The literature on CAE (Collaborative Autoethnography) Reflecting Allowed | Reflecting A... - 0 views
blog.mahabali.me/...-collaborative-autoethnography
collaborative autoethnography ethnography rhizo14 rhizomatic learning blog-post
shared by Vanessa Vaile on 30 Aug 14
- No Cached
-
collaborative autoethnography
-
Mainly this article (Geist-Martin et al) and this book (Chang et al)
-
plans to read this open access book on (non-collaborative) autoethnography
- ...78 more annotations...
-
open access article by Ellis et al on autoethnography (only skimmed it)
-
Disclaimer: I’m not a methodological purist, I’m an omnivore & a quilt-maker. I don’t even think ethnography believes in methodological purity; the researcher is the instrument even more so if it’s auto
-
So what was MY question?
-
how are people experiencing rhizo14?
-
I am interested in sub-topics of making connections and building community]
-
Why am I interested?
-
I would like to understand how other experienced this MOOC
-
it’s important to note the diverse ways in which the course was perceived by different people
-
I’m interested in what didn’t work. But I am also interested in what did work, and for whom.
-
this knowledge to help influence future designers of connected courses by highlighting the participant experience
-
it will always be partial
-
Geist-Martin et al cite Ellis (2004, p. 30) on autoethnography, and it captures how I feel about this approach
-
“The goal is to practice an artful, poetic, and empathic social science in which readers can keep in their minds and feel in their bodies the complexities of concrete moments of lived experience”
-
collaborative autoethnography rejects the traditional approach of disembodied academic research
-
came out of Chang et al is that there are three broad types of autoethnography
-
the type that emphasizes the auto (closer to autobiography, more narrative)
-
OR a type that focuses on the ethnography part (more analytical, relating one’s own experiences to the wider culture)
-
but any AE contains elements of both
-
I *think* in #rhizo14 we’re attempting something closer to the latter, but what we have at the moment is closer to the former.
-
the practice needs to move beyond mere storytelling in order to be research
-
Autoethnography needs to “use personal stories as windows to the world, through which we interpret how their selves are connected to their sociocultural contexts and how the contexts give meanings to their experiences and perspectives” (Chang et al, p. 18-19).
-
Geist-Martin et al’s & Chang et al’s critiques of their own process – here are some parts I wanted to highlight:
-
They looked for themes across their stories
-
They helped each other clarify certain aspects of each other’s stories
-
They critiqued and recognized ways in which their stories reproduced cultural stereotypes
-
They struggled with how to “cut” parts of their stories in order to make this paper
-
They mention how social activities they participated in, in each other’s lives, influenced how they wrote together
-
They talk about community-building that occurs because of the collaboration on the autoethnography itself
-
They raise ethical issues about how personal narratives actually refer to people outside the narrative itself and the ethics of such story-telling that will get published and scrutinized
-
Clearly, doing autoethnography collaboratively is meant to diversify the viewpoints on a topic, making the interpretation richer and more complex than just one person’s autoethnography. It also, of course, makes it more complicated to do. Easier to start than to finish
-
Chang et al mention 4 key dimensions of CAE:
-
Self-focused
-
Context-conscious
-
Researcher-visible
-
Critically dialogic
-
the more “critically dialogic” work is, the more it tends towards an analytic/ethnographic rather than evocative/biographical type of research
-
it makes sense to do evocative research on emotionally sensitive topics, where over-analyzing it might actually lose the essence of what is being researched
-
for tales of abuse, illness, etc., but not for #rhizo14 which is less of an emotionally taxing thing to talk about
-
Some more stuff about CAE:
-
Alternation between solo and group work
-
This part in Chang et al made me laugh because of its vagueness:
-
Chang et al call it an “iterative process”), there’s data collection at the beginning (which can keep happening as gaps are found via group negotiation); there’s data analysis and interpretation (where we seem to be at – and I think that might raise areas of gaps to go find data about or to re-write our narratives about – will explain later); and of course writing.
-
what matters is that I can basically do whatever I want, call it CAE, and set my own criteria for rigor I’m only half-kidding.
-
CAE as an emerging research practice should not be limited to a particular approach or style of representation
-
The authors suggest the following benefits of CAE (p. 25):
-
collective exploration of researcher subjectivity
-
power-sharing among researcher-participants
-
efficiency an enrichment in the research process
-
deeper learning about self and other
-
community-building
-
this quote (p. 26):
-
“CAE offers us a scholarly space to hold up mirrors to each other in communal self-interrogation and to explore our subjectivity in the company of one another”
-
this quote (p. 28):
-
“This kind of collaborative meaning-making requires that each team members be willing to be vulnerable and open with co-researchers in order to enable the deeper analysis and interrogation that enriches the final product”
-
the challenges of CAE:
-
Risk of incomplete trust to lead to premature consensus-building that compromises the data
-
Apparently quite difficult to do at a distance because of degree of closeness needed
-
Interdependency of research efforts
-
Mutlivocality can make each researcher influenced by the voices of others
-
Team effort
-
Ethics & confidentiality (this prob deserves a post on its own, but I’ll just give it a section here for now)
-
Ethics
-
Authors ask if CAE needs to go through IRB? Ours went through IRB. Not sure if they really understood the extent of what we were doing, but they approved it.
-
The biggest ethical issue I see is that when only indirectly reference others, we may be broaching on their confidentiality
-
We also need to be clear on who gets access to the data after we write our “report”, and how they can use it
-
We as individual autoethnographers also need to recognize the need to protect ourselves – how much are we revealing about ourselves and is it OK that all of that becomes open to public scrutiny as we publish it?
-
The incident over the use of our data during #et4online by Jen Ross and Amy Collier was a case in point – it is not that simple.
-
Ch 5 of that book about the data analysis side of things
-
emerging coding approach
-
I’ll just come back to one MAIN point that’s running through my mind (well, points, plural, but they are all related):
-
Can we get multiple autoethnogs out of this
-
How do we incorporate the views of people who wrote narratives in the autoethnog but who are not part of the team currently analyzing the data?
-
CAE implies that only the authors’ stories are told. Now the authors could react to stuff that happened by and with other people, but there are ethical issues in getting to deep with that
-
Can we use some of the other data in the narratives DIFFERENTLY? So not as autoethnog, but as narratives
-
The inherent “connectdness” of it all makes it almost paralyzing to imagine how we can tell our own stories (6-7 of us) without either implicating others, or needing to reference others
-
I usually do ethnography by using any and all data I can; this would mean referencing public blogs, etc.
-
I keep circling back to the same thing, right? There power questions, there are questions of who can tell whose story? There are multiple “others” in the “we” of autoethnography, and what do we do by telling our story and leaving out theirs?
-
What about the people who didn’t even blog visibly or at all, and so have no easy “trace” to find even if we wanted to incorporate their views?
