The way of the (s)word : emerging research methodologies

The thesis proposition (completed in January 2005) is Sacred Oral Storytelling Invokes Limen in the Transformation of Reality. I worked with four particular ancient ‘traditional’ stories from four different cultures: Zen Buddhist, Judaic, Inuit, and Yolngu Australian Indigenous. The four stories are many-layered, and could be termed ‘sacred’. I focussed on what transformations may occur in the context of storytellings (and story listenings) in a contemporary setting, while paying attention to the cultural contexts in which the stories had evolved. I focussed on the oral aspect of storytellings. ‘Limen’ was a word I chose because it is now obsolete. It carried few previous connotations. It is the threshold, the smallest point at which change is perceived to take place. I applied it both to the storytelling ‘event’, as well as to particular points in the telling-listening I termed ‘resonant moments’. I was interested in the transformative possibilities of storytelling and listening. I discuss the emergent nature of my methodologies and how they are not separate from the topic itself of transformation -- of liminal qualities being lived and experienced. I tell a story. I also tell of an actual storytelling event in which I experienced a significant leap in my own learning during the research process. The story is one of facing death. It is called The Teaching. I will be presenting a storytelling methodology at the same time as refracting it through other lenses. The research methodologies emerged in the way a story does, unfolding, and beginning to have pattern, cumulatively making meaning, I frame the storytelling event with the work of theorists whose ideas impinge on my own work and articulate what my own practice was -- being in tension between the 'molten lava of experience' and the 'hardening into igneous theories', languaged by Bakhtin. I show how methods of drawing, dreaming and writing were embedded in emerging research practices