Pelias (Southern Illinois U., Carbondale) takes on the soul, spirituality, and heart he finds absent but potentially present in the academy. Openly subjective, Pelias examines how over-confidence in objectivity crushes alternative thinking, especially in members of minority groups. He advocates examining the missing essence of the body and making i

Education without ethics, without sentiments, without heart, is simply soulless, factual academics and nothing more. This work features essays that poetically evokes the spiritual aspects of life in a seemingly dispassionate field.

Ronald J Pelias explores leaning as a metaphor for analyzing interpersonal interaction. Bodies leaning toward one another are engaged, developing the potential for long-lasting, meaningful relationships. But this ideal is not often realized. Pelias makes use of a wide variety of tools such as personal narrative, autoethnography, poetic inquiry and performative writing in his exploration of the physical space of relationships. This deeply personal work is essential for scholars and students of qualitative research and autoethnography.

Explore with Ronald Pelias the physical space between people, and learn the metaphorical importance of leaning, in this personal, performative narrative about relationships.

Five scholars met as writers at a workshop at the 2007 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry and made a commitment to write over the following year to, for and with each other. It became an experiment in the craft of autoethnography, exploring questions of intimacy and connection manifested through collaborative writing. Each year since then, the authors have returned to the Congress to read a small anthology of the year's writing-and to decide whether or not to continue. This book covers the first two years of that writing, offering stories of how writing touches, how it writes...

Performance uses the alphabet as an organizational device to present a series of short pieces that approach performance from multiple perspectives and various compositional strategies. Pelias's essays, poetry, dialogue, personal narratives, quick speculations, and other literary genres explore the key themes in this field, encapsulating the essence of performance studies for the novice and providing food for thought for the expert. Its brief, evocative, and reflexive pieces introduce performative writing as a method of research for those in performance and many other fields.

Performance uses the alphabet as an organizational device to present a series of short pieces that approach performance from multiple perspectives and various compositional strategies. Pelias's essays, poetry, dialogue, personal narratives, quick speculations, and other literary genres explore the key themes in this field, encapsulating the essence of performance studies for the novice and providing food for thought for the expert. Its brief, evocative, and reflexive pieces introduce performative writing as a method of research for those in performance and many other fields.