You Can't Go Home Again: An Auto-Ethnography of Educational Research in Post-Maria Puerto Rico

• In Event: 15.061 - MTCC Roundtable Session Two
  In Roundtable Session: 15.061-7 - Critical Approaches to Research

Abstract

As a Puerto Rican scholar in the diaspora, how is my role of researcher constituted, suspended, and interrupted in the aftermath of hurricane Maria? What multiple subjectivities do I inhabit as an ethnographer visiting my home island? How do I negotiate those subjectivities and identities with myself and with others? In this paper, I present an autoethnographic account of my first research trip to Puerto Rico after Maria. I look at the ways my identities interact and clash with each other and those I am working with, producing feelings of guilt, hope, and solidarity in spaces where people continually re-negotiate relationships of power and agency, resisting and at times reinforcing coloniality.

Author

• Aurora Santiago Ortiz, University of Massachusetts - Amherst