Unsanitized writing practices: Attending to affect and embodiment throughout the research process

Correspondence Dide van Eck, Radboud Gender & Diversity Studies, Postbus 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Email: d.vaneck@ru.nl Abstract Using examples from an ethnographic study of aircraft cleaning, we discuss and illustrate how “writing differently” can be performed throughout the research process—in the literature review, data collection, data analysis, and writing up. We argue that writing differently is an ongoing methodological tool in order to rethink/refeel research practices in ways that generate affective, embodied and caring accounts of empirical organizational contexts, particularly when marginalization is key such as in cleaning work. We turn to poetry to better understand andportray the affective and embodied intensities in different phases in the research project. Furthermore, instead of presenting a sanitized authoritative account of writing so that it becomes recognizable as academic knowledge, we leave in the messiness, struggles, and insecurities in “doing” writing differently.

In this methodological paper we want to address the limitations of conventional masculine academic research and writing practices for producing embodied and affective accounts. This echoes the work of scholars who have engaged in "writing differently" in order to voice marginalized perspectives in Management and Organization Studies (e.g., Mandalaki, 2020;Phillips et al., 2014;Pullen, 2018;Pullen et al., 2020;Pullen & Rhodes, 2015) and who have successfully opened up space to write about experiences that are usually silenced in academia, such as those around motherhood (Boncori & Smith, 2019;Van Amsterdam, 2015), transsexuality (O'Shea, 2018), religion (Jamjoom, 2020), and race/ethnicity (Anthym, 2018). Many of these papers are written in resistance to academic conventions that tend to colonize the experiences of marginalized people through the value placed on authority, linearity, and productivity.
Here, we seek to extend "writing differently" beyond its' usual focus on the life of the academic researcher/writer in order to attend to empirical contexts that exceed our own profession and the lives of academics. To illustrate what this may look like, we use excerpts from an ethnographic research project that the first author conducted. In this project she engaged in 7 months of participant observation, cleaning airplanes at a Dutch airport to gain insight into the embodied experiences of inclusion and exclusion in low-wage cleaning work. As illustrated in the above poem, oftentimes she became "stuck" in trying to translate the fieldwork experiences into conventional academic prose. Thus, we use "writing differently" to better understand and express the experiences of participants and researchers, and to be transparent about the ethical questions and vulnerabilities involved in research that engages marginalized workers. VAN ECK ET AL. -1099 We do not give a comprehensive overview or analysis of this fieldwork (for more information on this see Van Eck & Van Den Brink, 2019). Instead, we use this empirical research to exemplify what writing differently can offer if applied as a methodological tool throughout different phases of the research process-in the literature review, data collection, data analysis and writing up (including the review process). We thus show how "writing differently" can be used as an ongoing methodological tool in order to rethink/refeel research practices in ways that generate affective, embodied and caring accounts of specific phenomena. As such, writing differently can be considered part of an affective ethnographic approach (Gherardi, 2019) or deep engagement (Gilmore & Kenny, 2015;Leavy, 2017); ethical methodologies that enable deeper levels of care, transparency, compassion and trust than conventional methodologies offer. Poetry in particular has been at the core of Black feminist praxis, as a way of knowing and feeling difference, and a political tool toward change (e.g., Anthym, 2018;Lorde, 1984). As Dorion (2021, p. 2) posits poetry can be part of feminist ethnography that "empowers marginalized voices by stressing their legitimacy to produce knowledge." In conversation with our data and amongst ourselves we reflect openly on the possibilities and the dangers when using writing differently to study empirical contexts and marginalized experiences that are not our own.
These include issues of (mis-)representing the experiences of the other (Anthym, 2018), of (de-)colonizing the hardships of others (as a reviewer suggested), as well as dealing with (or against) academic conventions that determine what counts as proper "knowledge" (Manning, 2016).

| WRITING DIFFERENTLY IN REVIEWING LITERATURE
N: Should we also talk about how we're going to do this together, practically? D: I was thinking, maybe we can start with a google docs where we write "found poetry" (see also Prendergast, 2006;Leavy, 2017) based on our reading of a variety of papers that discuss writing differently through each other. N: This means that instead of reading and analyzing texts and subsequently writing a theoretical framework in conventional ways, we will read the selected texts "affectively." Practically, this means that we draw out words and sentences that touch us, move us and change us in that writing, like Rhodes andCarlsen (2018, p. 1297) (James, 1996, p. 236) dissected and stitched up as if it were a lifeless corpse (Thanem & Knights, 2019, p. 113)  Different writing practices come with their own set of tensions. Not adhering to conventional frames of reference with regards to capitalist modes of production-in academia related to production of a text-can produce feelings of insecurity. In the conversation above it seemed that unconventional writing practices induced in the third author a fear of not knowing how she mattered because she felt unproductive in relation to this text. Also, in taking on the practice of writing differently, we experienced how the power relations between us as students, colleagues, and supervisors shifted in terms of conventional academic structures. Instead of the supervisor acting as the knowledgeable superior to the PhD student, we noticed that the conventional academic hierarchies in writing this paper became more blurred or even turned around in terms of who is the student and who is the teacher/ authority.

| WRITING DIFFERENTLY IN COLLECTING AND ANALYZING (ETHNOGRAPHIC) DATA
In the following, we use three moments from the fieldwork in aircraft cleaning, and one moment from an interview with an aircraft cleaner which stood out because of its specific affective intensity, yet got lost in conventional ways of writing and analyzing data. We argue that insights from the fieldwork of cleaning work offer opportunities to think differently about how we write and what knowledge we produce through our writing.

| Rethinking/refeeling embodied work
The following poem is based on an interview with an aircraft cleaner called Neema who talked about the physical hardships of the work. As Leavy (2010, p. 180) mentions, "poetic transcription" is a technique in which the selected words and phrases of the interviewee become the basis of the poem. This technique allows the writer to stay close to the narrator's voice, rhythm and speech style, stressing the legitimacy of voices that are often unheard, or altered to become recognizable as academic knowledge. Akwa uses the metaphor of a vacuum cleaner to indicate the physically demanding nature of cleaning work. Here, we see how the "ideal worker" is presented as someone who does not complain and who can perform like a machine. Akwa points out the illusion of this disembodied ideal by stating that even machines wear out in time. The expectation that cleaners are disembodied workers who can perform like machines is augmented by the notion that cleaners and cleaning work should be invisible. The following poem was written to rethink/refeel moments when we could sense this push toward making cleaners and cleaning work invisible. VAN  Cleaning is a practice that focuses on eliminating the traces (often of people) that seem unsanitary. What is considered dirty is, as Douglas (2003) argues, highly dependent on the context in which this object or trace presents itself. Cleaning is also about making invisible that which does not belong, for example by wiping away the traces of previous passengers. Thus, the result of cleaning work is making it invisible. Within the context of air travel, cleaners become invisibilized too. Not only do cleaners need to wait until all the passengers have left the airplane, they are also often urged to not be in the way and leave the plane as quickly as possible. The participant observations show that the presence of cleaners is sometimes felt as "annoying" by other workers in the airplane or passengers whose activities are stalled because of the cleaning work. Similarly, in their study of the relations between management students and toilet cleaners, Zulfiqar and Prasad (2020) show that it is precisely the invisibility of the workers that clean toilets which perpetuates social inequalities: "how can what cannot be seen, felt or heard be given recognition and legitimation (Butler, 2004)?" (cited in Zulfiqar & Prasad, 2020, p. 39). As Marxist feminists also argued (Duffy, 2007), although the sustainability of society depends on reproductive labor such as cleaning, it is often constructed in contrast to "real work," and therefore remains invisible and unrecognized. Yet, the current increase in strikes of cleaning workers in the Netherlands-walking with signs showing texts such as "never invisible again"-, where they fight for higher pay and more security indicate cleaners' awareness of the value and indispensability of their work.
How do conventional academic writing practices contribute to rendering the embodied aspects of work invisible as well as leaving those performing invisible, marginalized work unseen, and unacknowledged? Within conventional academic writing there seems to be little room to capture embodied aspects of work (Gherardi, 2019;Thanem & Knights, 2019). Academic texts often assume a rational production of knowledge that does not afford space to integrate embodiment within the research-both the researchers' and the participants' embodiment are often written out of the research account. According to Thanem and Knights (2019)  academics "to work by way of the body particularly when confronting big political issues: the pains and sufferings of exploitation and oppression are felt by bodies (...) as our own personal troubles resonate with larger social problems and public issues (Mills, 1959), what we feel in here is felt out there too" (Thanem & Knights, 2019, p. 141). In order to work by way of the body, the practice of writing differently already becomes crucial in the data collection phase.
Whereas conventional academic (fieldnote-)writing practices emphasize the importance of "factual" observational notes to make sense of what is going on in the field, we argue the importance of writing embodied, affective accounts here. Writing exclusively "factual" observational notes presumes the researcher to be an all-knowing authority. This becomes particularly problematic when writing about marginalized positions that are different from our own. Feminist, postcolonial and queer scholarship addresses the importance of "vulnerable writing" that is explicit about, and recognizes the positionality of the researcher and the fragility of knowledge production in being able to present "what it is like" (Gherardi, 2019;Page, 2017). Admittedly, even in writing differently, studying (marginalized) experiences remains bound by textual forms, which will always be limited in representing embodied and affective intensities. Arts-based scholars have therefore argued for the need to also include methodologies that go beyond text, such as visual art, dance, performance art, and music (e.g., Biehl-Missal, 2015; Leavy, 2017).

| Rethinking/refeeling embodied normativities
As we portrayed in the previous section, the work of cleaning and those performing the work of cleaning are often rendered invisible and unacknowledged. Yet the following fieldnote diary fragments indicate how those who are considered out of place in cleaning work become extra visible or "hypervisible," although not in the usual ways that hypervisibility is enacted when marginalized groups enter workplaces that are dominated by privileged workers (Buchanan & Settles, 2019). These fieldnotes show that the first author's embodiment made her a space invader in this work context (Puwar, 2004), yet a privileged space invader who is expected to belong in higher valued, higher paid places. Her white middle-class body seemed misaligned with the working-class bodies of color that dominate the space of aircraft cleaning and thus could not blend in and become invisibilized in this space (cf. Ahmed, 2006;Vitry, 2020). Her presence in the cleaning company led to affective circulations such as surprise, frustration, and discomfort.
Who is seen as a legitimate cleaner is shaped by norms around embodiment. Gendered, racialized, and ableist notions about embodiment inform who is seen as an appropriate worker in certain contexts (Puwar, 2004;Vitry, 2020). In the academic work context, this principle operates in a similar way but with a different somatic norm than in cleaning: white male bodies are presumed the natural authorities. Their voices and experiences are overrepresented in academic writing as is critiqued in calls for decolonizing or democratizing academic knowledge (e.g., Cruz, 2008;Diversi & Moreira, 2016;Rhodes, 2019). In the context of cleaning, migrant, often non-White and female bodies are considered the somatic norm. With our attempts to write embodied and affective accounts, we aim to engage with what we encountered in the field and open up space for alternative knowledge creation and dialogs that could lead to political action. "The personally embodied experience may be a source of knowledge, which mobilizes individuals and collective affects with significant political effect" (Thanem & Knights, 2019, p. 135). Yet, as we have argued, academic writing conventions mostly eclipse such possibilities (Gherardi, 2019;Phillips et al., 2014;Pullen, 2018;Pullen & Rhodes, 2015;Thanem & Knights, 2019). Therefore, we turn to poetry again here.

N:
Exactly, and what we are doing is showcasing how our own bodies and those of our participants matter in the research process. We don't edit out the complexity and the mess of all the feelings that circulate and that we feel in our bodies.

D:
Writing poetry from our fieldnotes really exemplifies this for me. We used our intuition there. You sort of need to turn on your senses and your emotions in order to write those poems. So that you can show what happens in the affective realm.
Our participant observations of cleaning work and its analysis through poetry urged us to think about the ways in which embodied normatitivies (in)visibility and (dis)embodiment play a role in our academic practices. Thinking through academic writing with the ideas of "sanitizing" and "making invisible" in mind, we see how editing out what does not belong, what is considered dirty and messy is characteristic of academic writing (cf Pullen & Rhodes, 2008), albeit obviously in less physically demanding ways than in the cleaning work the first author engaged in.
The highly valued masculine ideals of rigor, validity, and reliability compel researchers to get rid of the chaotic, intuitive, and embodied parts inherent in the data collection, analysis and writing as well as the insecurities and doubts we feel throughout the research process. We are pushed to present a sanitized linear account of writing so that it becomes recognizable as academic knowledge (Gherardi, 2019;Manning, 2016). We feel that both the chaos of the research process and the affective intensities within the data are eclipsed in most research accounts, which is particularly problematic when marginalized groups or experiences are central to the research (Anthym, 2018;Gilmore et al., 2019;Weatherall, 2019). These experiences are difficult to grasp in the majoritarian language on which conventional ways of writing and knowing are based (Manning, 2016).
Poetic inquiry, as a form of writing differently, allows us to focus on what touched, moved or changed us in the data or the literature, as well as on what our participants are moved or touched by (e.g., van Amsterdam & van Eck, 2019). Playing with the rhythm of the text poetry enables us to better approach the chaotic and not-yet-known experiences related to marginalization that we tried to capture. Poetic inquiry also equips us with the sensibility to grasp the affect that circulates through the data, the literature and us as researchers. And, importantly, because poems are open to different readings or interpretations-also called verisimilitude (Ward, 2011)-they enable us to VAN ECK ET AL. give an account of our findings that is based in and on humility rather than ascribed expertize (Anthym, 2018;Rhodes & Carlsen, 2018;Richardson & St Pierre, 2008). As Rhodes andCarlsen (2018, p. 1297) describe, this means letting go of one's own epistemic authority and render the self-vulnerable and radically open to learn from other people.

| WRITING DIFFERENTLY AS A REFLECTION ON ETHICS
One of the reviewers who commented on an earlier version of this paper wrote an emotionally charged review in which they stated that they felt hurt by the parallel we drew between academic work and cleaning work because they felt we were colonizing the hardship of others. In reaction to this we felt a host of emotions, ranging from shock, shame, and annoyance, to confusion and gratitude. The three of us got together to make sense of our (emotional) responses and discuss how to move forward. One of us wrote the following poem based on this conversation: We try to carefully move forward here, keeping our idea that as academics we can learn from cleaners' work, but at the same time stressing that the difficulties we experience in writing are not the same as what cleaners' experience. In response to the reviews, we have thoroughly rewritten the text in order to more clearly signpost our aim of using "writing differently" in every part of the research process, from literature review, data-collection, and analysis to the writing-up in order to attend to and learn from an empirical organizational context beyond the academy, in which marginalization is key: airplane cleaning. VAN ECK ET AL. D: I worry about how people will read our work here. I don't want to be seen as someone who colonizes the experiences of my participants or uses them simply to get ahead myself. I wonder, can writing differently or writing affectively only be done in an ethical way when writing and researching ourselves? N: I don't think so. I think we shouldn't underestimate how we as researchers become entangled with the research setting and our participants, and thus ultimately co-construct the findings. There are many (feminist) scholars who make this point, for example those who draw from Haraway's ideas about "situated knowledge" (e.g., Prasad et al., 2019). But I do not think this should mean our experiences as scholars in and beyond the academic world should be the sole focus of our research endeavors. I don't want to assume that academics all have the same privilege; we are a heterogeneous bunch. Yet I still think that it would seriously limit the knowledge that gets produced if we cannot venture beyond the Ivory Tower of the academy to other workplace settings, especially those producing marginalized workers and experiences in other ways. M: Exactly. Wouldn't it be unethical to not report on their experiences? In our current project we argue that many scholars in our field of gender and diversity studies have a preference for studying white and golden color workers. Our main aim was to engage with workers and work settings that are often neglected. These will remain unseen or silenced if the fear of colonizing or misrepresenting their experiences pushes us to refrain from engaging with them in the field. D: And again here it is important that "writing differently" is not something that can be added at the end of a research process, in the writing up phase, but needs to be performed throughout the research process. A deep engagement with and care for the field and the people we do research with are required when conducting this type of ethnographic fieldwork. But I also think there will always be some form of misrepresentation, I will never be able to fully understand and feel what it is like to perform physically demanding work for a minimum wage for over a lifetime as Akwa explained to me.
Yet we should not hide these limitations and pretend to be this all-knowing authority.

| POSTLUDE: TOWARDS AN ETHIC OF CARE
We want to end our writing here with some thoughts on the politics of academic knowledge production. We have illustrated our insights with affective fieldwork notes and poetry from the research with airplane cleaners, who are at the margins of western society and the bottom of our capitalist value chain. We needed to write differently, because the lived realities of marginalized groups tend to escape conventional language practices (Anthym, 2018;Weatherall, 2019). White, middle class, masculine normativities inform conventional academic writing practices, and thus substantially limit the knowledge that can be produced to mostly disembodied, rational accounts. Conventional writing practices therefore seem better suited to articulate experiences that align with embodied normativities in academia related to gender, race, and class. We have tried to show that writing differently allows space for sensing, analyzing, and voicing experiences of those who occupy the margins (Dorion, 2021). We thus consider writing differently as a political act that can open up possibilities for thinking differently and feeling differently, and thus making the experiences of marginalized laborers such as cleaners more relatable to an academic audience (Gherardi, 2019;Manning, 2016;Rhodes & Carlsen, 2018;Steyaert, 2015). There is much more that can and should be done to improve the lives of those who are marginalized, and we thus need to be humble and realistic about what we can achieve with an academic text like this one. The material and affective potential of this writing is limited to embodied resonance and reflection on experiences that are mostly underrepresented and/or silenced in academic work. We have used writing differently as a way to affectively connect-to the literature, to our research participants, to reviewers, and to each other. We see our poetry as a feminist methodology that, as Faulkner (2018, p. 86) writes, "... can be a means of demonstrating embodiment and reflexivity, a way to refuse the mind-body dialectic, a form of feminist ethnography, and a catalyst for social agitation and change." We acknowledge, however, that our writing is not anywhere near enough to undo the inequalities we touch upon in this text, but it is a start. We, therefore, end with a call to scholars to foster an ethic of care by filling the silences present in academic knowledge production with other kinds of words.
academic writing is full of silences (Armitage, 2014)  becoming faithful witnesses (Gunaratnam, 2008) to the subjective realities of our research participants (Anthym, 2018, p. 204) does it suffice to just be t/here or do we need to be with and in-between? (Gherardi, 2019, p. 745 (Lorde, 1984, p. 44) or shattering (Ahmed, 2017) an "us" that is more VAN ECK ET AL. than the disembodied, un-affected/in-effective researcher-participant; author-subject en-counter?
we might need counter-narratives (Delgado, 1989) art (Manning, 2016) and affective pedagogies (Gherardi, 2019, p. 752) based in and on humility (Anthym, 2018, p. 199) to be able to respond to engage with these experiences do we have the courage to see/write/read poetry as a practice of resistance and reclamation? (Anthym, 2018, p. 79) is that how we can practice an ethic of care?

DATA AVIALABILITY STATEMENT
Research data are not shared.
The reason for this website was to make our research poems open-access and readily available for an audience also outside of academia.