Employing Intimate Ethnography, Performance, and Dialogue to “Craft a Reckoning of the Past for Lessons About the Future”

• In Event: Family in/as Fieldwork: Challenges and Possibilities of Researching (With) One's Own Family

Abstract

This paper reports on the process of designing and engaging feminist research methodology for my (in progress) dissertation, titled Bootstrap Boricuas: A Family Performing and Exploring Cultural Assimilation. I describe the genesis of the project -- which uses narrative, performance (auto) ethnography, and dialogue to explore the relational, ethical, and political implications of cultural assimilation in my U.S. family of Puerto Rican descent. I focus particularly on the how and why of my choice of methodology and methods, as I address the ethical and relational perils (experienced and foreseen) of engaging in this form of intimate ethnography (Waterston & Rylko-Bauer, 2006), as well as the exigency of employing a form of new ethnography (Saukko, 2002) as a dialogic methodology to help me connect personal/family narratives with larger social paradigms. There are indeed perils and joys in working closely with members of my family of origin as research participants and sometimes as co-researchers. In this paper I explore the perils and revel in the joys of engaging research that influences and is influenced by my relationships with my mother and brothers and our family relationship as a whole.

Author

• Ellen Correa, University of Massachusetts Amherst