Orienting My Map to North

Abstract

This chapter shares the complexity and human dimension(ality) of arts-informed narrative research. It considers the need for alignment between a research methodology, methods, and communication, yet illustrates how research doesn’t always journey along a pre-planned path. In sharing my embodied resistance to a planned narrative analysis, I reflect on the need for regular, fully embodied reflexivity to fulfil the overall aims of a research project. Further, the chapter explores the congruence between narrative, Arts-based and feminist approaches to research, and shares an innovative narrative restorying practice which merges Gee’s (An introduction to discourse analysis: theory and method, 2nd edn. Routledge, London, 2005) process of data gathering with a new materialist approach to capturing data that ‘glows’ (MacLure, Crit Methodol 13(4):228–232, 2013). In so doing, new and promiscuous research processes are celebrated.