Paper short abstract:

Through an autoethnographic, mix-genre (poetry, creative non-fiction, memoir, and scholarship) approach, this paper seeks to explore the limits and potentials of the non-knowing eye/I of ethnographic fieldwork and writing as it manifests in the soundscape of ethnographic voice and authority.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to conjure an abstracted time-space from the researcher’s embodied experiences. Moving through the researcher’s memories of growing up in the American Midwest in a blue collar military family and in a Fundamentalistic religious community and through long-term ethnographic fieldwork among anarchist activists in Barcelona, this paper weaves together multiple registers of locution and ways of knowing, including poetry, creative non-fiction, and scholarship. A central preoccupation of this paper is how to locate the self of the researcher in its social and historical position while disembodying itself from that position. In so doing, it explores intimacy, self-reflection, relation, and politics of knowledge production in ethnographic research and writing. This paper seeks to perform a mode of not knowing argumentation that operates on the level of affective resonance. The goal is to explore the extent to which lyrical saturation of the shared sonic environment of the conference space can expand into a communal field through which audience members and performer can co-imagine an “ethnographic” field.