A Continued Autoethnographic Tracing of the “Self” in Relation to #MeToo and Higher Education

• In Event: Tell Me How It Really Happened: Qualitative Analyses in Education Research

Abstract

Purpose
Researchers are expected to be “objective”—to identify and disregard their biases in the research process and work from a neutral viewpoint, disregarding emotion. Emotion is seen as inferior. Emotion is vulnerable (code for weak, for having less power). Emotion is also considered biased (suggesting that someone who has not personally experienced a topic of inquiry is without bias, rather than biased in a different way). This framing of emotion has a legacy of silencing, excluding, and oppressing groups of people, particularly in academia. In this paper, I reflect on my analytic resistance to this narrative by outlining the autoethnographic process (Davies, 2002; McPhail et al., 2017; Spry, 2001) I used to examine classroom assemblages that provoked emotional responses, such as shame, in pedagogical spaces that centered the #MeToo movement (Author, 2021).
Perspectives
I draw on new materialism, an umbrella term for a collection of scholarship that explores how nature and culture (and other binary understandings such as reason/emotion, discourse/material, male/female) are neither mutually exclusive, hierarchical, or independent categories (Fox & Alldred, 2017). Instead, nature and culture actively shape one another (and other forces) in different ways, creating each event’s effects (or assemblage, as per Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). According to this perspective, everything in our world—from meaning-making, to bodily histories, to physical objects and beyond—is interrelated and in a constant state of becoming (Barad, 2003).
Methods and Data
To outline my new materialist, autoethnography method, I begin by outlining the three classroom events that centered the #MeToo movement and formed the foundation of my data: first as an undergraduate student, then as a graduate student and course co-developer, and finally as a sessional lecturer. My data consisted of my memories; artifacts, such as my course syllabi; feedback regarding past analyses; reading and writing about theory; and empirical data contextualizing the historical and sociopolitical contexts. In my analysis, I asked: What contributed to these assemblages? How do the forces interact and shape one another? Who is protected? Who is at risk? How might identifying these forces offer opportunities to reshape academic spaces, shift power, and create transformative spaces of learning for more people?
Results
My analytic process was far from an independent, introspective recount of my experiences as the name autoethnography may imply. The active decisions I made to deepen my analysis made visible what is often purposefully excluded in academia, and this translated into possibilities for my self and others—other scholars, educators, and learners. Autoethnography was not a simple step-by-step process. Like all matter, my autoethnography process was an interrelated, shifting assemblage.
Significance
Through my autoethnographic process, I opened myself up to challenging norms in academia and, in doing so, I highlighted how resisting these norms can be transformative sites of learning that can subsequently inform the creation of new learning assemblages. I highlight the value of using autoethnography and new materialism to examine emotional assemblages and how doing so can facilitate more socially-just research, education, and practice.

Author

• Angela Underhill, Women's College Hospital