“Alum rock is a bit like me”: community, place and identity through poetic inquiry

The chapter outlines an ethnographic approach to engaging with the British Pakistani community living in a constituency of Birmingham. The aim of the research project was to enable the British Pakistani/Kashmiri community to challenge existing often negative narratives of their lives, community and place through social science performative methodology to create counter re-representations using performative social science methodology. I provide details on how through the form of duoethnographic poetic inquiry we were able to engage and capture actual lived experiences generating knowledge as a process of providing new understandings of identity, place and community that are from within the community. We see through using facilitative and collaborative methods of creating the poems we have been able to equip the participants to challenge, push boundaries and create their own truths from their own perspectives. These co-created texts are both research data and a consultation exercise in gaining a ground-up perspective. I conclude that this fusion of Art and Social Science methodology taking both personal and collective viewpoints to create a form of performative knowledge is perfectly suited as new forms of social engagements providing a heightened sense of agency for those involved.