Pedagogies of Self: Conscientising the Personal to the Social

This paper considers the catalytic potential for autoethnography, one of the "new ethnographies" , to provoke emancipatory consciousness raising activity. Autoethnography opens possibilities for the development of a critical reflexivity wherein senses of Self and agency might come to be understood in terms of the social processes that mediate lived experience and the material realities of individuals. It is on this basis that autoethnography offers opportunity for the enactment of a genuinely critical pedagogy. By means of exploring the Self as a social construct, possibilities for exposing the mediating role that social structures play in the construction of identities become apparent and open to deep critique and change. This is echoed by suggestion that conscientisation relates to:

2015

Autoethnography is a qualitative methodology that seeks to understand culture. It is unique from ethnography in that the researcher may be a member of the culture under study. An autoethnographic study of a non-traditional mentorship is highlighted. While the study yielded important findings - a product - relative to developing a mentorship, it also yielded important understandings about what the influence of the methodological approach  - a process - on the researcher as subject is when the researcher is the instrument of data collection. This article explores the influence of autoethnography on the researcher-participant and articulates the impact of acknowledging "I", discovering "I", and changing "I" as a process inherent in the methodology.

Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, 2014

Este ensayo presenta la autoetnografia critica como una estrategia innovadora para conducir investigaciones en comunidades marginadas y vulnerables. Como se usa en este ensayo, es una combinacion de la autoetnografia, la etnografia y la pedagogia critica por la cual la investigadora se hace participante en el estudio, dirigiendose al interior para examinar el Self y la complejidad de las perspectivas usando la lente de la pedagogia critica. La reflexividad y la introspeccion intensas apoyan este estudiodel Self como participante para ir mas alla del recuento de hechos tan objetivamente como sea posible, que es lo que ocurre con la autobiografia, para reconocer que la investigadora interpreta los hechos de su vida a partir de las perspectivas culturales que se han formado por anos debido a sucesos y circunstancias socioculturales, socio-historicas, sociopoliticas y socioeconomicas que le han ocurrido. Subsecuentemente como investigadora que es miembro de la cultura dominante enalgunas categorias puedo ver y entender como opresora de la gente que vive en las comunidades donde hago mis investigaciones.

Ethnography in anthropology has for a very long time been focused on the study of the ‘Other’. Field methods and techniques have been developed accordingly. While ethnography is a method of qualitative research that describes human social phenomena based on fieldwork of a community which is not the researcher’s own, in autoethnography the researcher studies the ‘Self’. The benefits of autoethnography are many - research of such a personal nature might give us insight into problems often overlooked in culture. These could be issues such as the nature of identity, ethnicity, sexuality, political life and undercurrents etc. However, there are many who criticize this form of ethnography as sentimental, unscientific and personal. This could, if done subjectively, lead to rewriting of one’s collective memory as well. This paper discusses autoethnography as a method of enquiry and puts forward a review of some of the prominent anthropological works done in the area. It also discusses the ethics of doing such a narrative yet experimental ethnography in anthropology.

Journal of Transformative Praxis, 2021

Autoethnography covers a wide range of narrative representations, thereby bridging the gap of the boundaries by expressing autoethnographers' painful and gainful lived experiences. These representations arise from local stories, vignettes, dialogues, and role plays by unfolding action, reaction, and interaction in the form of self-narration. Likewise, the autoethnographic texts must exhibit the autoethnographers' critical reflections on the overall process of the inquiry. These exhibitions shall alert the autoethnographers' research ethics, reflexivity, alternative modes of representation, inquiry, and storytelling. The original articles in this issue that rises from the domain of critical social theories within the various ranges of theoretical perspectives include journeying through informing, reforming, and transforming teacher education; critical ethnographic research tradition; a critical and political reading of the excerpts of myths; climate change education and its interface with indigenous knowledge and general traits of the participants as transformed teachers.

Handbook of Autoethnography, 2013

Video by Stacy Holman Jones at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRHdcikk5EA Introduction: In many ways, autoethnography represents a challenge to some of the very foundations and key tenets of much social science research in its exhortation explicitly to situate and “write in” the researcher as a key player—often the key player—within a research project or account, as illustrated by the opening excerpt from my autoethnographic account of being a female distance runner. Despite its burgeoning popularity, increasing sophistication and sustained challenge to more orthodox forms of qualitative research, there are those who view autoethnography’s focus on “self” with deep suspicion and scepticism, accusing the genre of flirting with indulgent, “navel-gazing” forms of autobiography. For many of us, however, it represents a fresh and innovative variation of ethnography—and more!—where an ethnographic perspective and analysis are brought to bear on our personal, lived experience, directly linking the micro level with the macro cultural and structural levels in exciting ways. For us, too, autoethnography provides rare discursive space for voices too often muted or forcibly silenced within more traditional forms of research, opening up and democratizing the research space to those seeking to contest hegemonic discourses of whatever flavor. """

2014

to engage in autoethnography that focused on the interactions of the auto (self) and the ethno (culture) components of this qualitative method of study. In an effort to be more culturally aware of my selfhood within the classroom, I sought to "story" pivotal moments in my personal history where class, race and privilege intersected. I aimed to interrogate these intersections and their role in shaping and informing my identity, while also harvesting new knowledge and understanding through the very act of retelling. I argue that the act of autoethnography was influential in dismantling unproductive visions of myself as an educator, while at the same time propelling me productively through Helms' (1990) White identity model. As a preservice educator, I share my own work with autoethnography, which is honest and personal, in the hopes that other preservice educators might engage in such self-reflection.

2021

This article emphasises the academic possibilities of autoethnography using a philosophical and theoretical framework to underpin it. The author uses a proposed research project to illustrate how and why autoethnography should be considered an academic methodology appropriate for a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) study. Crotty’s (1998) research paradigm model informs the author’s theoretical framework with a focus on Social Constructionism and Symbolic Interactionism as it’s foundations. The intention of the article is to encourage other doctoral candidates to consider the scholarly attributes of autoethnography for their own research endeavours through the utilisation of an interpretivist research paradigm

Qualitative Inquiry, 2001

This article argues the personal/professional/political emancipatory potential of autoethnographic performance as a method of inquiry. Autoethnographic performance is the convergence of the "autobiographic impulse" and the "ethnographic moment" represented through movement and critical self-reflexive discourse in performance, articulating the intersections of peoples and culture through the innersanctions of the always migratory identity. The article offers evaluative standards for the autoethnographic performance methodology, calling on the body as a site of scholarly awareness and corporeal literacy. Autoethnographic performance makes us acutely conscious of how we "Iwitness" our own reality constructions. Interpreting culture through the self-reflections and cultural refractions of identity is a defining feature of autoethnographic performance.

Springer Nature, 2023

In this chapter the notion of autoethnography is discussed from a posthumanities perspective as a decentring of the self. It posits that by taking the focus off the 'self', the auto, and moving it to how the 'self' is continually (per)formed by phenomena in the ethno, we can become aware of how 'stories' graphically trace our iterative journey to becomings, to being in the here and now and the then and there: of belonging in the world in all its dynamic possibilities rather than being in a world of static certainties. I argue that method could and should be viewed as movement: a material movement of thought. Autoethnography implies movement, a constant state of flux, a dialogical ethical commitment between storyteller and the phenomena we describe, the stories we tell, and those we describe them to, where the 'self' becomes the effects of our performed story while at the same time positing a 'self' as the cause of the story but which the story has served to reconfigure. I tell stories to dys-appear and disappear my 'self', becoming-other. And in so doing map rather than trace the contours of the assemblages I am embedded in and flow from. I explore my 'teaching' stories and elaborate on how such stories of the 'self' can become an ethical commitment to justice. Keywords Autoethnography • Posthumanities • Stories • Affects • Diffractive methodology • Assemblages • Feelings