The purpose of this paper is to open up a deeper, more complex discussion about ethical issues in queer autoethnography, by moving beyond either an outline of seminal…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to open up a deeper, more complex discussion about ethical issues in queer autoethnography, by moving beyond either an outline of seminal autoethnographic thinkers, instigators, and writers, or a simple rearticulation of the key issues currently under discussion within the field of autoethnographic ethics.
Design/methodology/approach
The author’s intention is to queer autoethnographic ethics – that is, to employ queering as a verb, and to queerly examine autoethnographic scholars through the problematizing lenses of unexamined privilege, and of potential ethical violence to the researcher. After this, the author turns to theological writers to help us to queer the notions of ethical certainty, challenging our fear of ideological uncertainty, our fear of the body, and our fear of ambiguity.
Findings
This paper offers a more expansive and challenging approach to traditional autoethnographic ethical guidelines. It also raises several significant questions for ongoing scholarly discussion in the field.
Originality/value
It is hoped is that this paper will open up new possibilities and trajectories in the ongoing debates about autoethnographic ethics.
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Robert E. Rinehart and Kerry Earl
– The purpose of this paper is to make a case for the strength of qualitative work, but more specifically for various kinds of ethnographies.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to make a case for the strength of qualitative work, but more specifically for various kinds of ethnographies.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors argue that global neoliberal and audit culture policies have crept into academic research, tertiary education practice, and research culture.
Findings
The authors then discuss major tenets of and make the case for the use of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies as caring practices and research method(ologies) that may in fact push back against such hegemonic neoliberal practices in the academy. Finally, the authors link these caring types of ethnographies to the papers within this special issue.
Originality/value
This is an original look at the concepts of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies with relation to caring practices.
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Current discourses on educational assessment focus on the priority of learning. While this intent is invariably played out in classroom practice, a consideration of the…
Abstract
Purpose
Current discourses on educational assessment focus on the priority of learning. While this intent is invariably played out in classroom practice, a consideration of the ontological nature of assessment practice opens understandings which show the experiential nature of “being in assessment”. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
Using interpretive and hermeneutic analyses within a phenomenological inquiry, experiential accounts of the nature of assessment are worked for their emergent and ontological themes.
Findings
These stories show the ontological nature of assessment as a matter of being in assessment in an embodied and holistic way.
Originality/value
Importantly, the nature of a teacher's way-of-being matters to assessment practices. Implications exist for teacher educators and teacher education programmes in relation to the priority of experiential stories for understanding assessment practice, the need for re-balancing a concern for professional knowledge and practice with a students’ way of being in assessment, and the pedagogical implications of evoking sensitivities in assessment.
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Merel Visse and Alistair Niemeijer
– The purpose of this paper is to focus on the possibilities of autoethnography as a commitment to care and a social justice agenda (Denzin, 2014:p. x).
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to focus on the possibilities of autoethnography as a commitment to care and a social justice agenda (Denzin, 2014:p. x).
Design/methodology/approach
Autoethnography can be seen as a “methodology that allows us to examine how the private troubles of individuals are connected to public issues and to public responses to these troubles” (Mills, 1959, cited in Denzin, 2014). This resonates strongly with the field of study: political care ethics, as the main focus is on how to promote a caring society. “Care” might be conceived broadly as everything the authors do to maintain and repair the world; i.e., as a social praxis.
Findings
Care ethics can benefit from autoethnography, as there is a strong(er) emphasis on “what matters,” what people care for, about and why, rather than on what is “right.” In this paper, the authors will thus explore the promises and pitfalls of autoethnography for a caring society, by connecting insights from theories on political care ethics and qualitative inquiry with the own autoethnographic performance at the International Conference on Qualitative Inquiry in May 2015.
Originality/value
Care ethics can benefit from autoethnography, as there is a strong(er) emphasis on “what matters,” what people care for, about and why, rather than on what is “right.”
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Pamela Zapata-Sepúlveda, Phiona Stanley, Mirliana Ramírez-Pereira and Michelle Espinoza-Lobos
The purpose of this paper is to present a collaborative (auto)ethnography that has emerged from the meeting of four academic researchers working with and from the heart in various…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a collaborative (auto)ethnography that has emerged from the meeting of four academic researchers working with and from the heart in various Latin American contexts.
Design/methodology/approach
Our “I’s” have mingled with our very varied participations in different themes, latitudes, and disciplines – health, education and psychosocial approaches. We have worked, variously, in both English and Spanish. At the core of this piece are our own biographies, motivations, senses, academic dreams, international contexts, and the injustices and suffering felt in our bodies.
Findings
We seek to reflect from our experience of traveling as young researchers and as women with Latin souls. Through our stories, we show how crossing cultures as part of our research and work gives us both a privileged position but also the constant stress and questioning that goes beyond the intellectual and appears in our embodied experiences of interculturality.
Research limitations/implications
The limitation of this piece of research is that it is based on personal experiences, that although there may be people who feel identified with these experiences, these are not generalizable or transferable.
Practical implications
Performative autoethnography is an instance to understand the world like a crisol with different faces; self, social, cultural and methodology, which allows us to understand the world from a holistic perspective.
Social implications
With this paper, we hope to contribute for other women in academia to see themselves reflected in the experience of moving through a globalized world.
Originality/value
Through both living in and reflecting on this process, we show how our experiences provide us with new, intercultural “worlds under construction.”
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The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible affects of personal traumas on the pedagogical practices of educators sometimes resulting in a type of pedagogical…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible affects of personal traumas on the pedagogical practices of educators sometimes resulting in a type of pedagogical malpractice. The content shares an interest towards reformation in artist training programs, and personal learning experiences for K-12 teachers.
Design/methodology/approach
Beginning an inward/backward journey of narrative inquiry, I use autoethnography to explore the following questions: What am I teaching my students, explicitly and implicitly? To what extent do I perpetuate the traumas of my pre-professional training? How can I interrupt this legacy of abuse in my own pedagogical practices? My journey is shared through a collection of brief narrative vignettes, referred to by the musical term suite, in which I critically examine my life experiences in search of answers to these questions.
Findings
Like most qualitative research puzzles, I’m left with more questions rather than finite answers. How would my educational experiences have been different, if I understood learning as a shared privilege between teacher and student? How much more transformative could my teaching, have been, if it were not a catchall just in case I wasn’t successful in my chosen path? How might I have grown as a performer, if teaching had been a respected and integrated part of my performance curricula? How much less of a failure would I have felt when I found myself leading a classroom in later years? Would I have perceived it as a failure at all?
Research limitations/implications
This situated narrative stops for the sake of article length, but the journey into becoming continues and will require consistent reflection to remain headed in the right direction.
Originality/value
This piece is an autoethnographic account that contributes to positive pedagogical practices.
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– The purpose of this paper is to promote visual autoethnography as a tool to explore and represent the captive qualities associated with gardening.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to promote visual autoethnography as a tool to explore and represent the captive qualities associated with gardening.
Design/methodology/approach
Visual autoethnography is presented as a method to explore the personal meaning of gardening. Visual autoethnography allows the writer to enmesh narratives of memory, sensual experiences and the self with images that amplify personal meaning.
Findings
The garden is a sensual landscape offering potential for personal expression and the vagaries of the human spirit. Despite its prominence as a leading leisure time activity in Aotearoa New Zealand gardening has received little serious scrutiny. What does this tell us? Is there a need to restore meaning or at least bring meaning to the fore of garden conversations be they personal, agreed, shared, reinforced or not?
Originality/value
While research into gardens and gardening has largely focussed on the other, this paper explores meaning through the self. The meaning of gardening is presented as a highly reflexive endeavor. Images allow the reader to migrate to the ethnographic site and share the ineffable properties that can be associated with what Francis Bacon once described as the purest of human pleasures.
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Sandy Farquhar and Esther Fitzpatrick
The purpose of this paper is to engage with challenges the authors encountered in duoethnographic inquiry, including questions about what it means to tell the truth, and the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to engage with challenges the authors encountered in duoethnographic inquiry, including questions about what it means to tell the truth, and the decisions the authors made about what stories to include and exclude. The focus is on the ethical challenges involved in duoethnography and the ways in which the authors chose, and or felt compelled to, overcome them. The authors provide an argument for the need of intimate, eclectic and open-ended inquiry-based research that poses questions, challenges dominant discourses and promotes a compositional methodology in which to explore lived the experience of participants.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors’ own duoethnographic process, embedded in an anthropological hermeneutics (Ricoeur, 1991), within a mode of narrative inquiry, developed over a period of three to four months. The authors had a number of formal and informal conversations – some recorded and transcribed, others remembered and reflected on later in e-mails or in draft academic papers. The authors shared articles, e-mailed, conversed with family and examined photos. Reflecting on some of these conversations, the authors were sometimes uncomfortable with the way the stories they shared had the potential to expose aspects of themselves and those the authors are close to. The authors developed fictionalising techniques and poetry in order to tell these stories.
Findings
Duoethnography engages with method that reveals truth as layered, contradictory and necessarily intersubjective. It is this tentative and contingent nature of truth that augers for a hyper-consciousness of the relationship between transgression and transformation. Using fictional ways of knowing: poetry, scripting and metaphor; and the usual technologies of research: anonymisation, de-identification; and drawing on notions of redaction and under erasure the authors found safe ways to represent particularly challenging issues. The process involved intimate revealing – small stories that the authors shared here to argue for the importance of the affective in transformative educational research.
Research limitations/implications
The authors continue to work in uncomfortable places and suggest that ethics often involves irreconcilable and incommensurate discourses which cannot always be accounted for in normalised codes of ethics. The authors argue that this tension provides an important on-going ethical encounter where, as researchers, the authors continue to generate and implement creative and innovative methodologies.
Originality/value
Throughout the paper the authors have suggested ways to challenge the linear, logical and the predictable as the authors wrestled with how personal narratives may reveal personal truth and transformation that may open ways for larger transformative actions.
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Jacquie Kidd and Gareth Edwards
Co-production in the context of mental health research has become something of a buzzword to indicate a project where mental health service users and academics are in a research…
Abstract
Purpose
Co-production in the context of mental health research has become something of a buzzword to indicate a project where mental health service users and academics are in a research partnership. The notion of partnership where one party has the weight of academic tradition on its side is a contestable one, so in this paper the authors “write to understand” (Richardson and St Pierre, 2005) as the purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of working in a co-produced research project that investigated supported housing services for people with serious mental health problems.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors set out to trouble the notion of co-produced research though a painfully honest account of the project, while at the same time recognising it as an idea whose time has come and suggesting a framework to support its implementation.
Findings
Co-production is a useful, albeit challenging, approach to research.
Originality/value
This paper is particularly relevant to researchers who are endeavouring to produce work that challenges the status quo through giving voice to people who are frequently silenced by the research process.