Academic librarians have complex and numerous professional identities. We are researchers, teachers, artists, administrators, and technologists. Many of us have advanced degrees in other fields, in which we may or may not remain active. We grapple with burnout and impostor syndrome, experience and confront racism in our workplaces, and are strongly affected by university politics and bureaucracy. In The Self as Subject: Autoethnographic Research into Identity, Culture, and Academic Librarianship, the authors tease out these complexities using autoethnographic methodology.
If we use stories as “equipment for living,” as tools to understand, negotiate, and make sense of situations we encounter, then a discussion of narrative ethics is a relevant, if not required, endeavor. In other words, if we learn how to think, feel, and interact with society via narratives, we also learn ethical ways of being with others, “correct” and “appropriate” ways that serve as foundations for many of our interactions. This latter epistemological assumption guides this study. In this article, the author synthesizes ethical themes of life research, themes of narrative privilege, media, and evaluative criteria. He then illustrates how these themes influence narrative inquiry.
This essay focuses on intersections of reflexivity as both an orientation to research and a writing practice that brings together the method of autoethnography and the paradigm of queer theory. Taking seriously autoethnography’s and queer theory’s commitments to uncertain, fluid, and becoming subjectivities, multiple forms of knowledge and representations, and research as an agent of change, we write a series of reflexively queer personal texts. These texts ask us—as writers and readers in a community of scholars—to question our desire to name and claim stories and to embrace the gifts and challenges of open texts and the importance of reflexivity as we test the limits of knowledge and certainty.
This chapter details the authors’ approach to understanding and practicing autoethnography. It begins by defining autoethnography and describing its history and emergence within qualitative social research and within psychology. It then proposes general guiding principles for those seeking to do autoethnography, principles such as using personal experience, acknowledging existing research, understanding and critiquing cultural experience, using insider knowledge, breaking silence, and maneuvering through pain, confusion, anger, and uncertainty. It continues with a discussion of autoethnography as a process and as a product, and a method that can take a variety of representational forms. After offering ways to evaluate and critique autoethnography, it concludes with a discussion of autoethnography as an orientation to the living of life and an approach that has the potential of making life better—for the writer, reader, participant, and larger culture.
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