Conversation with Suzanne Morch-Lassen 3 - The textures of silence

The role of silence in my PhD work or the role of silence in the research I'm doing?

I think both.

I think it's a great question.

So the role of silence in, if you like, your data collection, how you're collecting data, but also how you start with silence when you're working with your participants.

It's very interesting.

Um, yeah, actually, yeah, we start with the three breaths.

Like, my research is based on looking at the experiences, the lift experiences of people who've gone through this intervention with yoga, breath work and meditation.

And as we know, it's a very embodied intervention that maybe not everyone has the language for we're not used to working with these parts of the bodies with these type of techniques.

So when i start the interview i start it with three breaths and it actually it links them back to their experience so that's the intention of linking them back to their experience of when they've been doing the breath work um what i've been discovering is it sort of lets us land in the interview in a way um i always have like an observer with me that's part of the ethical um part of the ethics so all three of us actually start with three breaths and it just brings a calmness in it from what i feel it expands the space before we start the interview and you can see in the eyes of the people i sit across from that they land a different place in their body um And with some people, I actually end the interview as well with the three breaths.

And I have had one person where we actually did three breaths in the middle of the interview as well.

That's

remarkable.

So your beginnings and your middles and your ends in your interviews are completely different from any other qualitative interview I have ever seen in the 30 plus years that I've been working with colleagues.

You're doing interviews in a very different way.

And I think it is because you're respecting the silence.

And it is unusual, Suze, because so much of research methodologies, I would argue, involve activity, involve probably noise, asking questions, answering questions.

But you're different.

You embrace the slowness.

You embrace the silence.

So what gifts do you think slowness and silence provide for researchers as much as for research?

I tend to get answers that are not just those auto responses.

You know, we all have these auto responses, don't we? If you get asked questions, and especially if you're answering things that you don't want to answer, it's like, blah, blah, blah, something comes out.

So having these silences, and they're not awkward.

We do also have clay that maybe fills out that space that could be awkward.

but it allows for a deeper reflection.