‘People think refugees just likely know things’ (a found research poem)

Found and shaped by Erin Goheen Glanville, these (almost entirely in order) words are the most frequently repeated words in the first twelve interviews conducted as part of the Worn Words research project. Worn Words is an applied multi-media project, producing creative digital narratives for education on refugee discourse. But part way through the project I became stuck in a highly cognitive space, unable to be creative with the footage I had collected. So I tried a host of ways to get my brain in to a different mode, including creating word clouds with the NVivo software (a programme for analysing the data of research interviews) that I was using. It occurred to me that a word cloud kept the words random, even as I sensed a web of relationships in the cloud that I wanted to trace. So I created a list of the words in a Word document and began playing with joining words on a line or adding prepositions to link key words. Any significant words I have added are in square brackets. One word has been repeated. Words like ‘to,’ ‘for,’ ‘and’, and ‘to be’ verbs were removed in the coding process, so I add them back in to the poem as needed for meaning.

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The process of visualizing the interview data in this way resonated with my emotional experience of narrative inquiry as a research method: seeing rich but hazy relationships among the data points, experimenting with how to make those relations clear, prioritizing among the variety of linkages, worrying about the power you have as the researcher to make peoples’ narratives mean something other than what they mean, hoping you can communicate the significance of your findings as knowledge, delighting in the surprise when what you saw through a haze clarifies in the oddest of ways, and in the end knowing how partial (in both senses of the word) knowledge always is while you wonder whether anyone will read your work. The stilted style of this poem speaks to me of the way bureaucratic and legal rhetoric—so highly rational and formal—interfaces uneasily with the bright intensity of peoples’ experiences seeking refuge. And as hard as I tried to write the poem using a single line of thought, random words bulged out, required their own line, and announced themselves as a rebuttal. The impossibility of a single voice or narrator, speaks to the way our shared discourse is knit together: its thickness and entanglement, and—lacking a narrative weave—its contradictions.