Ahead of the second ARP workshop, I read Ellis and Bochner’s ‘Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography’, (Bochner and Ellis, 2006). The text took the format of a transcript of a conversation between a couple – Ellis and Bochner – who are also academics, about their practice of autoethnography.
Now revisiting my notes on this session, about a month and a half after doing this reading, and as I’m about to actually do my analysis and write up of my own research, I’m quite interested in the fact that the ‘research’ for this article and the analysis takes place in the home environment between a romantic couple. The focus of my own ARP is around expanding ideas of what constitutes research and information gathering. I wonder if this method of analysis could play a role in my own write up. I’m also live with my romantic partner who is also my artistic collaborator and a teacher. As I sit in the living room, writing this blog post, my partner spontaneously dances to Seal’s hit single ‘Kiss from a Rose’, which I’m playing from my work laptop. I like to play this song as it gets me in a creative mood for writing. For the purpose of motivating me around this blog, I’ve also started to watch Sex in the City from the beginning. For now, I am Carrie.
While Bochner and Ellis’ article does not explicitly bring to the surface the impact of ‘love’, ‘romance’ or simply ‘cohabitation’ on their analysis, it feels so there in the subtext. How could I bring this into my own research, analysis and write up?
I’ll come back to this, but for now here are the notes I made immediately following the workshop:
In a discussion of Ellis and Bochner’s text with other PGCert students, Ingrid found the reading very emotive. She had to stop several times and reread – it was difficult to focus on the ’academic’, because of the emotions involved in the text, but also outside of the text. This provoked a discussion around the experience of being an academic during challenging times. Simply put: how does an ongoing genocide bite into our reading?
While I definitely empathise with the question above, specifically reading this particular text, I had quite opposite experience. It was one of disconnect, a feeling I was being manipulated. This is because I felt there was no transparency in how this conversation was turned into a research paper. Was it recorded in the moment and then transcribed? Was it recalled from their (or one of their) memory? Did they even have a conversation or was it a complete fiction? It’s not that I think conversation or even a fictional conversation can’t be a methodology, but I want to know how partial it is, partial to whom. For me Bocher and Ellis are overly preoccupied with justifying autoethnography as a research method, and so they miss out on the real fun and juicy content that autoethnography can have. I want to know the positionality that this paper is written from. Did traffic from outside their window interrupt their conversation briefly? Do they gaze longingly at one another at any point? Did they mutually agree this to be an accurate transcript of their conversation? Did they edit any of their answers, once it got accepted to a fancy academic journal?
One of the reasons I’m critical of this essay is that I’m currently embarking on a similar process myself – me and four other academics from CSM and University of California Santa Cruz are currently writing an essay on Feminist Methods in Documentary Film for an anthology published by Bloomsbury Press. Like Ellis and Bochner, we are using conversation as method. We met over three days in New York this summer and had several conversations, which we recorded and then got transcribed word for word. As well as allowing people to share ideas more freely than they would within the confines of ‘academic writing’, conversation, we found, often generates far more words, far easily. This left almost three times past the word count required of our essay, and so meant there was quite an involved editing process. Far from being a true to life transcript, the finished version of our paper is bits of conversations from different days, spaces and times collaged together to appear like a very natural conversation. And yes, I did take out some of the ‘really’s and the ‘like’s. And rephrased/ added to some points.
ALL THIS IS TO SAY, should I wish to take an autoethnographic approach for my PGCert, it will require a certain amount of transparency and a certain amount of persuasion, for what I write to be taken seriously. For the reader not to feel hoodwinked, for the reader to trust what I’m saying really happened. Curiously, I’ve never felt hoodwinked when reading bell hooks’ autoethnographic writing, for instance in Teaching to Transgress (hooks, 1993). Perhaps it’s because bell integrates her positionality, and LOVE, which Eliis and Bochner kind of obscure. They seem a little too poised.