Poetic Portraiture as Critical Arts-Based Pedagogy and Methodology: Older Women’s Relationships Through the Life Course

Abstract

We conducted life history interviews with 18 older women about their lives and used poetic portraiture as a form of a poetic inquiry to present women’s stories. Poetic portraits are a representation of an interviewee in verse that focus on embodied aspects of their life story. Graduate students in a relational communication seminar created poetic transcriptions of the interviews as a form of qualitative thematic analysis and used the transcripts to create a visual and poetic portrait of each woman. We discuss the benefits of using poetic portraiture as research representation and reflective research practice.