Paper short abstract:

This study investigates the process in which a female Japanese immigrant in the UK identifies where she belongs through self-observation. Her autoethnography shows that her voice always negotiates her various social roles and identities, including traveling and other activities, according to “Ba”.

Paper long abstract:

This study investigates the process in which a Japanese woman, M, identifies where she belongs through observing herself in a new environment. M, as an autoethnography researcher, has been recording her oral tweets as many times a day as possible since she arrived in the UK as a short-term immigrant. In this study, I will use “Ba” (Shimazu, Ohira and Yagi, 2020) as an analytical framework to understand M’s daily routine. From the view of identity as a sense of “where I belong” (Hosokawa, 2011) in a multilingual and multicultural society of this age, I will discuss how the perspective of “Ba” helps in obtaining this sense.

The data for analysis was 72 hours of audio recordings taken over 143 days from September 11, 2019 to January 31, 2020. From this data, I will first reconstruct fragmentary events into stories in chronological order from tweets that describe M’s emotional changes according to her moving from “Ba” to “Ba.” Then, I will analyze these accounts using a framework of “interpretive autoethnography” (Denzin, 2014) and examine her “voice, roles and identity” (Kramsch, 2003) in them.

M’s autoethnographical data reveals the trajectory of the daily routine of a short-term immigrant, through which she reconstructs her identity as a multilingual speaker in her new environment. Analysis shows that M’s inner “voice” seems to be the key to making her new life meaningful to her. Her autoethnography tells us her daily practice consists of 1) contemplation of her “voice,” 2) verbalization of her “voice,” and 3) listening to her “voice,” or verbalized discourse, alone. It also tells us that her “voice” always negotiates her social roles and identities according to “Ba”; where she moves, spends her time, performs her daily routines, and accomplishes her activities.