Making Poems from People’s Stories: Poetic Portraiture as Representation, Inquiry, and Community Engagement

Poetic portraiture is an arts-based research method for representing an interviewee’s embodied aspects of their life story in poetry and poetic forms. It is a useful form for researchers and practitioners interested in a nuanced, critical, and evocative re-presentation of interviews. It engages with participants’ stories to challenge dominant ideologies and stereotypes by including marginalized voices and perspectives. It is a good method for showing researcher reflexivity and can be part of community engaged and participatory research.

Faulkner discusses the benefits of uses for, and ways to create poetic portraits with examples from a community engaged project with older women’s oral histories about their relationships across the lifecourse.

Sandra L. Faulkner is Professor of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University where she writes, teaches, and researches about close relationships. Faulkner’s interests include qualitative methodology, poetic inquiry, inclusive pedagogy, and critical perspectives on interpersonal and family communication. She often uses poetry, creative nonfiction, and autoethnography to explore her own negotiation of identity as a parent, partner, and professor.  Her research focuses on how individuals navigate gender and sexuality through interpersonal communication and personal narrative and the use of arts-based research as inclusive and critical pedagogy. Her book, Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method, & Practice (Routledge), won an Honorable Mention for the 2021 ICQI Book Award. She received the 2013 Knower Outstanding Article Award from the National Communication Association, the 2016 Norman K. Denzin Qualitative Research Award, the 2020 Trujillo and Goodall “It’s a Way of Life Award” in Narrative Ethnography, and the Legacy Award from the National Communication Association Ethnography Division. Find Faulkner online on her website and through her academic profile.