Weaving Different Discourses to Understand the Field: Mystory as an Analytical Tool

Abstract

The bricolage of discourses that is part of the mystory approach offers a way to make sense of disparate resources relevant to the study of everyday life. These resources can include popular culture and social media materials, interviews and observations, and academic literature. Here, I explain what mystory is, as well as how and why I fused together personal (autoethnographic), popular and different kinds of academic discourses as bricolage. By layering difference discourses (popular, field-based, academic) with personal reflections (memory), I created coherent narratives that explicitly answered research questions. By weaving these different discourses into distinct patterns of thinking and writing, I found a way to balance my voice alongside the voices of my research participants and other artifacts of their world of cafés, roasteries, coffee, and the Internet to overcome writers’ block. As such, this is also a story of how I found my voice through autoethnography.

Publish or perish

“…Poetry is an important feature to a field of academic writing I feel passionately committed to, autoethnography (Adams, Holman-Jones & Ellis, 2022;Bochner & Ellis, 2021;Kidd, 2018;Rinehart, 2018;Wang, 2021). While I tend to lean towards analytical over evocative forms of autoethnography (Piercy, 2022), I wish to continue to stretch and flex what is considered to be legitimate and valid as researching and writing practice in academia. It is with these intentions that I offer up my poem, "Writing for publication," for consideration and reflection.…”