Chapter 3: On the Fringe/At the Fringe: Fleshing out Research

Be ‘open to becoming affected by encounters, rather than simply reporting them’ is the invitation from Fotaki, Metcalfe and Harding (2014), and it is this message that we have taken to heart in our ‘fringe’ production. Inspired by friendship, ideas and an interest in fleshing out research, we offer our work as an illustration of embodied research as a process in action, in terms of both form and content. We share the story behind our research-in-the-making as it emerged over two days, during Edinburgh’s Fringe festival.¹ At night we went to performances at the Fringe, where life and research experiences were serendipitously reflected back at us in terms of content – topic and genre, as well as form – and enabled us to appreciate the provisional and unpredictable relations between performer and audience. By day, in our research practices, we allowed ourselves to use eclectic, improvisational and experimental modes of expression,² that are only just on the fringe of acceptability, even within the most enlightened circles of organisational studies.