ABSTRACT
The position of those who carry the burdens of social inequality is a better starting point for understanding the totality of the social world than is the position of those who enjoy its advantages. This chapter refers to a multi-phase study conducted into the embodied experience of oppression. Carried out over a ten-year period in multiple locations, this qualitative study employed a methodology that drew on somatic approaches to research, narrative inquiry, and performed ethnography. By incorporating interoceptively focused exercises into the interview process, participants were able to access present-moment embodied experience that related to the domains. An embodied approach to data analysis also recognizes that listening to the data with a poet's ear may better illuminate and distill subjective nonverbal material than more literal, mathematical, and/or structured approaches to qualitative data analysis. In order for the research to be genuinely reflective of a somatic approach, the body must be present in the writing of the research text.
