Project overview
This project is interested in the role of poetry in place-based policy and decision-making. Poetry is deployed as a tool for community engagement and as a method for representing qualitative data, especially felt and lived experience. Yet poetry, unlike narrative and storytelling, has received little critical attention. One of the prevailing historical assumptions is that poetry resists being instrumentalised. This project complicates this assumption: to bring the negative and extraordinary energy of poetry—that defines its value against rational deployment—into conversation with policy agendas that seek to deploy it.
