At the interface of Western and Indigenous research methodologies, this paper revisits the place of the “personal” and “autobiographical” self in qualitative visual research. We outline a community and partnership-based evaluation of a theater program for Indigenous youth using arts-based body-mapping approaches in Saskatoon, Canada, and explore the methodological limitations of the narrator or artist’s voice and representations to translate personal visual-narratives and personal knowledges they hold. In so doing, we describe how body-mapping methods were adapted and improvised to respond to the silent voices and absent bodies within personal visual-narratives with an epistemological eclecticism handling the limitations of voice and meaningfully engaging the potentiality of quietness. Extending the conceptual and methodological boundaries of the “personal” and “autobiographical” for both narrator and interlocutor, artist and observer, we contribute to debates on the processes and outcomes of personal knowledge production by articulating a generative, ethical, and culturally-grounded project mobilizing body-mapping as a quiet method that pursues self-work—the passionate and emergent practices of working on one’s self and making self appear in non-representational and ceremonial ways.

在西方和本土研究方法论的交界处，本文重新审视了“个人”和“自传”自我在定性视觉研究中的地位。我们使用加拿大基于艺术的人体贴图方法，概述了针对社区青年针对戏剧节目的社区和伙伴关系评估，并探讨了叙述者或艺术家的声音和表示方法在翻译个人视觉叙事和个人方面的方法学局限性他们掌握的知识。通过这样做，我们描述了身体映射方法是如何适应和改进的，以一种认识论折衷主义来应对个人视觉叙事中的无声声音和缺席的身体，这种认识论折衷主义处理了声音的局限性并有意义地发挥了安静的潜力。