I recently attended a webinar [Meet & Eat] Autoethnography in Online Doctoral Education which I very much enjoyed. One of the presenters asked a question of the audience that got me thinking, and I am really thinking out loud as I write this post:
How do we challenge an autoethnography? How do we challenge personal experience?
I answered briefly in the chat to say that I would not challenge any one else’s interpretation, but rather I would offer my own interpretation and ask for them to comment about it. I also mentioned that this was the approach that used in my own PhD thesis, and I referred, as I often do, to the parable of the blind men and the elephant:
I don’t know the questioner’s opinion of AE, he didn’t give it, so I don’t want to assume that he was misunderstanding what AE is and is not. But this type of question is often asked by those who do misunderstand the nature of qualitative research – often because they hold to some ideal of universal, objective truth, and they consider qualitative research to be inferior because it does not meet this standard. And the answer to the question from this perspective is to point out that you don’t challenge an AE by simply saying that it is not necessarily true, and that there are other possible interpretations. An AE does not pretend to be objective, and it is open about the fact that it is based on a personal story, although it is not just a story. As Ellis, Adams and Bochner say:
Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience.
Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams & Arthur P. Bochner (2011)
So rather than asking if an AE is true, we can ask if it is plausible to use the story to understand the relevant experience, whether it is a useful interpretation, whether it helps us to better understand the issues at hand. And, of course, we can ask whether there are other AEs that can help to give us a fuller understanding of it all.
“Lurker” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
In my last post I shared a quote from Joanne McNeil introducing the idea of researcher as lurker. Since then I have been thinking at some reasons for researchers to show or hide themselves from their participants, and the related issues of visibility of data and ethical considerations. Here is my starter for ten about levels of researcher visibility and possible research reasons.
Researcher Visibility
Research Reason
Status as researcher disclosed to participants from the outset
Participatory research Ethnography
Status as researcher initially hidden (not disclosed to participants), disclosed at/after data analysis stage
Concerns about researcher influencing behaviour (e.g. Hawthorne effect). Later disclosed so participants can authenticate interpretation
Status as researcher never disclosed to participants during data collection or analysis stage
Participant point of view not relevant Researcher as ‘god-like’/expert Data is being collected after the event Participants are anonymous
Data Visibility
How?
Public throughout
Open research/open data
Public at publication of project
Shared to institutional database
Shared with participants
Various ways
Shared on request
Various ways
Never shared
My next stage is to think through types of ethical (approval) to match these.
[I think more and more, by the way, that the insistence on the need for ethical approval by institutional gatekeepers is problematic (and not at all ethical). I say something about this in my PhD thesis (see ~ p 82).]
An interesting paragraph in a book I am reading at the moment (Lurking, by Joanne McNeil). We are used to talking about learners as lurkers, but here’s another perspective. What images do we invoke when we think about the researcher as lurker?
The picture of researcher as outsider – as a profiteer swooping in to steal content and to cherry pick meaning to fit their own agenda – was one that gave me pause during my own PhD (I am sure some of you remember the story of the ‘researchers’ who came across a Google Doc that some of us were using to start writing a journal article and used it in a conference presentation without asking or attributing – the affront we felt at that unethical behaviour has stayed with me). I chose participatory research as my methodology, and ultimately ended up writing an autoethnography because I wanted to try to allow my community to have a voice in what I was doing, and to make it clear that what I was saying was my own interpretation.
Of course Twitter is public, and the ToS make it clear that researchers are permitted to use tweets without attribution, but imo that is not the full story – there are also ethical considerations (I say some things about this in my PhD thesis if anyone is interested).
I’m not sure where I am going with this yet – as always I am writing to find out what I am thinking.
I didn’t have high hopes for GISH – I didn’t know what to expect. But I had hoped for some sort of collaborative creating and remixing with some like minded people. So I paid my $25.01 (why the .01, I wondered) and waited to see what the challenges would be like.
GISH is a week long event, and this year it ran from 30th July to 6th August. So on Sat 30th I logged in from my PC. First I tried to update my profile, but the web pages kept crashing, so I gave up on that. Next I headed to the Teams tab, expecting to find a chat room or a forum, but there was just a list of names with links to email them individually. Meh, I assumed the captain would be in touch.
And that was pretty much it. I scanned through the challenges and picked up a couple I could do alone from my desk (many of them either specified a specific location in the US or required interaction in busy places, neither of which were possible for me), and wandered off to do other things.
During my busier than usual work week I occasionally wondered why nobody was getting in touch – was I missing something? I checked the Teams tab again, but there was still nothing there. But apparently I was missing everything, as I found out after the event had ended. It turns out that there was a ios/android app, and that’s where my team were chatting. Somehow I’d missed mention of it on the web pages. I know this is all my own fault, and I could have got in touch with the captain (who I did not know), or other team members, but there it is.
And I can’t help feeling a little sad that nobody thought to ask me where I was.
For the last couple of months I have been slowly reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. Slowly – because it is a big book, in more ways than one. I am only scratching at the surface of it – but the discussion of the left and right hemispheres is fascinating. As a leftie and the daughter of a leftie, I grew up with a lot of folk wisdom about the left hemisphere as being the faculty of reason and language while the right hemisphere is the domain of emotion and visual imagery. This, as McGilchrist shows, is false – both hemispheres are involved in each, just in different ways. The right provides us with the big picture, while the left is good at analysing details and specifics. In his RSA talk, McGilchrist gives an example of a bird to illustrate this – using its left hemisphere to focus on picking out tasty seeds from amongst the pebbles while the right hemisphere scans the area for possible danger. Both functions are vital, both sides need to talk to each other and, importantly, also listen to each other. In particular, the right hemisphere is connected to the physical world in a way that the left is not. And this can lead us into problems when the left forgets to pay attention to the right, which it is prone to do. I would really recommend watching this talk. I’ll be back to talk about the consequences for humanity for prioritising the left way of thinking over the right which is the subject of the second part of this book.
— ds106 Daily Create now at @tdc@social.ds106.us (@ds106dc) June 24, 2022
Look around you and create a picture of what you see in words (or use the image below if you like). Describe it to us without using any metaphors or showing the photo.
What do you really see?
This might be considered a practice in writing alternative descriptions for images- what can be a valid substitute for the visual representation,
Describe the essential elements of a scene in words, e.g.
A silver vat of vivid red cherries calls to be eaten and stands out in contrast of a lush background of green ground cover and purple wildflowers.
A small brown box, resting in the corner of a sofa with a striped pink and purple velvet cover. A black cat curled up in the box, looking up at the camera with her bright yellow eyes which ask: ‘how dare you disturb my sleep for your silly game?’
