Social poetics as processual engagement: Making visible what matters in social suffering

Social and cultural poetics take us beyond language to an embodied sensibility. To explore the relevance of social poetics in medical training, this article uses as an exemplar an innovative program in geriatrics in a residency program in primary care. The program began with a series of meetings in which medical residents consulted community elders invited for their advice and wisdom on healthcare dilemmas as Senior Faculty, effectively becoming co-teachers and co-learners with one another. Through iterative reflection, residents, faculty and community elders all reported feeling struck by the unexpected responses and were often guided and called to action by them to ask new questions, to shift their stance, or offer greater accompaniment and care. These experiences illuminated what might otherwise have passed by unnoticed, particularly in regards to human suffering. The reflecting process made visible what mattered to each actor, shifting from negative assumptions and attitudes about older adults to a positive engagement with them, co-creating new possibilities for participants to articulate their lived experience of illness and healing. These are creative and moral acts, honoring the voices of those seldom invited to speak, resonating with them, acknowledging what matters to each participant, while taking into account wider issues of disparity and social justice.

Divided we tweet: The social media poetics of public online shaming

This article explores the divisive nature of social media public culture in which impromptu communities of strangers affirm or antagonize one another in non-face-to-face interactions through memes, hashtags, and other posts. Drawing upon the work of Michael Herzfeld, specifically his notion of cultural intimacy and social poetics, this article analyzes contemporary politicized social media to demonstrate what I call social media poetics, briefly, public online shaming through which antagonists criticize one another and, in so doing, create their own identities; this process relies upon essentializing communities of posters that quickly become polarized. During social media acts of “creative shame,” people “become” their posts, making social media a vehicle for perpetuating both community and disunity based on social identities affirmed or antagonized when somehow “embodied” in the posts.

Using Management Inquiry to Co-Construct Other Memories About the Future

The focal point in this article is to explore how management inquiry in the context of reflexive dialogical action research can be used as a way for researchers and managers to jointly construct knowledge that partakes in developing organizational life from “within.” This article builds on the acknowledgment that people in organizations have memories of the future. And it is argued that the prospective memories managers have of how an organizational dilemma will unfold in the nearby future shape their actions and co-construction of meaning in the present. In the article, we exemplify and explore how researchers and managers by using “unadjusted responses” and “social poetics” as ways of gesturing and responding can engage in management inquiry and enhance the future managers remember to make room for more desirable future memories to emerge that expand managers’ possible space for action in the present.