In this chapter I look back at the intellectual traditions within which embodiment is situated, that is, the phenomenological tradition on the one hand and the overcoming of the phenomenological tradition through Foucauldian understandings of the body on the other. In her recent article in Qualitative Research, Rachelle Chadwick (2016) specifically asks what the methodological challenges to embodying qualitative research are. While an interest in embodiment within the social sciences is not new and the narrative-expert Arthur Frank (2010) has previously offered insightful advice on how to re-inscribe bodies into social research, there is not much work that gives a comprehensive account on how to actually carry out embodied research and what this means in practice. An exception is Chadwick (2016) who chooses to ‘bring the body back in’ and provide ‘fleshier’ accounts of qualitative research methods by problematising transcription and using poetic representational devices to highlight multivocality and bodily contradictions in child birth narratives. As evident from this chapter, attempts at embodying research are becoming more common and the field is expanding in several directions. Here I engage with the origin of this approach and with its current debates.

The dilemma of embodying research – whose body?

Discourse and narrative approaches have dominated critical thinking since the 1970s in the humanities and the social sciences; however, there has been a recent surge of questioning this approach and asking what is the role of the extra-discursive, of the body and how affect and emotions can be inscribed in critical thinking. Extra-discursive turns in the social sciences include the ‘embodiment’ turn, the ‘sensory turn’ and the ‘affective turn’ which have contributed in different ways to make research less disembodied. Chadwick asks: ‘How do we find ways of doing embodied qualitative research which goes beyond the regular scenario of describing and interrogating talk about the body? How do we succeed in attending to the bodily and fleshy aspects of storytelling and talk?’ (Chadwick, 2016: 2)

In order to address these questions, it is key to reflect on what embodied research means and what methodological strategies have been used to embody qualitative methods. Despite several experimental data collection, writing and interpretation efforts made by qualitative social researchers, embodied reflexivity has emerged as the most common attempt at embodying research strategies.