International Perspectives on Autoethnographic Research and Practice

Lydia Turner, Nigel Short, Alec Grant, Tony Adams, Lydia Turner, Nigel Short, Alec Grant, Tony Adams, Lydia Turner, Nigel P. Short, Alec Grant, Tony E. Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138655379
• eBook ISBN: 9781315394763
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

International Perspectives on Autoethnographic Research and Practice is the first volume of international scholarship on autoethnography. This culturally and academically diverse collection combines perspectives on contemporary autoethnographic thinking from scholars working within a variety of disciplines, contexts, and formats. The first section provides an introduction and demonstration of the different types and uses of autoethnography, the second explores the potential issues and questions associated with its practice, and the third offers perspectives on evaluation and assessment. Concluding with a reflective discussion between the editors, this is the premier resource for researchers and students interested in autoethnography, life writing, and qualitative research.

SECTION 1

Understanding Autoethnography

INTRODUCTION

Outside, Walking In

Nigel P. Short

Setting the scene.

This chapter situates, embeds, and hopefully contributes to our ‘Understanding of Autoethnography’ through two fictional walks.

The first autoethnography is concerned with (trying to) ‘Understand Autoethnographies’, in particular, trying to understand autoethnography, using personal experiences to examine and critique cultural/political experiences. The conversation is fascinated with how time and temporality interact with everyday pragmatic practical concerns.

The second autoethnographic conversation discusses the invited authors’ contributions. Taking as a starting point the importance of time and temporality, alongside cultural and structural contexts, in thinking about identities, experiences, and positioning, the authors Sarah Helps; Kris Tilley-Lubbs; Robert Rinehart; Andrew Herrmann; Norman Denzin; and, finally, Kitrina Douglas reflect on how their subjectivities are experienced through their unfolding stories of everyday life.

Their chapters show variations in autoethnography as a research methodology and research method, including different ways to understand and conceive of autoethnography and how it can be used across disciplines/topics. In addition, the authors present autoethnographies that trouble normality and are associated with culture/politics and the contested self. There is work that puts forward alternative stories and alternative voices. The authors illustrate how bridges can be fashioned between an individual’s experiences and the cultures they inhabit, thereby creating social ownership of created knowledge.

The authors’ work challenges the toxic binary relationship(s) between those who are considered legitimate holders of knowledge and those who are not. This redundant (I suggest) binary relationship can be a barrier to the implementation and representation of evidence. Our multiple selves are implicated in all our endeavours. This subjectivity of knowledge, I believe, is unavoidable.

Nigel:

I’m sat on a blue swivel chair in a room at the top of my modest little house on the south coast of England. I’ve recently moved lots of books from this room to another. This room used to quake with books.

I wanted space.

Space to breath,

Space for cups of tea, lots of tea, different varieties of tea,

Mixed tea. Assam and Darjeeling.

Space to think and,

Space to move.

Space to let my mind wander,

It’s a beautiful sunny day. Through the window, I can see the English Channel and miles beyond. I enjoy this view. I feel good. John Dowland is playing on the CD cd player.

The blank PC screen sits in my periphery, winking at me, yelling ‘HELLO’. I need/want/have to write. I’m reminded of the difficulty highlighted by Sparkes (2013), of writing to order. What do we get ……… ‘if we force a story into textual form, what do we actually end up with?’ (p. 210).

The window is open. I can hear the town beginning its day. I can see trains, boats, and cars, and occasionally aeroplanes, as they make their westward way to Gatwick Airport.

On the table are Post-it notes, unfolded scraps of paper, and a handful of receipts with single words on them. I need to write.

On the channel are white triangles: yacht sails, tacking up and down the coast. The view reminds me of the coast in New South Wales, Australia. I remember a concert I went to in Sydney, Australia.

Notes from my diary:

18 January 1978. Conservatorium of Music. With Ian. Concert. Weather Report. Beautiful summer evening. Felt out of place. (Can you feel out of place at a jazz concert?) Apparently. Wore dark blue Stubbies (shorts). My Birkenstocks. My favourite T Shirt. It’s from a café in Gloucester Road Tube station. (On the front is the name of the café ‘Dave’s café, downstairs in Gloucester Road Tube’. The downstairs is printed in RED like a flight of stairs)

D

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Wayne Shorter introduces the band. ‘Hi, we’ve been in the studio recently, trying very hard to create new sounds; sounds that haven’t been made or heard before. Unpredictable melodies, an interruption to the often-anticipated jazz repertoire’.

This memory seems a wonderful conduit to this chapter. I’m keen to do a worthwhile job, create new ideas, say something new, move away from the often-predictable anticipated discussions about autoethnography whilst keeping an eye on the vultures of traditional normative values as they circle above my head. I’m keen to interrupt, to disturb and realise convergences of new opportunities. To agitate and problematise representation. I want to agitate the norm, to trouble normative onto-epistemologies. I am disinclined to re-hash what’s been written before. I want to re-consider autoethnographic gazes.

***************

I’m apprehensive about my contribution. Palpitations. More tea.

***************

January 2009. Studying for a Professional Doctorate at a university in the south of England. I’m with my supervisor. They ask about my research. I’m lost. I have many ideas, unsure how to progress. I’m introduced to Nick Holt.

Holt N (2003). Representation, legitimation, and autoethnography: An autoethnographic writing story.

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Whilst I am reluctant to develop a linear narrative, a narrative which looks back from where I am now and arranges the past(s) into a series of experiences that lead me to now, Holt’s work was an ‘emergence’ of some kind: my first experience, that I can remember, of what I now call autoethnography.

Following Deleuze (1997), I try ‘not to aim to extract a linear story, or to impose definite contours, but to interrogate the always in motion ‘lines of subjectification’ operating on and through her at different points of her life’ (p. 161). I’ve tried, in my own autoethnographic work over the years, to suggest that there are different ways of viewing a story or stories. I embrace ideas that autoethnographers, like their readers, have multiple voices. So, for example, there are older Nigels, younger Nigels, parental Nigels, the art critic (ha ha) Nigel, et cetera.

I am interested in intersectional/intrasectional world(s). I contest we are all caught up in different stories and different understandings of these stories; whose story, for example, are we reading now? What’s in the story, and what might have been left out or removed? Writing is about production rather than reproduction.

In addition, let’s consider onto-epistemology. An idea that ontology and epistemology cannot be separated and affect each other. Finally, embedded within this concept is that everything that emerges is rooted in politics, and while there are no intrinsic ways of being ethical, there are choices that people make in specific special progressive situations, that have consequences. We all have a role to play and should take partial responsibility. As Barad (2007) says, ‘We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world’ (p. 185).

A Play on Words

First Conversation

This three-piece, never ending, polyphonic story, influenced by many different walking conversations and different walking companions, tries to ‘Understand Autoethnography’ from different gazes. To afford different perspectives, multiple voiced, multi-dimensional characters are introduced.

Fractiousness has been promoted in an attempt to present the reader with the sense that the ‘self’ cannot be contained in linear trajectories. The reader will confront a labyrinth, a labyrinth made up of fragments, memories, visions, and oblique references, to get a sense of inner oracles.

And as Goodall (2009) suggested,

the very act of writing a story, or telling a tale in public or just to a friend, changes not so much how or what we know... it alters the way we think about what we know and how we know it.

(p. 14)

This writing has been influenced by Bronwyn Davies’s plays Life in Kings Cross (2009) and ‘Une Nuit a Paris’ (One Night in Paris) by the English rock group 10cc (1975). I remind myself that as writers, we all stand on each other’s shoulders; we perhaps, sometimes unknowingly, use others’ work and ideas. I often don’t know if I’ve had an idea before, and if I have, whose is it? Literature is a communal exercise (Le Guin 2004, p. 277).

The people involved in this (with a wink to Samuel Beckett) are composites of multiple people, and they are represented as follows:

BECKETT: An eclectic autoethnographic psychogeography deviant

POTTER: A builder’s labourer

FINN: A factory worker

These people discuss their different and occasionally parallel understandings of autoethnography, even when they didn’t know that’s what autoethnography might be called. After Deleuze (1997), the text is nomadic, resists stasis, seeks a freedom to roam, and encourages numerous different positions. By using this Play on Words, the conversations transcend any dominant voice(s) and re-consider and re-evaluate some of the contributors’ ideas and beliefs. This approach, porous, fragile, and vulnerable (as it has been on many occasions), provides an opportunity to consider complex, often contradictory static ideas and allows for the opening of developing dialogues. This work draws on ‘partial happenings, fragmented memories and on occasions echoes of conversations’ (Sparkes 2007, p. 521).

Imagine

Beckett is sat in his old, dirty, unwashed car in the National Trust car park at Ditchling Beacon on the South Downs in Sussex, UK. The Leisure Society is playing on the CD player. He’s waiting for the others. He gazes out over the weald towards the North Downs. It’s a clear, sunny, frosty, crisp, winter’s morning. He’s the only person here. Its 7.45 am. He’s early. They agreed to meet at 8.00 am. Beckett can see planes landing and taking off at Gatwick Airport. Where are they going? Where have they been? He’d like to be on one of those planes.

8.15 am. A green Land Rover arrives. We see Potter first. He’s sat in the passenger seat of Finn’s car. He waves. Finn toots the car horn and waves. Potter and Finn usually arrive in one car. This plan typically allows for a circular walk. One car drives all three of them to a place, and then they walk back to the car park and return and pick up the first car.

‘I hope Finn has the map’, Potter says to himself on their journey to the Beacon. ‘It’s good to know where you are going. Less likely to get lost and you can plan ahead’.

On the journey, Finn had said with a smile, ‘Before you ask, I’ve got the maps’. He liked the envisioned efficiency of Potter’s methodical ways.

The conversation continued during the car journey:

Finn says, ‘You know each time we get ready for our walk I get to think about a wonderful scene in The Beatles film “A Hard Day’s Night”. It’s where Ringo goes for a walk, a walk which seems completely unrelated to the film. He walks along a towpath in Putney, London. This reminds me of Beckett. Always seeming to go left when most people would go right. He likes never quite knowing what he might find’.

They meet and greet:

‘Morning. How ya doing?’ ‘I wonder what Potter has on his mind today?’ Beckett thinks to himself ‘He often worries about getting things just right, he has an idea that there are right and wrong ways of going about things’.

Potter is the first to reply to Beckett’s question:

‘Yeah. Ok thanks’. Then he says, apologetically, ‘Sorry. We took the wrong turning. I gave Finn the wrong directions. There are road works which I hadn’t scheduled for. I didn’t know. Sorry. Not a good start’.

‘Hello’, says Finn, with a spring in his step and his voice. ‘What a great morning. Ideal for a nice long walk. Great to get away from the humdrum of the factory’. He likes just getting on with things.

An unfolded Ordnance Survey map settles on the bonnet of Beckett’s car. A route is agreed upon. They head east towards the East Sussex county town of Lewes.

Sun on their faces.

Walking boots crunching underfoot.

A new prospect before them.

What will the day bring? Walking, as Thoreau (1980) says in his essay ‘Walking’, ‘inevitably leads into other subjects’ (p. 4):

‘I watched a wonderful new film last night called Paterson (2016)’, Beckett says by way of starting a conversation. ‘Beautiful, tranquil and peaceful. I liked the “not necessarily going anywhere” feel of it. It’s about a bus driver in Patterson, New Jersey. His name is Patterson as well. You spend a week with him and his wife and a few other people. The story builds to an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Editor Biographies
• Chapter Author Biographies
• Foreword by Ken Gale
• Foreword by Pat Sykes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Place to Start
• SECTION 1 Understanding Autoethnography
• SECTION 2 Doing and Representing Autoethnography
• SECTION 3 Supervising, Sharing, and Evaluating Autoethnography
• Assemblages
• Index