Sandra Lea Faulkner

‘ Poetic portraiture is an arts-based research (ABR) method for representing an interviewee's embodied aspects of their life story in poetry and poetic forms’. Creating poetic portraits allows researchers to evocatively engage with participants’ stories by challenging dominant ideologies and stereotypes to foreground marginalized voices and perspectives. It is a powerful method for demonstrating researcher reflexivity, portraying nuanced pictures of people's lives, and for doing ethnographic community engagement research. The author discusses the use of poetic portraits as a promising qualitative ABR methodology using a community engagement project with older women's oral histories about their relationships across the lifecourse as an example. The author argues that poetic portraiture provides insight into communication and aging because the women's portraits portray their stories in ways that challenge staid assumptions about women and aging.

In this personal narrative, the author discusses how good art can be a heuristic for creative practice using Leavy’s novel, Film Blue, as an example. The author uses ekphrastic poetry and themes in Film Blue to examine negotiations of identity as someone who is solidly middle aged and winging their way through how they can be who they want and need to be outside of culturally stifling messages about middle aged womxn. The author concludes that we can turn melancholy into a state of creativity. And perhaps instead of middle age being a blue period, it can be orange and purple, a kaleidoscope of rage and joy, all about the possibilities we take a chance to see.

Welcome, and thank you for turning your attention to this work. As a professional field, area of intellectual inquiry, sense and meaning-making device, embodied practice, discourse; and set of material and social conditions, communication, writ large, remains one of the most diverse and impactful yet contested, divisive phenomenon characterizing life as a human being. Indeed, well into the 21st century we continue to see the vast ways communication shapes—and is shaped by—an ever-evolving global landscape. A plethora of existent and emergent social platforms constituting the digital frontier have shifted the ways we think about and conceptualize things like distance, intimacy, identity/management, and democracy. Citizens continue to interpret and assign value to public events and sociopolitical issues at local, national, and international levels through the rhetorical lenses, terministic screens, and framing strategies created by professionals responsible for sharing such information. And, importantly, considerations at the micro, meso, and macro levels, such as what is normal?, what does it mean to be good?, or what is relational commitment?, continue to be communicatively negotiated within an ever-changing communication landscape characterized by endless verbal structures, nonverbal codes, visual cues and semiotic symbols, text and language, and, of course, bodies—of both the human variety and otherwise.

Young adults hold many stereotypes about aging and older adults that formal education cannot always address. Interaction and community engagement projects with older adults can challenge and dispel stereotypes young adults hold about older adults. This semester-long project is designed for undergraduate students in interpersonal and relational communication classes to engage in intergenerational dialogue to ease social isolation, interact across generations, and dispel ageist stereotypes through community engagement.

In this chapter, we discuss and provide examples of ways that poetic inquiry—a form of Arts-Based Research (ABR)—can be used as qualitative data analysis. We begin with a brief history of poetic inquiry, which focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of poetry as literary art to highlight social phenomena. Then, we discuss poetic analysis as a type of thematic data analysis and describe poetic portraiture as an example. Through poetic transcription, poetic portraits, and poetry analyzed as qualitative data, poetic inquiry can be a unique approach to thematic analysis. Poetic inquiry can provide a self-reflective approach to analyzing qualitative interviews as one seeks to maintain the interviewee’s voice and how they constructed meaning of their experiences. We conclude by discussing the possibilities of poetic analysis in qualitative research and provide questions a researcher can ask themselves to determine if poetic inquiry is an appropriate thematic analysis method for their work.

We present a critically focused, semester-long community engagement project entitled Intergenerational Connections as a form of critical interpersonal and family communication pedagogy (CIFCP). The project utilized Zoom to connect small groups of undergraduate students in the US enrolled in a course on relational communication with older adults in a long-term care facility to dialogue about close relationships. We were interested in how dialogue across generations maintained or altered students’ attitudes and expectations about communicating with older adults and analyzed student reflections before, during, and after the dialogues using a turning point analysis. The study was framed using Social Identity Theory (SIT) to show how young adults may label older adults as an outgroup contributing to negative stereotypes. We discuss two turning points related to Perceptions of Aging and Developmental Changes and Understanding and Expectations of Relationships and identify practical implications of the project for universities and communities.

The following essay is a response to Laurel Richardson’s collection of poems about marriage titled For Better or Worse. Reading the poems made the author consider how she talks, thinks, and teaches about marriage as a scholar who studies close relationships and how Richardson’s poems can instruct students and others about the ideals, critiques, and realities of marriage. The author presents assignments and class discussions about marriage in two family communication and six relational communication courses she taught from a Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication (CIFC) perspective in 2020–2022 by showing the critical work and reflection that students did that ultimately reinforced dominant ideas about marriage in the US. The author includes critical reflections on Laurel Richardson’s marriage poems for context and contrast.

I use the erasure poems in the poetry chapbook, “Bringing Up Baby,” as Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication (CIFC) research to critique white middle-class notions of mothering and motherhood. Poetic inquiry is a form of Arts-Based Research (ABR) methodology that offers Critical Family Communication (CFC) researchers a way to highlight the aesthetics of personal experience, focus on embodiment and participatory measures, and use artistic forms to meld scientific and humanistic understandings of relationships. I argue that poetic inquiry as CFC methodology adds to family communication studies and offers a research and practice agenda using poetic inquiry as (a) everyday theorizing, (b) critique of traditional understandings of family relating and relationships, and (c) an evocative, embodied form that positions author reflexivity and engages dialectics. I provide suggestions for incorporating poetic inquiry into CFC research.

We conducted in-depth interviews with 20 LGBTQ+ college students about their salient identities and identity negotiation strategies framing their experiences of negotiating identity gaps that created conflicts between their salient identities using the Communication Theory of Identity (CTI). Participants engaged in three main identity negotiation strategies including identity compartmentalization, gap reconciliation, and ignoring the gap. We developed a model showing the processes of identity negotiation. This study offers a greater understanding of how LGBTQ+ college students communicatively make sense of their various identities and how scholars, practitioners, and college student personnel can contribute to LGBTQ+ college students’ psychosocial well-being.