Writing as embodied knowing: an autoethnographic inquiry into initiation, affect, and relational transformation

This article examines writing—specifically the researcher diary—as a method of embodied and affective knowing within a qualitative study of initiatory experiences in sensitive research contexts. Drawing on autoethnography, affect theory, and the hermeneutics of experience, I argue that writing functions not merely as a tool of documentation but as a pre-analytic epistemic practice through which meaning emerges in the relational space between researcher and participants. The article is grounded in a qualitative project exploring initiation as a biographical, educational, and existential process among three groups: individuals working in thanatopedagogy, people involved in sex work and embodied sexual practices, and adults seeking or experiencing spiritual initiation. Within this study, the researcher diary played a central role in capturing embodied reactions, affective tensions, silences, and somatic traces that precede formal interpretation. The analysis demonstrates that embodied epistemology—understood as knowledge arising through the body, emotion, and relational presence—is crucial in research involving death, sexuality, spirituality, and biographical thresholds. The findings reveal recurring narrative structures of initiation, including symbolic crossings, processes of transformation, and micro-initiations understood as subtle internal shifts. At the same time, the diary documents the researcher’s own transformation, showing that fieldwork becomes a shared initiatory space in which knowledge is co-created. Conceptualizing writing as an epistemic micro-ritual, the article shows that writing is not the final stage of research but an ongoing mode of inquiry that intertwines analysis with reflexivity, vulnerability, and ethical relationality. The study contributes to reflexive qualitative methodology by demonstrating how embodied writing practices support the production of situated, affective, and relational knowledge in sensitive research contexts.Keywords: embodied knowing, autoethnography, researcher’s journal, initiation, affective epistemology, sensitive research