Research often involves the collection of data from multiple sources, inclusive of the embodied and multisensorial. These differing data sources, that are not language based, pose difficulties for researchers. This multimodal data is often collected alongside field notes, documents, interviews, and other language-based data and then translated into language. In the process of this translation, the embodied, relational, and multisensorial aspects of this data is often lost. To address this issue, I created a methodology called Embodied Mapping/s (EM) for collecting, analysing and disseminating non-language-based research. The doing of Embodied Mapping/s is about exploring differing embodiments and material relations among humans and non-humans to co-create a new inquiry in embodied and multisensorial research.
The doing of Embodied Mapping/s (EM) is not about fixing lines and encounters in order to produce a map or model; on the contrary it is about analysing differing embodiments and material relations among people, things and disability. Through the struggle of giving in to and following materiality, I realised that the doing of Embodied Mapping/s are continual performances of making, unmaking, doing and undoing through people’s embodied abilities. Through a doing of Embodied Mapping/s alternative ways of approaching, framing, doing and narrating interior spaces open up new knowledge processes, engagements, and methods through an embodied criticality that allows for a kind of stumbling and playing across/with new encounters. For example, these fibre mapping/s were created to analyse two museum case studies and to move qualitative data analysis away from text based and computer-based methods towards embodied and creative methods.
Through centralising embodiment, not only as an analytical method but also as something that informs innovative methodologies and methods, the doing of Embodied Mapping/s offers something novel to qualitative inquiry and creative embodied methodologies.
Research publications
- Rieger, Janice (2023) Design, Disability and Embodiment: Spatial Justice and Perspectives of Power. Routledge Advances in Disability Studies. Routledge, London, UK.
- Rieger, Janice, Devlieger, Patrick, Van Assche, Kristof, & Strickfaden, Megan (2022) Doing Embodied Mapping/s: Becoming-With in Qualitative Inquiry. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21, pp. 1-14.
- Rieger, Janice, Kessler, Charlotte, & Strickfaden, Megan (2022) Doing Dis/ordered Mappings: Shapes of Inclusive Spaces in Museums. Space and Culture, 25(1), 4–19.
- Rieger, Janice, Strickfaden, Megan, & Rolfe, Annie (2018) Case study report: Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Canada
- Rieger, Janice, Strickfaden, Megan, & Rolfe, Annie (2018) Case study report: Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg, Canada
- Rieger, Janice (2016) Dis/ordered Mapping/s of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. [Artefact]
- Rieger, Janice (2016) Dis/ordered Mapping/s of the Canadian War Museum. [Artefact]
- Rieger, Janice (2016) Doing dis/ordered mapping/s: Embodying disability in the museum environment. PhD thesis, University of Alberta.
Funding
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Fellowship; Canadian Federation of University Women (CFUW) Fellowship
Chief Investigator
