Poetic Inquiries at Work: Pluriversal Knowledge-Making from the Margins

Poetry, with its non-linear, embodied, and affective capacities, operates as a feminist, queer, and decolonial praxis. It challenges the dominant, rationalist epistemologies of traditional organizational studies (Boncori et al., 2025). By embracing poetry, we validate knowledge systems where the poetic has always been integral to understanding the social, the economic, and the spiritual, particularly in Global South, Indigenous, and other marginalized contexts (Abu-Lughod, 2016; Anzaldúa, 2000; Dar, 2019; Jangam, 2014; Oza, 2019). This stream creates a crucial space to explore how poetic inquiry can articulate nuanced, resistant, and collective forms of knowing that are often silenced or flattened by conventional academic prose (March, 2006). We believe that poetry can be an integral part of the research process and inquiry into organizations – not only as a means of expression but as a method of inquiry and reflection (Dar & Masood, 2023; Darmer and Grisoni, 2011; Faulkner, 2009; Jensen & Mahmud, 2009; Kumar & Kamble, 2022; Rostron, 2025). We invite submissions that present original poetic works engaging with themes of gender, labor, precarity, organization, or belonging from the margins, as well as scholarly papers that theorize poetry’s role as knowledge production in work and organizational studies (Van Amsterdam et al., 2023). We also welcome contributions that employ poetry as a methodological approach (such as poetic inquiry, found poetry, or collaborative poetry) and those that explore the historical and cultural roles of the poet-philosopher, storyteller, or griot in sustaining community (Abu-Lughod, 2016; John, 2024; Mir & Mir, 2006), activism, knowing and organising. Additionally, we encourage engagements with poetic traditions from the Global South, Indigenous, post-socialist, and other marginalized contexts as epistemological nodes of resistance, experience and voice, or as frameworks for understanding work. We also welcome submissions that examine how poetry intersects and engages with other creative methods like performance, sound, or visual arts within feminist and decolonial inquiry (Cooms and Saunders, 2024).