Scarheart: Research as Healing

Abstract

My chapter examines whether and if so, how, alternative approaches can be used to engage with intimate partner violence (IPV). I explore how poetry, creative writing and other forms of expression can be feminist methodologies for looking at IPV as they both offer us ways of thinking differently about objects of study, in more embodied, personal and situated ways, and can also be forms of healing in the very process of studying such “difficult” objects of research. I use artistic mediums as a form of healing when writing about the very thing that has caused so much personal hardship. My chapter also narrates my own experience with IPV as a survivor’s “ethnography of one”.