Fieldnotes, affect and action: Reflecting on lived experience to foster research for social change

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: What about fieldnotes in comparative and international education research? Approaches, practices and ethical considerations

Proposal

As a graduate student with an anthropological background who uses ethnographic methodologies in her current educational research, this paper will reflect on how fieldnotes were held up in my undergraduate training as conventional tools to analyse research and to make sense of the ‘other.’ In contrast, my fieldnotes focus on my feelings of otherness within academia, and help to ground my own lived experiences and those of young people I work with in spaces where our voices are often quantified and obfuscated through research. My work focuses on speaking with youth who are precariously housed or homeless about their access to education. In Canada, at least 35,000 young people experience homelessness in a given year (Gaetz, 2014), and drop-out rates for these youth are significantly higher than those for housed youth (between 63%-90% (Liljedahl et al., 2013)). I position these trends as not only an educational inequality in need of societal address, but as a deeply affective and urgent personal issue. As someone who was once in a similar position as my participants are today, my fieldnotes often function as a space for me to work through past trauma, conflicting feelings, and tensions with my role as a researcher. Being “in the field” is often anything but clearly delineated from being outside of it. My fieldnotes are filled with rage, disillusionment, sadness, and deeply personal reflections, but also help me make sense of how research can contribute to social change. Here, I will explore how my gendered and classed position within academia organizes how my fieldnotes become absent in my own writing, and how I navigate my knowledge and personal experiences of the very phenomena I hope to analyze. How do students who have grown up in poverty or experienced housing precarity learn to censor their own opinions and voices? And how can we resist the hierarchization of knowledge, which often ignores these experiences, in order to foster important “nuance” and “emotional subjectivity” (Ferrell, 2009, p. 80)? I will argue that fieldnotes have been an integral (though often painful) site in finding my academic identity, and link this process to finding strategies to pull my own narrative out of old notebooks for both educational and activist purposes with youth I work with today.

Author

• Jayne Malenfant, McGill University