Confabulating Research: Performing Memory-Work as Inquiry

Abstract

This collaborative autoethnographic essay centers on memory-work describing the ebbs and flows of boarding school policies’ effects on ethnic minorities in China and language policy decisions on multilingual citizens in Sri Lanka. The text is the product of the authors’ attunement to the role that confabulation plays in shaping collaborative autoethnographic research through the sharing and analysis of life-writing activities—for example, memoirs, journal entries, photographic narratives, and so on. Confabulation guided the authors through questions related to the meanings of self, other, and culture often taken for granted in (auto)ethnographic research. This is a topic expanded upon in the postface, where confabulation as the method, process, and outcome of research is discussed.

Reflecting on Violent Ruptures and Loss in Qualitative Research: A Poetic Inquiry

“…Often, our ways of knowing as teacher educators were informed by our researcher roles, and vice versa. In many ways, we engaged in confabulation through conversing about our remembrance (Barros et al, 2020), and the materiality of losing participants, who in the absence of larger families in the U.S., were part of our families and we were part of theirs even for a short period of time. From the onset of our research studies, we discussed memories and participant conversations about making sense of moments that were not part of our methodological exposures in the curriculum.…”

“…Memory in poetic inquiry helps us “remember what has been dismembered” (Barros et al, 2020, p. 3; Dillard, 2011). When losing participants with whom we have shared memories and moments of love, a form of dismembering occurs, especially when the loss is not on our terms.…”

“…When losing participants with whom we have shared memories and moments of love, a form of dismembering occurs, especially when the loss is not on our terms. In this sense, poetry and memory are intertwined to make sense and to describe the “materiality of memories--the ways remembering rejoins us with the collective consciousness of education as a public and private affair, a ritual through which we perform and modify meanings” (Barros et al, 2020, p. 17). We see poetry as intrinsic to memory and vice versa.…”