Abstract:This article discusses the possibility for vulnerable writing within feminist methodological approaches to research. Drawing upon a project that involved difficulties and tensions in conducting transnational research, including the documenting and telling of a partial narrative of an individual who set herself on fire, the article discusses what it might mean to focus more explicitly on explicating and recognising vulnerability in writing. In providing examples from working with a situated, localised analysis … Show more
“…Power relations and contested identities are always active, unstable and lived, and so they must be continuously recognised and negotiated in the field, which is inevitably messy importantly, humbling (Sultana, 2007: 382). In her discussion of vulnerable writing, Tiffany Page (2017) considers the potential for violence when representing, and attempting to produce (coherent forms of) knowledge from, the lives of others. Page’s notion of vulnerable writing encourages me to disclose the interaction above – a resident’s questioning of my positioning – rather than omit it from this output.…”
Section: ‘Why Did You Come Here?’ Reflections On Positionalitymentioning
In the wake of the so-called European migrant crisis, migration scholars have zoomed in on digital technologies and mobility. Seldom addressed, however, are the affective entanglements of migrant digital practices. Yet, as this article argues, waiting is a deeply affective and embodied experience, mediated by information and communications technologies, and tempered both spatially and temporally. Using the cultural politics of emotion as an entry point, and a reflexive and vulnerable methodology, this article explores the digital practices of 15 women waiting in a refugee camp in Greece. In aiming to more justly represent their experiences, this article seeks to move beyond spatial descriptions of migration, as well as to unsettle prevalent discourses of displacement as a liminal condition. Herein, I use the dialectic of strategy and tactics to explore the ways in which smartphones are mobilised in order to ‘make do’ with protracted experiences of displacement. Three mediated practices of ‘making do’ are explored: non-mainstream news consumption as a tactic of self-care; mediated family practices as a tactic of hope; and nature photography as a tactic of creativity. In the context of a dehumanising strategy of migration containment, I will argue that everyday tactics of self-care, hope and creativity constitute affective forms of agency.
“…Power relations and contested identities are always active, unstable and lived, and so they must be continuously recognised and negotiated in the field, which is inevitably messy importantly, humbling (Sultana, 2007: 382). In her discussion of vulnerable writing, Tiffany Page (2017) considers the potential for violence when representing, and attempting to produce (coherent forms of) knowledge from, the lives of others. Page’s notion of vulnerable writing encourages me to disclose the interaction above – a resident’s questioning of my positioning – rather than omit it from this output.…”
Section: ‘Why Did You Come Here?’ Reflections On Positionalitymentioning
In the wake of the so-called European migrant crisis, migration scholars have zoomed in on digital technologies and mobility. Seldom addressed, however, are the affective entanglements of migrant digital practices. Yet, as this article argues, waiting is a deeply affective and embodied experience, mediated by information and communications technologies, and tempered both spatially and temporally. Using the cultural politics of emotion as an entry point, and a reflexive and vulnerable methodology, this article explores the digital practices of 15 women waiting in a refugee camp in Greece. In aiming to more justly represent their experiences, this article seeks to move beyond spatial descriptions of migration, as well as to unsettle prevalent discourses of displacement as a liminal condition. Herein, I use the dialectic of strategy and tactics to explore the ways in which smartphones are mobilised in order to ‘make do’ with protracted experiences of displacement. Three mediated practices of ‘making do’ are explored: non-mainstream news consumption as a tactic of self-care; mediated family practices as a tactic of hope; and nature photography as a tactic of creativity. In the context of a dehumanising strategy of migration containment, I will argue that everyday tactics of self-care, hope and creativity constitute affective forms of agency.
“…I unwittingly commenced this journey of discovery in my doctoral research (Richards, 2012), where at first I undertook evocative autoethnography as a reflexive methodology in order to “authorise the self” (Skeggs, 2002, p. 368), “sanction a particular sort of knowledge” (Page, 2017, p. 25) and overcome dysappearance. It was only in the process of reflecting in this way that I started to see that I actually needed to focus on the replication of power (Richards, 2012).…”
Section: My Experiences As An Ill Academicmentioning
As an academic with a chronic illness, it has taken me a while to understand shame’s impact on my academic identity and choices. In this article, through a process of narrative recuperation, I consider the challenges and contradictions of living as an academic with chronic kidney disease, an incurable and often debilitating illness that, for the most part, is invisible to others. By means of evocative autoethnography, I trace the trajectory of silencing shame I experienced around my condition in academia and I show how and why this changed over a number of years. My aim in doing this is to uncover subjugated knowledge of what it takes to live as a chronically ill academic and to be an advocate for other academics living with chronic illness. I theorise my study using Garland-Thomson, Shildrick and Leder, all of whom have worked with the othering effect of shame on the nonconforming body. These theorists have described ways of resisting shame and, partly thanks to them, I was able to find ways of fighting back and recovering. My intention in sharing these illness narratives is to speak back to a dominant discourse that favours invulnerability and a masculinised, disembodied way of being academic.
“…Drawing on Ahmed and Swan, a recognition‐based praxis of generous encounters understood in this way is less about speaking or acting, than it is about listening and being ‘stopped in our tracks’ by what cannot be articulated through coherent, narrative linearity or documentary evidence. For researchers, it involves adopting a posture of vulnerability that requires us to be receptive to the limits of knowing and a willingness to stay with not knowing what to do or say (Page, ). As Swan () puts it, staying with not knowing involves listening In ways that are elusive and not easily reduced to prescription … encouraging us to challenge our ignorance‐making practices of Othering by listening to the unknowable and ungraspable.…”
When the Western Australian government announced in 2010 that Indigenous people would be compensated for unpaid wages, a Yindjibarndi woman named Bigali Hanlon submitted an application to access her government files so that she could lodge a claim. At the age of four, Bigali was taken from her home in Mulga Downs, Western Australia to live in a church‐run hostel for ‘fair‐skinned’ Indigenous children until she was sent into indentured domestic service as a teenager. Three large files document her history. These files, combined with in‐depth interviews, and a film about Bigali and other Indigenous Australian people, Walking Tracks Back Home, form the basis of this article. In reflecting on the issues raised by Bigali's story, we draw on feminist writing on the costs associated with being called to give an account of oneself, considering how listening might form the basis of an ethics of recognition in feminist praxis.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
