Researching Professional Identities through Intuitive Movement: Posthuman Diffractive Wonderings towards an Entangled Self

This research considers how the author’s performance of Intuitive Movement in the context of one-to-one sessions reflecting on the workplace, can be used by professionals to consider their identities at and beyond work. The author defines Intuitive Movement as a practice of improvising expressive, abstract performance with the body. Intuitive Movement is always ‘in relation with’ something, and the mover tracks the affective, sensory and imagination-based responses that are generated within each performative enactment. Perceptions of Professional Identities are often connected to human centred descriptions of productivity and power. This study contributes to how Intuitive Movement performance can be used to develop affirmative, ethical ways of perceiving workplaces in a way that is co-constituted between human and more-than-human actants. The enquiry suggests that the use of Intuitive Movement as a diffractive methodology, can orient away from capitalist and constructivist perceptions of Self in relation to Professional Identities. The field work involved engaging in one-to-one movement workshops with a policeman, social worker, priest, psychiatrist and academic. Sessions involved participants sharing stories about their workplace followed by the researcher Intuitively Moving as a response. Following the performance both participant and researcher shared the images, sensations, affective and emotional experiences that arose during the Intuitive Movement. A secondary contribution of the research enquiry is the production of an analytical tool called Wondering which is used to diffract the data sets. Wonderings use written and videoed text to engage in diffractive analysis using poetic enquiry methods, posthuman-autoethnography, posthuman theory and Intuitive Movement. The dynamic of the analysis simulates the researcher’s embodied experience of Intuitive Movement, frequently shifting text registers in both video and word formats. This thesis tracks the researcher’s conduct, planning, rationale, and facilitation of the research, marking their personally transformational understanding of Professional Identities. The researcher maps the insights generated through working with Intuitive Movement within and as a Posthuman subjectivity. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti, author of Posthuman Knowledge (Braidotti, 2019a), the findings argue that the performance of Intuitive Movement is purposefully situated between the researcher and participant, therefore generating co-constituted about ways of thinking and being Professional Identities. The diffractive analysis process, named as Wonderings by the author, form a methodological contribution in their fusing of Intuitive Movement with Posthuman theory through video and written texts. The resultant dismantling of binaries between researcher and researched, method and findings, lead to an argument for the use of Intuitive Movement as a form of Posthuman pedagogy that generates relational ways of knowing identities in the workplace. The researcher underlines the co-constituted nature of the knowledge generated in the research and the affirmative, ethical, emotional atmosphere of the understandings that occur in the context of the research, through and with their performance of Intuitive Movement.