Authorial Reflexivity in Narrative Ethnography and Autoethnography: A Phenomenological Discussion
Location
1047
Format Type
Event
Format Type
Paper
Start Date
January 2018
End Date
January 2018
Abstract
This paper is based on phenomenology which can generally be considered the study of experience as manifest through individual or communal perception. Within qualitative research, one such experience to be studied is that of reflexivity as enacted by the individual writer or researcher. Reflexivity, in general terms, can be thought of as the researcher’s conscious awareness of how her/his own sociology, history, ideology, and Self affects her/his relationship with the research purpose, participants, setting, or data and thereby leaves an individualized or personalized mark on the research product such as a monograph, essay, article, or otherwise text. In leaving this final mark on the research text, the researcher’s reflexivity operates at different degrees of awareness that are commensurate with a sense of distance, or lack thereof, between the researcher and her/his research text. In this paper, I discuss how my own reflexivity, on a sliding scale between “acutely aware/textually distant” to “mostly unaware/textually close,” has transformed according to the evolution of my preferred qualitative research repertoires, which I would term as systematic, narrative ethnographic, and autoethnographic, respectively. I emphasize that it is with this last repertoire, my most recent and most preferred, where I feel the most at home with my reflexivity, which is situated toward the extreme of authorial unconsciousness and narrative submersion, as perhaps can be seen in my 2016 monograph. This leads me to conclude that a worthwhile phenomenological study would be the researcher’s mapping of her/his own footpath through reflexivity in her/his qualitative research.
Authorial Reflexivity in Narrative Ethnography and Autoethnography: A Phenomenological Discussion
1047
This paper is based on phenomenology which can generally be considered the study of experience as manifest through individual or communal perception. Within qualitative research, one such experience to be studied is that of reflexivity as enacted by the individual writer or researcher. Reflexivity, in general terms, can be thought of as the researcher’s conscious awareness of how her/his own sociology, history, ideology, and Self affects her/his relationship with the research purpose, participants, setting, or data and thereby leaves an individualized or personalized mark on the research product such as a monograph, essay, article, or otherwise text. In leaving this final mark on the research text, the researcher’s reflexivity operates at different degrees of awareness that are commensurate with a sense of distance, or lack thereof, between the researcher and her/his research text. In this paper, I discuss how my own reflexivity, on a sliding scale between “acutely aware/textually distant” to “mostly unaware/textually close,” has transformed according to the evolution of my preferred qualitative research repertoires, which I would term as systematic, narrative ethnographic, and autoethnographic, respectively. I emphasize that it is with this last repertoire, my most recent and most preferred, where I feel the most at home with my reflexivity, which is situated toward the extreme of authorial unconsciousness and narrative submersion, as perhaps can be seen in my 2016 monograph. This leads me to conclude that a worthwhile phenomenological study would be the researcher’s mapping of her/his own footpath through reflexivity in her/his qualitative research.
Comments
Keywords: Phenomenology, reflexivity, qualitative research, narrative ethnography, and autoethnography.