Rose Richards (Researcher, Stellenbosch University)

Editorial Note: In this piece, Rose guides us through her journey of using autoethnography as a research methodology for her doctoral research. She highlights the emotional rollercoaster of such a methodology and how different writing styles provided varying insights into her story. 

 

I did my doctoral research on myself! Let me tell you about it and about autoethnography, the methodology I used to do it. If you think autoethnography sounds like a type of ethnography, you’d be right—but also wrong. It developed out of ethnography as a way of showing the complex relationship between researcher and subject of research, but in recent decades it has taken on an identity of its own.

While previously not well-known as a methodology, these days autoethnography is much-used and much-misunderstood. It is a methodology that is easy to use—but easy to use badly. The methodology is used to investigate subjectivity in various contexts in a wide range of disciplines to explore how personal experience interacts with culture, society and political structures. Essentially, all you have to do is be willing to write about yourself, so you can imagine how things might go wrong.

To start with, people do not always anticipate how difficult it is to write about yourself. There are various reasons for why this is so. Firstly, you do not know yourself or your story as well as you think you do. Secondly, you almost always underestimate how much emotional energy telling your story is going to require. Thirdly, you will certainly underestimate how long it will take you to conduct an autoethnography effectively.

When I set out to conduct an autoethnography of my own experience of kidney disease I had a very clear goal—I was going to teach a lesson to some financial people who considered me a high insurance risk. I had been angered by their ignorance of my disease and the implications of their decisions for my financial life. I wanted to give them insights into what the lived experience of kidney disease is really like and reclaim my identity which had been misrepresented by credit advisors and others after transplant. Pretty soon I discovered that my story was much more complex and far more emotionally loaded than I could have realised.

Through a process of journaling, academic and creative writing, and textual research I found that a different, foreign story emerged. True, it concerned my identity post-transplant, but not in a way I could have imagined. This story was a tale of uncertainty, fear, loss and vulnerability. Living with a transplant isn’t easy, even when the transplant works properly. You have to work at keeping the transplant healthy so you will always be a patient, even when you are well, taking daily medication, going for check-ups and managing side effects. Your past health misadventures tend to haunt you at the strangest times, and, along the way, you regularly see people die of the same illness you have.

Of course, I knew these things starting out—but I had never put them into a narrative or really thought about what they meant to me. Until I had started my autoethnography I had considered them to be a number of small, disconnected incidents instead of part of a bigger and more complex picture. I had to change my mind a lot while conducting the autoethnography. 

I changed the shape of my study in terms of the focus and key areas, and in terms of the way I wrote about it. At first, I wanted to tell a story and then analyse it, but as my ideas evolved, I realised that this would not yield the nuanced quality of data that I needed. So I began to play with form by mixing different writing styles together. This gave me a space in which to play with ideas by juxtaposing different styles and voices. It also led to an extraordinary experience.

I started writing about the part of kidney disease about which I felt most confident—dialysis. I warmed up with some creative writing where I wrote short impressionistic pieces about what I remembered feeling. When I use creative writing, I find I write almost unthinkingly. It just flows. After that, I put the stories aside and started to write about qualitative research on the experience of dialysis. I write differently for academic purposes, as you might expect. I structured my argument about dialysis being a lifesaver and how I appreciated being on it, cited appropriately and then looked for quotes from my stories to further substantiate my points. I could find none. It was as if someone else had written the stories. They were haunted by imagery of death, fear, shame, and loss. And yet I did appreciate dialysis. I used to call it my lifeline. I realised that both accounts were valid and that my experience was more complex than I had expected. I also saw that both accounts had significant gaps. What was left out in each was almost more interesting than what was included. By using two different ways of writing, I came to see the story in the gaps, omissions, and contradictions between the two, rather than in the written words.

This made me realise that autoethnography was a slippery creature with a lot of potential for storytelling and a lot of potential for easing you into a false sense of security. I would have to be vigilant, while giving myself space to play. I approached the next two chapters differently, using journal writing for one and a lot of memory work for the other. 

As I progressed, I found that I needed to take a “Wordsworthian” approach. Wordsworth was a nineteenth-century English poet who created his poems by recollecting in tranquillity the intense emotions that had given rise to his initial ideas. I obtained a measure of tranquillity by writing in my research journal before starting to write my chapters. If I could feel something triggering me, I would dutifully stop my academic writing and return to my journal to process it. My research journal is full of ignoble rantings about articles that angered me and dissections of difficult emotional states. This process allowed me to feel my feelings and contain them. When I reread my research journal notes, I felt as if I had dealt with some sticky stuff and could move forward. This process helped me to write more objectively about deeply personal things, which brought my work from the personal into the public domain, by making my individual experience more relatable to a general audience and less self-indulgent.

My background is literary, and this influenced how I wrote, as well as the types of imagery that I chose. It was possibly also a reason I took such pleasure in playing with writing styles and forms. However, it is worth noting that autoethnography is notorious for blurring boundaries, between personal and public, insider and outsider, academic and creative/aesthetic, acceptable and taboo. It is a methodology of liminality, allowing you to explore what happens in the spaces between things and to inhabit more than one identity at a time. 

Autoethnography is a methodology that allows you as researcher to bring your own voice and experience into a domain where doing that is considered taboo, and doing this allows you to question power relations around whose voice counts and how much. This may be no more (or less) drastic than creating space for a minority voice that talks back to power. But be warned—autoethnography will change you in ways you can’t predict and while that is happening your emotional life may become a rollercoaster.

There are lots of different disciplinary and theoretical approaches to autoethnography. If you want to read more about autoethnography, here are some pieces I found useful.

• Andrew, S. (2017). Searching for an Autoethnographic Ethic. Oxford: Routledge.
• Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as Method. California: Left Coast Press.
• Chang, H., F. Wambura Ngunjiri and K.-A. C. Hernandez. (2013). Collaborative Autoethnography. California: Left Coast Press.
• Ellis, C. (2009). Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work. California: Left Coast Press.
• Muncey, T. (2005). Doing Autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 4(1): 69-86. doi:10.1177/160940690500400105
• Reed-Danahay, D. (1997). Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. New York: Berg.

 

Author Biography

Rose Richards is the head of Stellenbosch University's Writing Lab. Her research interests include life writing, medical humanities, and autoethnography. She also does advocacy work for people living with kidney disease.

Email: rr2@sun.ac.za