Knitting as Metaphor for Work

Abstract

This article discusses the coauthors’ experiences as academic colleagues who took up knitting together, and the insights about contemporary complications and tensions of research and work that we developed through that practice. Adopting some of the tenets of ethnography and, more particularly, autoethnography and institutional ethnography, we ground our analysis in everyday encounters and routines in our academic workplace. Employing knitting as metaphor, we organize our discussion of findings as a series of tensions that are alternately evident and hidden in our work(place). We close by considering how our inquiry points to aspects of both similarity and uniqueness in relation to other work contexts and assists us in interpreting and understanding our academic work in the context of broader society.

Chapter 1. Temporal Discourse Analysis as an Analytic for Lifespan Writing Research

“…Given their complementary affordances, AE and IE can be productively used together, as Taber exemplifies by using AE "to foreground [her] own experiences" as a woman in the military and IE to "investigate policies and social practices" hooking her into ruling relations of the military and institutional regimes (p. 9). Since Taber argued for incorporating AE and IE, researchers across disciplines have taken up her call (Jubas and Seidel, 2016;Fixsen et al, 2022), but none have used these methodologies for studying lifespan writing development, as I do here.…”

Capturing the Complexities of Collaborative Partnerships in Early Childhood Through Metaphor

“…valuable way to reorganise instilled patterns of thinking by offering clarity (Jakel, 2002), a way of enhancing communication, and opportunity for exploring of tensions emerging in the literature (Jubas & Seidel, 2016), as well as enabling sensitive subjects to be surfaced (Southall, 2013). Metaphor became the way for meanings to emerge as well as to see the meanings.…”

Reaching for Low Hanging Fruit

“…Engaging in an institutional ethnography (Smith, 2005) of institutional change at MWU has enabled me to hone in on key disjunctures between policy and practice on campus as well as between the agency of faculty and MWU's structure (Chan, 2005;Deveau, 2011;Jubas & Seidel, 2016;Prodinger, Shaw, Stamm, & Rudman, 2014;Taber 2010;Venturato, Moyle, & Steel, 2013). This is significant because, as Smith (2005) states above, disjunctures "are of the transformation" (p. 187).…”