of the place being incorporated into the identity structure” (Anton & Lawrence, 2014, p. 452). However, using an arts-based and poetic approach, the authors wanted to move from a critical dialectic mode of analysis to using poetical thinking to think beyond the binary dictated by much of the dialectic literature (Freeman, 2016). While the authors believe that identity can serve as a source of both individual and collective meaning, they agree with Weir (2009) that it can also serve “as a source of oppressive constraint… an obstacle to self-creation and a barrier to freedom” (p. 534). Thus, analyzing identity requires more than a dialectical way of thinking. Using poetical thinking, we can access the senses, causing our readers to pause, reflect, and feel (Glesne, 1997). Through poetry, “language is charged, intensified, and concentrated” (Drury, 1991, p. 5). By orienting an evaluation around the concept of identity, the authors aimed to employ Fine’s (1994) suggestion that “researchers probe how we are in relation with the contexts we study and with our informants, understanding that we are all multiple in those relations” (p. 72). Through engaging with the concept of identity in the research, they explored the “hyphen” (Fine, 1994) in the moments where the researcher and the researched become entangled (Wagle & Cantaffa, 2008). Identity as an orienting lens not only illuminates the entanglement between researcher/researched, removing the binary categorizations assumed in the relationship, but also allows researchers to elucidate further participants’ lived experiences within a specific context or community.

Methodology

Poetical analysis is a relatively novel analytic method in evaluation research (Johnson et al., 2013), but as poetry is entangled within the affective domain, researchers using this approach write primarily for the reader, inviting them to experience new feelings and understandings (Lahman et al., 2019). However, evaluation traditionally has been driven by the postpositivist paradigm, which is concerned with empirical methodological rigor and evidence-based practice (Kaholokula et al., 2018; Parker, 2004). According to Glesne (1997), through “the process of blurring boundaries, experimental writing helps to heal wounds of scientific categorization and technological dehumanization. With its aesthetic sensibilities, experimental writing can introduce spirit, imagination” (p. 214). To build knowledge of a specific phenomenon, poetical writing and analysis can enrich current scientific endeavors and language, crafting more complex images of human life—a view shaped by the invocation of lived experience (Öhlen, 2003). Writing social science research often positions the researcher as talking or speaking for the participants, indicating a power dynamic with the researcher crafting a specific narrative. Regardless of the content, researchers use their authority and privilege to speak for and about the participants, sometimes hiding behind the lens of objectivity to do so (Aluwihare-Samaranayake, 2012; Richardson, 1992; Rorty, 1979). The experimental form of poetic analysis simply makes the staging we do as researchers more evident (Glesne, 1997), limiting the ways we might obstruct the voices of participants through traditional, categorical methods of analysis (Freeman, 2016). Combining an arts-based approach with a specific focus on identity in community-engaged research will hopefully mitigate the unintended consequences and potential replication of unjust oppressive narratives constructed on behalf of target populations by academics and practitioners participating in these spaces. However, an intentional invocation of reflexivity is critical when engaging in representational qualitative research (Pillow, 2010).

Within qualitative research, specifically work directly using and co-constructing the voices of participants, it is important to consider the question: “how do I do representation knowing that I can never quite get it right?” (Pillow, 2010, p. 176). Constructing poems aimed to illuminate certain aspects of participants’ identity calls into question the “accuracy” or trustworthiness of the data. Using reflexivity related to representation in qualitative research “becomes important to demonstrate one’s awareness of the research problematics and is often used to potentially validate and legitimize the research precisely by raising questions about the research process” (Pillow, 2010, p. 179). This type of reflexivity is termed positional validity, in which the researcher thinks through the factors impacting the research process, the related implications, and engages in self-disclosure (Macbeth, 2001). Working at the nexus of poetic transcription and identity theory, it is critical to consider the ethnocentric power within qualitative research (Pillow, 2010). The nature of qualitative work unavoidably implicates the authors in the representational exercise (Macbeth, 2001) - making reflexivity key to ethical research. However, the authors cannot remove themselves, their identities, or their cultures completely in the analytic process (Clifford, 1988; Macbeth, 2001), something important to consider while conducting qualitative work related to identity. We hope to highlight the research process and illuminate for the readers potential issues of representation through directly presenting positional validity with transparency of the analytic process.

The following research questions undergirded the inquiry:

1. What can poetic transcriptions illuminate about identity within the HT project?

2. What methodological insights were gained as a result of using poetic transcription?

Data collection occurred as part of a 5-year evaluation plan to assess project outcomes and impact, through an appreciative inquiry approach (Preskill & Catsambas, 2006). Data were collected in April and May of 2020 through phone interviews with members of the community coalitions in each county. Community coalitions were formed at the onset of the project to guide on-the-ground project development and decision-making. Coalition members worked closely with faculty and staff from the University of Georgia for project development. Members of the coalition were often pre-established community leaders and were self-appointed to serve on the coalitions. For data analysis, the first author engaged in poetic transcription (Glesne, 1997) to articulate the meaningfulness of themes generated through thematic analysis (Hill, 2005) using an arts-based approach centering the voices of the participants in an attempt to move away from categorical thinking (Freeman, 2016).

A methodological and epistemological note: it was not the authors’ intention with this research to assign identities; rather, they intended to use poetic transcriptions (Glesne, 1997) to illuminate the embodied interactions within an immersed state of being (Freeman, 2016). Narrative and poetical forms of thinking, due to their dynamic and action-oriented nature, contributed to increased performativity in social science research, also known as the performative turn (Freeman, 2016; Conquergood, 1989). A performative research approach to social science research can help us “understand how… narratives are created through performativity, emerging through daily embodied interactions, even as cultural discourses of professionalism seek to render bodies irrelevant” (Scott, 2011, p. 238–239).

Poetic Transcriptions

Engagement with poetic interpretations of participant speech is a form of qualitative work that emphasizes different ways of becoming entangled with social identity, equity, and access to capital, whether cultural, linguistic, or educational (Cahnmann-Taylor, 2008). The particular way of engaging data poetically varies by each researcher, but the primary author was inspired to follow Glesne’s (1997) concept of poetic transcription, or the “creation of poemlike compositions from the words of interviewees… creat[ed] with data from a study such as interview transcripts” (p. 202–205). In this style of transcription, each poem represents a theme related to the concept of identity from one participant’s perspective (Carr, 2003; Hill, 2005). Themes were developed through thematic analysis of the data from an inductive approach to address the intersection of community and individual-identity within participant narratives of the community-based health intervention. Thematic analysis was conducted to investigate overall gestalt within the data and to ascertain the extent to which identity was identified in the transcripts, related to participants’ lived experiences in the project. From the thematic analysis, three themes were identified which merited further exploration within the data due to the knowledge of and immersion in the data, and understanding of participants’ contexts. These three themes were selected due to their potential explanatory power for program coordinators to more appropriately interact with community-members within the community-based health promotion initiative. These three themes were the role of religion within rural communities, feelings of being an outsider by new community members, and historical race relations within rural communities. Each theme was developed related to the specific context of the five rural communities within the project, and is not meant to be generalized to all rural communities, though practitioners and researchers may benefit from reading about the themes within the context of this rural health promotion intervention. For each theme, there was a specific participant that embodied the theme strongly through their responses to interview questions, so poetic transcription was used to further explore participants’ narratives and lived experiences related to the identified themes.

To craft the poetic transcriptions, the first author limited the extraction of verbatim phrases from the transcripts to those that represented the particular theme from one participant’s transcript at a time. In this way, she hoped to ensure a poem that represented the voice of a single participant (Carr, 2003). To create each poem, she selected the phrases which embodied the particular theme identified, and eliminated certain words and moved others around, inserting repetitive phrases for emphasis where needed. This included eliminating words that directly discussed project logistics, which would distract from the theme in focus. The first author also relied on MacLure’s (2013b) conceptualization of wonder in data, remaining open to surprise to recognizing invitations within the data, and, “once invited in, [my] task [was] to experiment and see where it takes [me]” (p. 231). MacLure (2013a, 2013b) uses moments of wonder, or intensity, that emanates from data to explore data, remaining attuned to our embodied interactions and reactions to the data, such as a feeling in one’s gut or a quickening heartbeat that alerts us there is something there within the data. This wonder emanates from a particular fragment of text but also “in the person that is affected… [choosing] something that has chosen me… [a] mutual ‘affection’ that constitutes” the assemblage of data and researcher (MacLure, 2013b, p. 229). Moments of wonder aid in the analytical process by confounding one’s traditional conceptualization of themes in the data, while simultaneously exerting a fascination embodied within the researcher, spurred by the data, which animates further thought. Using MacLure’s (2013a, 2013b) wonder as analytic practice, the first author remained open to embodied moments of recognition within the selected transcripts that prompted me to think more about how identity manifests in the data, an affective relation between myself, the researcher, and the data. Specifically, using wonder as an orienting analytical concept, the first author included phrases in the poems which represented areas of space to pause and reflect on identity—moments when the participants revealed pieces of themselves and their identity in ways they might not have consciously recognized.

Rorty (1979) accounts for accuracy of representation by the researcher on behalf of the participant within qualitative research by advocating a move away from the quest for objectivity, “embra[cing] a contingent understanding of phenomenon…” by “engaging in continuous reflection, questioning, dialogue, and praxis” (Aluwihare-Samaranayake, 2012, p. 71). To account for the ethics of representation within poetic transcription, the first author engaged in an iterative process of reflection and questioning of her own assumptions while crafting the poetic transcriptions. The first author specifically used positional validity as a reflexive practice to provide self-disclosure in the analytic process to help contextualize the poetic transcriptions and deconstruct their representation as a specific truth (Pillow, 2010). Through the analytic process the first author reveals the entanglement between her perspective as the researcher and her interpretation of the participant’s voice, specifically in an analysis of how the poetic constructions relate to her own perception and construction of identity within research. Thus, to demonstrate this entanglement, she reflected on the poetic process, with specific focus on exposing her own vulnerability through poetic transcription. Through this process, her sense of self shows through in the creation of the poetry, though the words are not hers. The first author constructed the words of the participants in ways that appeal to her specific research inquiry. The themes selected and the names of the poems represented how the first author interpreted participants’ voices, and how she felt they can be used to advance her exploration of identity. While the research goal was to discover what poetic analysis can help uncover about identity within the transcripts, which methodologically, she cannot separate her own identity, preferences, and social constructions as a person external to these communities from the analytic process.

The following poetic transcriptions attempt to illuminate multifaceted aspects of identity. Thematic concepts guiding the poetic transcriptions included religion, feelings of being an outsider, and relations between history and place. The primary author constructed the first poem from the words of Amelia, a retired teacher and “busy” grandmother. Amelia’s poem provides insight to the role of religion within a specific rural community. Roger, a recent resident to the community, provided data for the second poem. Roger described how he and his wife felt like outsiders to the community, having lived in more urban areas prior to their move. Roger’s poem explores the dichotomy between insider/outsider and the difficulty acculturating to a new community. Finally, Don, a member of the county government and self-identified history aficionado, provided the data from which the first author constructed the third poem. Don’s poem presents a snapshot of the history of his community and provides an example of the ways people might try to distance themselves from the negative histories of our communities. Roger and Don were from the same county, while Amelia was from a different county; though all three were involved with the HT coalitions in their respective counties.

Table 1 provides a methodological example of the poetic transcription process for Amelia’s poem. Bolded terms in the transcript indicate phrases that were extracted to create the poetic transcription.

Table 1.

Comparison of Amelia’s Transcript with Poetic Transcription.

Interviewer (I): Can you describe the history of your community?
Amelia (A): My community is a little small town, and it’s kind of just a little quiet community, not very much in it to do… I go to church. We have a lot of churches around. We go to church. We have a lot of churches in this community… [Break]
I: Do you think that’s going to change the way you as a coalition work in the future once coronavirus is gone?
A: That is the thing that bothered me so much. The people in our world today, when there’s a problem, you get togetherness and as soon… But you can barely answer because we had Hurricane Michael come through and all of that, and you reached out to people. After that was over things got back. But after this, I got faith that people are going to… I just got that faith that people are going to try to show more love. I have faith that the people that pull through will think about what happened and what could have happened. I believe they’re going to show more love because love is what we actually need in this world. I believe they going to show more love. That’s what I’m hoping for. [Break]
A: …Whatever we are doing, we need to take the Lord. We need to, a lot of people don’t believe in the Lord, but I think the Lord is, should be our leader, and our guide, and our leader in this coalition. We need to take some spiritual guidance along with us. And another thing we like to take, we need to take some guidance for children. We need to stop. Every time a child do wrong, we tie him down. We need to try to uplift our children and encourage our children to have better respect, better confidence, and be more positive-minded kids. We need to try to have some kind of strength and guidance for our children also.

Preacher.
they call me a preacher when I start talking.
we go to church.
we recognize different people.
let them know that they can always count on us.
they can always count on us
whatever it is, let us know.
togetherness
we’re trying to find ways
to reach out to people
other
than being in their presence.
you get togetherness
I got faith
I just got that faith that people are going to try to show more love.
I have faith that the people [will] pull through I believe they’re going to show more love
love is what we actually need in this world.
I believe they going to show more love.
whatever we are doing, we need to take the Lord.
our leader, and our guide,
we need to take some spiritual guidance along with us.
every time a child do wrong,
we tie him down.
we need to stop.
we need to take the Lord.
they call me a preacher when I start talking.

The first moment that struck me in Amelia’s transcript was her deeply held religious beliefs she traced throughout the interview. When asked about her community, one of the first things she said was “we go to church” (Table 1). She was heavily involved with volunteer efforts in her community, mostly through church activities. For Amelia, Christianity and a strong sense of community were inseparable from the collective identity and her personal identity. The initial thematic analysis indicated a high concentration of data from Amelia’s interview for a theme called religious identity. To construct the poem, I pulled the coded interview transcript (coded initially by inductive analysis in MAXQDA), and identified areas in Amelia’s transcript that were most frequently categorized under the religious identity theme. I then selected these sections of the interview transcript as the foundation for the poetic transcription (Table 1). I identified words Amelia repeated as the guiding rhetorical devices for the poetic transcription. Because my research focuses on identity, I also looked at how Amelia positioned herself through her speech to construct a poem that interlaces Amelia’s personal religious identity with her overall perception of religious identity in her community.

While I did not recognize this explicitly during the original construction process, I used a lot of repetition in Amelia’s poem, which I now recognize was an allusion to religious hymns used often in Southern Christian churches. In addition to community “togetherness” (a repeated term; Table 1), Amelia also spoke frequently about love, which she connected to religion as well. Through the concept of love, she connected the volunteer work she did locally with her more global vision of how the world should be. I was specifically struck by the line “they call me a preacher when I start talking.” Perhaps too I used repetition because of my knowledge of Southern Christian sermons, which often use a call-and-response mechanism and repetition during religious worship. Through Amelia’s poem, I used the literary devices of repetition and allusion to connect with the deeply felt connection to religion for Amelia personally and how religion, for her, enhances the love for people and her community. Examples include “togetherness,” “we need,” “we need to take the Lord,” and “they call me a preacher…” (Table 1). These repetitions demonstrated Amelia’s rhetorical positioning of herself as connecting the needs of the project, and its future trajectory, to a Christian mission using a sermonic style, mirroring rhetorical devices used by preachers in the southern United States. Through repetition as a primary rhetorical device, I structured the poem in the sermonic, hymn-like style. Hymns themselves are poems that encourage affective encounters with a subject as well as foster a shared communal identity during worship of a religious deity (Park, 2019), connecting the poetic transcription to the shared Christian foundations of this rural community.

The other two poetic transcriptions relied on different literary devices, but I was also guided by a central theme - while Amelia’s poem was guided by the concept of Christian religion, Roger’s poem was guided by the concept of being an outsider, and Don’s poem was guided by the concept of how historical legacies interact with race relations in the community. I repeated the process of identifying sections of the selected interviews as having a high frequency of coding with the selected theme (feelings of being an outsider for Roger; race and history for Don). For Roger’s poem, I isolated words related to being an outsider to visually represent this theme. For Don’s poem, I isolated numbers used to punctuate the history of the community to visually represent his account of the legacy of his community. The following sections present the three poetic transcriptions and descriptions of what the poems mean in context of the interviews, but the process demonstrated in Table 1 guided the construction of all three poetic transcriptions.

Amelia

The way Amelia talked about religion struck me as I began sifting through the data to determine what “identity” looked like within the context of the HT project. With HT being situated within the rural southern United States, my personal experience of growing up in the “Bible Belt” of the southern United States helped me form this connection between religion and identity. In southern rural towns, religion is a strong part of heritage and everyday life. Religion, church, and Christianity were often described by participants in the interviews conducted, but no one was as emphatic as Amelia. Here, she provided an excellent portrait of what church and religion means to the community members, framed around the unifying concept of love. While crafting the poetic transcription, I read through the transcript looking for words related to religion, which included “church,” “preacher,” and “faith.”

Preacher

they call me a preacher when I start talking.

we go to church.

we recognize different people. let them know that they can always count on us.

they can always count on us

whatever it is, let us know.

togetherness

we're trying to find ways

to reach out to people

other

than being in their presence.

you get togetherness

I got faith

I just got that faith that people are going to try

to show more love.

I have faith that the people [will] pull through

I believe they're going to show more love

love is what we actually need in this world.

I believe they going to show more love.

whatever we are doing, we need to take the Lord.

our leader, and our guide,

we need to take some spiritual guidance along with us.

every time a child do wrong,

we tie him down.

we need to stop.

we need to take the Lord.

they call me a preacher when I start talking.

When first deciding to engage in poetic transcription, I was not sure of which transcript I wanted to examine first. Amelia’s transcript is one that was not initially informative for the evaluation work for the HT project, as most of the community activities she discussed were not related to the CDC-funded project. As I was coding Amelia’s transcript for a different component of my research inquiry, the way Amelia talked about religion stood out to me. This moment served as the inspiration for my first engagement with the poetic process. Hill’s (2005) article of creating poetic portraits from themes in the data inspired my initial approach. Though Amelia did not offer direct insights to the HT project, she provided a portrait of what religion means to the community. Using poetic engagement made me reconsider and revisit a transcript I had somewhat thrown to the side due to my perception of its irrelevancy from an evaluation standpoint. Working and growing up in the southern United States, I have an innate understanding of how the Christian religion specifically acts as an undercurrent for the way of life in the South, serving both a social and religious function in rural communities in the United States (Bouchard et al., 2020). Whether or not an individual is religious themselves, religion means more to Southern culture than simply going to church every Sunday—it influences interpersonal relationships, economic priorities, and policymaking. Amelia’s affective characterization of the hope for her community through religious wording highlighted poignantly the role religion plays for this community as well as for Amelia herself.

Roger

Reading Roger’s transcript was an illuminating experience of seeing how individuals might navigate their place within an insular rural community as an outsider. Roger is someone who did not grow up in the community, and his description of the community as a “mystery” highlights just how difficult it can be to become a member of these communities. Conceptualizing being an outsider, both as a member of the community and as a community development or public health practitioner, elucidates some of the nuance surrounding entry into a community.

Outsider

I’m a relatively recent resident to the community.

my wife and I moved here five years ago,

we’re in a way, kind of

outsiders.

we’re sort of urban dwellers

have a little bit

different

background, a kind of cultural makeup

different

from the general populace around here.

I’ve gotten to know some other people

expand my community,

connections within the

community

being kind of from the outside world,

it just helps to make those connections

I have a hard time knowing what anybody thinks around here.

I'm sort of an

outlier

and not many people really confide in me

I don’t have any close friends that

I would consider really close.

this community is,

to me,

it’s still shrouded in

mystery.

It’s pretty opaque

as far as what people think

or who’s really

who.

I don’t know really what’s bubbling under the surface

very deeply.

As someone who did not grow up in a rural small town, Roger’s invocation of the concept of outsiders resonated with me. Working with these communities as an outsider and member of the university, I cannot always fully understand the inner-workings of the community. Roger’s discussion encapsulated just how mysterious small rural towns can be to those of us without an embodied sense of the town, gleaned from growing up and understanding the town as a part of you in a way that reading through census data or even walking through the town cannot yield. This poem, while resonating with me on a personal level, also demonstrates how difficult it can be to integrate into these communities where, growing up, bonds are formed in ways foreign to those growing up in more urban or suburban areas. This idea of insularity has implications for the development and understanding of a collective community identity, especially for evaluators and community development workers who are external forces coming into these communities.

Don

While reading through Don’s tale of the history of his county, I was struck by his use of numbers, demarcating and punctuating a story about racism. It was almost as if the sterile nature of the numbers tried to contain and confine the evilness of slavery in the past with numerical recollection from the present time - using numbers as a form of temporal distancing. Don offered a detailed account of the history of the county and provided thick descriptions of place. While Don described many places within his county, such as specific historical landmarks, I have excluded them here to preserve his anonymity. Don uses metaphors of erosion and forestry to follow the economic downturn the county has experienced and connects much of this to the farming history, and the legacy of cotton farming, that built his community. The county where Don lives experiences formalized segregation policies to this day, and thus, the history of racialization remains a strong force in the daily lives of community members. I also felt a sense of movement within Don’s retelling of history, symbolized through various stylistic choices in the poetic transcription.

Legacy

Our county was founded in

1827,

a farming community and,

more to the point,

a cotton farming community.

that, of course,

has to do with the advent of the

mechanical cotton gin.

this was in

1797.

Georgia was founded by

land lottery…

a really big area of about

140

miles by about

miles was opened at one time

people poured in here.

slavery,

was a big part of the

cotton business

with the large population of people coming here to be

farmers,

cotton farmers,

they

came with them,

a lot of

slaves.

there’s a strip of land across the middle of Georgia that

follows the fault line,

and that part south of that fault line,

was

Ground Zero

for cotton farming in Georgia.

you have a gigantic influx all at once,

roughly about half of those people, that

17,000,

were Black people,

of course,

mostly were

slaves.

You start to see a

population

decline

as the time

goes on.

it was a

decline,

and the cotton was

going

away

other crops came in,

but farmers kept getting

poorer,

and the populations

continued

to move

away.

1960

you’ve got mechanical farming,

and the Civil Rights Act caused a

number

of Black people to

move

off

the

farm.

there’s an economic travesty happening

slow

motion.

In retrospect,

it was inevitable

What has

evolved

over

time

is just

chronic poverty.

We’ve brought in European kinds of

farming practices,

causing traumatic

erosion.

the

soil

eroded,

so did the economic prospects for the county

that left a population that is now about

62%

or so Black,

and most of the rest of the people are

White.

so now our county,

which used to be one

of the

largest counties in population,

is one of the

smallest,

we’re about

87%

under trees

trees just don’t require much labor.

Most of rural Georgia has a strong connection to agriculture in its history. All five counties involved in the HT project identify agriculture as their primary economic driver for most or all of their history. In Georgia, as in other parts of the South, cotton industries were closely tied with slavery, due to the use of enslaved people’s labor on plantations. Thus, the agricultural economy founded by cotton specifically is an economy founded upon slavery. Don does not explicitly discuss racism, but uses words that connote deeply seeded notions of segregation in his county. The historicism of the account seems to put distance between the tainted legacy of slavery and the economic boom of agriculture, but the historical account demonstrates how the two are linked. Don shows pride for the county’s agricultural roots, historically situating the county with a sense of space, and his metaphors of erosion demonstrate the embeddedness of chronic poverty with the decline of the agricultural industry. There seems to be a loss of pride in the labor required for forestry and loss of labor due to mechanized agriculture, as if it does not have the same strength associated with it as traditional agriculture. Historical constructions of place help denote a sense of collective identity in the community, one that is still scarred by the legacy of slavery and racism.

Discussion and Reflection

Poetical forms of thinking and analysis as research strategies intend to highlight the complexity and multidimensionality of the human experience within the social and cultural world (Hill, 2005). The focus of poetic transcription is to convey the perspectives of those negotiating certain experiences (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). The poetic process blurs the lines between the researcher and the researched, showing visually and affectively the entanglements researchers have in the data (Clough, 2002) and making these entanglements more explicit. This is distinct from categorical thinking, which primarily serves a classificatory and identification function for qualitative analysis (Freeman, 2016). With the categorical function, often manifested through coding and thematic analysis, we present the themes as they “emerge” from the data, using language focusing agency toward the data to distance ourselves from the analytic process and the entanglements that accompany the process. However, practitioners and researchers in applied social science fields, especially when attempting to evaluate social impacts, often seek methods that appeal to readers at both cognitive and emotional levels (Furman et al., 2007). Traditional categorical thinking processes may not reach this emotional level, though many practitioners appreciate using multiple ways of knowing and engaging with data. Poetical thinking and creating poetry, either through participants’ words or your own, “requires a reconsideration of one’s place in the world, a turning over of oneself to the sensuous; an entangling of subject and object, so that it is not clear whether the artist or the material is leading the creative process” (Freeman, 2016, p. 77). As evaluators and community development or public health practitioners, recognizing ourselves in the entanglements with the data may be an uncomfortable place to reside. However, any interpretation and analysis done as part of the job is entangled, despite relying on categorical or positivist thinking to sterilize and separate the researcher from these entanglements. Perhaps engaging in more artful analyses, while potentially suspect to funding agencies, can help visualize and emote one’s place in the data, using poetic engagement to reflect and affectively process the work in novel ways, bringing researchers and practitioners closer to the communities with whom they work and the social impacts they aim to conceptualize and identify. Poetic engagement may serve as an entry point for evaluators to consider the stories narrated and disseminated through evaluation work (Dutta, 2010), allowing a nuanced focus on cultural and social constructions in these communities. Novel analytic processes urge researchers to think through these narratives and how they may serve as an invitation for co-participation in the creation and imagination of a more humane world (Harter, 2009; Sharf & Vanderford, 2003).

There is also vulnerability in determining whether poetic analysis is “good enough” to constitute research poetry (Lahman et al., 2019). As a social scientist, not a trained literary writer, the primary author often questioned whether she was appropriately using the language mechanics, such as metaphor and alliteration, frequently associated with poetry. However, some scholars feel the baseline for judging research poetry should primarily focus on the degree to which the writer fosters empathy and understanding (Furman et al., 2007; Poindexter, 2002). While this specific concept is not explored deeply in the current study, engaging in an iterative process of reading and writing poetry, as well as sharing poetry with others in a type of community forum (Johnson et al., 2013), may enhance the value of the poems in community work, though this process of sharing may feel equally vulnerable. Through sharing, one can gauge the extent to which their writing has elicited any sense of empathy or understanding. Artful engagement is performative in nature (Conquergood, 1989), and thus, in order to actualize this performative aspect, the writing must be shared in some capacity.

Methodological insights from engaging with the poetic approach were varied but illuminating. A specific conceptual framework of identity guided the study, emerging from my current dissertation inquiry investigating the role of identity within community-based evaluation. Reading through the transcripts using MacLure’s (2013a, 2013b) concept of wonder allowed me to explore the concept of identity with more subtleties and nuance than I was able in previous research using traditional coding processes. Previously, I was using coding to identify overarching patterns within the data to explain what identity means within community-based research, which I felt lost the nuance present within individual narratives. The poetic transcription specifically allowed for an exploration into identity in an affective manner, remaining aware of both the participant’s voice and experience while also noticing the “intra-actions” (Barad, 2007) and moments in the data which elicited an embodied response from me as I experienced the data. Without this arts-based approach, much of the individual nuance present in these moments of expressed identity may have been lost through the traditional coding process. The arts-based, qualitative approach also enhances the trustworthiness of the data through personal reflections and positional reflexivity of how the researcher became entangled within the data. There were surprising moments of recognition of the concept of identity in a question where the participant revealed a part of themselves while talking about something that would not have immediately been connected with identity. The word emergence or recognition here means looking at identity through the poetic approach allowed the me to be open to moments of surprise in the data, looking in places I would not have considered demonstrative of identity through a more categorical methodology. Engaging poetically with data only previously analyzed categorically allows for moments of wonder for the researcher, viewing the data in new ways that may “disrupt the boundaries of power and knowledge that allow coders to maintain the enigma of their own self-certainty” (MacLure, 2013a). This wonder finds its way into analyses when researchers open themselves to what they might discover within the entangled relation between data and researcher (MacLure, 2013b). Wonder allows scholars to challenge the binaries put forth by conventional classificatory analyses.

Poetic transcription operates within the liminal space, in the intermediaries between objects which may only elicit an imperceptible response or recognition of the difference between truth and fiction (Cannon, 2018). Benozzo et al. (2013) posit that “perhaps data is less an object than a passage between objects” (p. 310), which Cannon (2018) explains as not seeking to get from one object to another, but rather moving about in the betweenness, the liminal space of the analytic process. This coincides with MacClure’s (2013a, 2013b) entangled relations between data and researcher and moments of wonder, rejecting a binary opposition present in positivist thinking. Hearkening back to the issue of representation within qualitative work, poetic representations aim not for truth-seeking because the poem itself does not attempt to make a stable form (Cannon, 2018). According to Richardson (1997):

“The poetic form… because it plays with connotative structures and literary devices to convey meaning, commends itself to multiple and open readings in ways that straight sociological prose does not. . . Knowledge is thus metaphored and experienced as prismatic, partial, and positional, rather than singular, total and univocal.” (pp. 142–143)

Using reflexivity on the analytic process, the primary author hoped to convey that the poetic transcription was not an attempt to get the participants’ identities right (Cannon, 2018), but rather an exploration into using transcription to read data in new ways to uncover new co-constructions of meaning related to the research inquiry. As Cannon (2018) responds to Pillow's (2010) question of doing representation, “I do representation knowing I can never get it right” (p. 574). However, through reflexivity, researchers can make visible how they do the work of representation (Britzman, 1995; Fine, 1994; Lather, 1993, 1995) and engage in a more ethical representational endeavor.

In program evaluation, poetic transcription remains an experimental form of writing (Carr, 2003; Johnson et al., 2013). Experimental texts, such as poetry, offer ways of presenting data that differ from traditional approaches (Denzin, 1997) and thus can allow help to explore and disseminate data outside of the traditional positivist or interpretivist paradigm that dominates the epistemology of evaluative thinking and much of development work (Bhattacharyya, 1995; Dutta, 2010; Johnson et al., 2013). While poetic analysis may be used primarily to evoke an emotional response from the reader, using poetic transcription together with more commonplace modes of reporting data, such to enhance the descriptions of themes (Carr, 2003), can more deeply express the impacts and outcomes of evaluation work, especially work involving communities. Evaluators traditionally claim a dispassionate stance toward their work, viewing advocacy of specific values with disdain, despite being motivated by specific cultural and personal values in the work we do (Patton, 2021; Stake, 2004). Working at the intersection of a positivist or pragmatic paradigm within much evaluation work, perhaps the time has come for evaluators to utilize methods that help them communicate and connect with other’s experiences (Rorty, 1989). The poetic and other arts-based approaches call for practitioners and researchers to reckon with their entanglements and subjectivities, “unmask[ing] the author” (Johnson et al., 2013, p. 488) and actively invite readers to participate in meaning-making. Not only does the poetic method allow for deeper connections with the data, but also from a methodological perspective, engaging with data through an arts-based approach encourages researchers to see themselves within the data, explicitly situating themselves within the assemblage rather than remaining an objective observer and interpreter. Objectivity in analysis is impossible; however, through poetic transcription, researchers can engage in the unmasking process to increase accessibility to the knowledge produced through their work (Abma, 1997; Johnson et al., 2013). Through poetic transcription, traditional qualitative data can be transformed into modes of meaningful expression to communicate the lived, sociocultural experiences of others (Carr, 2003), experiences central to the work done in evaluation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr Maureen Flint from the University of Georgia for providing feedback on the development of this manuscript.

Declaration of conflicting interests

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

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for the project under which this manuscript was developed was provided through a Centers for Disease Control High Obesity Program cooperative agreement with the University of Georgia.

ORCID iD

Catherine E. Sanders

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