Reflexivity With and Without Self

• In Event: Of Life Real and Unreal: An Ethics of the Heart

Abstract

Heshusius’s (1995) exercise in purposeless listening is an important way for beginning teachers to discover the obfuscating effects of their concerns with self and to practice letting go of these concerns to achieve a high level of attentiveness to the other. It is also a valuable activity for prospective researchers to engage in and this paper reports on the experiences of doctoral students who were asked to take part in a conversation with a young person and to reflect upon the nature of self and the relationship with the other within that conversation.
Doctoral research students appear to find the expectation of a high level of reflexivity in their research acceptable at a rational level, but difficult to enact in practice (Allan and Slee, 2008). They are encouraged to articulate multiple researcher selves (Peshkin, 1988), to discern the way in which these selves interact with their research and to accommodate competing ‘spaces of points of view’ (Bourdieu, 1999) but this hyper-vigilance of self and others may lead to a form of ‘vanity reflexivity’ (Kenway and McLeod, 2004, p, 528) or narcissism (Krizek, 2003) which detracts from the focus of the research and from research relations. Furthermore, as Heshusius (1995) argues, “attention to others which is shaped by one’s own concerns impairs one’s capacity to ‘really listen’” (p. 117). The growth of popularity of reflexive genres such as autoethnography and performance—and a forgetfulness of the other—may prove to be somewhat unwholesome.
This paper reports how doctoral students’ efforts to let go of the self, through a purposeless listening exercise, led to a more sophisticated understanding both of the role and function of reflexivity and of their capacity to attend to others. The students’ recognition of the need to both understand their own selves and to direct attention away from it is represented as an aporetic demand (Derrida, 1993). This demand consists of double contradictory imperatives, neither of which can ever be wholly satisfied but which has the potential for more productive and responsible research relations.

Author

• Julie E. Allan, The University of Birmingham