# data[].attributes.body
Acting up paper written in response to an attack on our tango paper. This was also the topic of the auto ethnographic text we shared during the PDW. thank you again for creating this space to share!

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Mandalaki & Perezts 2021 Acting up_abjection overruled

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This is what I thought about when reading Vanessa's beautiful poem. Thank you Vanessa for sharing it.

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AoM_Letter to Camilla_honoring her spirit

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AoM_Letter to Camilla_honoring her spirit

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This is my response to Oya Zincir's thoughtful text about the stuggle to find our way in academia, our own 'lost manucript'. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m911Hb_vjYFG_j8snB77HR1_9xjHE2q1clNyLwgAbrY/edit?usp=sharing

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This is my response to Vanessa's beautiful poem and some notes following the discussion we had <3
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_k4LZxzXc-GG4qbrnf31UiGhrvBQJGn6ZEzh8B2sac8/edit?usp=sharing

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A fantastic autoethnography penned by Liela Jamjoom about an emotional conference experience

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A fantastic autoethnography penned by Liela Jamjoom about an emotional conference experience

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This is the piece I wrote during our session in response to (and reflecting on) Ximena Vidal De Col's beautiful and brave piece on intimidation

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This is an autoethnographic account that was inspired by my PhD journey and later as an early caeer academic in business schools. I write to extend a critique to normative writing practices which I feel have 'chained' my body for very long. It was such a cathartic writing experience enabled by a lovely reviewing process with two truly embodied reviews!

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This is an embodied auto-ethnography inspired by some covid experiences. A cathartic writing that was inaugurated by certain experiences of othering experienced on the way back 'home'.

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This is my first single-authored paper, and where I feel that it is really "me" talking. I remember writing it was the most intense experience, I couldn't leave my keyboard, and yet I've never been more present to my surrounding "habitat". As if I was writing on the walls, through the walls, with the walls around me.  A special thanks to Banu and Alison for this beautiful and rich section of Feminist Frontiers in GWO!

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Abstract

A year into the COVID 19 pandemic, I reflect upon walls and the fact that the lockdown has exacerbated humanity's experience of walls in themselves and, guided by an act of pictorial rebelliousness, push for a feminist way of re-enchanting them both materially and symbolically.

1 THREE WALLS

Painting a wall is always a revolutionary act. My 4-year-old daughter already knew it without me or anybody explaining it to her: she was staring at me in defiance while splashing the paint-soaked brush across the wall.

At least it was one of the walls of our balcony, not the living room, was my first thought. Oh well... there was no point in interrupting her rebellious creativity now that it was too late already anyway. Instead of leaving the wall half-finished, just like the graffiti tag on the corner across the street was left incomplete because of the suddenness of the first lockdown in March 2020, I decided to join her and we spent the rest of the afternoon decorating our balcony together. The condominium administrators and the neighbors will probably complain at some point when they realize the "damage" we made to the building's uniform appearance, and we shall probably have to erase or cover-up our family artwork with boring gray paint.

But in the meantime, my daughter and I accomplished a political act, as much as an artistic exercise. We transformed that wall into a place of our locked-down existential affirmation. Like prisoners carving "I was here" on the walls of their cells, or students engraving their names, emotions, dreams, or drawing on their desks during class when their teachers turned their backs to them to write something on the board (at least, in the good old days when students still attended class in the flesh instead of on online platforms). Behind such acts of what many would label "vandalism," we are phenomenologically present to our gesture, we dedicate our intentional attention to our every move and literally (or colorfully) mark ourselves into existence (Pérezts, ). We do not do them in order to necessarily write, carve or paint something -the content is as relevant (if not less so) than the gesture itself. We do them to fix our being onto a material surface beyond ourselves, to write or paint ourselves through them, to mark our territory. The same existential and political reason that drove our ancestors to leave hand prints, drawings or inscriptions on the walls of caves.

Having grown up in Mexico, I've always been fascinated by mural paintings and frescoes. I have now been living in Lyon, France for some years, and its painted walls-le mur des Lyonnais, le mur des Canuts, la Bibliothèque de la Cité, and, more discrete, a hommage fresco to Diego Rivera just a mere 5-min walk from our apartment reproducing some of his iconic works- are certainly part of why I feel kind of like "at home" in Lyon. It is the frescoes of Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera, but also the less internationally known David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, or José Clemente Orozco, that trace the memory of my people and prefigure our mestizo identity on the very object that is erected to delineate space. Such frescoes transform the gray urban landscape into an open-sky gallery. More than a gallery, into a program. Political and artistic. Just like the East Side Gallery in Berlin, murals take an enhanced structuring or edifying dimension precisely because they are painted on walls.

And while half the population is a year into, at varying degrees but for the same reason, being locked away at home to contain contagion-"between four walls," as the common saying goes-it is these walls that precisely have captured my attention. They are everywhere I look. I feel them closing in on me, on each of us. Like a larger-than-life escape game that never seems to end. And this crowned virus, unable to reach us through these cement walls that protect us against its potential human carriers, is determined not only to reorganize our entire lives and societies, but to invade us on the "walls" of our social media profiles as well, where it has, quite literally, become "viral," and the only thing that anybody seems to talk or care about nowadays, while business-(and tragedy)as-usual keep unfolding.

Sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, I am ruminating this saying "being between four walls" almost as if it were a sort of prayer or mantra of our times. In the meantime, my eyes err across the imperfections on the surface of the walls that surround me, following the more or less straight angles, scouting the fingerprints my daughter left here and there, the posters and mirrors, the projected shadows as the Sun goes down and shines through our West-facing window, the dust that has accumulated on the floor plinths that we don't have time to clean, and all the scars left by daily life within these walls that a future coat of paint will cover-up sometime. Too often have I ignored these walls. Now they have been shouting their overwhelming presence at me for too long and keep doing so every waking moment, reverberating the sound of my children's noise while I try to write, echoing our unavoidable togetherness. These walls have become oppressive and oppressors, and yet they don't seem to be thick enough to allow for some piece of quiet and privacy from the other four people, however loved, that I share them with.

Walls. We bump into them. They have a material dimension, empirical, phenomenal. We can build them, demolish them, climb them, paint them. But they also have a symbolic, metaphorical, or even epistemological dimension. Now that being predominantly constrained by four walls has become our shared human condition, one of the greatest common denominators of humanity (Pérezts & Deslandes, ), these walls invite us to collectively reflect upon them as rarely before.

Being "trapped" between walls has often had the effect of freeing our tongues, or rather our pens or whatever tool we can get our hands on to scrape a piece of paper, or, if there isn't any, their very surfaces. Different places of incarceration in the world have witnessed the birth of tales of epic proportions (Thomas Malory, Miguel de Cervantès, Fiodor Dostoïevski), of poetry (Paul Verlaine, Guillaume Apollinaire), of morally provocative texts (the Marquis de Sade, John Cleland), of travel diaries (Marco Polo), history books (Fernand Braudel), philosophic essays (Machiavelli, Thoreau, Russell, Althusser, Gandhi), political manifestos (Vladimir Lenine, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Luther King Jr., wa Thiong'o, Nelson Mandela, Leonard Peltier) as well as a proliferation of epistolary writings (Saint Paul, Oscar Wilde, Vaclav Havel) and more. To the point that being locked down-particularly in spartan material conditions, or in the akin form of exile-is even a condition that is purposively sought in order to favor inspiration. Philosophers like Wittgenstein can testify to this, when he spent a lengthy retreat in a cabin he built with his own hands in Norway. So can the monks of any religion across the world. According to popular legend, it is said that the lyrics of the Mexican national anthem were only written because the fiancée of their author, Francisco Gonzalez Bocanegra, locked him up in a tiny room with just bread and water until he finished... Conversely, incarceration is also a recurrent leitmotif of fiction since the classics ( The Count of Monte Cristo, by Dumas (); The Last day of a Condemned man (1829/2009) and Les Misérables by Hugo (); No Exit [1947/2000, also known as Behind closed doors] by Sartre (); Chess story by Zweig (), among many others). Today, this theme is recolored by contemporary television series such as Orange is the new black (Kohan, ).

But let us leave the specificities of the carceral environment, or that of monastic or philosophical retreat, because what we are living through today is actually another kind of "prison": the domestic environment. The prison remains a world of violence and of the masculine (including prisons for women) that have the noble (albeit contestable and often tragic) objective of justice. However, the lockdown in our homes is too close to the animality (we feel "like caged lions" in a zoo) and to the feminine. Being confined to the home, has ultimately been, and largely remains in many parts of the world, the feminine experience par définition, either by tradition, modesty, or gendered division of labor. In light of this, we find it all the more dreadful. An unbearable situation, in our misogynist and patriarchal societies. Staying at home has long been disdained, seen at best as uninteresting, and at worst as degrading, as the reign of the subjection to the everyday, anchored in the banality of the daily routines and chores, and whose objective is the protection and the care (almost a bad word) of an anonymous "all of us," by attempting to limit the spread of the virus.

Some of the (women and feminist) readers of this text will have not failed to notice that, except for screenwriter Jenji Kohan, not one of the above-mentioned authors is a woman... So, if this lockdown is unleashing so much the pens or rather the tweets, it is also because a fair share of the world's population was subjected overnight to discover this symbolically feminine experience that both shes and hes have sought to flee, for different reasons (the escalating domestic violence being among the prices of this crisis already being paid behind closed doors, unsurprisingly by the most vulnerable).

So, in a way, and against all odds, it is on a quest to reconquer these four walls that humanity must embark, to reappropriate them, to give them new meaning. In this regard, (re)reading Frank's () Diary of hiding away in an attic for two years in Amsterdam during the German occupation and Jewish persecution seems just as a good idea in the present circumstances as (re)reading Camus' () The Plague, whose sales have soared in the past year, or Netflix's miniseries on Pandemic: how to prevent an outbreak (Adaskova & Sorre, ), whose first airing in early 2020 couldn't have chosen a more perfect timing.

Telling the stories of what is happening within our walls and marking it on walls (both material and digital) is an existential need as much as an act of resistance (Li & Prasad, ). Making sense of this globalized expérience féminine par excellence. This seems to be confirmed by the variety of "lockdown stories" flooding the Internet and social media, where domestic anecdotes of the everyday are given center-stage, and whose power resides in that they resonate globally. As many others, I bang my head against the wall in trying to cope with working from home, home-schooling my daughter, taking care of my newborn son, grappling with my marriage, and struggling to keep an ounce of private inner life in the midst of it all. Every night at 8 o'clock during the first period of lockdown, I joined my neighbors by going out on our (now colorful) balcony to clap in support of the medical teams and frontline workers, as one of the only social gestures I could do besides staying at home. I clapped, all the while dreading that once this whole crisis is over, those that once clapped-and particularly the reigning class-will wall themselves in an indifferent silence tomorrow. The weight of inertia will probably make us rush back to the same mistakes that led us collectively to "run into a brick wall" in terms of economic, social, environmental, racial, and political issues, worldwide. There is but a small step between sanitary lockdown measures and necrocapitalistic closure, as materialized by the wall project that has long haunted us for the Mexican-USA border.

However, and no matter how desperate, boring, tired, or exhilarating things get, I find myself thinking that the four walls around me are never actually four, according to the common saying. This popular expression is in fact misleading in that it makes us overlook an opportunity to give them a meaning different from that of undergoing domestic imprisonment. If we pause to consider it, there are only three walls, and this is what new feminine and feminist hermeneutics of these walls must pursue. The fourth one is not a wall, or not entirely. It is always also a door or a window of some kind. It is a wailing wall, a revolutionary fresco, a fantastic imaginarium. It is a blank page, a virgin canvas, an invitation to the voyage, a prison's glass parloir, a movie screen, a curtain between the audience and the stage-that can and will be lifted by the stroke of an artists' brush. It is this fourth one that we open each night at 8 o'clock to clap and discover the faces of our until-now much ignored neighbors. In a word, it is an opening, always. A non-wall.

Whether in a dungeon, a prison cell, or a monastery, a student dorm room, a refugee camp, a hotel room, an apartment or country house, no matter how big or small... all these figures of closed spaces that have become the locus of our global-yet always experienced as singular - lockdown, only ever have three walls. As long as we strive to not forget it. As long as we inhabit them as poets, or as painters instead of as slaves (Mandalaki & Daou, ). In order not to let these walls that today lock-us in turn into walls of silence and indifference. In order to appropriate them and put our embodied selves onto their surfaces. As long as we make them speak, to make them edifying, we make them the locus of a feminist political and artistic re-enchantment. Whether with a pinch of humor or of despair, of heroism or banality, of the exceptional or of the commonplace, of the literary or the pictorial, our three walls are the stage where our lives are being played out, and where the potential of our feminine creation can also be asserted (Biehl-Missal, ).

More than that, they are becoming one of its main characters, as important as the beings who breathe in it, just like Isabel Allende's () The House of Spirits, and it falls upon us to assert their magical realism, to re-enchant their existence.

This is why we paint the wall of our balcony.

We must.

A feminist reinterpretation of muralism.

(Childhood is decidedly an age of wisdom).

And following my daughter's example, in an act to conjure silence, I transcribe on the part of wall on our balcony still left virgin, these words by Eluard (, p. 8), who in 1942, amidst a World War, wrote what resonates today so vividly in my veins and in the linings of my free spirit:

Sur mes refuges détruits

On my refuge that crumbles

Sur mes phares écroulés

My beacon-tower that falls

Sur les murs de mon ennui

On ennui's walls

J'écris ton nom

I write your name

Sur l'absence sans désir

On absence on nude

Sur la solitude nue

Solitude on each tread

Sur les marches de la mort

Of the stair of the dead

J'écris ton nom

I write your name

Sur la santé revenue

And on health rekindling

Sur le risque disparu

On danger dwindling

Sur l'espoir sans souvenir

On hope without remembrance

J'écris ton nom

I write your name

Et par le pouvoir d'un mot

And by the power of a word

Je recommence ma vie

My life returns to me

Je suis né pour te connaître

I am born again to know you

Pour te nommer

And to name you

ENDNOTE

A brief description and some pictures of these painted walls in Lyon can be found here: https://en.lyon-france.com/Discover-Lyon/week-end-activity-ideas/frescos-and-murals-a-must-see-in-lyon (accessed January 21, 2021).

In France, between March 16 and end of May 2020.

Biography

Mar Pérezts is an associate professor of philosophy and organization at Emlyon Business School and a member of OCE Research Center. Her research is transversal, and delves into organizational questions with a critical eye grounded in her multicultural and multidisciplinary background. She serves as a Book Reviews Editor for Organization Studies since 2017.

Abstract

A year into the COVID 19 pandemic, I reflect upon walls and the fact that the lockdown has exacerbated humanity's experience of walls in themselves and, guided by an act of pictorial rebelliousness, push for a feminist way of re-enchanting them both materially and symbolically.

1 THREE WALLS

Painting a wall is always a revolutionary act. My 4-year-old daughter already knew it without me or anybody explaining it to her: she was staring at me in defiance while splashing the paint-soaked brush across the wall.

At least it was one of the walls of our balcony, not the living room, was my first thought. Oh well... there was no point in interrupting her rebellious creativity now that it was too late already anyway. Instead of leaving the wall half-finished, just like the graffiti tag on the corner across the street was left incomplete because of the suddenness of the first lockdown in March 2020, I decided to join her and we spent the rest of the afternoon decorating our balcony together. The condominium administrators and the neighbors will probably complain at some point when they realize the "damage" we made to the building's uniform appearance, and we shall probably have to erase or cover-up our family artwork with boring gray paint.

But in the meantime, my daughter and I accomplished a political act, as much as an artistic exercise. We transformed that wall into a place of our locked-down existential affirmation. Like prisoners carving "I was here" on the walls of their cells, or students engraving their names, emotions, dreams, or drawing on their desks during class when their teachers turned their backs to them to write something on the board (at least, in the good old days when students still attended class in the flesh instead of on online platforms). Behind such acts of what many would label "vandalism," we are phenomenologically present to our gesture, we dedicate our intentional attention to our every move and literally (or colorfully) mark ourselves into existence (Pérezts, ). We do not do them in order to necessarily write, carve or paint something -the content is as relevant (if not less so) than the gesture itself. We do them to fix our being onto a material surface beyond ourselves, to write or paint ourselves through them, to mark our territory. The same existential and political reason that drove our ancestors to leave hand prints, drawings or inscriptions on the walls of caves.

Having grown up in Mexico, I've always been fascinated by mural paintings and frescoes. I have now been living in Lyon, France for some years, and its painted walls-le mur des Lyonnais, le mur des Canuts, la Bibliothèque de la Cité, and, more discrete, a hommage fresco to Diego Rivera just a mere 5-min walk from our apartment reproducing some of his iconic works- are certainly part of why I feel kind of like "at home" in Lyon. It is the frescoes of Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera, but also the less internationally known David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, or José Clemente Orozco, that trace the memory of my people and prefigure our mestizo identity on the very object that is erected to delineate space. Such frescoes transform the gray urban landscape into an open-sky gallery. More than a gallery, into a program. Political and artistic. Just like the East Side Gallery in Berlin, murals take an enhanced structuring or edifying dimension precisely because they are painted on walls.

And while half the population is a year into, at varying degrees but for the same reason, being locked away at home to contain contagion-"between four walls," as the common saying goes-it is these walls that precisely have captured my attention. They are everywhere I look. I feel them closing in on me, on each of us. Like a larger-than-life escape game that never seems to end. And this crowned virus, unable to reach us through these cement walls that protect us against its potential human carriers, is determined not only to reorganize our entire lives and societies, but to invade us on the "walls" of our social media profiles as well, where it has, quite literally, become "viral," and the only thing that anybody seems to talk or care about nowadays, while business-(and tragedy)as-usual keep unfolding.

Sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, I am ruminating this saying "being between four walls" almost as if it were a sort of prayer or mantra of our times. In the meantime, my eyes err across the imperfections on the surface of the walls that surround me, following the more or less straight angles, scouting the fingerprints my daughter left here and there, the posters and mirrors, the projected shadows as the Sun goes down and shines through our West-facing window, the dust that has accumulated on the floor plinths that we don't have time to clean, and all the scars left by daily life within these walls that a future coat of paint will cover-up sometime. Too often have I ignored these walls. Now they have been shouting their overwhelming presence at me for too long and keep doing so every waking moment, reverberating the sound of my children's noise while I try to write, echoing our unavoidable togetherness. These walls have become oppressive and oppressors, and yet they don't seem to be thick enough to allow for some piece of quiet and privacy from the other four people, however loved, that I share them with.

Walls. We bump into them. They have a material dimension, empirical, phenomenal. We can build them, demolish them, climb them, paint them. But they also have a symbolic, metaphorical, or even epistemological dimension. Now that being predominantly constrained by four walls has become our shared human condition, one of the greatest common denominators of humanity (Pérezts & Deslandes, ), these walls invite us to collectively reflect upon them as rarely before.

Being "trapped" between walls has often had the effect of freeing our tongues, or rather our pens or whatever tool we can get our hands on to scrape a piece of paper, or, if there isn't any, their very surfaces. Different places of incarceration in the world have witnessed the birth of tales of epic proportions (Thomas Malory, Miguel de Cervantès, Fiodor Dostoïevski), of poetry (Paul Verlaine, Guillaume Apollinaire), of morally provocative texts (the Marquis de Sade, John Cleland), of travel diaries (Marco Polo), history books (Fernand Braudel), philosophic essays (Machiavelli, Thoreau, Russell, Althusser, Gandhi), political manifestos (Vladimir Lenine, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Luther King Jr., wa Thiong'o, Nelson Mandela, Leonard Peltier) as well as a proliferation of epistolary writings (Saint Paul, Oscar Wilde, Vaclav Havel) and more. To the point that being locked down-particularly in spartan material conditions, or in the akin form of exile-is even a condition that is purposively sought in order to favor inspiration. Philosophers like Wittgenstein can testify to this, when he spent a lengthy retreat in a cabin he built with his own hands in Norway. So can the monks of any religion across the world. According to popular legend, it is said that the lyrics of the Mexican national anthem were only written because the fiancée of their author, Francisco Gonzalez Bocanegra, locked him up in a tiny room with just bread and water until he finished... Conversely, incarceration is also a recurrent leitmotif of fiction since the classics ( The Count of Monte Cristo, by Dumas (); The Last day of a Condemned man (1829/2009) and Les Misérables by Hugo (); No Exit [1947/2000, also known as Behind closed doors] by Sartre (); Chess story by Zweig (), among many others). Today, this theme is recolored by contemporary television series such as Orange is the new black (Kohan, ).

But let us leave the specificities of the carceral environment, or that of monastic or philosophical retreat, because what we are living through today is actually another kind of "prison": the domestic environment. The prison remains a world of violence and of the masculine (including prisons for women) that have the noble (albeit contestable and often tragic) objective of justice. However, the lockdown in our homes is too close to the animality (we feel "like caged lions" in a zoo) and to the feminine. Being confined to the home, has ultimately been, and largely remains in many parts of the world, the feminine experience par définition, either by tradition, modesty, or gendered division of labor. In light of this, we find it all the more dreadful. An unbearable situation, in our misogynist and patriarchal societies. Staying at home has long been disdained, seen at best as uninteresting, and at worst as degrading, as the reign of the subjection to the everyday, anchored in the banality of the daily routines and chores, and whose objective is the protection and the care (almost a bad word) of an anonymous "all of us," by attempting to limit the spread of the virus.

Some of the (women and feminist) readers of this text will have not failed to notice that, except for screenwriter Jenji Kohan, not one of the above-mentioned authors is a woman... So, if this lockdown is unleashing so much the pens or rather the tweets, it is also because a fair share of the world's population was subjected overnight to discover this symbolically feminine experience that both shes and hes have sought to flee, for different reasons (the escalating domestic violence being among the prices of this crisis already being paid behind closed doors, unsurprisingly by the most vulnerable).

So, in a way, and against all odds, it is on a quest to reconquer these four walls that humanity must embark, to reappropriate them, to give them new meaning. In this regard, (re)reading Frank's () Diary of hiding away in an attic for two years in Amsterdam during the German occupation and Jewish persecution seems just as a good idea in the present circumstances as (re)reading Camus' () The Plague, whose sales have soared in the past year, or Netflix's miniseries on Pandemic: how to prevent an outbreak (Adaskova & Sorre, ), whose first airing in early 2020 couldn't have chosen a more perfect timing.

Telling the stories of what is happening within our walls and marking it on walls (both material and digital) is an existential need as much as an act of resistance (Li & Prasad, ). Making sense of this globalized expérience féminine par excellence. This seems to be confirmed by the variety of "lockdown stories" flooding the Internet and social media, where domestic anecdotes of the everyday are given center-stage, and whose power resides in that they resonate globally. As many others, I bang my head against the wall in trying to cope with working from home, home-schooling my daughter, taking care of my newborn son, grappling with my marriage, and struggling to keep an ounce of private inner life in the midst of it all. Every night at 8 o'clock during the first period of lockdown, I joined my neighbors by going out on our (now colorful) balcony to clap in support of the medical teams and frontline workers, as one of the only social gestures I could do besides staying at home. I clapped, all the while dreading that once this whole crisis is over, those that once clapped-and particularly the reigning class-will wall themselves in an indifferent silence tomorrow. The weight of inertia will probably make us rush back to the same mistakes that led us collectively to "run into a brick wall" in terms of economic, social, environmental, racial, and political issues, worldwide. There is but a small step between sanitary lockdown measures and necrocapitalistic closure, as materialized by the wall project that has long haunted us for the Mexican-USA border.

However, and no matter how desperate, boring, tired, or exhilarating things get, I find myself thinking that the four walls around me are never actually four, according to the common saying. This popular expression is in fact misleading in that it makes us overlook an opportunity to give them a meaning different from that of undergoing domestic imprisonment. If we pause to consider it, there are only three walls, and this is what new feminine and feminist hermeneutics of these walls must pursue. The fourth one is not a wall, or not entirely. It is always also a door or a window of some kind. It is a wailing wall, a revolutionary fresco, a fantastic imaginarium. It is a blank page, a virgin canvas, an invitation to the voyage, a prison's glass parloir, a movie screen, a curtain between the audience and the stage-that can and will be lifted by the stroke of an artists' brush. It is this fourth one that we open each night at 8 o'clock to clap and discover the faces of our until-now much ignored neighbors. In a word, it is an opening, always. A non-wall.

Whether in a dungeon, a prison cell, or a monastery, a student dorm room, a refugee camp, a hotel room, an apartment or country house, no matter how big or small... all these figures of closed spaces that have become the locus of our global-yet always experienced as singular - lockdown, only ever have three walls. As long as we strive to not forget it. As long as we inhabit them as poets, or as painters instead of as slaves (Mandalaki & Daou, ). In order not to let these walls that today lock-us in turn into walls of silence and indifference. In order to appropriate them and put our embodied selves onto their surfaces. As long as we make them speak, to make them edifying, we make them the locus of a feminist political and artistic re-enchantment. Whether with a pinch of humor or of despair, of heroism or banality, of the exceptional or of the commonplace, of the literary or the pictorial, our three walls are the stage where our lives are being played out, and where the potential of our feminine creation can also be asserted (Biehl-Missal, ).

More than that, they are becoming one of its main characters, as important as the beings who breathe in it, just like Isabel Allende's () The House of Spirits, and it falls upon us to assert their magical realism, to re-enchant their existence.

This is why we paint the wall of our balcony.

We must.

A feminist reinterpretation of muralism.

(Childhood is decidedly an age of wisdom).

And following my daughter's example, in an act to conjure silence, I transcribe on the part of wall on our balcony still left virgin, these words by Eluard (, p. 8), who in 1942, amidst a World War, wrote what resonates today so vividly in my veins and in the linings of my free spirit:

Sur mes refuges détruits

On my refuge that crumbles

Sur mes phares écroulés

My beacon-tower that falls

Sur les murs de mon ennui

On ennui's walls

J'écris ton nom

I write your name

Sur l'absence sans désir

On absence on nude

Sur la solitude nue

Solitude on each tread

Sur les marches de la mort

Of the stair of the dead

J'écris ton nom

I write your name

Sur la santé revenue

And on health rekindling

Sur le risque disparu

On danger dwindling

Sur l'espoir sans souvenir

On hope without remembrance

J'écris ton nom

I write your name

Et par le pouvoir d'un mot

And by the power of a word

Je recommence ma vie

My life returns to me

Je suis né pour te connaître

I am born again to know you

Pour te nommer

And to name you

ENDNOTE

A brief description and some pictures of these painted walls in Lyon can be found here: https://en.lyon-france.com/Discover-Lyon/week-end-activity-ideas/frescos-and-murals-a-must-see-in-lyon (accessed January 21, 2021).

In France, between March 16 and end of May 2020.

Biography

Mar Pérezts is an associate professor of philosophy and organization at Emlyon Business School and a member of OCE Research Center. Her research is transversal, and delves into organizational questions with a critical eye grounded in her multicultural and multidisciplinary background. She serves as a Book Reviews Editor for Organization Studies since 2017.

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A year into the COVID 19 pandemic, I reflect upon walls and the fact that the lockdown has exacerbated humanity's experience of walls in themselves and, guided by an act of pictorial rebelliousness, push for a feminist way of re-enchanting them both materially and symbolically. Painting a wall is always a revolutionary act.

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Link to a short tango video (scroll down to see it) we filmed with Emmanouela Mandalaki, that illustrates our paper "It takes two to tango: theorizing inter-corporeality and nakedness in researching and writing organizations ", and about the hostile reaction to which we shared our small text for this workshop. 

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Link to a short tango video (scroll down to see it) we filmed with Emmanouela Mandalaki, that illustrates our paper "It takes two to tango: theorizing inter-corporeality and nakedness in researching and writing organizations ", and about the hostile reaction to which we shared our small text for this workshop. 

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https://www.marperezts.com/post/it-takes-two-to-tango-shall-we-dance

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Dance with us, on the dance-floor and with words, as we reenact our individual and shared tango autoethnographic experiences to develop an understanding of field inter-corporeality as a phenomenological experience of nakedness empowered by the transformational potential of eros. We write as we dance to discuss how eroticizing through the other's presence our embodied nakedness, beyond sexual stereotypes, pushes us to meta-reflect on ourselves as organizational ethnographers and writers to reinvent our field and writing interactions as inter-corporeally relational and intersubjective. We problematize the sexual gaze that traditionally associates nakedness with shame and objectified vulnerability to stress the capacity of eroticizing our academic nakedness to enable free, embodied knowledge stripped of the traits of the dominant masculine academic order. In so doing, we join burgeoning autoethnographic and broader debates in the field of organization studies calling for the need to further unveil the embodied, erotic, and feminine aspects of organizational research and writing. Shall we dance?

. . .Just like a dance, danced by two. . .

In social science research, and particularly in immersive ethnographic methodologies, there is "the field" and there is "me". We try to take on the dramatis persona of "the researcher" or "the ethnographer", in the field and in our scientific accounts, but behind such rational methodological masks lies an embodied and relational experience ( Thanem and Knights, 2019). "Me" will venture into "the field", and the two will somehow be united for a parenthesis in space and time to share unpredictable encounters that will inevitably affect both. Just like two partners in a tango, who move together, sometimes tread on each other's feet, improvising and co-creating an unrepeatable dance. Just like us, Emmanouela and Mar, two academics, whose passion for dance bridged the ocean separating our bodies, pushing us to share the keyboard and write this paper. Shortly after being introduced via email by a mutual friend and colleague, we started exchanging diaries of our autoethnographic, often very personal, dancing experiences, partly transcribed below as italicized dialogs of our overseas correspondence. For several months, we knew each other only through our virtual texts until we finally met at the 2018 LAEMOS conference and danced together in Buenos Aires. As we will argue, Me-Field encounters strip off the armours of our objectified researchers' embodied selves and intentions, making us feel "naked". Reflecting on our dancing field experiences, we suggest that it is precisely this intense inter-corporeal experience of "nakedness" that makes theorizing possible, and that this must inform our writing.

Dance, nonverbal in nature, involves the kind of movement that binds dancers to each other and to their "field", providing access to the unspoken, tacit components of culture ( Slutskaya, 2006). Dance unlocks dancers' affective, cognitive, and emotive experiences ( Cancienne and Snowber, 2003) enabling embodied forms of introspection about their context. Embodied autoethnographic accounts have used dance as a metaphor to discuss the body as a medium for both reinforcing and transcending order ( Mandalaki, 2019; Slutskaya and De Cock, 2008), while insights from salsa ( Lucker, 2008) and tango ( Davis, 2015) have helped explain the deeply affective, performative, and embodied nature of academic research and autoethnography in particular ( Ronai, 1998; Spry, 2001). Indeed, dancing experiences share a performative nature with organizational experiences, which help understand organizational and researcher-field interactions in a novel way ( Cornelissen, 2004).

Here, we use our parallel and shared embodied autoethnographic experiences on the dance-floor to discuss the challenges and possibilities of theorizing from field events and draw broader implications for researching and writing organizations. Dancing, literally and symbolically, both in the way our bodies intermingle on the dance floor and in the way our words converse in this paper, made us realize that there is an unavoidable nakedness involved in both going into the field and writing about it. We experience this nakedness as a slippery concept, which slides across the hooks of a metaphor and an analogy while often being sensed literally in the field and in the below-exposed dialogical dancing prose. This nakedness removes the masks of our Me-Field encounters to provide a springboard where our inter-corporeal, sensuous, dreaming, loving, cognitive, and intersubjective experiences cohabit. It surprises us, and shakes our epistemic habits, pushing us to challenge vested understandings of how organizational research and writing must be conducted.

Drawing on the experience of our closed abrazo, we understand nakedness as a relation of erotic inter-corporeality, which transcends the individual naked body, subjected to the normative sexual gaze and connects it to other bodies through eros. We expose this nakedness in our writing, arguing for the need to rethink the potential of our naked researchers' bodies to engage in affectively erotic relations, which are "not primarily about sex" ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014: 276) but about a search for deeper connections of pleasure and love ( Lund and Tienari, 2019) enabling them to liberate their embodied knowledge. This challenges the sexual gaze that traditionally associates "being naked" with an objectified inferior position of shame, obscenity, discomfort, and vulnerability ( Cover, 2003) to uncover our affective ways of being inter-corporeally together in our field and writing practices ( Beavan, 2019). Such an understanding of nakedness gives access not only to what we see as distant observers but also and most importantly to the power of what we feel ( Dorion, 2018) and embody when we let our bodies free to eroticize each other in our research encounters. Denying this, ignores the beating life that moves our academic endeavors ( Beavan, 2019; Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Thanem and Knights, 2019), rendering them as empty as a tango danced alone.

We adopt a phenomenologically-inspired perspective that considers the primacy of the body in developing consciousness of lived events ( Henry, 1975; Merleau-Ponty, 1964) to discuss what nakedness, as an erotic experience of our embodied, living, research, and writing encounters, and as "an embodied method can do" ( Thanem and Knights, 2019: 143). We explore the possibilities and impossibilities of writing the naked self ( Gannon, 2006) and the naked other in an embodied dialogical italicized writing style ( Boncori and Smith, 2018; Helin, 2019a), whose lines set the stage for our written dance and our embodied theorization. In so doing, we contribute to the increasing acknowledgment of how "theorizing is endemically informed by corporeality" ( Grosz, 1994; Segarra and Prasad, 2018: 2) problematizing anatomical, phallocentric organizational research approaches that "dress" bodies with overly abstract discourse ( Ahonen et al., 2020; Fotaki, 2013; Phillips et al., 2014; Pullen et al., 2020; Thanem and Knights, 2019). Our understanding of nakedness responds to calls to reclaim eros in the academy as an energy source ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Dorion, 2018; Lund and Tienari, 2019) with a powerful embodied and inter-corporeal potential. This potential, we argue, allows further exposing the affective, emotive, and vulnerable aspects of doing and writing organizational research and autoethnography in particular, as increasingly called for in organizational literature ( Beavan, 2019; Boncori and Smith, 2018; Helin, 2019a, 2019b; Höpfl, 2000; Fotaki et al., 2014; Katila, 2019; Pullen, 2018; van Amsterdam, 2015). We add to these organizational debates, discussing how eroticizing, through the other's presence, our embodied nakedness pushes us to meta-reflect on ourselves as organizational ethnographers and writers, and redefine our field and writing interactions through eros, as inter-corporeally relational and intersubjective. This unleashes the performative and transformational capacity of nakedness as a form of writing and conducting (auto)ethnography, to produce its own aesthetically appealing discourse rooted in the ontological experience of relationally being-in-the-world, naked, with others.

So, dear reader, bear with us in this written dance where we will live, explore and dance these issues with you and for you, while developing our proposal of the experiential, methodological, and theoretical implications of nakedness in three movements. In the first movement of our dance, we discuss the nakedness of bodies as being stripped of the elements of their social construction and repression of their needs, to unveil the potential of embodied knowledge residing in their erotic phenomenological experiences. Second, we disentangle the "nakedness" of writing ( Cixous, 1996) as an embodied form of expression ( Fotaki et al., 2014; Pullen, 2018) and that of co-writing as an inter-corporeal experience, allowing us to "undress" the data in our eroticized bodies. We end by dance-discussing the liberating possibilities for researching and writing organizations as revealed by the erotic intersubjective and inter-corporeal experience of nakedness.

Shall we dance?

Naked bodies: Coming to terms with erotic embodied research and field inter-corporeality

I could never free my body much in front of others. It might have been due to my image of it, its perfections and imperfections, the politically correct idea of the self and the body that should match it. And it was all turned around now that I was freely disposed to my dancing partners' corporeal invitations. I felt that I needed to understand this tension: how moving while dancing could motivate a continuous self-and-other-discovery; a sense of "being" rather than having "to be".
Without names, phone numbers or obligations. All the poetry of the world contained in our abrazo. Violins bring our breath closer together. Then silence separates us. The dance floor reclaims its cathedral-like emptiness, waiting for us to come and re-inhabit it once the music starts again. I feel myself existing not only for you but also with you. I don't know who you are, or if we'll meet or dance again. But in that brief eternity, we were one. What does this mean, for me, for us, for those who danced with us that night? Then rationality kicks in: I remember that I'm doing fieldwork.
Oh yes, academic rationality giving more importance to thinking than to becoming. I felt perplexed: how was my body able to star in this playful interplay between these vulnerable other selves searching redemption in the fluidity of dancing? I remember the feeling of being inhabited by a host, keeping so much of my fieldwork data trapped within my skin, in the pit of my stomach, in the fatigue of my legs, growing inside my womb and not knowing whether the birth of this-thing, dance, text?-would get the better of me. The data lived in our bodies. . .

Our bodies and those of the subjects that we study in the field are always there, and yet they are not. We take them for granted ( Thanem and Knights, 2019), treat them as objects of disciplinary and surveillance practices ( Hassard et al., 2000). We censor and cover them up in our interpretations and texts, forgetting the naked body, which lies, literally and symbolically, behind the mask of "the researcher", "the worker", or "the manager" ( Pérezts et al., 2015).

Due to their messiness, affect, and fragility, embodied accounts are often epistemologically disavowed ( Segarra and Prasad, 2018) and methodologically contested as "valid" in organizational studies. Namely, several autoethnographic traditions, like analytic ( Anderson, 2006) or realist autoethnography ( Barron, 2013) remain skeptical of other autoethnographic approaches such as evocative autoethnography ( Bochner and Ellis, 2016; Denzin, 1997), which emphasize the researcher's post-modernist sensibilities as opposed to more traditional forms of symbolic interactionism ( Anderson, 2006). Nevertheless, despite persistent criticism rooted in positivist epistemologies ( Probyn, 1993), concerning the lack of "objectivity" and "scientificity" of embodied research accounts, ethnographic approaches have gradually tuned down the taboo.

Proponents of evocative autoethnography advocate the idea of "moments" of qualitative inquiry ( Denzin and Lincoln, 2000) involving deep self-reflexivity, personal, emotional, and corporeal engagement in the final narrative ( Ellis, 2004; Ellis and Bochner, 2000; Reed-Danahay, 1997; Van Maanen, 1990). Ethnography, and particularly autoethnography, is "a story of the body told through the body" ( Langellier, 1999: 208), which becomes the (auto)ethnographer's meaning-making medium ( Ellis, 2004; Pelias, 1999). Embodied accounts can then become the locus of imaginative research methods ( Elliott and Culhane, 2017), where culture is materialized and incarnated.

It is important to consider this body "in order to further reflect on and understand ambiguous organizing occurring 'on the move'", remarks Huopalainen (2015: 826) in her analysis of how bodily movements become internalized and standardized in fashion shows. In doing so, she also focuses on her own gaze: what she sees and what she does not while moving around the field. We agree and suggest going further by considering how the nakedness of bodies shapes our academic field experiences and the development of knowledge around these.

This is because, albeit deemed a matter of self-consciousness, nakedness becomes salient under the other's gaze ( Cover, 2003), which makes it an inherently relational phenomenon. Indeed, on the dancing stage or in the organizational field we are not alone in a solipsistic reflection. Our bodies are exposed, naked to each other: they retain a muscular, sensorial memory of our field interactions that informs our interpretations ( Hammer, 2015). We cannot ignore our aching feet in our high-heeled shoes after a Milonga. Too tired to remove our make-up, we often wake up in the morning to find our faces smudged with mascara, our bodies marked with traces of our partners' scent (or lack of it). The literal and metaphorical scars that we carry on our naked bodies in the aftermath of our fieldwork give access to levels of awareness that the mind alone cannot conceive and which challenge our cognitive schemas to produce knowledge through pure, uncontaminated inter-corporeal experience.

The nakedness that we experience in our fields is our "qualia": it is an unfamiliar term to denote that, which could not be more familiar ( Dennett, 1988), but which more often than not remains hidden. It is "as raw feels" ( Dennett, 1988) on our flesh and our skin ( Brewis and Williams, 2019; Cixous, 1996); what our embodied experience seems and feels to be in the organizational contexts that we research, work in, and write about. What Thanem and Knights (2019) express as our unavoidable necessity to engage with the affective richness of the research context, we thus suggest can be further theorized by the concept of nakedness whose erotic inter-corporeality triggers new meanings.

In the Garden, Adam and Eve were naked but "not ashamed" (Genesis, 2:25). They only realized their state in the presence of each other after having eaten the forbidden fruit: "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew they were naked" (Genesis, 3:7), and they felt shame and covered themselves with fig leaves. This foundational myth is deeply buried in our Western subconscious ( Milton, 1966), which associates being naked with a shameful exposure of genitals, linked to lustful and "improper" sexuality ( Jeffreys, 1990). This sexual rather than erotic gaze disregards the utmost expressions of eros, pleasure, and love that we can experience through nakedness during genuinely affective encounters ( Cover, 2003). Under the sexual gaze, the naked body is objectified, seen as the sign of vulnerability, obscenity, and shame, which if not correctly treated can lead to dangerous knowledge or a dangerous society ( Nead, 2002). The improper sexuality associated with this "unruly" naked body must be tamed, censored, and confined within accepted social conventions ( Nead, 2002). Hence, the development of a culture of "context-dependent shared and gazed-upon nakedness" ( Bell and Holliday, 2000: 130) and the structuration of a "legitimate" gaze in normed contexts, like marital sex, parent-child/doctor-patient interactions, shared baths or artistic encounters (e.g. advertising, paintings; Cover, 2003; Grosz, 1998).

This policing is also what academic conventions have attempted to do to the (symbolic, but sometimes also literal) unavoidable embodied nakedness involved in our research, theorizing, and writing endeavors. They commodify its erotic potential for love and pleasure through the sexual stereotype, and censor it behind the sexual academic gaze ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014). This covers our academic experiences with a disembodied (in fact, masculine) symbolic order ( Fotaki, 2011, 2013; Pullen et al., 2020) confining our leaky, bloody, and exhausted bodies to shame ( Beavan, 2019) and disavowing the epistemological validity of our inter-corporeal being experiences ( Segarra and Prasad, 2018).

However, it is through our naked bodies that we play, share affects and eroticize each other to make sense of our academic field interactions ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Thanem and Knights, 2019). Thus, we argue that we need to understand the potential of their erotic phenomenological encounters to challenge "sexual fixity" ( Brewis and Grey, 1994: 73): the objectification, shame, and vulnerability that we are conditioned to experience when exposed naked to each other. We need to shake the sexual academic norms that subsume eros to violence and domination ( Dorion, 2018), suppressing our bodies' genuine expressions of enjoyment ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014).

Following recent accounts, we understand eros as the imagination, prospect and longing for fearless connections of love and pleasure, including sexual attraction, passion, affect, and joy, which depart from stereotypical understandings of sex/sex appeal ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014), or de facto sexist interpretations of the erotic ( Dorion, 2018). Eros is love for the self and the other but also love of wisdom and the production of knowledge. Eros involves a desire to reconcile long-sustained normative binaries to make sense of our embodied, emotive, and intellectual dispositions ( Miller, 1998) through mutual exchanges of care, trust, and respect for and with others ( hooks, 2001; Lund and Tienari, 2019). We stress the liberating energy and embodied potential of eros to overturn academic conventions, gendered stereotypes, and dominant discourses ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014), to argue for the need to separate our academic nakedness from the sexual masculine order.

Let's allow our naked bodies to eroticize each other, and in so doing create a space for love in our field and writing encounters: "a space for relating to and acknowledging the "Other" and oneself in ways, which surpasses assigned identity categories and instrumental performance requirements" ( Lund and Tienari, 2019: 112). In this way, eros as love can creatively transform our writing practices and convert our exposed vulnerability into courage ( Dorion, 2018; Kiriakos and Tienari, 2018).

Tango can teach us how to do so. Because while on the dance-floor, one offers one's sensual self to the other's abrazo to experience intersubjective and relational encounters based on inter-corporeal openness, care, and mutual trust that only an eroticized gaze freed from sexual stereotypes can encourage ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Cover, 2003). The sensuality in tango ( Davis, 2015) does not sexually commodify our bodies, liberating us from feelings of shame and obscenity. This brings forward the potential of inter-corporeal nakedness as the purest expression of "being-in-the-world" to enable humanly possible, affectively erotic connections with one another.

Understanding how nakedness, as an erotic inter-corporeal experience, shapes our field and writing experiences counters the ontological duality between body and mind. Instead, it views the ethnographer as a "body-subject" ( le corps-propre, Merleau-Ponty, 2013) that continuously reinvents its subjectivity and surrounding environment in a dynamic process of inter-becoming, where consciousness and corporeality co-exist. We start from the principle that theorizing emerges from the "phenomenological parameters of corporeality" ( Segarra and Prasad, 2018: 1), which possess "all the explanatory powers of the mind" ( Grosz, 1994: 7). We argue that it is not our pre-held beliefs but rather the process of experiencing through the naked body that shapes our ontological and epistemological relationship to the world, to our research fields and to others. Further still, we view the researcher's naked body as shared in a phenomenological binding that is no longer an affection "perverted by the eye" ( Henry, 2011: 800) wearing the sexual gaze, but that which opens us up to the invisible life of erotic self-affection, both for and with others' naked bodies. This is far from a conscious decision or a well-structured procedure, enabling this surprising process of being with the naked self and the naked other in the field through corporeally informed reflection.

Far from undermining the methodological rigor expected in organizational research methods, the adoption of this phenomenological lens, unveils the potential of nakedness to relationally and organically redefine our field and writing practices and their rigor ( Pullen et al., 2020). This adds to the anthropological richness of the data generated from a balance between professional distance and personal involvement ( Anteby, 2013). It accords with recent debates stressing the reflexive, emotive, and embodied engagement in the autoethnographic experience ( Beavan, 2019; Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Boncori and Smith, 2018; Pullen, 2018; Thanem and Knights, 2019), to emphasize that evocative and emotive narratives ( Ellis, 2004) can co-exist with analytical reflexivity ( Anderson, 2006; Boncori and Smith, 2019), as they both emerge from researchers' naked inter-corporeal experiences. It also joins recent attempts to blur long-sustained boundaries between ontological and epistemological research underpinnings, arguing that the construction of knowledge is intersubjective, rooted in the ontological experience of inter-corporeally "being-in-the-world" with others ( Segarra and Prasad, 2018), naked.

Sensing what our eroticized naked bodies are together capable of, literally and metaphorically, urges us to put them down on paper. Because our dancing, living, sweating, bleeding, leaking, gendered naked "bod[ies] must be heard" ( Cixous, 1996: 338), and because we want to make them heard. This takes us to the second movement of our dance.

Naked writing and co-writing

Urged to put words on this novel experience, I was struggling to find the right academic references to cite, a category to put it in, underestimating its inherent credibility. But I could only live it and sense it, neither understand nor write about it at first. Words all seemed wrong. It was mainly the sensations in my fingers that once rested on someone's shoulders. Objectifying Milonga dances as "forms of organizing" never seemed to fit the movements I re-enacted, nor the living memory of the dance, although it was in fact just that: people making sense of each other's bodies, moving in the dance of an organized community that needs not utter a word for it to function. And I started wondering why organizational research is largely about writing! So, this was my excuse to dance again. Corporeally "ethno-writing" my experience started to feel more palpable, as "toe-words" were dancing out of my fingers to dress the "data" (or rather "undress" it?). I often had to go back to delete, rewrite, and find better words to describe what I (thought I) wanted to say, particularly as English is not my first language.
Nor is it mine! Indeed, the notes I took were in Spanish: el idioma del tango, mi idioma. It was a triple translation: from music to prose, from body to words, from Spanish to English; a simultaneously liberating and terribly frustrating process. My fingers couldn't keep up with what my mind was trying to expel, nor could my mind keep up with what my body had experienced.
The whole experience started suffocating me. . .Was I taking a big risk in wanting to register myself forever between the lines of a manuscript? Should I leave the readers with their interpretations or should I suggest mine? Like when I dance: should I follow my partner when I feel uncomfortable with the moves, or not? I realize the almost schizophrenic psycho-synthesis of this (auto)ethnographic process. My naked dancing moments inform the nakedness that I feel in my research practice and before my text's audience, which I paradoxically seek to create while writing about all this. Why do we have to dress our nakedness with words, then?

Because "Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement" ( Cixous, 1996: 875).

Yes, we must! Cixous is right to use the imperative mode so often: it is a programmatic and performative commitment. Not just because we are two women. But because, we need to reincorporate the "Other/Mother/Feminine" ( Höpfl, 2000: 103) and the potential for love that resides in our academic bodies ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014), too often perceived as polluting the androcentric and heteronormative view of organizational research and writing, in the neoliberal university ( Prasad, 2016; Lund and Tienari, 2019; Segarra and Prasad, 2018). Indeed, driven by the neoliberal economic logic of competition (purported as gender neutral; Benschop and Doorewaard, 2012), academic excellence is associated with a universalized and disembodied (masculine) way of conducting, writing and theorizing organizational research, evaluated against external metrics ( Fleming, 2020). But, these metrics violently hurt and cover our naked academic bodies and texts, converting them into the surface onto which masculine pedagogies, visible and invisible wounds are painfully inscribed ( Bell and King, 2010). We feel the pain. We remember how Burrell posits analysis as a potentially "fearsome weapon of mutilation" arguing that words as conceptualizations, "imprison . . .[what they] seek to address" ( Burrell, 1997: 20). Academic rigor tends to dictate institutionalized, rational closure in textual production, pushing us to say what others expect us to say ( Pullen, 2018), and depriving our texts of the creative transformational potential of corporeal openness ( Martinez, 2014). Yet, this is "a hopeless project, as we limit ourselves and what we are capable of expressing" ( Helin, 2019b: 4).

Indeed, we should use all our senses in conducting and writing organizational research, to counterbalance the excessive importance given to discourse ( Hammer, 2015; Kostera, 2007). After all, while corporeally writing down thoughts ( Helin, 2019b; Pullen, 2018), we do more than bring back tales from the field ( Van Maanen, 1988): our skin-texts and naked bodies become the mediation of experience and of its expression ( Brewis and Williams, 2019). This is even truer for autoethnographic accounts, which depart from "objective truths", fusing the subject and the object in the researcher's subjective, embodied, mental, and emotional experiences ( Ellis, 2004; Ellis and Bochner, 2000; Gannon, 2006). Autoethnographic experience converts the authorial autobiographical "I" to an existential "we" ( Spry, 2001), whereby the personal "dances" with the social and the theoretical to produce sophisticated and theoretically compelling accounts ( Ronai, 1998), often conveyed through unorthodox textual forms, like personal essays, poetry, or dialogs ( Beavan, 2019; Boyle and Parry, 2007; Helin, 2019a; van Amsterdam, 2015), as we do here.

Unsurprisingly, at least for us as women, many of these organizational research accounts of naked bodies often translate as:

" écriture féminine - a writing of the body and by the body, after Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Monique Wittig [. . .which] involves breaking a code of practice where human fluids must be cleansed, suppressed and closeted." ( Pullen and Rhodes, 2008: 255)

This position writes against academic conventions that reflect the masculine traits of a "science of erection" ( Höpfl, 2000: 104), and against the cleansing of the abject, irrational Other of the feminine ( Fotaki, 2011; Grosz, 1994; Prasad, 2016; Pullen and Rhodes, 2008). In organization studies, écriture feminine is increasingly acknowledged as a space where feeling and thinking dispositions are fecund and interweave to shape embodied texts. These can meaningfully connect us to our readers ( Fotaki and Harding, 2017), for instance through multi-vocal writing ( Ahonen et al., 2020; Boncori and Smith, 2018), dream-writing ( Helin, 2019b), collaborative bricolage ( Handforth and Taylor, 2016) or cyborg writing ( Mandalaki and Daou, 2020; Prasad, 2016).

Following Cixous, the evocative learning and writing power lies within our skin: "I was born, so to speak, in the skin of writing, and I have writing in the skin" (quoted in Brewis and Williams 2019: 90). Beavan engages with what Cixous calls our "outlawed subjectivity" to be able to write-perform "[her] body and [her] text" ( 2019: 65) as inseparable. Crucially, writing serves as the epistemological tool to reclaim eroticism in academia by reinventing the relationships between bodies and knowledge, to understand "academic work as embodied practice" ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014: 269) that can subvert the dominant order.

Joining these debates in our field, we argue that "naked" writing through eros can and must ever further perform this potential. Because eros drives us with "an uncontrollable and un-cooptable energy and longing [for each other and for knowledge that] exists independently of whether it is recognized, rewarded or appreciated by dominant institutions" ( Lund and Tienari, 2019: 98-99). It can therefore enable forms of resistance that can transform the hegemony of the neoliberal university ( Ahonen et al., 2020). In challenging the sexual academic gaze, our eroticized bodies heal our wounds enabling us to reinvent our relational inter-corporeal potential to create knowledge that speaks freely with others ( Rhodes, 2019; Thanem and Knights, 2019).

So, let's put the unrepeatable movement of our dancing silhouettes and their erotic aesthetic into the verses that we exchange ( Cixous, 1996). Let's liberate our embodied knowledge from its masculine academic confines ( Fotaki, 2011, 2013; Rhodes, 2019), to expose the vulnerability, affects, messiness, and pleasure that we share. We might run the risk of being marked for what we-maybe unintendedly-appear to be in the text; or paradoxically, often feeling guilty for this almost "insidious" purpose of "researching" ourselves and our research subjects to produce a publishable piece ( Prasad, 2014) that " looks good" ( Beavan, 2019, emphasis in original). Yet, bringing our entire, sweaty, tired, and erotic naked beings to our texts is the only way to not empty our research endeavors from everything alive and meaningful within them, to affectively resonate with others.

To do so, here we adopt an embodied duo-autoethnograhic writing style, whereby we combine "naked" dialogical italicized reflections and common text. Our paper resembles a form of porous palimpsest ( Brewis and Williams, 2019), an embodied scriptology ( Rhodes, 2019), exposing the intellectual, aesthetic and poetic ( Pelias, 1999) capacity of naked writing to liberate our embodied knowledge. In the italicized chunks, we constantly dress and undress the self and the other to produce a naked text that follows the frantic movement of our dance. We unveil our shared blockages and struggles as dancers, researchers, and women writers of organizations, and find comfort in each other's words. We care for each other, feel, trust, and eroticize our naked dancing bodies through our words, and invite our readers to join the sweaty rhythm of our dance ( Ulmer, 2017). We need this "dirtiness" in our writing ( Pullen and Rhodes, 2008) to textually expose our inter-corporeal nakedness and its erotic inter-play, with all the affect and vulnerability that they carry, to counter the "penetrative conclusiveness" of academic rigor ( Phillips et al., 2014: 316).

Our naked "knowledge is made in our doing together" ( Beavan, 2019: 65, emphasis in original); in our naked researcher bodies' eroticizing "practices of knowing in being" ( Barad, 2003: 829): the stage where the epistemological understanding of our ontological (auto)ethnographic experience happens.

Where were you all this time? How could I think I w/could dance/write without you? Dancing, like researching, is a kind of organizing that requires training, but also imagination, allowing oneself to drift, while also remaining present every instant as a body, beyond a persona. And the other, you, Emmanouela, my alter, mirrors my being in the world at this moment where I am with all my baggage, my age, my vulva, my memories, my fears, my dreams, my difference, my place in the various hierarchies.
We called each other to a dance through writing, letting our experiences intermingle like bodies in a dance. We connected from afar very intimately, before knowing each other in "real" life.

And we are aware of the dangers that this might involve for the reviewing and publishing process, given the reproductive and cleansing power of academic organizational discourse ( Katila, 2019), that Pullen (2018) goes as far as paralleling with labiaplasty. We know that this naked writing might be perceived as shocking, shameful, lustful, vulnerable, or undisciplined through the lens of the sexual academic gaze. Yet, we cannot but liberate our womanly possible, naked, embodied " cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros" ( Cixous et al., 1976: 889, our emphasis), recognizing the impossibility of containing this cosmos in concrete theories and methodological categories.

Our naked co-writing becomes the site where our first embodied encounter takes place. Next, we discuss our shared inter-corporeal experiences on the Milonga dance-floor to further develop an intersubjective understanding of the potentials of nakedness, as an inter-corporeal erotic process, for conducting and writing organizational research.

In the next sub-sections, we textually and visually dance (with) the reader through the process whereby nakedness-in its affective and erotic multiplicities-unfolded in the context of our shared inter-corporeal experiences on the Milonga dance-floor. In doing so, we identify and discuss two implications of nakedness for the way we experience, write, and share our research. First, we ground the possibility of theorizing from field-research, particularly with ethnographic approaches, as rooted in inter-corporeal nakedness. This allows us to revalue the (auto)ethnographer's embodied self-of which gender is not a mere, secondary variable but a crucial aspect ( Moreno, 1995)-from a methodological perspective, to acknowledge how it fosters awareness of inter-corporeal, and intersubjective lived experiences as integral to the knowledge development process. Second, nakedness furthers embodied research and writing through unlocking the relational potential brought by an erotic dimension. This enhances our understanding of intersubjectivity as inter-corporeality by reframing our ontological status as organizational researchers in naked erotic terms.

The way we experience organizational field research, and particularly ethnography, is very different from the methodological guidelines that we learn. We think we will go into the field with our comfortable researchers' boots (or dancing shoes) and everything will eventually make sense. Yet, we often feel lost and clueless. Accepting that our whole being (including the field and personal experiences) is both what we study and the lens through which we study it, is a first step toward untangling the theorizing process. In ethnography, and even more in "naked" autoethnography, the self, much like the other, is a resource ( Collins and Gallinat, 2013), since self-and-other awareness and the experience of researchers' bodies in relation to their field are what make research possible.

In our dance, we felt our lived body ( Grosz, 1994) and understood autoethnography as an embodied performance in being and writing, whereby the autobiographical impulse met the ethnographic moment through movement ( Spry, 2001). We combined our bodily and sensual awareness with our dancing partners. We coordinated balance, energy, strength and the moving space we both occupied while dancing. We were attentive to each other's moves to avoid colliding with other couples and to the other's emotional engagement during the dance, to establish and maintain the connection: it is a shared responsibility. As in Hammer's (2015) account of sighted and visually impaired cyclists riding tandem: it is not uncommon to "be the eyes" of our dance partners when they close theirs, or have a very limited field of vision due to the close abrazo. It "requires . . . a critical awareness of 'body-to-body' presence" ( Hammer 2015: 515). It all becomes blurred kinaesthetically and synaesthetically while " being with" others' bodies in the field.

Our naked dancing body becomes the site of intersubjective and inter-corporeal experience, which we argue is true of any immersion in the field and in organizational life ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Fotaki et al., 2014; Thanem and Knights, 2019). This brings us to nuance the overemphasis on sight and observation as one of the main gateways to ethnographic field techniques. While we rely heavily on observation and the evocative visual capacity of writing down our tales, our observations are more often "quick than thick" ( Wolcott, 1995: 90) and rarely live up to their promise ( Bate, 1997). Ethnography is not just about getting a glimpse into others' worlds and writing about them. It is about making sense of these worlds that are no longer just theirs but have become affectively ours as well ( Fotaki et al., 2017), imbued with feelings, impressions, and struggles, all constructed through our shared, embodied, multi-sensory experiences ( Spry, 2001). We share the idea that data is not out there waiting to be objectively evaluated and collected. It is instead relational, co-created ( Riach et al., 2016), co-enacted and co-embodied. Ethnography involves collective reflection in situ; not in the aftermath of data generation ( Gilmore and Kenny, 2015), but emerging in corpus at the intersection of cognitive, affective, intersubjective, and co-embodied power dynamics continuously evolving in the research field.

Beyond "going native", which bodily-detached, anthropological and ethnographic perspectives consider a necessary step in the research process ( Van Maanen, 2011), we thus argue that it is also about "going naked". As we immerse in our field, we discover our incapacity to separate our researcher's body from the actual body we inhabit, urging us to take off the researcher's mask and expose ourselves naked to all who take part in our research life. Such "naked" ethnographic moments lead us to open up, and intersect with life beyond distant observation, making it impossible to understand intersubjectivity without considering its inter-corporeal dimensions. Our nakedness shapes our experiences and writing practices and should thus not be hushed or cleaned up, but should be welcomed and engaged with, including its unavoidable, gendered dimension:

As Moreno puts it: "In the field it is not possible to maintain the fiction of a genderless self. In the field, one is marked" ( 1995: 246-7). Moreover, our naked texts become crowded places, where invisible authors and readers intersect, ready to mark each other's identities in transformative ways ( Probyn, 1993; Stanley, 1992). We are haunted by others' interpretations and discriminations of our sexualized nature ( Beavan, 2019; Brewis, 2005; Dworkin, 1981; Thanem and Knights, 2019) in our field and writing encounters, and this is even truer when we are exposed naked, literally and symbolically. We cannot ignore this process of moving as sexualized females and males on the dance floor if we want to make sense of our field encounters.

When we dance, we experience passion and eros, which unsettle critical paradigms, creating a rift between politics and experience, and shaking normative understandings of gender and power dynamics ( Davis, 2015). Exposing our gendered nakedness to each other on the dance floor appears as the condition for experiencing gender not as discrimination within the limits of heterosexual normativity and its violence ( Dorion, 2018), but as the potential of our sensual, erotic, affective, relational and intersubjective becoming. This compels us to recognize that our material, gendered, leaky, erotic bodies are sites of knowing, understood within a relational epistemology. They are the springboard from which academic knowledge not subjected to instrumentality can then emerge, as a crystallization of the shared naked experience, before we "dress it up" with academic conventions, including masculine (supposedly universal and rational), gendered imperatives. Despite these conventions, the porosity of our texts ( Brewis and Williams, 2019) exposes us naked to our co-authors, reviewers and wider audiences.

This is where our ethnographic life takes place: in the classroom, in our field encounters with unknown others, as much in the arms of our dancing partners and on the screens of our readers, editors, reviewers and co-authors. All of these condition our methods. All of these sexualize, eroticize and mark our (gendered) identities in their different ways ( Stanley, 1992), thereby deeply affecting what knowledge generation means and how it happens ( Fotaki, 2011). Our autoethnographic nakedness, as experienced in this process, allows us to reinvent theorizing in our conflated personal and professional dancing, research, and co-writing practices intersubjectively, through the generating power of an erotic dimension, as is further disentangled and discussed next.

Our tale ends but the story goes on.

As established in the above sections, the nakedness that we experience in tango enhances our awareness of how our bodies shape our connections with the material and immaterial environment, to which we are naturally bound with flesh and bone ( Merleau-Ponty, 1964). It appropriates inter-corporeal research and writing practices (what Henry calls corpspropriation), which appear to us not only in the "light of the world", but in the affective, subjective, and corporeal "light of life" ( Henry, 1975) at the inter-corporeal level of "being with" others ( Pérezts et al., 2015).

Dancing with as "being naked with" teaches us how to affectively relate and be sensitive to other bodies, how to synchronize our moves in our academic practices to the rhythms of our interactional repertoires and to theorize from a conflation of shared eroticism. Further, as any metaphor, tango simultaneously highlights and hides ( Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). We dress our bodies in glittery clothes, we cover our faces with masks, and we edit our words with academic conventions. But our feet often hurt inside the high heels, we feel nervous about getting the moves wrong, our fingers dissolve from the cleansing writing norms. Errors, (im)perfections, affective and cognitive fragility and messiness are inscribed on our naked bodies, in our embodied research performances and relations with others, disguised by the synchronized moves that we make together, overshadowed by the stage lights, unheard below the music volume. Nakedness simultaneously exposes, covers, and transforms our shared vulnerabilities, inner affective dispositions, the cognitive and corporeal joy and suffering that we carry with us in our living researchers' bodies.

Far from the experience of shame and vulnerability of the sexually-gazed upon naked body ( Cover, 2003), this experience of nakedness immerses us in a humanly possible, erotic, inter-corporeal sharing, which gives place to effervescent expressions of love; the pleasure and awe of dancing in closed abrazo. We reflect our nakedness and its erotic interplay as we have lived it in our text. We purposefully write as we dance, experiencing our feminine, eroticized dancing bodies' dialog as the only written gateway for revealing what is often shamed, unspoken, unwritten, but by no means unreal ( Cixous, 1996); and without which our dance-text and our autoethnography of dancing would be meaningless.

We argue that only by liberating our naked academic bodies from the sexual gaze ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Fotaki, 2011), only by rethinking our unavoidable nakedness as an enabler of genuine connections and becomingness with one another, can we access a space of truly affective relational academic exchanges ( Lund and Tienari, 2019), like those we experience on the dance floor. Eroticizing our academic nakedness allows for a "reflexive un-doing" ( Riach et al., 2016: 2071), which enables us to approach our research context with "openness and curiosity about the social world" ( Spicer et al, 2009: 549, cited in Riach et al., 2016) to escape the nets of colonizing (masculine) epistemic superiority. This process includes our co-authors and even our editors, reviewers and readers, as the "ghosts" behind our pages-with whom we make collective sense of our inter-corporeal experiences-but also the subjects that we encounter in the field. Through nakedness, we can all bind together with the power of eros to redefine our academic subjectivities, research, and writing practices in purely relational, intersubjective, and inter-corporeal terms. These subvert the disembodied discourses imposed upon our bodies by a distant academic intellect ( Lund and Tienari, 2019; Thanem and Knights 2019), to allow our embodied knowledge to experiment with its own aesthetically appealing freedom ( Rhodes, 2019) through an academic co-writing that touches ( Pullen and Rhodes, 2008) and performs new possibilities ( Cixous, 1996).

Our account responds to and extends recent organizational literature debates stressing the need to understand how eros can create a space that includes the self and the other in body, heart, and mind to creatively transform our writing and broader academic practices ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Dorion, 2018; Kiriakos and Tienari, 2018; Lund and Tienari, 2019). We also contribute to recent organizational autoethnographic accounts on writing differently ( Beavan, 2019; Bell and King, 2010; Brewis, 2005; Brewis and Williams, 2019; Boncori and Smith, 2018; Helin, 2019b; Katila, 2019; Pullen, 2018; Thanem and Knights, 2019) by highlighting the relational potential of temporally, spatially, and materially situating and eroticizing academic nakedness from within and between bodies. We echo Van Maanen's articulation ( 2011) that ethnography-and particularly naked autoethnography experienced through eroticized bodies-is not associated with specific research techniques, but remains open to improvisation and the situated experiences of the researcher.

Understanding what naked bodies can do in their erotic, inter-corporeal encounters, also joins recent attempts in pushing the potentials of embodied organizational research methods ( Thanem and Knights, 2019) broadly, beyond the autoethnographic method that we employ here. It aims to uncover what the politics of regulation-regarding the naked, affective, and embodied aspects of doing and writing organizational research-have historically strived to censor and contain by making them a signifier for what is obscene, vulnerable, shameful, and opposed to reason. Writing through nakedness participates in efforts to subvert the academic status-quo that confines our bodies in the straightjacket of academic conventions, and stands against the widespread shadow of methodological rigor, defined and assumed as abstract and disembodied objective detachment ( Ahonen et al., 2020; Mandalaki and Daou, 2020; Phillips et al., 2014; Rhodes, 2019; Thanem and Knights, 2019). Nakedness embraces and defends the vulnerable and the inter-corporeally erotic, instead of objectifying and denying it, pushing us to challenge traditional conceptions of who the researcher should be or how organizational research must be conducted.

Following Cixous (1996), we have to name the silenced; to reveal the sweat and blood of what has been cleansed and mutilated ( Pullen, 2018; Pullen and Rhodes, 2008); to unshame shame ( Beavan, 2019), in order to understand eroticizing our academic nakedness as an empowering act of courage and love ( Dorion, 2018; Kiriakos and Tienari, 2018). Through love for knowledge and for each other, we can then access that much needed "moment of rapture, of recognition where we can face one another as we really are, stripped of artifice and pretense, naked and not ashamed." ( hooks, 2001: v).

Regardless of the method, future papers could thus explore how this erotic potential of nakedness might play out in other research practices such as interviews or shadowing, as well as how it might inform our interpretations of the contexts that we study.

Final steps, final words

Embracing our nakedness with eros as love allows us to fluidify our words through our moving bodies, and draw the epistemological understanding of our methods from our ontological erotic being-in-and-with-the-field experiences. This pushes us to reinvent the transformational potential of our inter-corporeal encounters to create new possibilities for dancing, living, loving, researching and writing together in academia. Such possibilities are neither the sign of diminished academic rigor nor mere resistance to the dominant academic order. They instead offer space for transformation toward a new academic world ( Lund and Tienari, 2019), where we can build genuine, interpersonal relationships based on affect, care, and relationality, with heightened ethical ( Fotaki et al, 2014; Pérezts et al. 2015; Pullen and Rhodes, 2014) and aesthetical possibilities. These will be particularly needed in a pandemic and post-pandemic era, where social bodies are restricted to confining, covering and cleansing their nakedness from fear of pollution and contagion. Reinventing our capacity to openly expose and eroticize each other's naked bodies beyond sexual stereotypes, might enable us to truly relate again to shape hopeful futures in academia and society more broadly.

Much like dancing, living, researching, and writing do not just "happen". They require intention: an invitation expressed through an open body, exposed, naked. . . It is about celebrating our naked being and writing, in all their corporeally shared mystery. One, two, three, four. . . the tango rhythm still resounding in my head. . . I write like I dance. Only completely with you. . . or not at all. Shall we?. . .

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Editor and the Reviewers for their support and a particularly rich reviewing experience. We would also like to thank Alison Pullen for introducing us to each other as well as our colleagues and friends who provided friendly and helpful feedback throughout the whole process.

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Author biographies

Emmanouela Mandalaki is an assistant professor of Organizations at NEOMA Business School. In her research, Emmanouela engages with (auto)ethnography heavily informed by her artistic practices (dance, painting, poetry, performative arts), which she combines with feminist thinking and creative forms of writing to explore issues of embodiment, ethics, gender, diversity, and affect in organizations.

Mar Pérezts is a tango dancer and an associate professor of ethics and organization at Emlyon Business School and member of OCE Research Center. Based on critical and philosophical perspectives, her research crosscuts sociological and organizational questions. She currently serves as Book Reviews Editor at Organization Studies.

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It takes two to tango: Theorizing inter-corporeality through nakedness and eros in researching and writing organizations - Emmanouela Mandalaki, Mar Pérezts, 2020

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Dance with us, on the dance-floor and with words, as we reenact our individual and shared tango autoethnographic experiences to develop an understanding of field inter-corporeality as a phenomenological experience of nakedness empowered by the transformational potential of eros.

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The paper published in 2021 in JMI that includes the personal narratives in my video: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1056492615592181

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also here:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1056492611435509

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Maria's video on her engagement with autobiographical writing & reflections for the future

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AoM/Auto-ethnographic Writing: My early steps and reflections for the future

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Raysa Rocha - Autobiographical Reflection 

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In this piece, I am attempting to develop some of the earlier thoughts I had in "Locked up in lockdown".  It concerns the recognition that the older person we see has had many experiences and their unfair share of catastrophes before they even reach their senior years.

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Writing differently - a late academic's thoughts and experiences

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Writing differently - a late academic's thoughts and experiences

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Ruth Slater - AoM PDW Writing Differently.mp4

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Store photos and docs online. Access them from any PC, Mac or phone. Create and work together on Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.

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A small team of co-researchers from George Washington Univerrsity discuss what writing differently means to them. Submitted by Julia Storberg-Walker.

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Executive Leadership Program at GWU_ Students and Faculty Discuss Writing Differently

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Submission to AOM PDW Collective Autoethnography CQuental

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Dr. Sheena Vachhani on the knots and politics of writing differently

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Dr. Sheena Vachhani on the knots and politics of writing differently

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Here is Sheena's inspirational video.

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Johansson and Jones (2020) Writing past and present classed and gendered selves

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Johansson and Jones (2020) Writing past and present classed and gendered selves

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I mention this chapter in my organising team video.

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johansson jones past and present classed and gendered selves 2020

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In this video I talk about duoethnography as a collaborative autoethnographic method.

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Professor Alison Pullen: writing differently is about survival

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Professor Alison Pullen: writing differently is about survival

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In this conversation, which is a continuation of a relationship that started in writing and reading, Professor Alison Pullen speaks about writing differently as survival and being able to be yourself in neoliberal academia, and about writing on paper as a way to write freely, fluidly and with enjoyment.

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Conversation with Alison Pullen 2021-06-16.mp4

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Sara Persson on her PhD journey and autoethnographic writing.mp4

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Liela Jamjoom_PDW AoM Autoethnographic Entry

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PDW_AOM_JUST ABOUT MANAGING_a narrative on a pandemicacademic friendship and the post-pandemic crisis in management

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AOM Autoethnographic writing_Ximena Vidal De Col

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In this video, Dr Bristow explains what writing differently means to her and she shares her experiences. She highlights writing differently as an act of rebellion, and putting the author back into knowledge production. It is rewarding because of the opportunity for authenticity which the open conditions of this form of knowledge production provide.

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Alex Bristow Writing Differently AOM 2021.mp4

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Store photos and docs online. Access them from any PC, Mac or phone. Create and work together on Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.

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Oya Zincir - autobiographical reflection for 'Just About Managing' PDW

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Dr Mrinalini Greedharry: The promise of literature

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Dr Mrinalini Greedharry: The promise of literature

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In this video Mrinalini Greedharry asks what it means to write differently from her perspective as a literary scholar. Among other things she makes the point that writing 'differently' is shaped by relations of power, including colonial histories.

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Greedharry (2021) The limits of literature as liberation: Colonialism, governmentality, and the humanist subject

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Greedharry (2021) The limits of literature as liberation: Colonialism, governmentality, and the humanist subject

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This essay is referred to by Mrinalini Greedharry in her video.

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Maranda Ridgway
Emmanoueuela Mandalaki
Mar Perezts
Vanessa Englert
Elham Malik
David Jacobs
Oya Zincir
Guy Huber
Louvisa Eiriksdottir
Ximena Vidal De Col
Mally Smith
Jyoti Bachani
Vinicius Galante
Liela Jamjoom
Heidi Weigand
Ann-Louise Howard
Sarah Robinson
Camilla Quental
Raysa Rocha

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Dr Francesca Sobande: Writing and sharing poetry for research and reflexivity

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Dr Francesca Sobande: Writing and sharing poetry for research and reflexivity

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Francesca Sobande has written poetry both during her PhD and afterwards in her research, including doing a collaborative exchange of poetry. She also talks about embracing subjectivity in writing, not 'hiding' the writer's position and experiences.

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Academy of Management Conference Recording (Francesca Sobande).mp4

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Kociatkiewicz and Kostera (2021) - Liquid Unseen University

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Kociatkiewicz and Kostera (2021) - Liquid Unseen University

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Kociatkiewicz and Kostera (2021) - Liquid Unseen University

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A small team of students and a faulty member discuss how their writing and reflecting generates new and transformative understandings.

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Executive Leadership Program at GWU: Students and Faculty Discuss Writing Differently

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Monika Kostera: The spectre of writing differently

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Monika Kostera: The spectre of writing differently

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In this video Professor Monika Kostera talks about the spectre of writing differently, a movement which haunts academia with a promise to write for readers instead of metrics.

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Dr Jenny Helin: Engaging students in writing differently

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Dr Jenny Helin: Engaging students in writing differently

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In this conversation Dr Jenny Helin talks about the importance of introducing students to the idea of 'writing differently', which is something she has done in her own pedagogical practice.

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Professor Ilaria Boncori on "writing differently"

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Professor Ilaria Boncori on "writing differently"

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Ilaria talks about "writing differently" and what it means to her. She uses the example the paper, co-authored with Charlie Smith (which is under the "Inspirational resources" tab) to illuminate her thinking.

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Ilaria Boncori Writing Differently for AoM.mp4

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Store photos and docs online. Access them from any PC, Mac or phone. Create and work together on Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.

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Professor Bob Mackenzie in conversation with Ruth Slater - 

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Professor Bob Mackenzie in conversation with Ruth Slater - 

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Bob and Ruth discuss writing differently, issues of power which scholars may encounter when writing differently, and the importance of critical friendship

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Store photos and docs online. Access them from any PC, Mac or phone. Create and work together on Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.

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Mandalaki and Pérezts (2020) It takes two to tango

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Mandalaki and Pérezts (2020) It takes two to tango

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Dance with us, on the dance-floor and with words, as we reenact our individual and shared tango autoethnographic experiences to develop an understanding of field inter-corporeality as a phenomenological experience of nakedness empowered by the transformational potential of eros. We write as we dance to discuss how eroticizing through the other's presence our embodied nakedness, beyond sexual stereotypes, pushes us to meta-reflect on ourselves as organizational ethnographers and writers to reinvent our field and writing interactions as inter-corporeally relational and intersubjective. We problematize the sexual gaze that traditionally associates nakedness with shame and objectified vulnerability to stress the capacity of eroticizing our academic nakedness to enable free, embodied knowledge stripped of the traits of the dominant masculine academic order. In so doing, we join burgeoning autoethnographic and broader debates in the field of organization studies calling for the need to further unveil the embodied, erotic, and feminine aspects of organizational research and writing. Shall we dance?

. . .Just like a dance, danced by two. . .

In social science research, and particularly in immersive ethnographic methodologies, there is "the field" and there is "me". We try to take on the dramatis persona of "the researcher" or "the ethnographer", in the field and in our scientific accounts, but behind such rational methodological masks lies an embodied and relational experience ( Thanem and Knights, 2019). "Me" will venture into "the field", and the two will somehow be united for a parenthesis in space and time to share unpredictable encounters that will inevitably affect both. Just like two partners in a tango, who move together, sometimes tread on each other's feet, improvising and co-creating an unrepeatable dance. Just like us, Emmanouela and Mar, two academics, whose passion for dance bridged the ocean separating our bodies, pushing us to share the keyboard and write this paper. Shortly after being introduced via email by a mutual friend and colleague, we started exchanging diaries of our autoethnographic, often very personal, dancing experiences, partly transcribed below as italicized dialogs of our overseas correspondence. For several months, we knew each other only through our virtual texts until we finally met at the 2018 LAEMOS conference and danced together in Buenos Aires. As we will argue, Me-Field encounters strip off the armours of our objectified researchers' embodied selves and intentions, making us feel "naked". Reflecting on our dancing field experiences, we suggest that it is precisely this intense inter-corporeal experience of "nakedness" that makes theorizing possible, and that this must inform our writing.

Dance, nonverbal in nature, involves the kind of movement that binds dancers to each other and to their "field", providing access to the unspoken, tacit components of culture ( Slutskaya, 2006). Dance unlocks dancers' affective, cognitive, and emotive experiences ( Cancienne and Snowber, 2003) enabling embodied forms of introspection about their context. Embodied autoethnographic accounts have used dance as a metaphor to discuss the body as a medium for both reinforcing and transcending order ( Mandalaki, 2019; Slutskaya and De Cock, 2008), while insights from salsa ( Lucker, 2008) and tango ( Davis, 2015) have helped explain the deeply affective, performative, and embodied nature of academic research and autoethnography in particular ( Ronai, 1998; Spry, 2001). Indeed, dancing experiences share a performative nature with organizational experiences, which help understand organizational and researcher-field interactions in a novel way ( Cornelissen, 2004).

Here, we use our parallel and shared embodied autoethnographic experiences on the dance-floor to discuss the challenges and possibilities of theorizing from field events and draw broader implications for researching and writing organizations. Dancing, literally and symbolically, both in the way our bodies intermingle on the dance floor and in the way our words converse in this paper, made us realize that there is an unavoidable nakedness involved in both going into the field and writing about it. We experience this nakedness as a slippery concept, which slides across the hooks of a metaphor and an analogy while often being sensed literally in the field and in the below-exposed dialogical dancing prose. This nakedness removes the masks of our Me-Field encounters to provide a springboard where our inter-corporeal, sensuous, dreaming, loving, cognitive, and intersubjective experiences cohabit. It surprises us, and shakes our epistemic habits, pushing us to challenge vested understandings of how organizational research and writing must be conducted.

Drawing on the experience of our closed abrazo, we understand nakedness as a relation of erotic inter-corporeality, which transcends the individual naked body, subjected to the normative sexual gaze and connects it to other bodies through eros. We expose this nakedness in our writing, arguing for the need to rethink the potential of our naked researchers' bodies to engage in affectively erotic relations, which are "not primarily about sex" ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014: 276) but about a search for deeper connections of pleasure and love ( Lund and Tienari, 2019) enabling them to liberate their embodied knowledge. This challenges the sexual gaze that traditionally associates "being naked" with an objectified inferior position of shame, obscenity, discomfort, and vulnerability ( Cover, 2003) to uncover our affective ways of being inter-corporeally together in our field and writing practices ( Beavan, 2019). Such an understanding of nakedness gives access not only to what we see as distant observers but also and most importantly to the power of what we feel ( Dorion, 2018) and embody when we let our bodies free to eroticize each other in our research encounters. Denying this, ignores the beating life that moves our academic endeavors ( Beavan, 2019; Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Thanem and Knights, 2019), rendering them as empty as a tango danced alone.

We adopt a phenomenologically-inspired perspective that considers the primacy of the body in developing consciousness of lived events ( Henry, 1975; Merleau-Ponty, 1964) to discuss what nakedness, as an erotic experience of our embodied, living, research, and writing encounters, and as "an embodied method can do" ( Thanem and Knights, 2019: 143). We explore the possibilities and impossibilities of writing the naked self ( Gannon, 2006) and the naked other in an embodied dialogical italicized writing style ( Boncori and Smith, 2018; Helin, 2019a), whose lines set the stage for our written dance and our embodied theorization. In so doing, we contribute to the increasing acknowledgment of how "theorizing is endemically informed by corporeality" ( Grosz, 1994; Segarra and Prasad, 2018: 2) problematizing anatomical, phallocentric organizational research approaches that "dress" bodies with overly abstract discourse ( Ahonen et al., 2020; Fotaki, 2013; Phillips et al., 2014; Pullen et al., 2020; Thanem and Knights, 2019). Our understanding of nakedness responds to calls to reclaim eros in the academy as an energy source ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Dorion, 2018; Lund and Tienari, 2019) with a powerful embodied and inter-corporeal potential. This potential, we argue, allows further exposing the affective, emotive, and vulnerable aspects of doing and writing organizational research and autoethnography in particular, as increasingly called for in organizational literature ( Beavan, 2019; Boncori and Smith, 2018; Helin, 2019a, 2019b; Höpfl, 2000; Fotaki et al., 2014; Katila, 2019; Pullen, 2018; van Amsterdam, 2015). We add to these organizational debates, discussing how eroticizing, through the other's presence, our embodied nakedness pushes us to meta-reflect on ourselves as organizational ethnographers and writers, and redefine our field and writing interactions through eros, as inter-corporeally relational and intersubjective. This unleashes the performative and transformational capacity of nakedness as a form of writing and conducting (auto)ethnography, to produce its own aesthetically appealing discourse rooted in the ontological experience of relationally being-in-the-world, naked, with others.

So, dear reader, bear with us in this written dance where we will live, explore and dance these issues with you and for you, while developing our proposal of the experiential, methodological, and theoretical implications of nakedness in three movements. In the first movement of our dance, we discuss the nakedness of bodies as being stripped of the elements of their social construction and repression of their needs, to unveil the potential of embodied knowledge residing in their erotic phenomenological experiences. Second, we disentangle the "nakedness" of writing ( Cixous, 1996) as an embodied form of expression ( Fotaki et al., 2014; Pullen, 2018) and that of co-writing as an inter-corporeal experience, allowing us to "undress" the data in our eroticized bodies. We end by dance-discussing the liberating possibilities for researching and writing organizations as revealed by the erotic intersubjective and inter-corporeal experience of nakedness.

Shall we dance?

Naked bodies: Coming to terms with erotic embodied research and field inter-corporeality

I could never free my body much in front of others. It might have been due to my image of it, its perfections and imperfections, the politically correct idea of the self and the body that should match it. And it was all turned around now that I was freely disposed to my dancing partners' corporeal invitations. I felt that I needed to understand this tension: how moving while dancing could motivate a continuous self-and-other-discovery; a sense of "being" rather than having "to be".
Without names, phone numbers or obligations. All the poetry of the world contained in our abrazo. Violins bring our breath closer together. Then silence separates us. The dance floor reclaims its cathedral-like emptiness, waiting for us to come and re-inhabit it once the music starts again. I feel myself existing not only for you but also with you. I don't know who you are, or if we'll meet or dance again. But in that brief eternity, we were one. What does this mean, for me, for us, for those who danced with us that night? Then rationality kicks in: I remember that I'm doing fieldwork.
Oh yes, academic rationality giving more importance to thinking than to becoming. I felt perplexed: how was my body able to star in this playful interplay between these vulnerable other selves searching redemption in the fluidity of dancing? I remember the feeling of being inhabited by a host, keeping so much of my fieldwork data trapped within my skin, in the pit of my stomach, in the fatigue of my legs, growing inside my womb and not knowing whether the birth of this-thing, dance, text?-would get the better of me. The data lived in our bodies. . .

Our bodies and those of the subjects that we study in the field are always there, and yet they are not. We take them for granted ( Thanem and Knights, 2019), treat them as objects of disciplinary and surveillance practices ( Hassard et al., 2000). We censor and cover them up in our interpretations and texts, forgetting the naked body, which lies, literally and symbolically, behind the mask of "the researcher", "the worker", or "the manager" ( Pérezts et al., 2015).

Due to their messiness, affect, and fragility, embodied accounts are often epistemologically disavowed ( Segarra and Prasad, 2018) and methodologically contested as "valid" in organizational studies. Namely, several autoethnographic traditions, like analytic ( Anderson, 2006) or realist autoethnography ( Barron, 2013) remain skeptical of other autoethnographic approaches such as evocative autoethnography ( Bochner and Ellis, 2016; Denzin, 1997), which emphasize the researcher's post-modernist sensibilities as opposed to more traditional forms of symbolic interactionism ( Anderson, 2006). Nevertheless, despite persistent criticism rooted in positivist epistemologies ( Probyn, 1993), concerning the lack of "objectivity" and "scientificity" of embodied research accounts, ethnographic approaches have gradually tuned down the taboo.

Proponents of evocative autoethnography advocate the idea of "moments" of qualitative inquiry ( Denzin and Lincoln, 2000) involving deep self-reflexivity, personal, emotional, and corporeal engagement in the final narrative ( Ellis, 2004; Ellis and Bochner, 2000; Reed-Danahay, 1997; Van Maanen, 1990). Ethnography, and particularly autoethnography, is "a story of the body told through the body" ( Langellier, 1999: 208), which becomes the (auto)ethnographer's meaning-making medium ( Ellis, 2004; Pelias, 1999). Embodied accounts can then become the locus of imaginative research methods ( Elliott and Culhane, 2017), where culture is materialized and incarnated.

It is important to consider this body "in order to further reflect on and understand ambiguous organizing occurring 'on the move'", remarks Huopalainen (2015: 826) in her analysis of how bodily movements become internalized and standardized in fashion shows. In doing so, she also focuses on her own gaze: what she sees and what she does not while moving around the field. We agree and suggest going further by considering how the nakedness of bodies shapes our academic field experiences and the development of knowledge around these.

This is because, albeit deemed a matter of self-consciousness, nakedness becomes salient under the other's gaze ( Cover, 2003), which makes it an inherently relational phenomenon. Indeed, on the dancing stage or in the organizational field we are not alone in a solipsistic reflection. Our bodies are exposed, naked to each other: they retain a muscular, sensorial memory of our field interactions that informs our interpretations ( Hammer, 2015). We cannot ignore our aching feet in our high-heeled shoes after a Milonga. Too tired to remove our make-up, we often wake up in the morning to find our faces smudged with mascara, our bodies marked with traces of our partners' scent (or lack of it). The literal and metaphorical scars that we carry on our naked bodies in the aftermath of our fieldwork give access to levels of awareness that the mind alone cannot conceive and which challenge our cognitive schemas to produce knowledge through pure, uncontaminated inter-corporeal experience.

The nakedness that we experience in our fields is our "qualia": it is an unfamiliar term to denote that, which could not be more familiar ( Dennett, 1988), but which more often than not remains hidden. It is "as raw feels" ( Dennett, 1988) on our flesh and our skin ( Brewis and Williams, 2019; Cixous, 1996); what our embodied experience seems and feels to be in the organizational contexts that we research, work in, and write about. What Thanem and Knights (2019) express as our unavoidable necessity to engage with the affective richness of the research context, we thus suggest can be further theorized by the concept of nakedness whose erotic inter-corporeality triggers new meanings.

In the Garden, Adam and Eve were naked but "not ashamed" (Genesis, 2:25). They only realized their state in the presence of each other after having eaten the forbidden fruit: "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew they were naked" (Genesis, 3:7), and they felt shame and covered themselves with fig leaves. This foundational myth is deeply buried in our Western subconscious ( Milton, 1966), which associates being naked with a shameful exposure of genitals, linked to lustful and "improper" sexuality ( Jeffreys, 1990). This sexual rather than erotic gaze disregards the utmost expressions of eros, pleasure, and love that we can experience through nakedness during genuinely affective encounters ( Cover, 2003). Under the sexual gaze, the naked body is objectified, seen as the sign of vulnerability, obscenity, and shame, which if not correctly treated can lead to dangerous knowledge or a dangerous society ( Nead, 2002). The improper sexuality associated with this "unruly" naked body must be tamed, censored, and confined within accepted social conventions ( Nead, 2002). Hence, the development of a culture of "context-dependent shared and gazed-upon nakedness" ( Bell and Holliday, 2000: 130) and the structuration of a "legitimate" gaze in normed contexts, like marital sex, parent-child/doctor-patient interactions, shared baths or artistic encounters (e.g. advertising, paintings; Cover, 2003; Grosz, 1998).

This policing is also what academic conventions have attempted to do to the (symbolic, but sometimes also literal) unavoidable embodied nakedness involved in our research, theorizing, and writing endeavors. They commodify its erotic potential for love and pleasure through the sexual stereotype, and censor it behind the sexual academic gaze ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014). This covers our academic experiences with a disembodied (in fact, masculine) symbolic order ( Fotaki, 2011, 2013; Pullen et al., 2020) confining our leaky, bloody, and exhausted bodies to shame ( Beavan, 2019) and disavowing the epistemological validity of our inter-corporeal being experiences ( Segarra and Prasad, 2018).

However, it is through our naked bodies that we play, share affects and eroticize each other to make sense of our academic field interactions ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Thanem and Knights, 2019). Thus, we argue that we need to understand the potential of their erotic phenomenological encounters to challenge "sexual fixity" ( Brewis and Grey, 1994: 73): the objectification, shame, and vulnerability that we are conditioned to experience when exposed naked to each other. We need to shake the sexual academic norms that subsume eros to violence and domination ( Dorion, 2018), suppressing our bodies' genuine expressions of enjoyment ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014).

Following recent accounts, we understand eros as the imagination, prospect and longing for fearless connections of love and pleasure, including sexual attraction, passion, affect, and joy, which depart from stereotypical understandings of sex/sex appeal ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014), or de facto sexist interpretations of the erotic ( Dorion, 2018). Eros is love for the self and the other but also love of wisdom and the production of knowledge. Eros involves a desire to reconcile long-sustained normative binaries to make sense of our embodied, emotive, and intellectual dispositions ( Miller, 1998) through mutual exchanges of care, trust, and respect for and with others ( hooks, 2001; Lund and Tienari, 2019). We stress the liberating energy and embodied potential of eros to overturn academic conventions, gendered stereotypes, and dominant discourses ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014), to argue for the need to separate our academic nakedness from the sexual masculine order.

Let's allow our naked bodies to eroticize each other, and in so doing create a space for love in our field and writing encounters: "a space for relating to and acknowledging the "Other" and oneself in ways, which surpasses assigned identity categories and instrumental performance requirements" ( Lund and Tienari, 2019: 112). In this way, eros as love can creatively transform our writing practices and convert our exposed vulnerability into courage ( Dorion, 2018; Kiriakos and Tienari, 2018).

Tango can teach us how to do so. Because while on the dance-floor, one offers one's sensual self to the other's abrazo to experience intersubjective and relational encounters based on inter-corporeal openness, care, and mutual trust that only an eroticized gaze freed from sexual stereotypes can encourage ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Cover, 2003). The sensuality in tango ( Davis, 2015) does not sexually commodify our bodies, liberating us from feelings of shame and obscenity. This brings forward the potential of inter-corporeal nakedness as the purest expression of "being-in-the-world" to enable humanly possible, affectively erotic connections with one another.

Understanding how nakedness, as an erotic inter-corporeal experience, shapes our field and writing experiences counters the ontological duality between body and mind. Instead, it views the ethnographer as a "body-subject" ( le corps-propre, Merleau-Ponty, 2013) that continuously reinvents its subjectivity and surrounding environment in a dynamic process of inter-becoming, where consciousness and corporeality co-exist. We start from the principle that theorizing emerges from the "phenomenological parameters of corporeality" ( Segarra and Prasad, 2018: 1), which possess "all the explanatory powers of the mind" ( Grosz, 1994: 7). We argue that it is not our pre-held beliefs but rather the process of experiencing through the naked body that shapes our ontological and epistemological relationship to the world, to our research fields and to others. Further still, we view the researcher's naked body as shared in a phenomenological binding that is no longer an affection "perverted by the eye" ( Henry, 2011: 800) wearing the sexual gaze, but that which opens us up to the invisible life of erotic self-affection, both for and with others' naked bodies. This is far from a conscious decision or a well-structured procedure, enabling this surprising process of being with the naked self and the naked other in the field through corporeally informed reflection.

Far from undermining the methodological rigor expected in organizational research methods, the adoption of this phenomenological lens, unveils the potential of nakedness to relationally and organically redefine our field and writing practices and their rigor ( Pullen et al., 2020). This adds to the anthropological richness of the data generated from a balance between professional distance and personal involvement ( Anteby, 2013). It accords with recent debates stressing the reflexive, emotive, and embodied engagement in the autoethnographic experience ( Beavan, 2019; Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Boncori and Smith, 2018; Pullen, 2018; Thanem and Knights, 2019), to emphasize that evocative and emotive narratives ( Ellis, 2004) can co-exist with analytical reflexivity ( Anderson, 2006; Boncori and Smith, 2019), as they both emerge from researchers' naked inter-corporeal experiences. It also joins recent attempts to blur long-sustained boundaries between ontological and epistemological research underpinnings, arguing that the construction of knowledge is intersubjective, rooted in the ontological experience of inter-corporeally "being-in-the-world" with others ( Segarra and Prasad, 2018), naked.

Sensing what our eroticized naked bodies are together capable of, literally and metaphorically, urges us to put them down on paper. Because our dancing, living, sweating, bleeding, leaking, gendered naked "bod[ies] must be heard" ( Cixous, 1996: 338), and because we want to make them heard. This takes us to the second movement of our dance.

Naked writing and co-writing

Urged to put words on this novel experience, I was struggling to find the right academic references to cite, a category to put it in, underestimating its inherent credibility. But I could only live it and sense it, neither understand nor write about it at first. Words all seemed wrong. It was mainly the sensations in my fingers that once rested on someone's shoulders. Objectifying Milonga dances as "forms of organizing" never seemed to fit the movements I re-enacted, nor the living memory of the dance, although it was in fact just that: people making sense of each other's bodies, moving in the dance of an organized community that needs not utter a word for it to function. And I started wondering why organizational research is largely about writing! So, this was my excuse to dance again. Corporeally "ethno-writing" my experience started to feel more palpable, as "toe-words" were dancing out of my fingers to dress the "data" (or rather "undress" it?). I often had to go back to delete, rewrite, and find better words to describe what I (thought I) wanted to say, particularly as English is not my first language.
Nor is it mine! Indeed, the notes I took were in Spanish: el idioma del tango, mi idioma. It was a triple translation: from music to prose, from body to words, from Spanish to English; a simultaneously liberating and terribly frustrating process. My fingers couldn't keep up with what my mind was trying to expel, nor could my mind keep up with what my body had experienced.
The whole experience started suffocating me. . .Was I taking a big risk in wanting to register myself forever between the lines of a manuscript? Should I leave the readers with their interpretations or should I suggest mine? Like when I dance: should I follow my partner when I feel uncomfortable with the moves, or not? I realize the almost schizophrenic psycho-synthesis of this (auto)ethnographic process. My naked dancing moments inform the nakedness that I feel in my research practice and before my text's audience, which I paradoxically seek to create while writing about all this. Why do we have to dress our nakedness with words, then?

Because "Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement" ( Cixous, 1996: 875).

Yes, we must! Cixous is right to use the imperative mode so often: it is a programmatic and performative commitment. Not just because we are two women. But because, we need to reincorporate the "Other/Mother/Feminine" ( Höpfl, 2000: 103) and the potential for love that resides in our academic bodies ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014), too often perceived as polluting the androcentric and heteronormative view of organizational research and writing, in the neoliberal university ( Prasad, 2016; Lund and Tienari, 2019; Segarra and Prasad, 2018). Indeed, driven by the neoliberal economic logic of competition (purported as gender neutral; Benschop and Doorewaard, 2012), academic excellence is associated with a universalized and disembodied (masculine) way of conducting, writing and theorizing organizational research, evaluated against external metrics ( Fleming, 2020). But, these metrics violently hurt and cover our naked academic bodies and texts, converting them into the surface onto which masculine pedagogies, visible and invisible wounds are painfully inscribed ( Bell and King, 2010). We feel the pain. We remember how Burrell posits analysis as a potentially "fearsome weapon of mutilation" arguing that words as conceptualizations, "imprison . . .[what they] seek to address" ( Burrell, 1997: 20). Academic rigor tends to dictate institutionalized, rational closure in textual production, pushing us to say what others expect us to say ( Pullen, 2018), and depriving our texts of the creative transformational potential of corporeal openness ( Martinez, 2014). Yet, this is "a hopeless project, as we limit ourselves and what we are capable of expressing" ( Helin, 2019b: 4).

Indeed, we should use all our senses in conducting and writing organizational research, to counterbalance the excessive importance given to discourse ( Hammer, 2015; Kostera, 2007). After all, while corporeally writing down thoughts ( Helin, 2019b; Pullen, 2018), we do more than bring back tales from the field ( Van Maanen, 1988): our skin-texts and naked bodies become the mediation of experience and of its expression ( Brewis and Williams, 2019). This is even truer for autoethnographic accounts, which depart from "objective truths", fusing the subject and the object in the researcher's subjective, embodied, mental, and emotional experiences ( Ellis, 2004; Ellis and Bochner, 2000; Gannon, 2006). Autoethnographic experience converts the authorial autobiographical "I" to an existential "we" ( Spry, 2001), whereby the personal "dances" with the social and the theoretical to produce sophisticated and theoretically compelling accounts ( Ronai, 1998), often conveyed through unorthodox textual forms, like personal essays, poetry, or dialogs ( Beavan, 2019; Boyle and Parry, 2007; Helin, 2019a; van Amsterdam, 2015), as we do here.

Unsurprisingly, at least for us as women, many of these organizational research accounts of naked bodies often translate as:

" écriture féminine - a writing of the body and by the body, after Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Monique Wittig [. . .which] involves breaking a code of practice where human fluids must be cleansed, suppressed and closeted." ( Pullen and Rhodes, 2008: 255)

This position writes against academic conventions that reflect the masculine traits of a "science of erection" ( Höpfl, 2000: 104), and against the cleansing of the abject, irrational Other of the feminine ( Fotaki, 2011; Grosz, 1994; Prasad, 2016; Pullen and Rhodes, 2008). In organization studies, écriture feminine is increasingly acknowledged as a space where feeling and thinking dispositions are fecund and interweave to shape embodied texts. These can meaningfully connect us to our readers ( Fotaki and Harding, 2017), for instance through multi-vocal writing ( Ahonen et al., 2020; Boncori and Smith, 2018), dream-writing ( Helin, 2019b), collaborative bricolage ( Handforth and Taylor, 2016) or cyborg writing ( Mandalaki and Daou, 2020; Prasad, 2016).

Following Cixous, the evocative learning and writing power lies within our skin: "I was born, so to speak, in the skin of writing, and I have writing in the skin" (quoted in Brewis and Williams 2019: 90). Beavan engages with what Cixous calls our "outlawed subjectivity" to be able to write-perform "[her] body and [her] text" ( 2019: 65) as inseparable. Crucially, writing serves as the epistemological tool to reclaim eroticism in academia by reinventing the relationships between bodies and knowledge, to understand "academic work as embodied practice" ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014: 269) that can subvert the dominant order.

Joining these debates in our field, we argue that "naked" writing through eros can and must ever further perform this potential. Because eros drives us with "an uncontrollable and un-cooptable energy and longing [for each other and for knowledge that] exists independently of whether it is recognized, rewarded or appreciated by dominant institutions" ( Lund and Tienari, 2019: 98-99). It can therefore enable forms of resistance that can transform the hegemony of the neoliberal university ( Ahonen et al., 2020). In challenging the sexual academic gaze, our eroticized bodies heal our wounds enabling us to reinvent our relational inter-corporeal potential to create knowledge that speaks freely with others ( Rhodes, 2019; Thanem and Knights, 2019).

So, let's put the unrepeatable movement of our dancing silhouettes and their erotic aesthetic into the verses that we exchange ( Cixous, 1996). Let's liberate our embodied knowledge from its masculine academic confines ( Fotaki, 2011, 2013; Rhodes, 2019), to expose the vulnerability, affects, messiness, and pleasure that we share. We might run the risk of being marked for what we-maybe unintendedly-appear to be in the text; or paradoxically, often feeling guilty for this almost "insidious" purpose of "researching" ourselves and our research subjects to produce a publishable piece ( Prasad, 2014) that " looks good" ( Beavan, 2019, emphasis in original). Yet, bringing our entire, sweaty, tired, and erotic naked beings to our texts is the only way to not empty our research endeavors from everything alive and meaningful within them, to affectively resonate with others.

To do so, here we adopt an embodied duo-autoethnograhic writing style, whereby we combine "naked" dialogical italicized reflections and common text. Our paper resembles a form of porous palimpsest ( Brewis and Williams, 2019), an embodied scriptology ( Rhodes, 2019), exposing the intellectual, aesthetic and poetic ( Pelias, 1999) capacity of naked writing to liberate our embodied knowledge. In the italicized chunks, we constantly dress and undress the self and the other to produce a naked text that follows the frantic movement of our dance. We unveil our shared blockages and struggles as dancers, researchers, and women writers of organizations, and find comfort in each other's words. We care for each other, feel, trust, and eroticize our naked dancing bodies through our words, and invite our readers to join the sweaty rhythm of our dance ( Ulmer, 2017). We need this "dirtiness" in our writing ( Pullen and Rhodes, 2008) to textually expose our inter-corporeal nakedness and its erotic inter-play, with all the affect and vulnerability that they carry, to counter the "penetrative conclusiveness" of academic rigor ( Phillips et al., 2014: 316).

Our naked "knowledge is made in our doing together" ( Beavan, 2019: 65, emphasis in original); in our naked researcher bodies' eroticizing "practices of knowing in being" ( Barad, 2003: 829): the stage where the epistemological understanding of our ontological (auto)ethnographic experience happens.

Where were you all this time? How could I think I w/could dance/write without you? Dancing, like researching, is a kind of organizing that requires training, but also imagination, allowing oneself to drift, while also remaining present every instant as a body, beyond a persona. And the other, you, Emmanouela, my alter, mirrors my being in the world at this moment where I am with all my baggage, my age, my vulva, my memories, my fears, my dreams, my difference, my place in the various hierarchies.
We called each other to a dance through writing, letting our experiences intermingle like bodies in a dance. We connected from afar very intimately, before knowing each other in "real" life.

And we are aware of the dangers that this might involve for the reviewing and publishing process, given the reproductive and cleansing power of academic organizational discourse ( Katila, 2019), that Pullen (2018) goes as far as paralleling with labiaplasty. We know that this naked writing might be perceived as shocking, shameful, lustful, vulnerable, or undisciplined through the lens of the sexual academic gaze. Yet, we cannot but liberate our womanly possible, naked, embodied " cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros" ( Cixous et al., 1976: 889, our emphasis), recognizing the impossibility of containing this cosmos in concrete theories and methodological categories.

Our naked co-writing becomes the site where our first embodied encounter takes place. Next, we discuss our shared inter-corporeal experiences on the Milonga dance-floor to further develop an intersubjective understanding of the potentials of nakedness, as an inter-corporeal erotic process, for conducting and writing organizational research.

In the next sub-sections, we textually and visually dance (with) the reader through the process whereby nakedness-in its affective and erotic multiplicities-unfolded in the context of our shared inter-corporeal experiences on the Milonga dance-floor. In doing so, we identify and discuss two implications of nakedness for the way we experience, write, and share our research. First, we ground the possibility of theorizing from field-research, particularly with ethnographic approaches, as rooted in inter-corporeal nakedness. This allows us to revalue the (auto)ethnographer's embodied self-of which gender is not a mere, secondary variable but a crucial aspect ( Moreno, 1995)-from a methodological perspective, to acknowledge how it fosters awareness of inter-corporeal, and intersubjective lived experiences as integral to the knowledge development process. Second, nakedness furthers embodied research and writing through unlocking the relational potential brought by an erotic dimension. This enhances our understanding of intersubjectivity as inter-corporeality by reframing our ontological status as organizational researchers in naked erotic terms.

The way we experience organizational field research, and particularly ethnography, is very different from the methodological guidelines that we learn. We think we will go into the field with our comfortable researchers' boots (or dancing shoes) and everything will eventually make sense. Yet, we often feel lost and clueless. Accepting that our whole being (including the field and personal experiences) is both what we study and the lens through which we study it, is a first step toward untangling the theorizing process. In ethnography, and even more in "naked" autoethnography, the self, much like the other, is a resource ( Collins and Gallinat, 2013), since self-and-other awareness and the experience of researchers' bodies in relation to their field are what make research possible.

In our dance, we felt our lived body ( Grosz, 1994) and understood autoethnography as an embodied performance in being and writing, whereby the autobiographical impulse met the ethnographic moment through movement ( Spry, 2001). We combined our bodily and sensual awareness with our dancing partners. We coordinated balance, energy, strength and the moving space we both occupied while dancing. We were attentive to each other's moves to avoid colliding with other couples and to the other's emotional engagement during the dance, to establish and maintain the connection: it is a shared responsibility. As in Hammer's (2015) account of sighted and visually impaired cyclists riding tandem: it is not uncommon to "be the eyes" of our dance partners when they close theirs, or have a very limited field of vision due to the close abrazo. It "requires . . . a critical awareness of 'body-to-body' presence" ( Hammer 2015: 515). It all becomes blurred kinaesthetically and synaesthetically while " being with" others' bodies in the field.

Our naked dancing body becomes the site of intersubjective and inter-corporeal experience, which we argue is true of any immersion in the field and in organizational life ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Fotaki et al., 2014; Thanem and Knights, 2019). This brings us to nuance the overemphasis on sight and observation as one of the main gateways to ethnographic field techniques. While we rely heavily on observation and the evocative visual capacity of writing down our tales, our observations are more often "quick than thick" ( Wolcott, 1995: 90) and rarely live up to their promise ( Bate, 1997). Ethnography is not just about getting a glimpse into others' worlds and writing about them. It is about making sense of these worlds that are no longer just theirs but have become affectively ours as well ( Fotaki et al., 2017), imbued with feelings, impressions, and struggles, all constructed through our shared, embodied, multi-sensory experiences ( Spry, 2001). We share the idea that data is not out there waiting to be objectively evaluated and collected. It is instead relational, co-created ( Riach et al., 2016), co-enacted and co-embodied. Ethnography involves collective reflection in situ; not in the aftermath of data generation ( Gilmore and Kenny, 2015), but emerging in corpus at the intersection of cognitive, affective, intersubjective, and co-embodied power dynamics continuously evolving in the research field.

Beyond "going native", which bodily-detached, anthropological and ethnographic perspectives consider a necessary step in the research process ( Van Maanen, 2011), we thus argue that it is also about "going naked". As we immerse in our field, we discover our incapacity to separate our researcher's body from the actual body we inhabit, urging us to take off the researcher's mask and expose ourselves naked to all who take part in our research life. Such "naked" ethnographic moments lead us to open up, and intersect with life beyond distant observation, making it impossible to understand intersubjectivity without considering its inter-corporeal dimensions. Our nakedness shapes our experiences and writing practices and should thus not be hushed or cleaned up, but should be welcomed and engaged with, including its unavoidable, gendered dimension:

As Moreno puts it: "In the field it is not possible to maintain the fiction of a genderless self. In the field, one is marked" ( 1995: 246-7). Moreover, our naked texts become crowded places, where invisible authors and readers intersect, ready to mark each other's identities in transformative ways ( Probyn, 1993; Stanley, 1992). We are haunted by others' interpretations and discriminations of our sexualized nature ( Beavan, 2019; Brewis, 2005; Dworkin, 1981; Thanem and Knights, 2019) in our field and writing encounters, and this is even truer when we are exposed naked, literally and symbolically. We cannot ignore this process of moving as sexualized females and males on the dance floor if we want to make sense of our field encounters.

When we dance, we experience passion and eros, which unsettle critical paradigms, creating a rift between politics and experience, and shaking normative understandings of gender and power dynamics ( Davis, 2015). Exposing our gendered nakedness to each other on the dance floor appears as the condition for experiencing gender not as discrimination within the limits of heterosexual normativity and its violence ( Dorion, 2018), but as the potential of our sensual, erotic, affective, relational and intersubjective becoming. This compels us to recognize that our material, gendered, leaky, erotic bodies are sites of knowing, understood within a relational epistemology. They are the springboard from which academic knowledge not subjected to instrumentality can then emerge, as a crystallization of the shared naked experience, before we "dress it up" with academic conventions, including masculine (supposedly universal and rational), gendered imperatives. Despite these conventions, the porosity of our texts ( Brewis and Williams, 2019) exposes us naked to our co-authors, reviewers and wider audiences.

This is where our ethnographic life takes place: in the classroom, in our field encounters with unknown others, as much in the arms of our dancing partners and on the screens of our readers, editors, reviewers and co-authors. All of these condition our methods. All of these sexualize, eroticize and mark our (gendered) identities in their different ways ( Stanley, 1992), thereby deeply affecting what knowledge generation means and how it happens ( Fotaki, 2011). Our autoethnographic nakedness, as experienced in this process, allows us to reinvent theorizing in our conflated personal and professional dancing, research, and co-writing practices intersubjectively, through the generating power of an erotic dimension, as is further disentangled and discussed next.

Our tale ends but the story goes on.

As established in the above sections, the nakedness that we experience in tango enhances our awareness of how our bodies shape our connections with the material and immaterial environment, to which we are naturally bound with flesh and bone ( Merleau-Ponty, 1964). It appropriates inter-corporeal research and writing practices (what Henry calls corpspropriation), which appear to us not only in the "light of the world", but in the affective, subjective, and corporeal "light of life" ( Henry, 1975) at the inter-corporeal level of "being with" others ( Pérezts et al., 2015).

Dancing with as "being naked with" teaches us how to affectively relate and be sensitive to other bodies, how to synchronize our moves in our academic practices to the rhythms of our interactional repertoires and to theorize from a conflation of shared eroticism. Further, as any metaphor, tango simultaneously highlights and hides ( Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). We dress our bodies in glittery clothes, we cover our faces with masks, and we edit our words with academic conventions. But our feet often hurt inside the high heels, we feel nervous about getting the moves wrong, our fingers dissolve from the cleansing writing norms. Errors, (im)perfections, affective and cognitive fragility and messiness are inscribed on our naked bodies, in our embodied research performances and relations with others, disguised by the synchronized moves that we make together, overshadowed by the stage lights, unheard below the music volume. Nakedness simultaneously exposes, covers, and transforms our shared vulnerabilities, inner affective dispositions, the cognitive and corporeal joy and suffering that we carry with us in our living researchers' bodies.

Far from the experience of shame and vulnerability of the sexually-gazed upon naked body ( Cover, 2003), this experience of nakedness immerses us in a humanly possible, erotic, inter-corporeal sharing, which gives place to effervescent expressions of love; the pleasure and awe of dancing in closed abrazo. We reflect our nakedness and its erotic interplay as we have lived it in our text. We purposefully write as we dance, experiencing our feminine, eroticized dancing bodies' dialog as the only written gateway for revealing what is often shamed, unspoken, unwritten, but by no means unreal ( Cixous, 1996); and without which our dance-text and our autoethnography of dancing would be meaningless.

We argue that only by liberating our naked academic bodies from the sexual gaze ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Fotaki, 2011), only by rethinking our unavoidable nakedness as an enabler of genuine connections and becomingness with one another, can we access a space of truly affective relational academic exchanges ( Lund and Tienari, 2019), like those we experience on the dance floor. Eroticizing our academic nakedness allows for a "reflexive un-doing" ( Riach et al., 2016: 2071), which enables us to approach our research context with "openness and curiosity about the social world" ( Spicer et al, 2009: 549, cited in Riach et al., 2016) to escape the nets of colonizing (masculine) epistemic superiority. This process includes our co-authors and even our editors, reviewers and readers, as the "ghosts" behind our pages-with whom we make collective sense of our inter-corporeal experiences-but also the subjects that we encounter in the field. Through nakedness, we can all bind together with the power of eros to redefine our academic subjectivities, research, and writing practices in purely relational, intersubjective, and inter-corporeal terms. These subvert the disembodied discourses imposed upon our bodies by a distant academic intellect ( Lund and Tienari, 2019; Thanem and Knights 2019), to allow our embodied knowledge to experiment with its own aesthetically appealing freedom ( Rhodes, 2019) through an academic co-writing that touches ( Pullen and Rhodes, 2008) and performs new possibilities ( Cixous, 1996).

Our account responds to and extends recent organizational literature debates stressing the need to understand how eros can create a space that includes the self and the other in body, heart, and mind to creatively transform our writing and broader academic practices ( Bell and Sinclair, 2014; Dorion, 2018; Kiriakos and Tienari, 2018; Lund and Tienari, 2019). We also contribute to recent organizational autoethnographic accounts on writing differently ( Beavan, 2019; Bell and King, 2010; Brewis, 2005; Brewis and Williams, 2019; Boncori and Smith, 2018; Helin, 2019b; Katila, 2019; Pullen, 2018; Thanem and Knights, 2019) by highlighting the relational potential of temporally, spatially, and materially situating and eroticizing academic nakedness from within and between bodies. We echo Van Maanen's articulation ( 2011) that ethnography-and particularly naked autoethnography experienced through eroticized bodies-is not associated with specific research techniques, but remains open to improvisation and the situated experiences of the researcher.

Understanding what naked bodies can do in their erotic, inter-corporeal encounters, also joins recent attempts in pushing the potentials of embodied organizational research methods ( Thanem and Knights, 2019) broadly, beyond the autoethnographic method that we employ here. It aims to uncover what the politics of regulation-regarding the naked, affective, and embodied aspects of doing and writing organizational research-have historically strived to censor and contain by making them a signifier for what is obscene, vulnerable, shameful, and opposed to reason. Writing through nakedness participates in efforts to subvert the academic status-quo that confines our bodies in the straightjacket of academic conventions, and stands against the widespread shadow of methodological rigor, defined and assumed as abstract and disembodied objective detachment ( Ahonen et al., 2020; Mandalaki and Daou, 2020; Phillips et al., 2014; Rhodes, 2019; Thanem and Knights, 2019). Nakedness embraces and defends the vulnerable and the inter-corporeally erotic, instead of objectifying and denying it, pushing us to challenge traditional conceptions of who the researcher should be or how organizational research must be conducted.

Following Cixous (1996), we have to name the silenced; to reveal the sweat and blood of what has been cleansed and mutilated ( Pullen, 2018; Pullen and Rhodes, 2008); to unshame shame ( Beavan, 2019), in order to understand eroticizing our academic nakedness as an empowering act of courage and love ( Dorion, 2018; Kiriakos and Tienari, 2018). Through love for knowledge and for each other, we can then access that much needed "moment of rapture, of recognition where we can face one another as we really are, stripped of artifice and pretense, naked and not ashamed." ( hooks, 2001: v).

Regardless of the method, future papers could thus explore how this erotic potential of nakedness might play out in other research practices such as interviews or shadowing, as well as how it might inform our interpretations of the contexts that we study.

Final steps, final words

Embracing our nakedness with eros as love allows us to fluidify our words through our moving bodies, and draw the epistemological understanding of our methods from our ontological erotic being-in-and-with-the-field experiences. This pushes us to reinvent the transformational potential of our inter-corporeal encounters to create new possibilities for dancing, living, loving, researching and writing together in academia. Such possibilities are neither the sign of diminished academic rigor nor mere resistance to the dominant academic order. They instead offer space for transformation toward a new academic world ( Lund and Tienari, 2019), where we can build genuine, interpersonal relationships based on affect, care, and relationality, with heightened ethical ( Fotaki et al, 2014; Pérezts et al. 2015; Pullen and Rhodes, 2014) and aesthetical possibilities. These will be particularly needed in a pandemic and post-pandemic era, where social bodies are restricted to confining, covering and cleansing their nakedness from fear of pollution and contagion. Reinventing our capacity to openly expose and eroticize each other's naked bodies beyond sexual stereotypes, might enable us to truly relate again to shape hopeful futures in academia and society more broadly.

Much like dancing, living, researching, and writing do not just "happen". They require intention: an invitation expressed through an open body, exposed, naked. . . It is about celebrating our naked being and writing, in all their corporeally shared mystery. One, two, three, four. . . the tango rhythm still resounding in my head. . . I write like I dance. Only completely with you. . . or not at all. Shall we?. . .

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Editor and the Reviewers for their support and a particularly rich reviewing experience. We would also like to thank Alison Pullen for introducing us to each other as well as our colleagues and friends who provided friendly and helpful feedback throughout the whole process.

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Author biographies

Emmanouela Mandalaki is an assistant professor of Organizations at NEOMA Business School. In her research, Emmanouela engages with (auto)ethnography heavily informed by her artistic practices (dance, painting, poetry, performative arts), which she combines with feminist thinking and creative forms of writing to explore issues of embodiment, ethics, gender, diversity, and affect in organizations.

Mar Pérezts is a tango dancer and an associate professor of ethics and organization at Emlyon Business School and member of OCE Research Center. Based on critical and philosophical perspectives, her research crosscuts sociological and organizational questions. She currently serves as Book Reviews Editor at Organization Studies.

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It takes two to tango: Theorizing inter-corporeality through nakedness and eros in researching and writing organizations - Emmanouela Mandalaki, Mar Pérezts, 2020

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Dance with us, on the dance-floor and with words, as we reenact our individual and shared tango autoethnographic experiences to develop an understanding of field inter-corporeality as a phenomenological experience of nakedness empowered by the transformational potential of eros.

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Valtonen and Pullen (2020) Writing with rocks

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Valtonen and Pullen (2020) Writing with rocks

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Rocks. Geological forces across time and space. Non‐human beings. Humans. Affect material encounters with rocks. Connecting. Being. Writing... From the Artic to Eastern Finland. From Sydney to Kanga...

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Professor Ilaria Boncori and Dr Charlotte Smith -

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Professor Ilaria Boncori and Dr Charlotte Smith -

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I lost my baby today: embodied writing and learning in organizations

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ML I lost my baby today published version.pdf

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Store photos and docs online. Access them from any PC, Mac or phone. Create and work together on Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.

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- The Neverending Shift

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Store photos and docs online. Access them from any PC, Mac or phone. Create and work together on Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.

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This is one of the papers referenced in Kristin's video. It is published open access in Culture and Organization.

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This is the second paper referenced in Kristin's video. It is also published open access in Qualitative Research Journal.

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Copyright

Introduction

The past is an elusive place to find women, particularly female organizational actors and their many vital contributions. I write polemics of the heart, which involve challenging conventions that silence women with assertive autobiographical literary strategies ( Ferguson, 1986). In this paper, I introduce ficto-feminism; a novel postmodern, prowoman method that invites writers to draw on various sources to present a faithful but fictious conversation between a female historical figure (a protagonist) and the researcher/author. This method allows for the creation of a more intimate portrait of a woman for whom we might only have scant traces of her endeavours, her career and of her life. Management and organizational studies (MOS) and management history (MH) have developed largely under the discourses of masculinity, coloniality and capitalism. The result has been an abundance of scholarship devoid of feminist approaches (theories and praxis). Ficto-feminism is a strategy for studying the past and promoting neglected subjects within these studies.

My work is rooted in a social justice project, campaigning for the excluded, while simultaneously broadening our ideas of MOS and MH and who the important players are (subjects and writers). Generally, I want to challenge the limits imposed on the field by the dominant discourses of capitalism and patriarchy and to reveal overlooked figures and their accomplishments. Management and its history have been forged by privileged players, privileged subjects and privileged methods ( Calas and Smircich, 2020).

Ficto-feminism is an activist method for two reasons. First, it is a method which confronts and protests against current taken-for-granted strategies of reconciling the historical record by simply adding in missing pieces (for example, see Graham, 1996; Mills and Williams, 2021). Instead, I wish to offer an account which constructs a rich portrayal of a neglected historical actor and her contributions, to management theory and practice. The second reason is related to the power of this alternative account to offer women in the present access to historical mentors, organizational theories and insights into alternative methods of practice. This portrait is meant to go beyond fixing the so-called limited historical record, to creating a vivid portrait of a female leader.

Despite much encouragement by early feminist historians like Joan Acker and Joan Wallach Scott, very few researchers have taken on this area of combined scholarship, namely feminism and gender and MOS/MH. A recent study by Mills and Novicevic (2020) reviewed the scholarly output of three top MH journals between 2006 and 2018 and found that only 1.8% had anything to say about gender, feminism or women's history ( Management and Organizational History, Business History and Journal of Management History). A forthcoming article by Mills and Williams (2021) reveals that the journal Business History (one of the field's most prominent journals) indicates that the trend to engage with women as historical actors or gender and feminism has decreased over the last 10 years. Granted, MH journals are not the only place where scholarship should engage with gender, feminism and history, but it speaks to systemic exclusions in MOS/MH, and it makes the call by the Qualitative Research Journal for activist methodologies inside and outside of the academy all the timelier and more important.

Often seen as the same field, it is important to understand that labour history is generally considered a separate discipline from management and from management (capitalist) interests. There has been recognition of the important influences of the early days of social work on improving labour practice. Women such as Mary Parker Follett have been recognized in the labour movement. Parker Follett and a few exceptional women have captured the attention of MH, but overall, the examples remain limited and hard fought-for inclusions (see Calas and Smircich, 1996; Williams and Mills, 2017, 2018). For example, until recently, Frances Perkins, the architect of labour practices now taken for granted, was not regarded as a key player in management theory ( Williams and Mills, 2019a; Williams, 2020a). It is argued that the lack of interest of marrying social good with capitalism is in part to blame.

Along with a growing and enthusiastic group of feminist scholars in MOS, I have been experimenting with writing differently ( Rhodes, 2015; Vachhani, 2019).

Feminists, among other researchers, have grappled with how to produce research that recognizes the materiality of living gendered lives at the same time as it acknowledges postmodern notions of identities and relationships between identities as multiple, fluid and layered ( Gonick et al., 2011, p. 741).

I want to move beyond digging up small traces and arguing that "she" deserves a rightful place. "She" does, but when the sources are so much more insignificant by comparison to male actors, it is difficult to develop an account which compares or competes. My work invites a critique on the practices of the positivist historians and the proclivity to create a single, authoritative standpoint version of additive history instead of an appreciation for the pluralities of history and the various ways accounts can be constructed.

This article proceeds as follows: I first explain ficto-feminism and its methodological components. I then speak to the merits of writing differently and incorporating literary techniques. I then introduce Hallie Flanagan, my protagonist, and the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1935-1939) through a fictitious conversation. This conversation allows me to share a sense of Hallie as a person, beyond a reified list of accomplishments. In the discussion, I briefly review the discourses which hid Hallie from view, along with how agency is enacted and the benefits of reflexivity, emotionality and resonance. I conclude with some advice on how to undertake a ficto-feminist approach.

Ficto-feminism

Ficto-feminism fuses aspects of collective biography with autoethnography and fictocriticism to advance not only a new account of history in subject but also in style of writing. Ficto-feminism is a creative method for feminist historical enquiry. Its implication for feminist research is not only a contribution to theory development, method and writing style but also to pedagogy. Ficto-feminism can reveal a plausible sense of an understudied female figure and demonstrate her importance in a compelling manner. My experience in writing the histories of women in management is that there are relatively limited records and women are highlighted in gendered roles and as limited historical actors. These mere fragments rarely give one an impression of these women's personality, let alone the full scope of their accomplishments in the context of the barriers they faced. Considerably, more emphasis has been placed on male actors and constructing a history of management from a capitalist and patriarchal perspective ( Wallach Scott, 1994; Rose, 2010). Women are neglected as subjects and contributors, and feminist approaches exist at the margins, occupying a peripheral place in critical management studies. Women are rarely the subject of MH, despite playing significant roles. They are often falsely constructed as newcomers to the workplace or marginalized actors ( Williams and Mills, 2019b).

Ficto-feminism has four descriptive dimensions which I will explain further at the end of this article. These are (1) the opportunity to surface discourses; (2) the potential to unlock agency; (3) reflexive and embodied/emic insights and (4) emotionality and resonance. The method requires some "letting go" of convention and the adoption of a new style of writing, inspired by literary studies and fictional writing.

Collective biography

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) and further developed by Davies and Gannon (2006), collective biography is as a practice of integrating and iterating a collaboratively formed text, which ultimately generates a coherent narrative ( Page and Speedy, 2012). This technique can weave back and forth between what is considered real and imagined tales "in order to deconstruct and re-construe new meanings and possibilities" ( Page and Speedy, 2012, p. 236). I combine historical writings, autobiographical accounts, media reports and texts pulled from a specific time frame of the protagonist's life and career (to contextualize and historically place the protagonist). I interweave the voices of present and past writers and the protagonist herself and envisage an imaginary conversation. It is through Gannon and Davies' work that I became attracted to the opportunity that collective biography affords in understanding and undoing gendered subjectification. More so, collective biography offers opportunity for innovations in writing and revising, with the goal of achieving moments of resonance (emotional and intellectual clarity) in both writer and reader ( Gonick et al., 2011). Importantly, in my approach, I maintain the visibility of the sources so that the reader can navigate their origins while still following the fictitious conversation.

Collective biography reveals how interconnected, intertwined and non-linear writing is with the promise of an expanding rhizomatic form with multiple points of entry ( Deleuze and Guatarri, 1987) and a place of "emergent possibilities" ( Davies et al., 2013, p. 684). Collective biography also reveals the sociomateriality of living gendered lives. My protagonist and I are nested in a specific spatial arrangement which reveals our individual and shared constitutive entanglement and how we are bound up in material forms and human interaction ( Moura and Bispo, 2020). In a way, I map myself onto her and become part of her and she becomes part of me. I no longer feel that we are discrete entities.

I deliver on the objectives of collective biography by using stories to make "visible the discursive processes in which we each have been collectively caught up" ( Davis and Gannon, 2006, p. 11). I want the reader to be aware of the discursivity at work, while still being able to be transported to a time and place. There are several tenets I have adopted from Davis and Gannon (2006), including (1) a commitment to revise history, (2) making the narrative imaginable, (3) using the writing strategy to access the past (where the past can be re-experienced), (4) developing documentary-style materials (curating source material) and (5) revealing the changeability of the past and the multiplicity of "truths".

Autoethnography

I draw the reader's attention to three aspects of autoethnography, which inform my method: (1) critical use of reflexivity; (2) an examination of one's own position and (3) reflection on practices which shape the research endeavour ( Styhre and Tienari, 2013). Autoethnography is here a blend of personal experience, values and the research process. The lines between researcher and subject are blurred through the recognition of the self as a part of the story to be told ( Ellis and Bochner, 2000). I am drawn to an approach which is emotionally evocative (see Ellis and Bochner, 1992, 2000, 2003) and where the researcher is visible (see Anderson, 2006). Autoethnographers also recognize that we are constantly constructing meaning and social realities ( Cunliffe, 2003). And though autoethnography enjoys a prominent place generally in feminist work, it is less so in the context of MOS/MH. However, its application is expanding, particularly where women are experimenting with embodied writing ( Boncori and Smith, 2019; Gilmore et al., 2019).

I draw on the opportunity that autoethnography provides in creating a "field work" encounter and introducing self-narrative in a specific social context ( Butz and Besio, 2009). Though this encounter is fictional, it is still a deeply accountable process. In this personal encounter, I portray a relationship with my protagonist, and thus, I am committed to a fair and reasonable representation. I draw on several sources to illuminate Hallie's contributions to MOS.

Fictocriticism

I draw on the generative capacity of fictocriticism as an interventionist tactic ( Hancox and Muller, 2011). The result is a creative rendering of a figure, which highlights her many great but largely neglected contributions to female leadership. In Hallie's case, her leadership instructs us how to improve social welfare outcomes along with creating economic stimulus. Her personality gives us insight into the traits she honed to be an effective leader; she was clearly focussed, clever, humorous, empathetic, assertive and humble.

Fictocriticism [1] involves the mobilization of different genres where fact and imagination intertwine ( Williams, 2020b). Fictocriticism resists convention: "Fictocriticism is self-reflexive writing that breaks down the boundaries between fiction and criticism, reader and writer, by using aesthetic techniques" ( Jiwa, 2013, p. 104). Proponents of fictocriticism argue that it challenges the limitations of traditional academic writing and offers power to the writer (see Rhodes, 2015). The application of fictocriticism in MOS/MH is in its infancy, with just a smattering of examples (see Rhodes, 2015; Weatherall, 2019; Williams, 2020).

Some place fiction on the opposite side of history, in irreconcilable contradiction (Munslow, 2010). However, Michel de Certeau (as cited in White, 2005) calls fiction, the "repressed other" (147). Fiction holds significant potential because history is "a tenuous notion, perhaps especially for those historically disenfranchised" ( Steinberg, 2003, p. 385). Writers of fiction have shown an awareness of the fluidity between fiction and history. Fiction allows me to enliven so-called "facts" or historical traces, to create a more engaging narrative. My approach to fictocriticism uses first-person writing, punctuated by narratives, reflections and combined literary and academic strategies. I fill in the gaps (historical traces) with my own ideas to produce a coherent story. I play in the liminal spaces of my sources to help construct my protagonist. The result is a fictitious encounter in which I give myself over to the fantasy of an in-person conversation.

Writing differently

Writing differently is a relatively new approach for feminists in MOS/MH. Writing differently is not just about method, it is also about so-called taboo subjects in management ( Boncori and Smith, 2019; Gilmore et al., 2019; Vachhani, 2019). Other disciplines have longer traditions of merging fictional writing and autobiographical work ( Spry, 1999; Leskelä-Kärki, 2008). This opportunity exists for MOS/MH as well, but it has not been fully exploited for its potential. The dominant way storytelling techniques have been used in MOS/MH has been to support products and profits, various activities ( Weick, 1995) narrating the "self-made" (male) entrepreneur ( Weber, 1957) and leadership narratives, such as transformation leadership ( Mittal and Dhar, 2015).

The general utility of fiction writing for female historical figures is clear: such "writing is also about unearthing a hidden or unacknowledged or unnoticed life" ( Brown and Krog, 2011, p. 58). I use fiction to evoke empathy, interest and inspiration. My strategies include (1) building an imaginative space or describing a real space in an imaginary time, (2) writing directly to the reader and in the first person, (3) writing in the present tense even when in the apparent past, (4) creating and reflecting emotion and (5) writing visually ( Farr, 2019). It is my view that writing should be affectively charged if we are expected to change hearts and minds ( Keen, 2016) [2].

Ethical considerations

In writing for another, I bear the responsibility of taking a cautious approach that respects my protagonist's own agency. My work (just as any other) runs the risk of engaging in critique of challenging one gendered account (masculine) with another gendered account (feminine) ( Williams and Mills, 2019a). However, I think that prowoman, gendered writing is a powerful advocacy tool, and this fictional offering is a polemical counterinitiative in the service of women. Current practice offers little room to get to know figures like Hallie. This is not about conflating feminism with fiction ( Williams, 2020b) but rather offering a feminized authoritative account, emboldened by the veracity of my research, feminist disposition and respect for Hallie.

Hallie Flanagan

Short biography

Hallie Flanagan (1890-1969) taught at Vassar College and was a student at George Baker's famous 47 Workshop dramatic production studio. She earned a master's degree from Radcliffe and was the first woman to be granted the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship ( Hiltzik, 2011). This resulted in her book Shifting Scenes (1929). By 1933, US Secretary Harry Hopkins had taken on the most elaborate relief program ever conceived as part of the New Deal [3] ( Taylor, 2008). Hallie was recruited to be national director of the FTP in 1935. At its peak, 12,372 workers were engaged ( Flanagan, 1940). The project produced 63,928 performances, to which 30,398,726 people from 32 states attended ( Flanagan, 1940). Her success was largely due to her ability to combine art with relief work ( Flanagan, 1940; Mathews, 1967). After the FTP, she returned to Vassar and wrote Arena ( 1940) with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation ( Flanagan, 1940). Between 1942 and 1946, she served as dean at Smith College and then remained as a professor in the Theater Department until she retired in 1955 ( Bentley, 1988).

The limited sources

I relied on Hallie's book Arena ( 1940), a first-person account of the FTP. Hallie shares the specifics of the program's success but does not take credit for many of her strategies and contributions. In reading it, I had to grasp at the text to get a sense of her personality as she placed the outputs and outcomes of the program out front in her narrative and herself as a person, "backstage". In Shifting Scenes ( 1929), her personality and passion for theater emerged more clearly. The Library of Congress Archives houses materials for the FTP and the Work Progress Administration (WPA) (see The New Deal Stage). These materials consist of copies of plays, photos and a few scant reports, but none of the sources are written to help us understand any of the key players in any detail. I also reviewed US Congressional records and session hearings of the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). There is an exchange which I address in our conversation which highlights Hallie's moral strength and integrity. Thus, while others have attempted to bring to light Hallie's accomplishments, here I will give you a sense of her as a real person, through the creation of a vivid portrait, capable of inspiring and teaching us. My fictional additions are intended to create a sense of who Hallie was.

Setting the stage

I travel back in time to meet Hallie on her last day at Smith College in 1955. She is 65. I have my dog-eared copy of Shifting Scenes. My favourite passage reads,

Romance in England does not reside in the streets but passes through them, coming from nowhere and departing into mysterious obscurity. The people swarming through the streets do not reveal themselves to you as in Prague, or Naples, or Paris, by stopping in their thoroughfares to fight, make love, laugh, sing, drink, eat, quarrel, or philosophize. They are marks scrawled on a blackboard to be instantly erased. What part of this civilization at once inchoate and crystallized, shall I find upon the stage? ( Flanagan, 1929, p. 4).

Hallie met the demands of a challenging labour program while serving a creative heart. She spent much of her life as a teacher, but I am interested in her time as the architect of one of the most innovative and successful labour attachment programs under the WPA in the era of the New Deal, namely the FTP.

Her office at the college is full of boxes. It overlooks a broad courtyard. She sits behind her kneehole desk. I picture it once cluttered with various plays, posters, lecture notes and student projects. She is dressed in a dark print blouse, coordinated with a smart beige cardigan; a lovely silk scarf tied at the nape of her neck. Classic wide beige linen flood pants are paired with sharp brown and white saddle shoes. She has elegant short hair and seems effortlessly chic and classy.

She invites me to call her Hallie.

Befitting the period, I have brought a vintage 1950s Ferguson reel-to-reel audio tape recorder (model 441-TR), which I found on eBay for $118. It fits snugly into its own mint condition, mini cherry-coloured vinyl suitcase.

Unspoken thoughts of mine will now appear in italics. My comments will appear under KW, whereas Hallie's will appear under HF in the following transcription.

In conversation with Hallie Flanagan

HF: The wisdom of the program was that it recognized that individuals ought to be valued for their skills and put to work in a way that tapped into those same skills ( Flanagan, 1940). The arts-based programs sought to put those artists back to work doing what they did best; creative labour ( Flanagan, 1940) [4].

The arts are often neglected in MOS/MH (Williams and Mills, 2018). There were five arts-based programs under the WPA. The FTP was the most outspoken politically (Taylor, 2008).

KW: What are some of the challenges that your business model had?

HF: We had social objectives bridged with economic ones. We operated under the Relief Act of 1935, which mandated us to provide 90% of our funding go to wages. Further, 80% of workers had to come from accredited theater unions, and there were ten ( Flanagan, 1940).

KW: Your program was the only one that made money -- how was this accomplished?

The discipline of management and its fundamental relationship with capitalism is a key reason for neglecting the New Deal and associated actors (Foster et al., 2014).

KW: Major changes were happening on Broadway at that time. How did this affect your program?

HF: "Almost overnight, theaters across the country closed and reopened as movie houses, making both the Great Depression and the advent of new entertainment technology the adversary of the theater worker [...]. This made the FTP a very risky prospect" ( Williams and Mills, 2018, p. 284).

KW: What did Broadway think of the Federal Theater?

HF: Well, they did not take to me very kindly! We were art and relief combined, and we were trying to figure out "how to best meet the needs of both people on relief and people in the audience over a vast geographic area ( Mathews, 1967, p. 29).

KW: What do you mean by "they were not kind"?

HF: "The old-line Broadway manager wise in the devious ways of the commercial theater, [was who Broadway thought] was needed for the job, not some college professor from a girls' school" ( Mathews, 1967: 35).

Hallie "was apt to embrace experimental approaches and to rethink theater in terms of contemporary arts and economics" (Mathews, 1967, p. 42).

KW: What else agitated the norms of the day?

HF: The Federal Theater became a way to reflect on and educate audiences about the economy, social priorities, and the ups and downs of modernity ( Mathews, 1967).

KW: You mean the Living Newspapers?

HF: Yes, exactly. We were asked to keep all performances free of political bias, but still offer "free, adult, uncensored theater" (Hopkins, 1935, as cited in Mathews, 1967, p. 33).

KW: please tell me about the Living Newspapers.

HF: The Living Newspapers were newsreels on stage ( Mathews, 1967). The format was the most forgiving in that it helped us accommodate large casts, avoid elaborate and costly scenery ( Mathews, 1967) and we could train in a hands-on manner, every aspect of theater ( Flanagan, 1940).

KW: Did this also mean that you could attend to social and economic concerns originating locally?

HF: Yes, it was "a living theater, flourishing in a particular soil of a particular region and acting as an artistic and social force on the people of that region" (Flanagan, as cited in Mathews, 1967, pp. 28-29).

She is passionate about this. Her pace quickens in excitement.

A production in Iowa was called Dirt and it debated the loss of rich farmland. Spirochete in Seattle engaged in the debate about sexually transmitted disease. Power in New York was inspired by the new electric utility and the struggle to control a new technology ( Flanagan, 1940).

KW: Is it your view that it was just not seen as serving political interests, despite meeting objectives with respect to audience engagement and work relief ( Flanagan, 1940)?

HF: This is so ironic, because "in the Living Newspaper everything is factual. The records from which any living newspaper is taken are always open to all [...]. [and there was] not one allegation [...] that the news [reports] were untrue" (Flanagan, as cited by US Congress, 1938, pp. 2,860-2,861).

Hallie was a victim of red baiting (targeted attacks against left-wing politics).

KW: Can I read to you a part of the transcript from the HUAC?

The HUAC (Special House Committee on Un-American Activities and Propaganda) led partisan enquiries into suspected communist activities and conspiracies.

KW: "The Chairman. Now, will you just tell us briefly the duties of your position?

Mrs. Flanagan: Yes, Congressman Dies. Since August 29, 1935, I have been concerned with combating un-American inactivity [emphasis added].

The Chairman: No. We will get to that in a minute.

Mrs. Flanagan: Please listen. I said I am combating un-American inactivity.

The Chairman: Inactivity?

Mrs. Flanagan: I refer to the inactivity of professional men and women; people who, at that time when I took office, were on the relief rolls; and it was my job to expend the appropriation laid aside by congressional vote for the relief of the unemployed as it related to the field of the theater" (Dies, Flanagan, as cited by US Congress, 1938: 2,839).

The committee marginalized Hallie's opportunity to participate (US Congress, 1938).

KW: The critique was largely political and partisan?

KW: And this was the end?

HF: Yes, funding was dropped, and we had to wrap up the project in 1939.

KW: You took it upon yourself to tell the story of the Federal Theater in your book, Arena ( 1940). Why did you think this was important?

HF: I felt it important to document what we built and the trials and triumphs we experienced.

She pulls a copy of Arena from the top of a nearby box and opens it at a marked page. She begins to read with fluency and emotion:

[...] It was gusty, lusty, bad and good, sad and funny, superbly worth more wit, wisdom and imagination than we could give it. Its significance lies in its pointing to the future. The ten thousand anonymous men and women - the et ceteras and the and-so-forths who did the work, the nobodies who were everybody, the somebodies who believed it - their dreams and deeds were not the end. They were the beginning of a people's theater in a country whose greatest plays are still to come ( Flanagan, 1940, p. 373).

We both pause. She is an exceptional orator.

The FTP archive was lost between 1943 and 1974 until faculty at George Mason University found the files in Baltimore Maryland. The files were eventually moved to the Library of Congress in 1994 (George Mason University, A History, 1972-1978).

It feels like the right moment to draw our interview to a close and I ask a final question.

KW: Do you feel that you were ahead of your time [5]?

She smiles and closes her eyes, then opens them and engages me directly.

HF: I think we were exactly where we were supposed to be. "We live in a changing world: [...] The theater must become conscious of the implications of the changing social order, or the changing social order will ignore and rightly, the implications of theater" ( Flanagan, 1940, pp. 45-46).

Regrettably, many did not share in the contemporary vision of the program.

KW: Are there any final thoughts you would like to share?

HF: I feel lucky to have been given the opportunity to contemplate the complexity of human emergency alongside the development of a country-wide peoples theater (New York Times, 1937, is cited in US Congress, 1938).

I thank her and she smiles in the most genuine way. I reluctantly take my leave.

Post-interview reflection

When I first read Arena, I could feel the energy and rush of the program Hallie built and the unexpected opportunities and achievements for workers and for the arts. Hallie's professional accomplishments offer (1) a female model of leadership, (2) an innovative organizational structure and (3) the bridging of enterprise with social purpose. Hallie's story and her time with the FTP have value not only for practitioners operating in a variety of sectors but also for scholars and theorists engaging in a new spectrum of capitalist behaviours and organizational structures.

In this retelling, I went beyond the sources and played in the liminal spaces, to deliver a portrait of Hallie that revealed my passion and her personality. I wanted to build on prior work which has attempted to bring Hallie to the fore ( Williams and Mills, 2018). Hallie's time with the FTP offers important lessons in leadership and management practice and in fusing creative output with social good and economic stimulus.

My key objective beyond simulating dialogue with Hallie about her program was that I create a feeling of who she was, more than an abstracted and reified figure. When I first read about Hallie Flanagan, I was immediately fascinated by all that she had accomplished. I wanted to know who she was. By "writing" her, I hope to bridge the gap between a list of accomplishments, underappreciated in their own domain and a person who offers lessons, insights, humour and relatability. Perhaps some of my readers will be social welfare-driven leaders and practitioners who can see Hallie as a mentor. Perhaps others will be feminists interested in using this method to introduce other neglected figures.

Discussion

The dimensions of ficto-feminism

As indicated at the start of this paper, there are several dimensions of ficto-feminism, including its potential to unlock agency, share reflexive and emic insights and to achieve emotionality and resonance. Here, I share a short summary of how these dimensions are revealed and why they are useful.

Hallie and the FTP were hidden from view because of targeted attacks by the HUAC, the general inattention and misunderstanding of the value of insights from the arts and creative labour and the controversial New Deal agenda, which bridged social welfare objectives with economic ones. The FTP's organizational model was complex and at odds with the emphasis on capitalistic models of organizational practice which dominate MH ( Williams and Mills, 2018). The controversial theater design and content were boldly political and engaged with important social issues, which, along with the loss of the archive, created existential, political, ideological conditions for neglect.

By taking a novel methodological approach, I attempt to humanize Hallie, surfacing her voice by curating a conversation which highlights her successes and challenges. I was also able to demonstrate her ideas and her confidence and therefore remove some of the gendered effects, namely the socially constructed gendered roles which limit women ( Langle de Paz, 2016). In Hallie's case (and during her time with the FTP), feminism was conflated with communism, she was viewed as a teacher, not a Broadway producer, the arts and social welfare were of little consequence to the objectives of capitalism.

By using a reflexive approach, my insights and sense-making helped Hallie become more alive and visible. My emotions are articulated openly in my writing and are meant to help me understand my protagonist better, develop a persuasive narrative and elicit an emotional response in you as my reader. Emotional engagement recognizes the research effort as experiential and that we engage in both thinking and feeling to understand ( Campbell, 2001). In this respect, I concur with Blakely (2007) who argues that emotional engagement in the research process offers "intellectual clarity" (59).

Undertaking a ficto-feminist polemic

I would like to invite sister researchers to try ficto-feminism, so here is some practical advice to get you started. Begin by finding a historical figure who inspires you to develop a confident command of your sources. Read deeply because you will need to navigate across those sources to create a coherent narrative. Secondly, do not fall into the trap of looking in the usual spaces. As you saw with Hallie, archives (if they exist) can be lost. Some sources might surprise you. The HUAC committee records provided some lively insights into Hallie's wit and strength. The arts also offer many overlooked lessons for MOSs. Personal writings are very helpful (e.g. Arena and Shifting Scenes); they gave me confidence that I was close to mimicking her voice where I had to fill in small gaps. Perhaps, the most fun aspect of this approach is setting the scene. Though this is fictional, do some research to place your protagonist realistically in space and time (e.g. Smith College, Hallie's dress). Additionally, draw on sources which give you a sense of the sociopolitical environment (e.g. media reports).

Conclusion

The aim of ficto-feminism as a method is to afford feminists a novel way to investigate and write about neglected women. The narrative that is produced is meant to sound plausible. It is also an approach that produces an account which challenges convention, specifically in MOS and MH. This article provided an opportunity to make an overlooked figure (a female protagonist) more visible to the discipline and to reveal her experiences and contributions. My hope for this method is that figures of the past can be given new life and that we can reclaim overlooked voices.

The New Deal represents a series of public works projects and financial reforms enacted in the 1930s in the US, under the WPA.

(2021), "Feminist frustrations: the enduring neglect of a women's business history and the opportunity for radical change", Business History. doi: 10.1080/00076791.2021.1896706 .

US Congress (1938), "House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Seventy-Fifth Congress, Third Session [H. Res. 282, Vol. 4]", http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/metabook?id=diescommittee.

Kristin S. Williams, PhD, is visiting researcher at the University of Eastern Finland and teaches and researches at Dalhousie University. She is associate editor with Culture and Organization and Qualitative Research in Organization and Management and serves on the executive committee of the Division of Critical Management Studies at the Academy of Management. Kristin identifies as a polemical feminist engaged in activist writing and narrative methods. She was a recipient of the 2018 Senior Women Academic Administrators of Canada Award and the 2018 Emerald Literati Award for Outstanding Paper ( Journal of Management History).

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Introducing ficto-feminism: a non-fiction, fictitious conversation with Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939)

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Copyright The past is an elusive place to find women, particularly female organizational actors and their many vital contributions. I write polemics of the heart, which involve challenging conventions that silence women with assertive autobiographical literary strategies ( Ferguson, 1986).

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Video Reflection

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As this is a workshop encouraging autoethnographic writing, the concept of critical friendship may be useful to create a supportive and productive environment.  This document is a short summary of a longer article. MacKenzie, B. (2015). "Critical friendships for coaching and mentoring in writing." e-Organisations and People 22(1): 42-51.  AMED.

There is a link to a longer article: https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1668504674?profile=original

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Kociatkiewicz & Kostera (2018) The body in the library

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Kociatkiewicz & Kostera (2018) The body in the library

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The unexpected, if still clichéd, discovery of a body in the library introduces Agatha Christie's plot starring the genius amateur detective, elderly Miss Marple. We will use the same situation as the starting point of our article and investigation, promising both the unmasking of the culprit and the departure from the currently standard form of an academic text. In a self-consciously rambling and digressive text, we will touch on various issues relevant to writing what we consider good social science, and the difficulties in doing so. Firmly reaffirming the need for writing organization studies and social science in the narrative mode, we trace what we see as the decline in quality and joyousness of contemporary management journal articles, and attempt to demonstrate, both through narrative means and by more traditional academic reasoning, how and why it is important to embrace variety in the ways knowledge in the social sciences is constructed and communicated.

"Oh, ma'am, oh, ma'am, there's a body in the library!"

The phrase, spoken by the parlor maid introduces the central conundrum at the heart of Agatha Christie's (1942) crime novel starring Miss Marple, the elderly amateur detective: an unknown (though soon identified) woman has been found dead in the stately home library, with few clues as to how she got there and who might have caused her death. At the time of writing, the setup was already a well-known theme, as Christie readily acknowledges in the novel's foreword. It nevertheless provides an opportunity for the author to play with the form of a detective story, and to produce an entertaining text that continues to attract readers and to serve as a basis for academic discussion (e.g. Klein, 1998; York, 2007) to this day. And so, we will use the same situation as the starting point of our article, promising both the unmasking of the culprit and the departure from the common form of an academic text. Along the way, we will touch on various issues relevant to writing what we consider good social science, and the difficulties in doing so. This discussion will not follow a linear line of argumentation, not due to lack of attention or due care, but because we believe digressions are important, and hesitation is an underappreciated facet of being a social scientist. We leave it for the reader to decide whether the identification of the perpetrator provides closure to the investigation, but our wider argument will certainly remain open at the end of the text.

The promised narrative that forms the backbone of this article follows the premise of Agatha Christie's novel with some slight variation, as the dead body discovered in the public library is that of an older woman: well dressed, with platinum blonde hair, and completely unknown to everyone on the premises. She appears to have been strangled. The police are called but the librarian also elicits help of her old friend, the general busybody and keen gardener Miss Jane Marple, who quickly establishes the identity of the corpse: it is the Body of Knowledge.

But who has killed Ms Knowledge and why? Before we can relate the course of the investigation, we need to provide some context establishing its relevance for an article on academic writing appearing in Management Learning. In order to do so, we need first to consider why the narrative structure of an investigation is at all suitable for a scholarly text.

Our argument starts with our agreement with Barbara Czarniawska's (2000) emphatic declaration: "a student of social life, no matter which domain, needs to become interested in narrative as a form of knowledge, a form of social life, and a form of communication" (p. 2). We, too, believe that stories and the social world go hand in hand: narratives frame and organize the way in which we perceive the world, as well as form the traditional form of human knowledge ( Bruner, 1991); they are the most common form of social interaction ( MacIntyre, 1997). We make sense of the world around us through stories ( Weick, 1995); indeed, they make it possible for us to share our world, as Aristotle (1996) noted already thousands of years ago in Poetics, and as Hayden White (1973) and David Carr (1986) argued slightly more recently.

The distinction between stories and narratives, and the precise definition of each, is not particularly relevant to our argument, and we shall not attempt to add to the existing tangle of conceptualizations. Regardless of where one draws boundaries, and whether one sees stories as subsets of narratives (like Gabriel, 2000), narratives as particular kinds of stories (like Boje, 2001) or, like us, uses the terms interchangeably, stories/narratives can be seen as the prevalent form of human communication. They come in many different modes, from epic, through tragic to comic, and, of course, there exist a multitude of hybrids and combinations of them, in everyday life, art, and as well as in science.

For modern societies not only tell stories, but also write them down and ascribe special status to some of them: that of literature or of social science. The latter is, of course, more important for discussing management writing, and also more problematic: it is all too easy to forget that to writing social science is to engage in telling stories, to treat research texts as non-narrative, and to consider textual templates (such as the dominant format of a journal article) as rigid rules of communication. And thus, a contemporary guide for academic writers might caution the budding social scientist:

Don't confuse yourself with your friends teaching creative writing in the fine arts department. You're not crafting a deep narrative or composing metaphors that expose mysteries of the human heart. ( Silvia, 2007: 45)

However, if we accept narrativity (and, yes, the possibility of exposing the mysteries of the human heart) as an aspect of all texts, even academic ones, we might examine the possibilities of conscious engagement with the stories we are trying to tell through our writing. The first and most direct way that academic authors can use narratives is to write with plots ( Czarniawska, 1999). The plot is a strategy of transition from one state to another and serves as a sensemaking device, linking together social actors, events and places. These are associations beyond simple chronology, but they do not have to claim cause-effect relationships. Instead, they show what actions have been taken by whom and with what consequences. This used to be a common way of writing in social sciences, also in organization studies, where the case study was very prominent both as method and as a way of presenting evidence ( Czarniawska-Joerges and de Monthoux, 1994). David Boje (1995) explains that stories facilitate communication but do not define it-they leave a certain freedom for interpretation, which makes them potentially not just enlightening but also emancipating. Umberto Eco (2000) points to yet another good reason to include stories in academic writing: he believes that this helps to anchor scientific reasoning in human experience, making it more meaningful to the reader, as well as just making the text more pleasant to read. Writing specifically about management, Pierre Guillet De Monthoux (2007) argues that art and literature helps us understand totalities, a task that should lie at the heart of any considered research program:

To have an aesthetic perspective means to assemble knowledge fragments into something that has meaning. (p. 133)

Stories can be used on all stages of research and writing, Barbara Czarniawska (1999) argues, from watching how the stories are created in the field, through collecting them ( Kostera, 2005), interpreting others' stories through a narrative frame, analyzing them, and constructing own stories. This requires considering literary qualities of texts we encounter and write, including qualities such as genre, narration, and mode of emplotment. The tales from the field are mostly, even if not exclusively, realist and documentary ( Van Maanen, 1988), but this is not the only genre that has relevance for social sciences ( Wolf, 1992).

For our case, it is important that fiction has also been argued as important for social science and management research and writing. We wholeheartedly agree with Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges and Pierre Guillet de Monthoux' (1994) call to arms, which is also the title for their jointly edited book: Good novels, better management! Fiction helps to grasp the context and provides a training for imagination. By reading more fiction we may be able to solve puzzles that no mainstream management textbook can help us with tackling.

Banks and Banks (1998) and Phillips (1995) have suggested that writing fiction might also play an important role in research presentation: as illustration, as thoughts experiment, as allegory. It can also help enliven the text, as long as the intent is not to mislead the reader. In case of our story of Miss Marple, we have chosen to use a specific genre for our fictional counterpoise to the academic discussion: that of a detective story. Barbara Czarniawska (1999, 2014) has long mused about the similarities between management writing and crime fiction: both share a their tradition of narrative probability, dedication to detail and almost ethnographical realism. Moreover, both social science and detective stories are oriented toward problem solving in a social context and there are valid similarities between a researcher and a fictional detective. Bruno Latour's (1993) masterful Aramis, or the Love of Technology exploits this similarity to great extent, presenting an ethnographic study as a murder investigation, with detective protagonists tracing the villains responsible for the demise of a technological research and development project.

Ours is a slightly different project, and a different story: the question we are asking ourselves deals with what happened to meaningful knowledge in the social sciences? Why are so many academic texts bland, unilluminating and formulaic ( Alvesson and Gabriel, 2013)? The answer we seek is not one that would take the form of critique or solutions rooted in the current trends. We wish to go beyond linear thinking, even of the most radical and critical kind. And for a task of that magnitude, enlisting help of the formidable Miss Marple might just provide us with the resources we need.

The investigation

Returning to the principal investigation, we find Miss Marple assembling the diverse cast of possible suspects. She is not easily fooled by staunch denials or timorous protestations of innocence; it is clear to her that the culprit must still be found near the murder scene. But who? She investigates, and soon it is time for her to question the suspects. To start with, she turns to a frequent visitor to the library, Monsieur Michel Foucault, easily distinguishable by his basilisk-like panoptical gaze. He knew Ms Knowledge well enough, there is no denying that. But when pressed, Foucault remains elusive. He holds out his hands and explains,

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. ( Foucault, 1977: 27)

"Well, well," says Miss Marple. "well, well ... were you worried about her rising power and influence?" Foucault nods, but feels the need to underscore the strength of his conviction. He continues, gesticulating wildly:

There has been an inversion in the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, "Take care of yourself" and "Know yourself." In Greco-Roman culture, knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle. ( Foucault, 1982: 22)

"You didn't like Ms Knowledge, did you?" Miss Marple looks him thoughtfully in the eyes. "Is there anything you wouldn't do to stop her?"

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. ( Foucault, 1984: 50)

Miss Marple nods to herself and smiles. "That's very brave ..."

It is not Knowledge alone that Monsieur Foucault had an uneasy relationship with-his attitude toward the Author (or at least some interpretations of authorship) was equally suspect. This is best seen in a series of very well-known texts appearing throughout the 1960s, all dealing with the various aspects of the role of the reader in producing the meaning of any text. The earliest, and also the most relevant for our article, is Umberto Eco's (1989)The Open Work, published in Italian in 1962. The titular open work is presented there as a desirable possibility, involving the reader in active interpretation, up to and including the co-construction of meaning together with the original author. Eco does not claim that all artistic endeavors are open, but that development of openness is a historical process allowing for the appearance of richer, more meaningful works that better embody the complexity of a contemporary world. Roland Barthes' (1977) "The Death of the Author" famously undermines the significance of the very act of authorship (and, in particular, the significance of any extratextual attributes of any particular author) for the meaning of the text, but again presents this as a result of historical development: in order to have died, the Author (using Barthes' own capitalization) must have previously been alive. Foucault (1998) flips this notion on its head: in his essay, authorship appears as a historical construct of limited usefulness as well as one which might have reached its sell-by date.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of the above essays, or at least of the strands of thought which they represent, for the practice of literary criticism. Their impact on social science (and management) writing has been more limited. But before we examine it, we need to let Miss Marple question another suspect.

Still in the library, she addresses another visitor: a silent figure, resting morosely in a chaise longue in the corner of the big room. She knows him by sight, that ironic German with his bushy eyebrows and the huge mustache. Even in his best humor he was rarely sociable, he now appears to have sunk into one of his melancholy moods. But could Herr Friedrich Nietzsche be the perpetrator of this horrible crime? He once drafted Ms Knowledge into his mobile army of metaphors, and she appeared thoroughly shaken by the experience. Despite the slumped posture, his eyes gaze piercingly at the elderly detective who calmly meets his gaze. Slowly and deliberately, seeming to carefully pick each and every word, he describes the nature of his relationship with the deceased:

That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in a blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of existence by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have something of the same character. ( Nietzsche, 1976: 42)

"Oh yes?" Miss Marple feigns surprise. Nietzsche leans back again, and stares resentfully into the ceiling. But after a long moment of uncomfortable silence, he continues,

let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as "pure reason," absolute spirituality," "knowledge in itself": these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing." ( Nietzsche, 1989: 119)

Jane Marple takes a sterner tone: "Are you sure you are telling me the whole truth, Herr Nietzsche? It wouldn't do to hold anything back." At last, the philosopher turns his head and looks at his frail-bodied questioner. He starts speaking again, haltingly, as if with overburdened by the sheer weight of his melancholy. But could it be a glint of humor twinkling in the corner of his eye?

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration [...]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour [...]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist. ( Nietzsche, 1976: 46)

"I do think you should be more careful in how you choose your friends," Miss Marple concludes and finally leaves the German to his thoughts.

Our detective is far from the only person to find Nietzsche's pronouncements not immediately clear. In his writings, he gradually gravitated toward an aphoristic style consisting of very loosely connected paragraphs and maxims that, while succinct, rarely provided a detailed argument. A useful typology to bear in mind here is Roland Barthes' (1974) distinction between the writerly and readerly texts. The former, much like the work of Nietzsche, actively engage the reader and demand interpretation based on the reader's context, passions, interests, and ideas. Roughly equivalent to the aforementioned Eco's ideal of the open work, writerly texts serve to produce meaning in collaboration between the author and the reader. In contrast, readerly texts narrow down the possible range of interpretations and enforce

the pitiless divorce which the literary institution [or, indeed, an academic one-Authors] maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness-he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious. ( Barthes, 1974: 4)

Seriousness is a damning charge for Barthes, himself an author mostly of academic rather than purely literary texts, much as it was for Nietzsche, whose playfulness (as well as whose works' adaptability) remains one of the many reasons for his continued relevance and readership. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of today's academic publishing institutions, whose ideals skew strongly toward readerliness of scientific output. Another recent book promising to be a guide to publishing journal articles ( Becker and Denicolo, 2012) invites the authors to make their texts "relatively reader-proof" (p. 93), or making sure to limit the readers' interpretive agency to as strongly as possible. We might note that there is a strong historical dimension to this stance: not too long ago, management texts published in major journals and as books by major publishers could be found that challenged stylistic boundaries, played with genre codes and conventions of academic social science. We might note Gibson Burrell's (1997) attack on linear thinking featuring text running through the book in two opposite directions (from the first page to the last and vice versa), with some correspondences between the two lines of argument helpfully pointed out by the author, others left for the reader to explore and discover; Anne Loft's (1995) combination of collage and academic article, or Ann Rippin (2015) more recent work fusing doll-making with research and academic writing. Some authors even speak of a literary turn in organization studies ( Glaubitz, 2016; Monin, 2004), though this usually involves scholarly consideration of literature rather than treating contemporary academic texts as literary work. Kociatkiewicz and Kostera (2016) analyze management literature as a genre, but their study concerns bestseller books existing, at best, at the edges of academic respectability, and offers little insight into the possibility of allowing for writerliness in research articles and books. We might also note that one string of well-publicized attacks on the so-called postmodernists (which always remained a curiously fuzzy label) in the 1990s, most notably by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1997), highlighted the lack of clarity in writing as one of their main sins, and also as an obfuscatory technique allowing such authors to get away with nonsensical theses and meaningless publications. As "fashionable nonsense" became less fashionable, clarity became the chief virtue of social science writing. Even today, when Alvesson et al. (2017) correctly, in our opinion, bemoan the loss of meaning in so much contemporary social science, they tout greater emphasis on clarity as one step toward a solution. We disagree vehemently.

These divagations have distracted us from Miss Marple's investigation who, having left Herr Nietzsche to his strangely joyful brooding, turned to examine the questionable activities of Mr Karl Popper, a philosopher of science whose acquaintance with Ms Knowledge dates back to his youth. He had been observed acting suspiciously, lately, and had also been the subject of persistent rumors of a long-standing love affair with Ms Knowledge, one that appears to have gone sour. Could he have falsified the clues while testing his hypothesis on ignorance not being the same as the absence of Knowledge? Asked directly about their relationship, he responds with clear indignation:

How can we admit that our knowledge is a human-an all too human-affair, without at the same time implying that it is all individual whim and arbitrariness? ( Popper, 1962: 16)

"Well, aren't we all human, young man?" Miss Marple nods, amiably. Mr Popper (1962) clearly feels the need to make his point more forcefully and directly:

The way in which knowledge progresses, and especially our scientific knowledge, is by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems, by conjectures. These conjectures are controlled by criticism. They may survive these tests, but they can never be positively justified. (p. vii)

"I would agree with you, but I think everything that has existed still lingers with us," the detective muses. "Do you not feel guilty about the events?" The philosopher considers the remark for a moment. Then he nods and asserts with a cool calm:

By blaming us, and our language (or misuse of language), it is possible to uphold the divine authorship of the senses (and even of language). But it is possible only at the cost of widening the gap between this authority and ourselves: between the pure sources from which we can obtain an authoritative knowledge of the truthful goddess Nature, and our impure and guilty selves. ( Popper, 1962: 17)

This sounds almost like an admission of culpability, but Miss Marple is not convinced. The death of Knowledge is still a tangled mystery, and unraveling it require both skill and tact. She excuses herself, and leaves us to ponder the significance of Popper's ideas.

The philosopher of science is known mostly for his contributions to epistemology, most directly regarding natural sciences, but with a distinct side-effect of undermining the scientific legitimacy of much social science work. His stance of critical rationalism continues to intrigue management scholars ( Thomas, 2010), and his defense of open society (and the associated ideal that entailed this defense) appears as relevant for organization theory as it does for political studies ( Armbrüster and Gebert, 2002). For the purpose of this investigation, we need to focus on Karl Popper's vision of science as a tool for reducing uncertainty. His idea of falsificationism, building a system of knowledge out of the realization that scientific theories can be falsified (proven wrong) but can never be verified (proven true), posits science as a probabilistically utopian endeavor aimed at asymptotic approach toward the truth. It is a vision that dovetails nicely with Zygmunt Bauman's description of the three different ways in which different societies and eras reacted to the all-pervading uncertainty (we also recommend Teofil Ruiz's, 2002, demonstration of the fear of the unknown as the driving force of history). He depicts these three historical visions as metaphorical utopias that help both in establishing common goals, and in directing communal action against uncertainty.

The metaphors he uses are that of the gamekeeper, the gardener, and the hunter. The gamekeeper believes in a certainty that lies beyond human control, with intervention as an act of last resort that should be avoided in most circumstances. This is the oldest, pre-modern vision in the Western civilization, married to the idea of divine order beyond comprehension of mere mortals. The gardener's world is one where dedication and attention are needed from the human actors in order to achieve the dream. He or she busies him- or herself with planning, understanding the desired order and then: ordering, adding what is needed and subtracting what does not belong. This is the idea of society championed by Popper, though with the twist of working toward the inclusion of more gardeners in both planning and execution of the utopia. While the blueprint for the garden might be sought out or invented (different interpretations of the utopia championed different approaches), the important feature of all its manifestations was a vision of harmony

in which every insider-plant had its own dignified and praiseworthy slot allocated, whereas all possible blots on the landscape were conspicuous solely by their absence. [...] Gardeners' utopias were visions of perfect totality-the quality of its parts coming a (sometimes distant) second, as its derivative and after-effect. (Zygmunt Bauman in Bauman et al., 2015: 74)

The hunter (a solitary figure that should not be confused with the social and sociable hunter-gatherers of anthropological and historical record) has lost faith in the gardener's grand project and, consequently, drastically narrows the horizons of her or his actions. Thus, while still utopian in their aims, hunters embark on the quest for individual fulfillment, that would allow the creation of a personal and localized Eden. The grand picture is largely unknowable, and the only certainty that matters is the act of pursuit itself. This

is a "winner take all" utopia of hunters, concerned as they are, each one of them, with the contents of his hunting bag at the end of the hunting day, and giving little-if any-thought to the predicament of the less dexterous, less sharp-eyed huntsmen or detractors from shooting and killing-let alone to how much, if anything at all, of the game might survive the hunt. Hunters' utopia is not a vision of a perfect world. It is a vision of a perfect (private) spot carved out and protected against hopelessly imperfect and repellent surroundings: of a relatively convenient, comfortable and secure niche to be cut out, individually, from the essentially and irreparably awkward, prickly and insecure world. And, once cut out, it is to be fenced off tightly, impermeably, from the wilderness doomed to decay. (Zygmunt Bauman in Bauman et al., 2015: 75)

For Bauman (2000, 2007), this is the diagnosis of the current era he terms the liquid modernity, with hunters representing the dominant role models who have replaced the yearning for social happiness with the imperative of consumption.

It might not yet be clear why presenting a historical account of overarching utopias (at least according to one analysis) is relevant for discussing either Popper's ideals of knowledge generation or writing practices in management studies. But there is an important link, as these overarching utopias serve not only as modes of organizing, but also as inspirations: for research, for writing, for publication. They also shape the ideal of good writing, including good writing in organization research.

The inspired texts of poets, prophets and storytellers, following the rhythms dictated by gods and muses, belonged in the gamekeepers' utopia, that of a perfect harmony existing outside of human manipulation and interference, but one to which writers could, if they wished and knew how, tune in and receive the blessings of expression. For that, inspiration, humility, and sensitivity were needed, but there was also, inevitably, the question of the worthiness of the vessel. Who was worthy of seeking and receiving the gift? How are we, the readers, to know? Hence, the discussions and fights over what is and what is not inspired script, more important for their participants than questions of authorship or genuine historical wording. Hence, also, the stories of proven inspiration circulating alongside the texts. Thus, characteristically, the Renaissance scholar Albertus Hunacius reports on the vision of the great theologian, Thomas Aquinas: one day, a voice emanating from a crucifix assured the weary Thomas: "equidem bene scriptisti de me," or "you have written well of me" ( O'Malley, 1974). This was the pursued and valued ideal, and this is the cosmic beauty we admire in the timeless songs of Sappho, in the verses of Ecclesiastes, in the tales of the knights of the Round Table, but also in writings we today regard as (proto-)scientific such as the work of Vitruvius or the philosophy of Confucius.

The second vision of authorship, historically appearing later in Europe, followed the gardeners' utopian dream of order maintained by either discovery or creation. More or less direct human intervention was desired and adopted, from classical authors seeking to detect laws of nature and the human mind and transferring them to a prose carrying the flows and rhythms they strived to portray, to modernist architects and reformers of society and the environment. These writings did not oppose a strongly personal style and form, quite the opposite: the distinctive and man-made became valued and sought after. The pleasure of reading works by Voltaire, Michel de Montaigne, and James Joyce as well as artfully crafted scientific writings of Carl von Linné, Sigmund Freud, Erving Goffman or, indeed, Karl Popper, cannot be explained only by their significance or even by the points they make.

The current era in writing is dominated by hunters, as is easily seen in most published, and highest-rated (by metrics rather than any consensual judgment) articles. The clear aim is to pursue and capture a significant "value-added" contribution, to be brief, fast and to the point, to address stated issues. Text must be explicit, compact, have a key point and refrain from containing an unclear line of argument or multiple arguments. Conclusions should be positive, well-developed, and never surprising (by the point the reader reaches such conclusions). The aim is to contribute to the citeability and impact of the journal, as measured by factors and rankings. On the success of the strivings to publish such work depends the fate of the writers: employability in academic institutions, career, promotion and prospects to, by securing grants, create funding for their universities and be eligible for having time to devote to research and writing. Writing has become measurable, straightforward, linear and governable. But do we read it and relish it? And what could we do to do so, as authors, reviewers, and readers?

As we ponder the question, we might take the time to return to Miss Marple's ongoing investigation. Her final suspect is the outwardly kind Polányi Michael úr, the Hungarian-British public intellectual once enamored with Ms Knowledge. He does not try to deny his infatuation, nor the joy their brief sojourns brought him:

To hold such knowledge is an act deeply committed to the conviction that there is something there to be discovered. It is personal, in the sense of involving the personality of him who holds it, and also in the sense of being, as a rule, solitary; but there is no trace in it of self-indulgence. ( Polányi, 2009: 25)

Miss Marple nods sympathetically, but wonders about the later development. Did the infatuation last, or did he, like the others, start harboring doubts and discovering the very numerous shortcomings of Ms Knowledge? Michael Polányi (2009) throws his hands up in the air:

The fact that it is impossible to account for the nature and justification of knowledge by a series of strictly explicit operations appears obvious in its light, without invoking deeper forms of commitment. (p. xviii)

His eyes darken as he pronounces, in a more subdued tone:

But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge, then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge. ( Polányi, 2009: 20)

Miss Marple leaves the pensive Hungarian to his thoughts, her mind working to assemble all the acquired clues. We, on the other hand, need to turn our thoughts to reading and learning rather than to the writing process. Michael Polányi's most celebrated contribution in this field lies in the distinction between explicit and tacit knowing. The former results in knowledge readily transmittable through step-by-step textbooks, instruction manuals and, generally, readerly texts in Barthes' terminology. The latter leads to knowledge much more difficult to transmit, particularly through formalized and mechanized means. And yet, the two forms of knowing are impossible to disentangle: explicit statements build on tacit assumptions, while tacit understandings incorporate explicit insights. And both are crucial for the functioning of organizations, both are studied in (and produced through) management research.

There is some evidence ( Nussbaum, 1990) that literary texts can serve as catalysts (if not sole carriers) of tacit learning, and that writerly texts are not just better literature, but also better social science. But there is more: Pierre Bayard (2007) in a profound and thoroughly entertaining short book casts further light on the indelible connection between reading, forgetting, and imagining; all books and articles, even the most thoroughly studied, are at best incompletely remembered, even right after the act of reading, and recollection and interpretation relies on context and imagination. Thus, all texts are, to some extent, writerly, and, thankfully, no texts are ever reader-proof. The fixing of meaning is a dream, and even in academic journals, the demiurgic Author has well and truly died, though not without leaving behind destructive textual rules and guidance.

The denouement

Jane Marple has, by now, heard enough. All the characters present at the crime scene had clear motive and significant amount of malice. And though one might try to examine each alibi and every unwary footstep, Miss Marple sees little point in doing so. She is convinced that none of the suspects she interviewed had the means or the nerve to murder Knowledge. But the investigation has not been unfruitful: Miss Marple has unearthed traces of Ms Knowledge's recent speeches, traces that shine a completely different light on the murder mystery. She had, indeed, been acting very strangely. Here are some of the things reliable witnesses recently heard from the mouth of the deceased, and in the hallowed halls of distinguished universities, no less:

Our mission is to develop and enthuse leaders and entrepreneurs who create, share and use knowledge to deliver equitable and sustainable futures around the world.

We are a hub of shared enquiry and discovery where individuals learn from and collaborate with peers, experts and business leaders. We unite opportunities, people and cultures, developing collective knowledge to define the future of business.

We are equally committed to developing new scholars and teachers, and to creating and disseminating pathbreaking knowledge, concepts, and tools which advance the understanding and practice of management; we accomplish this through our faculty research and PhD programs.

Research: To produce and disseminate research of world-class quality, within the School and through international partnerships, which increases knowledge, skills, understanding and impact.

Developing effective and responsible leaders by creating insightful knowledge and inspiring minds in dialogue with the world around us.

The specific sources, readily available via an Internet search, will remain shrouded here to shield the more sensitive readers from the outbursts of symbolic violence. They come not from journal articles, but from guidelines and regulations created to steer management research in Britain (similar examples can be found in other countries). Deeply unnerved, Miss Marple mutters to herself as she goes through the list she compiled: the statements (her list goes well beyond the quoted excerpts) are clearly no product of a stable mind, much less one who inspired the sublime work of all the questioned suspects.

It is obvious to her that the poor woman must have been in a bad state and clearly not feeling quite herself. She must have been depressed, and might have been delirious. Was she driven to take her own life, and, if so, by whom?

As Gibson Burrell (1997) convincingly argued, linearity kills, in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense. It kills learning, communication, and the joy of reading, but it also academic knowledge. Linearity sorts everything out while distorting the very texture of the medium it operates in. The oft-declared aim is to ensure stable and trustworthy quality. Yet such a regime of research and publication clearly fails to prevent substandard quality, as any read-through of even the leading journals of the field quickly demonstrates. On the contrary, new monstrous specimens arise and thrive, while making the whole terrain unusable, toxic, unhealthy, and esthetically repellent. Everything has to be peer reviewed nowadays, even calls for papers, even conference event notifications. It is impossible for an academic author to express a thought that is not revised and rewritten unto unrecognizeability, fitted into a Procrustean bed of format and style. The published articles read, in the words of one of our students, as if written by one and the same person, an undead demiurge of a super-author. State and run, make contribution and never meander, hit and kill another four star publication. Review and never let someone say something in an unexpected or personal way. Publish and perish.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this final clue is hidden in the already examined report by inspectors Alvesson et al., in the work otherwise preaching more transparency, clarity, and strong regulation. And yet they have rightly surmised the events leading to the death of Ms Knowledge, possibly building on their narrative knowledge of cases recorded by Patrick Hamilton (1941), where psychological bullying led the central character to the brink of suicide, and by Agatha Christie (1937), where suicide was disguised to look like a murder. Miss Marple must give them their due:

Meaningless papers do not merely fail to have any impact with the social changes that urgently confront us, but they spread cynicism and fatalism among the participants and reinforce instrumentalism. They also clutter the sphere of knowledge with noise so that truly original and meaningful publications have less chance of being developed, noticed, discussed, and acted upon. ( Alvesson et al., 2017: 12)

This is an effective and self-perpetuating machine of production and consumption, perfected and punctured by rankings, factors, indexes and quality assurance procedures, a veritable perpetuum mobile, requiring no Muse, no genius, no God, no reader, no jouissance du texte ( Barthes, 1973). It is, indeed, so perfect that it produces no discontent from within and it has turned what is without completely irrelevant. But as the murder mystery finally starts to clear, there will still remain just one, nagging, question: What for? Why are we all engaging in the clearly corrupt and useless system, why are we teaching new researchers joyless research approaches and cynical attempts to game the system? Why, in the end, do we end up publishing meaningless and poisonous articles that, even if they start as interesting insights, become homogenized and tedious through the revision and resubmission process.

The amateur detective shakes her head, reluctantly impressed by the clear diagnosis, but also troubled by its implications. Together with the inspectors, she sits down on the library sofa, and the policemen start enumerating all the tasks and procedures needed to unearth the sources of the problem. Miss Marple's attention starts to wander, but at that point they are interrupted by the librarian, the very person who asked for her help. Having listened to the inspector's ideas, he sighs, profoundly sad.

"But how can we go on from here? It is easy for you to say, you sirs are famous and well respected inspectors. But how can we, ordinary people and anxious academics, live and work without her?"

"We're all very ordinary," Jane Marple nods compassionately, "but ordinary people can sometimes do the most astonishing things."

Concluding musings

Throughout this text, we attempted to describe and actively perform a less rigid way of academic writing, digressive, hesitant, and rarely signposted. We have shown some of the sources of our conviction that such texts are needed, but like the previously described utopians, we too were guided by an overarching dream.

In a book about management co-authored by Zygmunt Bauman ( Bauman et al., 2015), Monika Kostera proposes a fourth utopian vision, to stand alongside the already described as a possible source for future inspiration. Her metaphor is that of the Arcadian gardener, who, having learned from the failings of the modernist gardening projects, and wary of the meaninglessness of the currently dominant hunters, believes both in human vision and in the extant order, in light as well as in darkness. In short, the Arcadian gardener regards humanity and its doings as part of the ecosystem and is much more relaxed about ordering than the gardeners of the past. He or she laughs at the futility of producing a linear world and has a deep respect for mystery, while, honors rationality as much as the imagination. This gardener is ready to reclaim the Earth trampled down by a horde of hunters and does not even lose faith in what has been turned into a complete wasteland: he or she is, again, as was the gamekeeper, ready to trust that there is a Grail to be found, one capable of healing the Fisher King and his infertile land. This conviction can guide the gardener's research, but it can also guide the writing and publication process.

Importantly, in this text we can answer that nagging question: what for? We undertake the narrative quest, perhaps more so than with any other academic text we've authored, with a clear aim even if not a clear destination. As promised in the opening paragraph, we seek to uncover the truth, to solve a murder mystery. Symbolic as the murder may be, it is a murder investigation nonetheless, and we let an expert investigator-our protagonist-do the job, while we, the authors, remain modest Arcadian gardeners, letting the plots come together, ideas grow semi-wild, while keeping a careful eye on the composition and the meaning of it all.

In our narrative quest, in the roles of authors aspiring to be Arcadian gardeners, we have pursued a fairly simple plot, inspired by detective novels. We did so for our own satisfaction, but also in order to gain insight into what we perceive as a dramatic loss of meaning in contemporary social sciences, and in management studies in particular. It is a feeling we share with many academic authors, including the already-mentioned Mats Alvesson et al. (2017). The loss is so urgent that we felt justified to portray it as a murder of the body of knowledge. We believe it to be, to a high degree, a consequence of the neoliberal agenda of subordinating academia to principles and ideas alien to universities and running counter to their aims, ethos, and sense (see, for example, Collini, 2012; Izak et al., 2017). Such subverted academic institutions fail to fulfill their role in the developing, sharing, and, perhaps most importantly, cherishing knowledge and instead produce something which effectively eliminates and depreciates it. Respecting the intelligence of our Readers, we will refrain from spelling out in academic jargon our expectations regarding the significance of our narrative study. As we have indicated in the title of our text, we will not attempt to reach closure, in our argument or in our narrative foray. However, we would like to finish with a coda.

All the suspects we asked Miss Marple to interrogate in our story wrote beautiful prose of deep and enduring relevance to management and organization studies, though none of them published specifically in that discipline. Their works continue to be read, cited, and appreciated by readers of different academic and disciplinary status, different experience, and different goals and passions. We can reasonably expect them to continue in this role long after most of the top-cited and impact-heavy articles published in leading management journals (including the present one) fall into obscurity. They are all authors we admire, and ones who brought us inspiration in our formation as academics. But we need to strike one final note of caution: if the work is to be truly seen as open, and its composition writerly, there must always remain the possibility of reinterpretation. Pierre Bayard, (2001, 2008) demonstrated it in his books revisiting famous detective novels, where he argues for hidden culprits not revealed by even the most famous literary detectives: Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. We need to remain similarly cautious: even Miss Marple's denouement is provisory, open to re-reading as new facts on the case emerge. We are sure Mr Popper would second this final hesitation.

And yet it is true that Ms Knowledge is dead, apparently bullied to insanity, and most probably driven to suicide. She had been loved by many, envied by perhaps even more. May she rest in peace and may her tormentors meet the deserved punishment. But is this really the end? We do not believe so. Her loving sister, Ms Tacit Knowledge, told Miss Marple, whom she befriended and invited to the funeral, that she was firmly resisting the treatment that killed her sister. Insensitive to the confinement of rules and procedures, rankings, indexes, and KPIs, unbound and unambitious, she is by nature a survivor. But she also revealed a secret to her friendly and wise companion: a long-lost child of the elder Ms Knowledge, taken away from her at birth, as her guardians considered her too serious and too virginal to be allowed in the warm and emotional world of motherhood. The missing daughter is somewhere around, though she has not yet made herself known to the mourning crowd. Finding her would require a work in a different genre, though, and Miss Marple is for once at loss on how to proceed. The younger Ms Knowledge is, for once, reassuring: "we will have to use our intuition, dear Jane."

"Yes," Miss Marple nodded, "and our imagination."

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The body in the library: An investigative celebration of deviation, hesitation, and lack of closure - Jerzy Kociatkiewicz, Monika Kostera, 2019

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The unexpected, if still clichéd, discovery of a body in the library introduces Agatha Christie's plot starring the genius amateur detective, elderly Miss Marple. We will use the same situation as the starting point of our article and investigation, promising both the unmasking of the culprit and the departure from the currently standard form of an academic text.

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Wet sheet that gets cold. The smell of sweat. A disrupted, unpleasant night again where my dreaming had me; a felt vulnerability from which it was impossible to hide. Sometimes, at bedtime, I already know that it will be a tough night. At the same time, the night offers experiences that radically differ from my everyday life. I want to learn from the way in which these experiences unfold and what I am capable of doing at night; what can my dreaming body teach me that can be generative for my writing? Through a reading of Hélène Cixous's work on the writing body and inquiring into my night dreaming, I elaborate on possibilities for writing that differ from my usual daylight writing. Written in the form of seven invitations, I note that these possibilities are not about finding ways to overcome vulnerability in writing, but rather writing through vulnerability as a gift from the dreaming-writing-body.

References

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Dream Writing: Writing Through Vulnerability - Jenny Helin, 2019

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wet sheet that gets cold. The smell of sweat. A disrupted, unpleasant night again where my dreaming had me; a felt vulnerability from which it was impossible to hide. Sometimes, at bedtime, I already know that it will be a tough night. At the same time, the night offers experiences that radically differ from my everyday life.