Embodied Dialogue and Dance as Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

In this chapter, the author explores embodied ways of knowing, dance and dialogue and the ways they may be connected. The author aims to unravel how the notion of dialogue, conceived during the height of humanism, can be revised and expanded in concert with posthumanist, new materialist ideas, and how it may continue to inform research even within the realm of post-qualitative inquiry. The author’s desire has been to honour multiple voices from many fields and life forms that have shaped the author’s professional path as a dance scholar and a critical arts educator. The writing process has involved different approaches and textual styles. The author acknowledges the author’s thoughts are rooted in collaborations, meetings, incidents and events that have taken the author towards unknown territories, knowings and connections. The chapter starts with a discussion on the concept of dialogue and its origins. Next, the author explores the notion of dialogical spaces from multiple viewpoints and continues with a section on dance. Finally, the author depicts how collaborative, embodied writing as research practice has evolved during the past decade together with colleagues from different fields. The author shares poems created with the author’s co-researchers as explorations on research methodology. The author concludes that post-qualitative inquiry, for the author at least, is about creating new realities and territories that did not exist before the inquiry, and that dance as embodied dialogue and as a collaborative, embodied research practice may create spaces where human beings and non-human things connect with and affect each other and where new knowledges emerge.