Autoethnography Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

First-person accounts of madness and of encountering psychiatric services provide
important sociocultural and psychological knowledge about the subjectivity of distress.
The importance of such accounts is often based upon a claim of the authenticity
of personal experience. However, authenticity is a highly heterogeneous concept:
a popular current manifestation of the discourse of authenticity is in positive psychology,
where it is often underpinned by humanist assumptions such as the rational
autonomous self. The post-structuralist critique of humanism challenged such essentialist notions some time ago and has been adopted explicitly by research methodologies such as autoethnography. The purpose of this article is to argue that this tension—between the value of methods such as autoethnography that offer a legitimate
source of knowledge regarding the subjective experience of madness on the one
hand, and the problems with an essentialist conception of the ‘authentic’ self on the
other—can be addressed by the deployment of a reconceptualised form of authenticity
based on Spivak’s (in: Guha and Spivak (eds.) Selected subaltern studies, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1988) notion of ‘strategic essentialism’, especially when
modified by De Certeau’s (The practice of everyday life, University of California
Press, Los Angeles, 1984) distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’. The implications
of this distinction in terms of developing autoethnographies of distress are then
discussed.

- by
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- Positive Psychology, Authenticity, Autoethnography, Narratives
- by Dan Shevock
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- Music Education, Spirituality, Ecological Literacy, Autoethnography

The discipline of disaster studies has been hesitant to critically interrogate dual discourses of vulnerability and ‘building resilience’ in a meaningful way as it continues to dominate research and practice. This is despite deep engagement within different disciplines to offer radical reconsiderations of these discourses. I use multi-year long autoethnographic immersion into the problematic of resilience. I integrate personal experience as a White, female scholar who studies disasters, with an almost decade-long project focused on the pre-and-post Katrina context of New Orleans bounce rap. I task what it means ‘to be resilient’ and who decides when groups have reached this state. I situate an empirical challenge to metanarratives of resilience and the colonialism they suggest, and also task resilience as constructed by elites and imposed on those decided as vulnerable. This work suggests a dramatic shift away from the building resilience discourse into meaningful engagement with the institutional neglect of the colonial present that fosters disaster in the first place.

- by Natalie D Baker
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- Critical Theory, Resilience, Autoethnography, Institutional racism

This MSc thesis explores a transmasculine embodiment through bodies, acts, and objects, from a new materialist perspective. The study is situated within the field of transgender studies, and the research question, ‘how can transmasculine embodiment through the materialities of the body and everyday acts and objects be understood through new materialism’, is answered through an autoethnography. Key findings are that a) a trans-becoming emerges through the phenomenon of meeting someone’s eyes, b) through material-discursive practices transmasculine people work with and against the body, and c) onto-epistemologies of race and gender emerge through the interplay of temporal, spatial, and corporeal processes.

- by Max van Midde
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- Transgender Studies, Embodiment, Autoethnography, Transgender

This thesis is a study of Tottenham High Road, and how the urban blocks which comprise its depth are composed. Depth has a number of components: architecture, space and time; depth is the armature in which people live their social lives, and the place where local cultures emerge. The conception of depth offers a way of capturing urban life in its richness and its reciprocities. The literature about high streets offers few detailed analyses of their spatial and psycho-social ordering and this thesis seeks to fill that gap. The approach is a hermeneutics of praxis, using ethnographic methods, in-depth interviews, and situating the information spatially using architectural drawing techniques. It offers a novel method of investigating and understanding the structures and processes which make up the high streets and which, in aggregate, make the whole city. Tottenham High Road is used here as a case study, a vehicle through which to interpret evidence about the existence and nature of depth, with its manifold structures. Understanding depth is vital to understanding high streets, so this thesis allows a deeper and richer interpretation of high streets than has previously been possible.
There is a problem in planning orthodoxy around high streets, typified in Tottenham: the richness of depth is flattened and codified, in order to frame swathes of city as sites from which to reap economic reward. In fact, depth contains all of human life, and understanding it, therefore, is an ethical responsibility for planning. Depth has a number of characteristics, ordered by different processes and forces. Firstly, physical order, shaped by both economic and social forces. For example, the most public uses are found in the 'shallowest' parts of depth, and these are the most valuable sites because they command the greatest passing trade. Secondly, depth has a social order, through playing out of place ballet by people as they live their lives. The social order operates interdependently and reciprocally with the physical order of depth. Commitment between people and places (citizenship) results in special place cultures, which are hosted in depth. Depth has variation in the scope of decorum from the outer edge of the block to the centre: more things are possible inside the block than at its edge.
The insights about depth in this thesis are relevant to many areas of life: to planning, to politics and to existing theory, because depth provides an account for the ethical order in which other areas of human life take place. With an understanding of depth it is possible to evaluate planning proposals, efforts at ensuring political participation, to shed light on existing theories such as Cosmopolitanism, and to add a valuable layer of information about the real structures of London to the existing literature.

- by Jane Clossick
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- Urban Geography, Architecture, Ethnography, Urban Planning

This conversation takes place in Warsaw. Carolyn Ellis has come to Poland to accompany Jerry Rawicki, a Warsaw Ghetto survivor, on his first trip back to Poland since the Holocaust. There she arranged to meet Marcin Kafar, a scholar in Poland who has spent time with her at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. During this visit, Marcin assists Carolyn with video recording Jerry’s experiences as they visit Holocaust sites, and Jerry remembers and reflects on his experience. Afterwards, Marcin converses with Carolyn about autoethnography, storytelling, and the importance of life in the context of searching for ethos by academics.

- by Marcin Kafar and +1
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- Communication, Humanities, Qualitative methodology, Auto-ethnography

Autoethnography is a method of research that involves describing and analyzing personal experiences in order to understand cultural experiences. The method challenges canonical ways of doing research and recognizes how personal experience influences the research process. Autoethnography acknowledges and accomodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher's influence on research. In this book, the authors provide a historical and conceptual overview of autoethnography. They share their stories of coming to autoethnography and identify key concerns and considerations that led to the development of the method. Next, they outline the purposes and practices--the core ideals--of autoethnography, how autoethnographers can accomplish these ideals, and why researchers might choose to do autoethnography. They describe the processes of doing autoethnography, conducting fieldwork, discussing ethics in research, and interpreting and analyzing personal experience, and they explore the various modes and techniques used and involved in writing autoethnography. They conclude with goals for creating and assessing autoethnography and describe the future of autoethnographic inquiry. Throughout, the authors provide numerous examples of their work and share key resources. This book will serve as both a guide to the practices of doing autoethnography and an exemplar of autoethnographic research processes and representations.

- by Tony Adams and +1
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- Ethnography, Qualitative methodology, Autoethnography, Qualitative Research
- by Carolyn Ellis
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- Ethnography, Autoethnography, Collaborative Research

I examine here Theory and Scholarship (taken to be formalized social scientific frameworks that seek to map out the real world and social actions in an objective fashion) via an autoethnographic lens. Chiefly, I ask how autoethnography as a research method reconfigures them: how may we extend knowledge using autoethnography? While much critique has centered on the “doing” (dispassionately?) versus “being” (going native?) of autoethnography, I argue that such a dichotomy is inherently false. Instead, doing is located within the ethnographer’s very being, so that a closer look at the autoethnographic research process is required, from conception to implementation to introspection. I attempt such a processual analysis here: drawing on an earlier social scientific project, I relate the intellectual and social process whereby it was translated into an autoethnography. Using a performative lens to illustrate the dialectical mode of doing and being in the research process, I intersperse portions of personal narrative with academic writing, to enable a disjunctural appreciation of the various layers of interpretation. While the epistemic framework I hold to here is indeed a poststructural one, privileging fragmentation and social situatedness, it also emphasizes continuity and interconnections in the research process.

- by Rahul Mitra
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- Research Methodology, Autoethnography, Ethnographic Methods

Bringing together interdisciplinary leaders in methodology and arts-based research (ABR), this comprehensive handbook explores the synergies between artistic and research practices and addresses issues in designing, implementing, evaluating, and publishing ABR studies. Coverage includes the full range of ABR genres, including those based in literature (such as narrative and poetic inquiry); performance (music, dance, playbuilding); visual arts (drawing and painting, collage, installation art, comics); and audiovisual and multimethod approaches. Each genre is described in detail and brought to life with robust research examples. Team approaches, ethics, and public scholarship are discussed, as are innovative ways that ABR is used within creative arts therapies, psychology, education, sociology, health sciences, business, and other disciplines.

- by Patricia Leavy
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- Fiction Writing, Sociology, Public Sociology, Visual Sociology

Researchers are familiar with ethics applications that endeavor to ensure the safety of their participants, but only recently have they been urged to examine the short and long terms effects of research on themselves and consider the risks to their own safety and wellbeing (Bloor, Fincham & Sampson, 2007). This paper considers some of the risks to researchers of engaging in research by exploring some emotional dangers the authors encountered whilst engaged in their own research. The authors use their autoethnographies to create a co-constructed narrative (Ellis, 2009) to identify some of the emotional risks that can be associated with being a researcher. The risks are discussed in terms of vulnerability (Behar, 1996), emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983), emotions as data or evidence, and emotionally-sensed knowledges (Hubbard, Backett-Milburn, & Kemmer, 2001). It is Laurel Richardson’s (2000) argument that “the ethnographic life is not separable from the self” (p.16) that informs the authors’ efforts to understand, rather than simply know, the potential of emotions in research.

- by Elke Emerald
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- Autoethnography

The essay seeks to explore body-focused phenomenological writing in disability studies and film theory throughout publically shared anecdotes, coming-out narratives, and embodied autoethnographies. Through the author’s own bodily experiences in academia, particularly writing, attending conferences, and teaching, Greenberg bridges the gaps between the disciplines through an embodied autoethnographic phenomenological methodology inspired by film scholar Vivian Sobchack.

- by Slava Greenberg
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- Film Studies, Disability Studies, Embodiment, Phenomenology

This article presents an ongoing reflexive account of us as three collaborating academics undertaking research and writing a journal article in the field of management and leadership. Influenced by collaborative autoethnography, it draws on narratives written at the time, recorded conversations and letter exchanges between us as we prepare our work for submission to a journal. Through the process we show how the quality of research improves. We do this by paying attention to the contradictions between the rational expectation of how research should occur and the messiness of what actually happens; and how difficult this was for us to pay attention to. This was achieved during a reflexive process of coming to know and learn about each other in a way that shone a new light on ourselves. We share the benefits of engaging in challenging dialogue and reflection that maintains a level of unsettlement within our collaboration. The contribution of our article is to demonstrate our use of collaborative autoethnography as a reflexive heuristic to enhance research practice in a multiple perspective context. This has enabled validity in action by making explicit learning and knowledge of the peripheral goings on of the collaborative process that might normally go unnoticed.

- by Robert Warwick and +1
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- Research Methodology, Collaboration, Reflexivity, Autoethnography

Canadian University Institutional Review Boards (IRB) assess action research proposals based on the ethical protection of participants, the methodology, and any potential implications for human participants involved in the qualitative study. There are more disadvantages than advantages through this ethical review process. This positional paper analyzes complex issues including: the implications that are intertwined with ethics in qualitative action research with human participants when assessed by IRBs; the challenges associated with autoethnography in terms of whether IRBs can ethically assess research proposals properly; and recommendations for the future review of qualitative action research within Canadian universities.

- by Bruce Maxwell
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- Ethics, Assessment, Qualitative methodology, Autoethnography

Recreational trespass or 'urban exploration' (UE) is the practice of researching, gaining access to and documenting forbidden, forgotten or otherwise off-limits places, including abandoned buildings , construction sites and infrastructure systems. Over the past two decades, a global subculture has coalesced around this activity. More recently, however, the practice has begun to transform along divergent lines. The aims of the present article are threefold: first, to bring UE and its emergent variants to the attention of a criminological audience; second, to interrogate increasingly spectacular visual representations of UE and attendant processes of commodification; and third, to introduce the rhizome as a way of thinking about urban social formations, their development and appropriation.

- by Theo Kindynis
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- Criminology, Sociology Of Deviance, Autoethnography, Critical Criminology

Abstract: This autoethnography entails writing and thinking about early memories as an attempt to understand the self and others. Due to their nebulous nature, these memories have become translucent memories, as they are neither pure... more

- by Burhanettin Keskin
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- Narrative, Autoethnography

Sovereignty is an absolute power. It allows the wielder to require obedience, and is frequently supported by a “monopoly of coercive force” (Heywood, 2000, p. 37). Like sovereignty, mana motuhake is a power. However, it does not require... more

- by Katarina Gray-Sharp
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- Indigenous Studies, Autoethnography

Everybody is born into a family. Each has its own history, therefore, 'our history' is not made by us, but by previous generations. The rise of International migration and the crumbling of family structures, however, only make it harder for descendants to learn about their family history. Inhibited by language and geographical barriers as well as lost connections to the bearers of knowledge, many offspring of migrant families year for answers to questions such as 'Where do I come from?' or 'How did I get here?' Answering these requires re-establishing lost connections and meeting family one previously did not know. This paper illustrates how the juxtaposition of two generations of Chinese Australian migrants' narrative (a 'pioneer migrant' and an 'overseas born Chinese' are vital to piecing together a segment of family history.

- by Christopher Cheng
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- Asian Studies, Self and Identity, Social Networks, Family studies
- by Arthur Bochner
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- Social Psychology, Interpersonal Communication, Narrative, Autoethnography

En su más reciente libro publicado por Routledge, Psychology through critical auto-ethnography, Ian Parker (2020). Asume el rol de antropólogo para explorar el mundo de la psicología en tanto disciplina académica. En contraste con los etnógrafos clásicos que viajaban a tierras lejanas para describir otros mundos —otras culturas— y descubrir en ellos claves de la existencia y la organi- zación humana, Parker elige el camino de la autoetnografía, para escudriñar el mundo de la psico- logía a través de su propia experiencia como estudiante, investigador, profesor y activista social.

In this chapter, I use a visual auto-ethnography methodology and a storytelling approach and data from social media platforms, field notes and journals to share my experiences, motivations, and travel behaviors as a female film-fanatic tourist. Goodall (2000) advocated for a more feminine communication style in academia and emphasized rapport-building through listening and observing (e.g., by engaging in personal reflection about meanings) rather than problem solving. Accordingly, I embarked on a media pilgrimage (Norris, 2013) to examine the intimacy of traveling as a solo female film-induced tourist and the intersectionality of contents tourism by mimicking imaginary hedonistic characters and exploring landscapes associated with the American television show Breaking Bad during the summer of 2016.

- by Stefanie Benjamin
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- Popular Culture, Autoethnography, Film Induced Tourism, Visual Research Methods

Lesbians have limited visibility or representation in educational research, and there has been even less consideration of the ways that lesbians’ experiences are racialized. Using a methodological approach that entwines Karen Barad’s concept of queer temporalities with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s discussion of single-axis intersectionality, this paper uses critical autoethnography to offer narrative examinations of the author’s queerness as constantly enmeshed with her Whiteness. The author considers the degrees to which being situated in the socio-politically conservative U.S. South have influenced her experiences as a queer lesbian academic, even as White privilege has, intentionally and unintentionally, shaped her scholarship.

- by Stephanie Anne Shelton
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- Education, Narrative, Race and Racism, Gay And Lesbian Studies

On March 16, 1996, the author interviewed her mother, Beth Tillmann, about Beth's parents' divorce and her life as a foster child. From detailed notes taken during this phone conversation and from family stories told to the author throughout her life, the author constructed a narrative titled "A Home of Her Own." Its structure and tone mimic the way her mother speaks about the dissolution of her family of origin and her attachments to and separations from those who tried to help her rebuild a sense of home. After the story is a discussion of what narrative representations of loss offer the writer, the subject, and the reader.

- by Lisa Tillmann
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- Narrative, Autoethnography, Foster Care, In-depth Interviews

Examines my own story of origin as a breech baby. In between performances of identity in a visual culture, there are fallow periods wherein images that augment identity may be collected and charged with new meaning. While the Harlem Renaissance, from the 1920s to the mid 1930s, inaugurated the performance of “The New Negro,” the 1960s and early 1970s saw the introduction of the performance of “Black [as] beautiful.” I characterize “The New Negro” as the unintended last vestige in the ad hoc assembly understood as modern Western identity, which typically defines its virtue in contradistinction to alterity or Otherness—in this case, its definition of the archetypal Negro as base and insignificant. In contrast, the evolving effort to convey that “Black is beautiful” heralded something quite different—the burgeoning of a postmodern aesthetic in both art-making and identity-making. “Black [as] beautiful “ introduced a social identity in flux into the visual culture, disturbing the lexicon of modernity, a Cinderella ending to a defining ugliness.

- by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.
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- Visual Studies, Self and Identity, Narrative, Art Practice as Research

By thinking through our relationship with what we look out onto, by considering the frames we encounter the world through from specific domestic sites of kinship, I work to examine love’s propositional quality and the structures that... more

- by Adam Kaasa
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- Emotion, Architecture, Autoethnography, Windows

Se presenta en este trabajo el proceso de elaboracion de un documental sobre las practicas culturales de un grupo de miembros de la etnia Qom procedentes de la region argentina del Chaco (region de Pampa del Indio, Villa Rio Bermejito y Resistencia) y de la comunidad de Derqui en Buenos Aires (estos ultimos inmigrados de las mismas zonas del Chaco).
El documental fue realizado a partir de un material videograbado por los propios miembros qompi, dirigido al estudio de los contextos de actividad de sus comunidades con un doble objetivo: disenar materiales educativos para las escuelas de educacion bilingue castellano-qom’lek basados en los usos de la lengua en contextos cotidianos y realizar un diagnostico de la pervivencia y estado de la cultura qom en la actualidad.
Primero se realizo un seminario-taller con miembros de las comunidades citadas, entre los cuales habia tanto educadores que estaban participando en la elaboracion de materiales educativos, como lideres de las comunidades, y se llevo a cabo una primera aproximacion a los elementos basicos de su identidad. Posteriormente, se impartio un breve curso sobre tecnicas de grabacion con unas sencillas camaras proporcionadas por el proyecto y se establecio un plan de grabaciones por temas, lugares y personas.Posteriormente, se impartió un breve curso sobre técnicas de grabación con unas sencillas cámaras proporcionadas por el proyecto y se estableció un plan de grabaciones por temas, lugares y personas.
This article describes the process of producing a documentary of cultural practices by members of the Qom ethnic group in Argentina. The participants were the inhabitants of Pampa del Indio, Villa Rio Bermejito and Resistencia, located in the northern Argentinian region of El Chaco. Also included was the community of Derqui on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, composed of Qoms who had migrated from the region of El Chaco. The documentary was produced using video material recorded by members of the Qom community for the purpose of documenting their social and cultural life. The project had a double objective: a) to develop educational materials based on daily language practices to be used as part of their bilingual school program (Castellano- qom’lek), and b) to facilitate diagnosis of the current situation and survival of Qom culture. In the first phase a workshop and seminar were held with Qom teachers who had had previous experience in developing this type of educational material and with community leaders in order to define the basic elements of Qom identity. In the second phase, a basic course on camera handling and recording was given to various Qom members with domestic cameras provided by the project. Finally, priorities were assigned regarding subjects, places, routines, and so on.

- by Amelia Álvarez and +1
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- Visual Anthropology, Autoethnography, Antropología Visual, Documentary authorship

This essay is based on a cyber autoethnographic research I have conducted on Hornet, a geosocial networking application (GNA) created for gay and bisexual men, without establishing a clear-cut distinction between my identity as a user and that as a researcher. Here I discuss how feminist and queer autoethnography in and of cybercultures can refrain from objectifying or exploiting others by enabling research relations that (a) are not hierarchical, (b) disturb the researcher/researched binary, (c) embrace the impersonal ethics of cruising, and (d) do not shy away from recognizing the role of the researcher’s body unlike the conventional (masculine) researcher who allegedly has no emotional, erotic, or bodily presence within the field or in the research. I also address cruising as a queer autoethnographic method, while uncovering the methodological and ethical implications of doing autoethnography in a cyberfield that is libidinally invested.

- by Tankut Atuk
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- Sociology, Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Qualitative methodology

This child-parent research is a student-led inquiry into three adolescent girls’ experiences of learning during the age of COVID-19 shelter-in-place mandate. In this collaborative autoethnography, a research team of five (three adolescent researchers—two of whom are sisters—and their respective mothers) met via videoconference to engage in five rounds of inductive and deductive data collection and analyses. Findings capture the three adolescents’ experiences of new teaching methods in new learning spaces: (1) the physical space of “Doing School at Home-How it Feels;” (2) the negotiations undertaken by the girls called “Improvisation and a School Mindset;” and (3) the need to respond to one constant: “Everything is Always Changing.” A fourth theme, called “Being at Home Gives Me...” was created to capture the human experience of doing school at home—and the new spaces that opened up. Recommendations to help make school work in the home space are provided.

- by Sandra Schamroth Abrams
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- Psychology, Children and Families, Learning and Teaching, Autoethnography

In this chapter, we consider ethical complexities and conflicts involved in children’s entanglements with early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions that operate at a nexus of power and potential. We understand children in... more

- by carmen blyth PhD
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- Ethics, Posthumanism, Autoethnography, Stories
- by Christopher N Poulos
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- Death, Autoethnography, Family Communication, Loss and Trauma

It is a well-known fact that Sören Kierkegaard critiqued official Christendom in mid-nineteenth century Denmark. Unfortunately, this attack is misunderstood, often seen as a either a quirk, or as an ineffectual theme in his opus. In this paper I suggest that the attack on Christendom was not only not a quirk, but a decisive discursive attempt to understand how we are to live in the existential moment of decision. Through narrative vignettes, I examine how the interrogation of Christendom by Kierkegaard reflects and impacts ideas of identity, community, and the church in contemporary America.

- by Andrew Herrmann
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- Religion, Christianity, Philosophy Of Religion, Self and Identity

Patricia A. and Peter Adler’s 1999 article on The Ethnographer’s Ball, a hypothetical geography of the community of ethnographers, launched this exercise in futurist speculation. What will happen to autoethnography in the future? What historical trajectory will it take? The adherents of autoethnography—now in its ascendance as a research movement, particularly with the launch of its new journal—will likely follow one or another trajectory that previous intellectual communities have traced. This paper projects five potential scenarios for the future of autoethnography twenty years from now: from universal acceptance, to a narrowly defined community, to being hijacked by a future intellectual movement, to institutionalization within the academy, to complete disappearance. It compares these scenarios to the fates of other scholarly communities such as symbolic interaction, world-systems analysis, and social impact assessment.

- by Mitchell Allen
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- Autoethnography

This chapter is responding to food security in Indigenous communities in Canada. Using an autoethnography research framework, Indigenous meaning was explored in view of community-based food security and why it became a challenging issue for many northern Indigenous communities. The ways of Indigenous knowledge have much to offer in support of resilience against food insecurity, considering intercultural reconceptualization of research methodologies with environmental sustainability and educational programs that support Indigenous communities. The goal of this contribution is to enhance the capacities of Indigenous communities to make informed decisions about their food security short-to-long term by developing new ways of food sovereignty.

- by Ranjan Datta and +1
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- Autoethnography, Indigenous Peoples, Food Security and Social Justice

Critical duoethnography, as a research methodology, can be used in innovative ways to assist educational researchers engaged in social justice research projects. This chapter offers four responses to the question of how critical duoethnography, as a form of qualitative inquiry, can be used by educational researchers to further social justice initiatives. First, critical duoethnography will be described as a tool for reflexivity; second, as an engaged form of collaborative reading and deciphering; third, as an interactive feminist approach to interviewing; and fourth, as a research methods pedagogy.

El mercado global farmacéutico ha provocado en la actualidad una actitud distinta frente a la enfermedad. Médicos, enfermeros y terapeutas alópatas son hoy “ofertantes”, mientras sus pacientes se han convertido en “usuarios”, consumidores de bienes y servicios para aliviar su sufrimiento. El tratamiento de la enfermedad mental en el medio hospitalario no escapa de esta lógica mercantil de la biomedicina. A través de un relato etnográfico y de las narrativas de algunos pacientes institucionalizados, el artículo aborda algunas expresiones íntimas de la experiencia de la locura en el marco del capitalismo biomédico en Bogotá, Colombia.

This article employs a mad transdisciplinary approach to autoethnography to detail vulvodynia — or chronic vulvar pain — within the system of (dis)ability. Through autoethnography, the self operates as a mobile orientation from which to identify and disrupt the colonial rationalities that differentially construct and narrate vulvodynia across sites of madness and disability. Through historical, discursive, and autoethnographic analysis, I locate vulvodynia’s role in various processes of subject, race, and settler-state formation from the nineteenth century up to the neoliberal present.

- by Renee Dumaresque
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- Epistemology, Research Methodology, Disability Studies, History of Medicine

Abstract
Hanna Ojamo: Arts Organizations of a New Era - A Case Study of the Changes in Funding and Leadership in State-Subsidized Arts Organizations in Finland (Working title of PhD Thesis 2017–2021)
How do changes in funding affect the leadership of the state-subsidized orchestras, theaters and art museums in 2017⏤2019? The research uses critical social theory and sociology to study the changes in leadership and funding in the arts organizations in the populist neoliberal political era and the state-subsidy system’s renewal process of 2016⏤ (VOS). Extensive background material was collected in 2015⏤2017 during the predoctoral study phase at the University of the Arts Helsinki. The emphasis of the research is in media analysis. Reports, social media conversations in the media, ministry documents, statistics, social policy documents, newspaper articles, interviews in the organizations as well as field observations of the researcher are analyzed in-depth. To understand the phenomenon and to put it in context, it studies the shift from the welfare arts policy discourse of the 1960s to the 2020’s competition society. The current state subsidy system favors some arts organizations heavily while leavings others outside. In the new legislation suggestion of 2018, incentives and choices were introduced in funding instead of even distribution of money. After he Finns party took over the Ministry of Education in Finland, May 2017, the renewal process has become politically ever more complex putting the new legislation in practice earliest in 2020. The framework of the study is critical social theory, J. Habermas’s theory of communicative action according to which active social parties form communication in the society. The method is critical discourse analysis (DA) combined with political context analysis and autoethnograpgy.
The research suggests that state-subsidized orchestras and art museums are experiencing great indirect and direct pressure in their leadership styles as a result of the changes in funding. Subsidies are under constant threat, the established arts institutions must endure the pressure of constant change. This in turn, reflects into organizational culture and has possible long-term effects on the identity and curricula of the institutions. The study suggests that leadership has not yet been fully adapted to meet the needs of the changing climate of funding, incentives and quality criteria. More flexibility, creativity and collaboration is needed for securing basic funding and keeping the subsidies in the future. The legitimacy of the arts is challenged by the populist coalition government. Audience development programs and fundraising are encouraged by the state. The research brings new knowledge on cultural policy, funding and leadership of orchestras and art museums of the mid-2010s for future managers when they navigate change. Preliminary findings of the study suggest that cultural policy and power in is a two-way discourse from the ministry level to the organizational level when negotiating funding for future arts organizations. The PhD thesis was started 1. September, 2017 and the estimated doctoral defense takes place in 2021.
Keywords: cultural policy; funding; arts organizations; leadership; critical social theory; sociology; change
Supervisors: Professor Tanja Johansson (PhD Sc.Econ.), Head of the Doctoral School, Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki; sub-supervisor PhD Pauli Rautiainen, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Eastern Finland and Tampere University Faculty of Management

- by Hanna Ojamo
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- Sociology, Cultural Policy, Leadership, Political Science
- by nili R Broyer
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- Disability Studies, Critical Disability Studies, Israel Studies, Autoethnography

Już pierwsze etnografie społeczności internetowych realizowały narracyjny model opowieści o osobistym doświadczeniu. Dziś to podejście nadal reprezentuje wielu badaczy cyberkultury, coraz częściej uprawiających autoetnografię metodologicznie świadomą i intencjonalnie wpisaną w korpus technik etnograficznych. Artykuł przedstawia charakterystykę, historię i dorobek tak rozumianej autoetnografii Internetu – umocowanej teoretycznie i metodologicznie w tradycji jakościowych badań społecznych, poszukującej równowagi między emic i etic w narracyjnej warstwie tekstu etnograficznego i stawiającej w centrum swojego zainteresowania relację pomiędzy podmiotem a przedmiotem badania

- by Magdalena Kamińska
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- Autoethnography, Cyberculture, Netnography, Cybercultures

This essay seeks to interrogate what it means to become a legible man as someone who held space as a multiplicity of identities before realising and negotiating my trans manhood. It raises the question of how we as trans people account for the shifting nature of our subjectivity, our embodiment and, indeed, our bodies. This essay locates this dialogue on the site of my body where I have placed many tattoos, which both speak to and inform my understanding of myself as a trans man in Ireland. Queer theory functions as a focal tool within this essay as I question family, home, transition, sexuality, and temporality through a queer autoethnographic reading of the tattoos on my body. This essay pays homage to the intersecting traditions within queer theory and autoethnography. It honours the necessity for the indefinable, for alternative knowledge production and representations, for the space we need in order to become, to allow for the uncertainty of our becoming.

- by Matty Kennedy
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- Irish Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Autoethnography