Conference Agenda

Qualitative research has long privileged language as its primary medium of knowledge production. Interviews, transcripts, fieldnotes, and textual analysis remain central to how meaning is generated, analysed, and communicated. Yet this linguistic emphasis often renders invisible the embodied, emotional, and sensory dimensions of research practice. This conference contribution examines the role of the body in qualitative inquiry, tracing a conceptual and methodological movement from disembodied knowledge production toward corporeal praxis. It argues that qualitative research can more fully account for lived experience by recognising embodiment not as an add-on, but as a foundational condition of knowing, interpreting, and relating.

Drawing on phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, the session is grounded in three interrelated premises: first, that human understanding is fundamentally embodied; second, that language is inherently inaccurate, incomplete, and unable to fully capture experience; and third, that communication is deeply metaphorical, relying on embodied meaning-making even when expressed in words. These premises challenge conventional assumptions about data, rigor, and reflexivity, and invite a rethinking of how qualitative knowledge is produced, analysed, and disseminated.

The session conceptualises the body in qualitative research as the lived experience (shaping how participants encounter and interpret the world) and as the researcher’s own body in the field (how positionality, emotion, fatigue, discomfort, and affect inform interactions, interpretations, and ethical decisions).

By acknowledging these dimensions, the contribution demonstrates how embodied approaches can help researchers transcend the limitations of language and engage more fully with the complexity of qualitative data.

The session also foregrounds the role of emotions in qualitative research. Although emotions are central to how the world is experienced and understood, researchers’ emotional responses are frequently marginalised, treated as bias, or relegated to brief reflexivity statements. This contribution reframes emotions as epistemically productive, offering insight into meaning-making, power relations, and ethical complexity. Through embodied and creative techniques, delegates are invited to explore practical strategies for attending to emotions, capturing reflexive insights, and negotiating the movement from private notes and embodied awareness to public scholarly accounts.

Drawing on concrete examples from my own research, the session interweaves theoretical grounding with experiential learning. Delegates will be invited to participate in short practical exercises designed to heighten awareness of embodied modes of knowing and to reflect on their own positionality, assumptions, and beliefs. In doing so, the session invites researchers to reimagine qualitative inquiry as a practice of embodied understanding, where meaning arises not only through words, but through movement, interaction, emotion, and the lived body itself.