An Autoethnography of Becoming A Qualitative Researcher

A Dialogic View of Academic Development

Trude Klevan, Alec Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367425098
• eBook ISBN: 9781000540895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

An Autoethnography of Becoming a Qualitative Researcher chronicles Trude Klevan's personal experiences of her doctoral journey, with Alec Grant as an external academic resource and friend, and her subsequent entry into the neoliberal higher education environment. It gives a personal and intimate view of what it's like to become an academic.

This book is constructed as an extended dialogue which frequently utilizes email exchanges as data. Firmly grounded in the epistemic resource of friendship, it tells the story of the authors' symbiotic academic growth around their critical understanding and knowledge of qualitative inquiry and the purposes of such knowledge. The tale told is of the unfolding of a close and mutually beneficial relationship, entangled within sometimes facilitative, sometimes problematic, environmental contexts. It uses these experiences to describe, explore, and critically interrogate some underlying themes of the philosophies, politics, and practices of qualitative inquiry, and of higher education. Disrupting conventional academic norms through their work, friendship, and correspondence, Trude and Alec offer a critical and epistemological view of what it's like to become a qualitative researcher, and how we can do things differently in higher education.

This book is suitable for all researchers and students, their supervisors, mentors, and teachers, and academics of qualitative research and autoethnography, and those interested in critiques of higher education.

1 THE COLOUR OF WATER An autoethnographically inspired journey of my becoming a researcher

DOI: 10.4324/9780367853181-1

This chapter was originally published as: Klevan, T., Karlsson, B., and Grant, A. (2019). ‘The color of water: An autoethnographically-inspired journey of my becoming a researcher.’ The qualitative report, 24(6), pp. 1242–1257. The original, published, paper was based on Trude’s PhD journey, in terms of it serving as an exemplar of how autoethnography can be understood and practised, following particular, epiphanic moments in the life of a becoming-academic. The original text has been modified to fit as a chapter in this book and is extended on in more recent dialogical exchanges between Alec and Trude.

Trude

For what reasons and for whom do we write? I believe that, sometimes, I write primarily to and for myself, to try to make sense of my experiences and thoughts. Writing is a way of thinking, bringing my thoughts to life in a concrete and visible manner through the movement of my hands on the keyboard. It is the clicking sound of words in the making. At some point, it is like the text starts to live a life of its own. Through my actions and that clicking, the words seem to appear on the screen as I think them, and sometimes – it seems – even before I do. I also like the idea of how my thoughts and reflections at a point in life can presumably be ‘captured through writing.’ Going back and reading my own texts remind me of what engaged and troubled me back then, while, simultaneously, I’m also given the opportunity to revisit and re-story my thoughts from where I stand now. The ‘me’ who appears in the text is somehow and simultaneously me and not me. I can relate to parts of it while, at the same time, I am now somewhere else. To me, the revisiting is particularly useful when talking to and supervising PhD students, as the text reminds me of what it was like – for me – to be in that role. This does not mean that my writing is to be understood as an accurate record of what ‘actually happened’ and that I ‘know how being a PhD student feels like.’ Following Rolfe (1997), writing is a process of ‘coming to understand,’ where the very act of writing enables thinking in different ways. Writing is thinking. Writing is also part of becoming. Through writing our stories, we write ourselves. Writing is analytical and sense-making, but it can also be understood as a creative process. Through my writing the paper of my PhD journey, I made sense of that journey, while also creating the journey and myself. I created ‘the troubling PhD student.’

The text was written very shortly after my thesis was defended and accepted. It was a personally necessary text for me to write. I felt an urgent need to write to make sense of my thoughts and give them focus, and to manifest myself as a researcher, or, ‘pulling myselves (my selves) together’ (Rolfe, 1997, p. 448). So, you could say that I primarily wrote text for myself, or, even, I wrote myself. Nonetheless, it made me happy when a PhD student approached me recently and told me that she had found great joy in reading the paper. She wished she had read the text earlier in her own PhD journey, and she even suggested that this should be a recommended read for all new PhD students. While it pleased me that she had found the paper useful, I also think that maybe she read it at just the right time. Had she read it earlier, perhaps it could have disturbed her own journey? The paper represents my journey; others will have their own journeys. That does not mean that the text is without interest to others. Having written and published it, it is of course open to interpretations. The text is no longer ‘mine,’ it is out there, and anyone can make what they wish of it. What I believe the text may show is how a PhD journey is subjective in all its phases. It also shows how it is part of our lives and contexts. My experiences as a PhD student are entangled with my life experiences, as is my sense-making and creation of them. A journey is always part of a bigger journey, other people’s journeys, and the material worlds in which we roam about. In Norway, we actually have a right to roam. I have this dream that some of this right could also apply in academia:

For centuries we have been free to roam the countryside, in woodlands and meadows, on rivers and lakes, amidst coastal islets and mountain summits – no matter who owns the land. While we are free to forage for saltwater fish, berries, mushrooms or flowers, we come away not only with the fruits of nature but with our own memories and experiences.

(Norwegian Environment Agency, 2020)

My text is one of academic roaming about and of academic self-making. It includes some of the reflections that the format of a thesis does not have room for and, as such, writing it contributed to making my PhD journey and my becoming a researcher feel more complete. With a nod to the Norwegian environment agency, perhaps it shows how the fruits of research are not just fruits to be harvested, but how they are also entangled with my memories and experiences? A major issue in the text is to show how subjective experiences embedded in cultural contexts can trigger but also be used to begin to trouble and critically explore onto-epistemological and methodological issues in academia and research. The text shows and interrogates my initial and developing awareness of how onto-epistemological understandings and development are entangled with personal and professional development. It, and its concluding section, will also serve as a platform for succeeding chapters in this book, which (especially Chapters 2–5) will elaborate on and develop the issues raised in it.

Trude ¹

1 This point marks the start of the original TQR journal article.

I was six. Our kindergarten teacher had given us an assignment. We were to fill in the dotted lines of several drawings in the right color. The dotted lines resembling the water jet coming out of the garden hose were to be blue, only I drew them yellow. I remember thinking about what color to choose. To me, water had no color. It was transparent. No color or all colors, but not just acolor. But how do you draw something transparent? I chose yellow. Of the colors available, yellow was the lightest and most transparent color that I could think of. I was not completely satisfied, but it was the best solution I could come up with. The teacher looked through my work and marked the drawing with the water jet with a red X – red X for wrong, for failure. I was told that water was not yellow, it was blue. I can still recall my frustration and mixed emotions triggered by her response. I experienced a feeling of shame and inferiority for having gotten it wrong. Everyone else in the class got it right. But I also felt a sense of protest, of rebellion and resistance. I wondered why my teacher’s solution was the right one. What is the color of water?

A story is commonly defined as having a certain structure; it has a beginning, middle, and concluding section. In a story, one thing happens in consequence of another (Polkinghorne, 1995; Richardson, 1997). According to Frank (2010), a story is told because something a bit out of the ordinary happened. I recently obtained my PhD degree, and I can call myself a researcher. My qualitative research has yielded certain findings and, based on these, implications for further research and clinical practice. But parallel to this development of knowledge, there is also another story that has been unfolding. I like to refer to this as the story of my becoming a researcher. If it is a story, does it have a clear structure? And what are the crucial elements and experiences that shape it? How is the story of my becoming as a researcher related to the story of the knowledge developed from my PhD project? To me, the story of my becoming as a researcher has been a long journey that started long before this project began. I do not actually know when it began. I certainly hope that it has not ended.

In this chapter, I aim to unfold and critically reflect on my becoming a researcher. In doing so, I will explore how the development of knowledge and my understanding of what counts as knowledge is entangled with my personal and professional development. Through this personal exploration, a further aim is also to explore and trouble what counts as qualitative knowledge and inquiry in contemporary academia. In line with the questions posed earlier, the story of my becoming as a researcher is perhaps best characterized as a messy one, with no clear point of departure or end station. The chapter is written in a manner that aims to reflect some of this wandering about in the sometimes seemingly foggy landscape. Some of the critical experiences that guided this process and influenced my directions are included in the text, expressed as three different acts. These three acts are also illustrated with personal vignettes. The acts are followed by an epilogue that reflects and challenges what counts as knowledge and research in contemporary academia.

According to Flyvbjerg (2006, p. 223) ‘Social science has not succeeded in producing general, context-independent theory and, thus, has in the final instance nothing else to offer than concrete, context-dependent knowledge.’ A growing awareness of the impact of context and of how truth(s) and knowledge in social sciences can be understood as unstable and changing constitute crucial elements in the story of my becoming as a researcher. Perhaps even more so, my story is about how these truths and this knowledge are irrevocably entwined with me as an unfinalized and changing person. It has moved from being a story about a researcher researching a separate world to one of how researcher and participants, matter and meaning are entangled.

I used to think that becoming a researcher was about acquiring certain knowledge and skills in order to fulfil the role of a researcher. I imagined that in fulfilling this role, my researcher self would come to the fore. All the other parts of me would of course still be there but would constitute a backcloth that would not really be of interest or importance. Richardson (1997) describes this as the ‘story line’ that academics are given. This story line implicates that the ‘I’ should be suppressed in academic work and writing, on behalf of the all-knowing and all-powerful work of the academy. Richardson argued this 20 years ago. In spite of this, and more recent related critiques of conventional qualitative inquiry (Grant, 2018a; Jackson and Mazzei, 2009, 2012), in my experience, the critically reflexive, emerging, and diffractive ‘I’ still seems to be offered limited space and attention in mainstream qualitative research. This does not mean that this is always the case. In certain academic communities, there appears to be a growing interest in and acceptance of critical qualitative inquiry. For many academics and students, however, it seems to be the case that the story line of conventional approaches is frequently taught and offered (Grant, 2016a, 2016b, 2018a).

For me, the ‘I’ is not of tremendous interest just because it is the ‘I,’ but because it has become increasingly clear to me at a personal level that it is irrevocably and constantly intertwined with knowledge and truths, and, thus, to the story of my becoming a researcher. I sometimes wished this was not so for me as I am generally not a person who craves attention. However, despite an occasional desire to stay in the shadows and fiddle with my research and writings, I have come to a growing conviction that my ‘I’ cannot be left out.

This ‘I’ is uncomfortable in the context of the fact that in academia and in life we often appear to be given the story line that there are right answers and truths. On the one hand, a world with no answers may be accused of being relativistic and confusing. Confirming approaches and categorization in accordance with the already known can be important in research. Nevertheless, much can be lost when only sticking to predefined research story lines (Davies, 2016). In order to develop knowledge and avoid reproducing the already known, the need to expand our understanding of the meaning of research also seems to be apparent. On the basis of the discussion so far, challenging and expanding our understanding of research involves challenging and understanding what constitutes knowledge and what place different kinds of knowledge have in the world. It also implicates awareness of ways of being, or, rather, becoming in the world (Denzin and Giardina, 2008; Law, 2004).

My own experience in the training of PhD students in the Norwegian context is that such issues are often given limited attention. Methodological attempts to question, trouble, and expand the meaning of knowledge and ways of developing knowledge can even be discouraged (Richardson, 1997). For instance, I was advised to use ‘proper,’ meaning conventional, qualitative approaches instead (Klevan, 2017). When sharing these experiences with other PhD students or qualitative researchers nationally and internationally, such experiences appeared to be the rule rather than the exception. PhD students often appear to be trained to do research, but not so much to reflect critically on how research is done and what purposes it may serve.

Research in general is often described as having functions like testing hypotheses or filling knowledge gaps. According to Grant (2014a, 2016a, 2016b), who writes from a standpoint position as a critical qualitative researcher, an equally important aim in qualitative research is to trouble the world. Troubling – which in this context means challenging the tacit assumptions governing specific aspects of life – clearly needs a troubler. As such, in doing research, being – or, perhaps more so, becoming – a qualitative researcher can also be argued to be about troubling oneself and one’s ways of reasoning.

My initial assumptions about reality, what can be known, and how to proceed in order to explore the truth were subject to constant troubling and successive reorientations in the course of my PhD project. These assumptions developed from searching for rule-based modes of analysing a truth that I more-or-less understood as being out there to understanding truth as context-dependent, interpreted, and co-created. An evolving understanding of how the researcher, research participants, and what counts as knowledge are situated in historical, social, cultural, and material contexts characterizes this process. Even more so, it involves taking in and exploring how the ways through which we proceed to find or create knowledge are inevitably entwined both with what we ‘find’ and with the ‘finder.’ Barad (2007, p. 185) puts it this way: ‘Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world.’

What we regard as truth and how to get knowledge about truth is at the core of ontological and epistemological questions. Understanding reality as ‘made,’ becoming, and multiple is connected to understanding the acquiring of knowledge as becoming and multiple. This requires research approaches and a researcher evolving together in terms of questioning and troubling how knowledge is generated, the knowledge itself, and how both these issues are contextually situated. Thus, knowing is never developed in isolation (Mazzei, 2014). An understanding of ‘reality’ as becoming is entangled with selves becoming in the world. In this sense, ontological and epistemological issues are related, and they contribute to the becoming of each other. As such, to me, the term onto-epistemology turned out to provide a useful way of thinking, indicating that we are in fact dealing with the study of practices of knowing in being, or more so, becoming in the world (Barad, 2007; Davies, 2016; Kaiser and Thiele, 2014).

Setting out on onto-epistemological journeys, shifting from an understanding of a world as is, with the researcher as a coherent and stable self to this world, to one in which both world and researcher are becoming and entangled, requires research communities that allow for and encourage breaches with the common story line offered to academics (Richardson, 1997). Encounters and dialogue with troubling others that challenged and encouraged me to expand and rethink my framework turned out to be golden. The encounters with troubling-nurturers have been crucial to my becoming as a researcher. The voices of my two most important ones are included at the end of this paper, as positioned responses to what I have written.

The PhD project

The aim of my PhD project was to explore experiences of helpful help in a mental health crisis, within the context of crisis resolution teams. Helpful help was explored from three different perspectives: Service users, family carers, and clinicians. The overall PhD study comprised three sub-studies, one sub-study for each group of participants. Thus, each sub-study had its separate data material, consisting of qualitative interviews with the respective group of participants. Altogether, I conducted 34 semi-structured interviews that were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim (Klevan, 2017).

The design of the study and its findin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• Foreword Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• Prologue Page
• 1 The colour of water: an autoethnographically inspired journey of my becoming a researcher
• 2 The PhD project and the novice researcher entering academia
• 3 The hermeneutic phenomenological turn and beyond
• 4 The narrative turn
• 5 The discursive approach
• 6 Diffraction, entanglement, and difference
• 7 Friendship, trouble nurturing, and performing wild time
• 8 Playing the game or striving to play?
• References
• Index