Bodying the War Correspondent: Deploying Creative Practice to Explore the Reporter's Body as a Sense-Making Tool

<p dir="ltr">In her 2021 essay, Bodying the Journalist, Chantal Francoeur acknowledges that journalists’ bodily experiences – “that complex assemblage of impulses, reactions, senses, emotions, energies and physical states” – are not easy to categorise or analyse. She argues that foregrounding the body both as an object of study and as a key resource for conducting research lies in part with journalists themselves investigating how they use their bodies as sense-making tools. This article operationalises Francoeur's three-dimensional framework for understanding how journalists deploy their bodies through the creation and analysis of a personal essay about the lived experience of a Reuters staff correspondent who was assigned to Afghanistan in 2011. The essay was written by one of the authors in journalism's creative non-fiction genre to explore her everyday encounters and embodied routines during a key period in the conflict that saw a surge in violence and coincided with the major news event of Osama Bin Laden's death. The personal essay's focus on how the journalist mobilised her body in her daily encounters with the new environment and interactions with others contributes to growing recognition of the emotional and physical work performed behind news headlines.</p>