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- Convenors:
-
Kim Silow Kallenberg
(Södertörn University)
Evelina Liliequist (Umeå University)
Kristofer Hansson (Malmö University)
Christine Bylund (Umeå University)
Pernilla Severson (Linnaeus University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Knowledge Production
- Sessions:
- Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
We understand autoethnography as a methodological approach that recognizes, and uses, personal experiences and feelings in the center of the analysis, rather than hiding them away. In the panel we will combine research presentations with a workshop on autoethnographic and creative writing.
Long Abstract:
A common understanding of the autoethnographic method is that it involves making oneself a part of what is being studied to some extent. We understand autoethnography as a methodological approach that recognizes, and uses, personal experiences and feelings in the center of the analysis, rather than hiding them away. In many ethnographic studies, playing by the rules is to maintain a certain degree of distance towards the field of research. What can be gained if we developed new methods and theories for this boundary work? Do researchers and fields need to be separated in order for knowledge to be created, or can the lack of distance be an asset? How far can you bend, or even break, the rules and norms of research and still be able to call it research?
This panel takes the next step and explores questions of ethnographic knowledge production by focusing on the autoethnographic method. In the panel we will combine research presentations of various kinds with a workshop on autoethnographic and creative writing, thus including the autoethnographic approach as both process and product.
We invite participants that wish to contribute to a discussion on autoethnography, whether it is about methodology, research ethics or ways to disseminate research. We welcome traditional paper presentations as well as more experimental displays, such as readings, and different kinds of performances. The panel will be open for digital participation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 21 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper I discuss how breaking rules of methodology with autoethnographic methods, not only allow researchers to draw from their own experience, but also can be a way for researchers to break barriers of thought and develop new perspectives.
Paper long abstract:
The importance of literacy is heavily emphasized in the contemporary public discourse in Iceland. Politicians make policies about it, researchers make knowledge about it and the media reports on it. Working as a school librarian I knew I should join the choir, but something troubled me so instead I signed up for a PhD-program in ethnology to critically analyze this discourse of reading and its implications. This brought up many new questions of how and why. How to get a new view on a familiar discourse? And why? If everybody else says reading is succeeding, why shouldn’t I?
Still working at the library, I conducted action research to explore, based in practice, what troubled me with the emphasis on literacy. During the research period I kept a research diary, looked back into memories of puzzling moments or other experiences that came to my mind in relation to the subject matter and wrote this down to reflect on it and find alternative solutions to the puzzles.
This autoethnographic method not only allowed me as researcher to draw on my experience from the school library in order to focus my research but also to position myself as a researcher and to develop new perspectives on literacy besides those transmitted through public discourse. Breaking rules of methodology can thus also be a way for researchers to break barriers of thought.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will present how I take advantage of my experience in writing my doctoral theses about unintended pregnancy. In what way can the embodied narratives that my experience generates be used in research and what ethical and methodological problems do I encounter along the way?
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I will present an autoethnographic approach as part of a larger ethnographic study about unintended pregnancy in Finland in the 2010s. Autoethnography is part of the study that also consists of interview data, a questionnaire about love, sex and relationships and online media articles and comments. The questions I try to answer is what the autoethnographic method can bring to a larger assembly of several methods in order to get a more comprehensive image of a phenomenon. How have I used my own experience and what advantages, or disadvantages, does it have? I see my experience as embodied narratives, narratives in plural because this is a story that I have access to in multiple versions, that is retold in different contexts. It is also embodied knowledge; I have lived through it and it can bring knowledge that is not accessible in any other way than through autoethnography. I will also touch on the ethical and methodological problems that arise and how this approach challenges assumptions about research and what knowledge is.
Paper short abstract:
The paper is an autoethnographic account of my mother’s battle against cancer and it compares her negotiating strategies with that of her doctors in the chronological reality of the approaching death. The paper combines the “normal” ethnographic research with its “abnormal” subjective content.
Paper long abstract:
The paper is an autoethnographic account of the final three months of my mother’s battle against inoperable rectohepatic cancer. The aim of the paper is to contrast her narrative and negotiating strategies with that of her doctors in the chronological reality of the disease. Discovering the points where those narrative strategies were parallel and supportive or contrastive and opposite, will reveal the way in which they affected the choices of treatments the patient chose and/or was offered. Furthermore, the paper analyses the concepts of good and bad patient, the former being the compliant one and the latter being the demanding one, and the way they were formulated and perpetuated in the narratives and behaviors of the doctors and hospital staff. Finally, the paper will examine emerging and shifting realities of power, control and responsibility which were revealed in the timeline of imminent and approaching death. Methodologically, the paper presents an attempt to create valid scientifically relevant knowledge by combining the “normal” ethnographic research, done during eighty-six daily visits to the hospital through participation, observation and many formal and informal meetings with doctors, patients, hospital staff, taxi drivers, dog walkers or fellow smokers in front of the hospital, with its “abnormal”, painful, subjective content which have unavoidably colored and shaded my perceptions and practices. I will try to reveal and discuss those potential shadings in knowledge creation.
Paper short abstract:
The point of departure for this paper is the loss of two childhood friends that both died as young adults related to substance abuse and mental illness. The presentation is a reading – where the condensed meaning from an ethnographic material is presented in the form of co-constructed narratives.
Paper long abstract:
The point of departure for this paper is the loss of two of my childhood friends – Marcus and Noel – that both died as young adults related to substance abuse and mental illness. Since their deaths, I have interviewed friends and family of both of them to understand my own and others' grief and to seek possible explanations as to why they died. An autoethnographic approach is used to better understand myself in relation to the empirical field.
This paper is based on Carolyn Ellis’ idea of “co-constructed narratives”, or narratives as “jointly-authored” (Ellis et al. 2011:279). Ellis et al writes that co-constructed narratives “illustrate the meaning of relational experiences, particularly how people collaboratively cope with the ambiguities, uncertainties, and contradictions” (Ellis et al. 2011:279) of being friends and family. In my presentation, I will practice the idea of co-constructed narratives – thus exceeding the conventions of how an ethnographic material is usually represented. The presentation will be a reading where I read – after a short contextualizing introduction – cutouts from the empirical material about Marcus and Noel. Inspired by Svetlana Alexievich's way of summing up long interviews in just a few sentences or words, I have put together the essence of the interviews I've conducted to tell a possible story about my dead friends – representing common understandings as well as differing conclusions. The ambition is to test a new form for (auto)ethnographic knowledge by searching for a ”condensed form” (cf. Ingridsdotter & Silow Kallenberg 2018:61) of meaning based in the (auto)ethnographic material.