Autobiographical and researched experiences with academic writing: an analytical autoethnodrama (original) (raw)
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Crafting Autoethnography Processes and Practices of Making Self and Culture, 2023
This chapter consists of an autoethnographic performance of the managerialist technology of control known as the Professional Development Review (PDR). The PDR is a strategic management driven activity completed by staff in UK universities. Its goal is to monitor, assess and measure staff performance against a set of criteria. For academics on permanent lecturing and research contracts, criteria typically include: teaching, research and impact. The chapter focuses on the making of this autoethnographic performance. In the process of making, self-reflection was experienced as a swaying pendulum movement, oscillating between the performing-public-academic self which attempted to conform to organisational expectations, and the hidden-private-self which was critical of, and resistant to, these expectations. The pendulum was a means for self-reflection and critical inquiry in the author's attempts to deconstruct, process, and make sense of her experiences. Creating the autoethnography functioned as a form of catharsis, self-care, and resistance, in that it allowed for a reconciliation of the public and private selves and provided a means of surviving and negotiating a way through the maze of academic life.
Academic Autoethnographies: Inside Teaching in Higher Education invites readers to experience autoethnography as a challenging, complex and creative research methodology that can produce personally, professionally and socially useful understandings of teaching and researching in higher education. The peer-reviewed chapters offer innovative and perspicacious explorations of interrelationships between personal autobiographies, lived educational experiences and wider social and cultural concerns, across diverse disciplines and university contexts. This edited book is distinctive within the existing body of autoethnographic scholarship in that the original research that is presented has been done in relation to predominantly South African university settings. This research is complemented by contributions from Canadian and Swedish authors. The sociocultural, educational and methodological insights communicated in this book will be valuable for specialists in the field of higher education and to those in other academic domains who are interested in self-reflexive, transformative and creative research methodologies and methods.
Academic Autoethnographies: Inside Teaching in Higher Education invites readers to experience autoethnography as a challenging, complex, and creative research methodology that can produce personally, professionally, and socially useful understandings of teaching and researching in higher education. The peer-reviewed chapters offer innovative and perspicacious explorations of interrelationships between personal autobiographies, lived educational experiences, and wider social and cultural concerns, across diverse disciplines and university contexts. This edited book is distinctive within the existing body of autoethnographic scholarship in that the original research presented has been done in relation to predominantly South African university settings. This research is complemented by contributions from Canadian and Swedish scholars. The sociocultural, educational, and methodological insights communicated in this book will be valuable for specialists in the field of higher education and to those in other academic domains who are interested in self-reflexive, transformative, and creative research methodologies and methods. " This book illuminates how autoethnography can engage authors and researchers from varied epistemological backgrounds in a reflexive multilogue about who they are and what they do. The creative representations of the lived experience of doing autoethnography sets the book apart both methodologically and theoretically, revealing how rigor and critical distance can serve to position autoethnography not only as a personal self-development tool but a tradition and method in its own right. " – Hyleen Mariaye, Associate Professor, Mauritius Institute of Education, Mauritius " This compelling book foregrounds autoethnography as an innovative and creative research methodology to generate reflexive sociological understandings of teaching and researching across disciplines in higher education. Rich, evocative and authentic accounts reveal unique possibilities for the transformation of teaching, learning and research at personal, professional and socio-cultural levels. " – Nithi Muthukrishna, Professor Emerita,
Autoethnographic writing inside and outside the academy and ethics
Writing & Pedagogy
Published writers of fictional or semi-fictional works entering the academy as doctoral candidates express surprise at the requirements of formal human ethics reviews. Admitting an element of the autoethnographic exists in their writing, they may insist that they possess what Freeman called 'narrative integrity'. This paper considers the ethics of autoethnography as they apply to both the academy, chiefly within the PhD by artefact and exegesis, and the world of published writers, seeking possible solace from such scholarly concepts as 'relational ethics' , or 'ethic of care'. Drawing methodologically on our experience as doctoral supervisor and student and with the permission of writer/students whose stories are inseparable from this work, this study unpacks in ethical terms the problems reported by students whose methodology involves evocative or performative autoethnography. As interpretatist methodologists, autoethnographers maintain it provides insights into the interplay between the personally engaged self and mediated cultural descriptions. Methodologically, it enacts the self and others as data. This connection between the personal and the social makes it difficult for autoethnographers to speak of themselves without speaking of others. Examining autoethnography involves a close scrutiny of the boundaries between the self and the other, a process that is both enlightening and essential for supervisory dyads in creative writing methodologically informed by autoethnography. These aspects of the ethics of autoethnography are crucial, but little attention has been paid to the problematic notion that practiceled research is emergent in practice and that its autoethnography requires a retrospective approach, looking backwards as well as forwards. The reality of applying this methodology in practice-led research clashes with the pro-active nature of ethics procedurals required by universities. The paper identifies nine praxical problems that arise from such clashes, and considers best-practice principles for responding
Mind the research gaps: drawing on the self in autoethnographic writing.
When writers and other scholars seek to define a ‘gap’ in knowledge for their writing, creative and/or academic, to fill, they inevitably draw on their experiences and ‘hunches’. The notion that ideas for research begin with a ‘hunch’ is ingrained in literature on methodology (Cormack, 1991). Educated guesses, organised systematically and purposefully, emerge from exploratory and reflective practice. Minding the gap – identifying, claiming and inhabiting an original space for writing – is a requirement for writers in the academy, creative or otherwise, research student or researcher. The epistemological origins of the gap go back to the self and the realm of autoethnography. However, to draw upon the autoethnographic in university discourses, artefacts and texts draws attention to another gap: the ethical gap between writers in the academy bound by a HREC (Human Research Ethics Committee) and those beyond it whose reputation licenses them to draw more freely on the world around them and its ‘others’. This study minds two gaps. It asks what the implications of inevitably drawing on the self to generate a research question might look like. Then it explores the ethical implications for researchers in autoethnographic writing who discover they need to consider the role of others in their narratives more deeply than they might as professional writers.
SOTL in the South, 2021
Academic publishing plays a visible role in the lives of academics in the contemporary university. This paper, located in the academic literacies field of critical enquiry, illustrates the complex ways in which two South African academics understood and discursively constructed their identities through their writing for a recently published book exploring lecturers’ teaching and learning contexts and practices. The autoethnographic sensitivity of the research enabled the elicitation of critical self-reflective accounts, presented through detailed individual reflective sketches. The analysis uses the concepts of autobiographical self, discoursal self and affiliation (Ivanič, 1998; 2005) to show how these writers were able to discursively represent themselves in the book. It further highlights how continued disparities and inequities that characterise academic publication are experienced by the writers. The findings demonstrate the value of the social practice view of writing and its capacity to make visible how writers enact various linguistic, rhetorical and stylistic resources as they discursively construct their alignment to their scholarship community. In particular, it illuminates generative spaces where academic development practitioners can lead dialogues to re-examine current publication practices, their consequential nature for writers and explore possibilities to support emergent SOTL authors.
Becoming University Scholars: Inside Professional Autoethnographies
Journal of Research Practice, 2010
This article shows part of the results of a research project: The Impact of Social Change in Higher Education Staff Professional Life and Work (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, SEJ2006-01876). The main aim of this project was to explore and understand how scholars establish a dialogue, resist, adapt themselves or adopt changes, in the process of constructing their professional identities. As the members of the research team were scholars ourselves, teaching and carrying out research in Spanish universities, we started this research by writing our own autoethnographies. As a result, we developed nine autoethnographies which give a complex and in-depth account of senior and junior scholars' journeys into their process of constructing their professional identity and working lives in a rapidly changing world. This article starts by giving a context to the research project and arguing the need for conducting autoethnographies. It goes on to discuss the process itself of wr...
Analyzing Stories from Canadian Academic Writing Instructors: A Collaborative Autoethnography
2016
Garbati Jordana, Samuels Boba, Analyzing Stories from Canadian Academic Writing Instructors: A Collaborative Autoethnography [Analiza opowiadań kanadyjskich nauczycieli pisania akademickiego: zbiorowa autoetnografia]. Studia Edukacyjne nr 38, 2016, Poznań 2016, pp. 331-345. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. ISBN 978-83-232-3013-7. ISSN 1233-6688. DOI: 10.14746/ se.2016.38.20 Writing instruction in Canadian universities takes a variety of forms. While there are few formal departments for writing studies, many institutions do have a writing centre – a place that offers writing instruction to varying degrees. The writing centre may be housed within a department, a library, or within a student services unit. Its position within a university may indicate the degree to which writing is valued by the administrative body. The goal of our paper is to share insights into the ways that writing professionals perceive, work in, and adapt to current demands for writing instruction in higher educa...
2014
This thesis shifts the traditional emphasis around academic writing and writing development from students’ shortcomings as writers to an exploration of an under-researched aspect of the debate, namely lecturers’ perspectives of academic writing (their own and students). It draws on a New Literacy Studies (NLS) approach that locates academic writing and writing development in higher education, within a critical and situated theory of practice. The research is located within a postmodern, post-structural paradigm and involves a deliberate deconstruction of methodologies involved in traditional qualitative research (Stronach and MacLure, 1997). Foucault’s concept of ‘disciplinary power’, Lather’s suspicion of scientism (1986) and the work of feminist theorists like Pillow (2000), and Richardson (1997) are used to challenge traditional notions around qualitative research. Post-qualitative research methods and ideas (St. Pierre, 2011) are used to deterritorialise and reterritorialise tra...