WITHDRAWN: New Materialist Auto-Ethico-Ethnography: Agential-Realist Authenticity and Objectivity in Intimate Scholarship

• In Event: 61.070 - Sheraton Roundtable 10 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 61.070-7 - (Re)Thinking Auto-Ethnography and Biography

Abstract

This study explored how authenticity and objectivity in autoethnography are viewed from a new materialist perspective, particularly through Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism. The findings showed that in terms of authenticity, new materialism suggests a non-representationalist voice, which argues against the need to exactly mirror preexisting phenomena in some metaphysical world through language in traditional research paradigms. Writing autoethnographies now is less a way of telling than a way of knowing in being. An agential-realist account of objectivity posits that instead of being distanced from what the subjects of cognition are observing, objectivity entails accountability and responsibility to what is real. This understanding of objectivity engenders a reconfiguring of data as diffractive phenomena in an auto-ethico-ethnography.

Author

• Chau Bao Vu, Louisiana State University