The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives against the Grain. Symposium Collective

The mutual constitution of sensuous and discursive understanding in scientific practice: An autoethnographic lens on academic writing

“…It fortifies the need to acknowledge and flesh out how emotions and sensuous experiences come to play a role in the research process and reflect on the challenges involved—without producing texts that are navel-gazing, narcissistic accounts devoid of theoretical relevance and epistemological problematization. Currently there is an ongoing debate about this within academia, in part associated with the increasing popularity of autoethnographic approaches (Brandt et al, 2001; Bridwell-Bowles, 1992; Cintron, 1993; Gannon, 2006; Hindman, 2001; Kirsch, 1997) and recent calls by researchers, for example in the field of organization studies, for the need to innovate and incorporate methods that are appropriate for capturing organizational phenomena that are less prone to be quantified, measured and objectively assessed, such as aesthetic data on organizations (Warren, 2008). Hopefully, this article contributes to this debate by providing an example of how bringing in the personal does not necessarily exclude theoretical reasoning and insights beyond the self.…”

“…Personal writing styles such as autoethnography have been criticized for leaving little room for critical analysis and evaluation (e.g. Brandt et al, 2001; Garratt and Hodkinson, 1998; Kirsch, 1997), especially of the self. An important part in ethnographical studies in general, and autoethnography in particular, is the notion of self-reflexivity, which implies that the researcher writes into his or her research how the self has affected the research in question.…”

“…A second critique that has been raised by Brandt et al (2001: 6) is that choices regarding how to read ourselves are shaped by ‘narratives that dominate our minds and world at the time’. Subjectivity is hence a relational matter, but oftentimes, the evidence of experience that the autoethnographer struggles to capture in her writing, risks overlooking questions about the constructed nature of experience, and how one’s story is necessarily structured through language and history (Scott, 1991).…”

When Things Fall Apart

“…For example, Keith Gilyard calls his sociolinguistic work in Voices of the Self "autobiographical narrative" (1991,11). Victor Villanueva (in Brandt et al 2001) calls the approach he uses in Bootstraps and elsewhere "critical autobiography," and his description is similar to the moves a writer makes in autoethnography:…”

‘That’s My Stuff’: Pasifika Literature and Pasifika Identity

“…Vā offers a conceptual space by which to think of the way Pasifika identities are 'constructed in the context of relationships with significant 4 While I independently arrived at this term, I have since become aware of its previous usage in a range of disciplines, where it similarly denotes acts of giving voice to alternative or subaltern subjectivities. See, for instance Brandt, et al 2001;Bromley 2010;Wellik and Kazemek 2008. others' (Mila 2010:154). In this case, it has allowed for a contextual analysis of Pasifika as a diasporic community in Aotearoa, with complex connections to Pākeha/Papālagi, the dominant group that holds political and social power; to the indigenous Māori population; and between migrant and successive generations within and across the various ethnicities making up Pasifika.…”