AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AND THE STUDY OF ACADEMIC LITERACIES: EXPLORING SPACE, TEAM RESEARCH AND MENTORING

AUTOETNOGRAFIA E O ESTUDO DOS LETRAMENTOS ACADÊMICOS: EXPLORANDO ESPAÇO, PESQUISA EM EQUIPE E MENTORIA

ABSTRACT

Autoethnography is the study of culture through the study of self (ELLIS, 2004; ELLIS et al, 2011). In this paper, we explore the value of autoethnography in the study of academic literacies. We draw on our own experiences as ethnographers and autoethnographers of literacy to provide illustrative examples. We show how autoethnography has provided a fresh understanding of the role of place and space in developing academic writing across countries and between English and Spanish (OLMOS-LÓPEZ, 2019). We discuss the value of team autoethnography in researching academic writing (TUSTING et al., 2019). And we reflect together on our own journey of development as academic writers, showing how a mentoring relationship has been part of both of our trajectories. The paper aims to argue for the value of autoethnography as an approach to studying academic literacy practices, particularly in providing insight into identity and personal experience.

Keywords:
autoethnography; academic literacies; place

RESUMO

Autoetnografia é o estudo da cultura através do estudo de si (ELLIS, 2004; ELLIS et al, 2011). Nesse artigo, exploramos o valor da autoetnografia no estudo dos letramentos acadêmicos. Recorremos à nossa experiência como etnógrafas para fornecer exemplos ilustrativos. Mostramos como a autoetnografia tem propiciado a compreensão dos papeis do lugar e do espaço no desenvolvimento da escrita acadêmica em diferentes países e entre inglês e espanhol (OLMOS-LÓPEZ, 2019). Descrevemos o valor da autoetnografia no estudo da escrita acadêmica (TUSTING et al., 2019). Também refletimos juntas sobre nossa própria jornada de desenvolvimento como escritoras acadêmicas, enfatizando como uma relação de mentoria foi fundamental em ambas as trajetórias. O artigo busca defender o valor da autoetnografia como abordagem para o estudo dos letramentos acadêmicos, particularmente por lançar luz em questões relacionadas à identidade e experiência pessoal.

Palavras-chave:
autoetnografia; letramentos acadêmicos; lugar

INTRODUCTION

This paper aims to explore the contribution of autoethnographic approaches in the study of academic writing practices in situated contexts. It is rooted in a dialogic engagement between the two authors which emerged from the mentoring relationship we describe below. In the paper, we illustrate our discussions of research literature with our own autoethnographic reflections, to exemplify the insights this work provides on the importance of place and space in academic writing careers, on writing in team research, and on mentoring relationships. Autoethnography positions academic writers both as objects of research, and as subjects researching their own situated contexts; in this paper we are ourselves in both of these positions.

Ellis et al. (2011) define autoethnography as a method which combines characteristics of autobiography and ethnography. They characterise autobiographers as often writing about epiphanies, that is, moments that had a significant impact in the writer’s life, while ethnographers try to develop understanding of a culture. In the combination of the two, Ellis et al. state that “when researchers doautoethnography, they retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity” (p. 276). From this perspective, writing involves reflection and thinking. It is a central part of the process of doing an autoethnography. As Adams et al. (2015) argue, writing is “a way of coming to know an experience better or differently. [Hence,] autoethnographers often start with a journal entry, narrative, poetry, blogs… or other forms of personal writing in which authors explore their experiences with the goal of understanding those experiences” (p. 68).

In this paper, we combine engagement with research literature with individually and collectively constructed autoethnographic accounts of aspects of our own experiences with academic literacies, to frame theoretical insights that can contribute to the growing understanding of authoethnography as an epistemological approach in the field of academic literacy studies (see Green et al. 2012 on ethnography as epistemology). By (re)producing how we individually and collectively developed dialogic autoethnographic accounts, we identify key constructs of space and place critical to understanding academic literacies as social constructions, as well as exploring the processes of dialogue between ourselves and other researchers that we developed to inscribe accounts of particular dimensions of academic literacy production. In this way, we are following Ellis et al.s’ (2011) approach of retrospectively and selectively writing about experiences which exemplify certain aspects of our respective academic cultures. Our goal in presenting these experiences and our dialogic approach to constructing and writing our autoethnography is grounded in shared discussions of our academic literacy histories, rooted in the mentoring relationships that we describe. By reconstructing our dialogic process of constructing autoethnographic accounts of academic writing in places, spaces, communities and relationships, and framing key theoretical constructs critical to this process, we demonstrate the value of an autoethnographic perspective in enriching the theoretical understandings of the complex and developing experiences of writers and others in the field of academic literacies research.

1. AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC STUDIES OF ACADEMIC PRACTICES

To situate the approach that grounded the construction of our dual autoethnographies, we will share a series of episodes in which we seek to develop and illustrate the critical dimension of understanding academic writing processes as situated phenomena. We will thereby make visible how autoethnography is both a process of research, and a way of developing new insights into the personal and collective academic literacies processes and events that we have encountered in differing academic and social contexts. Before this, the presentation of literature framing authoethnography as an emerging approach to academic literacy research that follows is designed to locate the developments in this research field, to build understanding of this developing approach, and to raise issues that our author team explored in developing our autoethnographic perspectives.

2. ROOTS AND DEVELOPMENTS OF AUTOETHNOGRAPHY GUIDING OUR STUDY OF ACADEMIC LITERACIES

To date, autoethnography has been predominantly an enterprise carried out by academics; therefore, it is no surprise that many autoethnographic works focus specifically on academics’ own lives and practices. While the well-known work of Ellis and Bochner (e.g. BOCHNER & ELLIS, 2016) focuses centrally on the emotional experiences of the self-as-academic, other work adopts the approach that Reed-Danahay (2009, p. 31) calls “critical autoethnography … in which we examine our own institutional and professional contexts with an eye not only toward a better understanding of ourselves as anthropologists, but also a more vigorous reflection on the institutional practices and fields in which we operate”. This paper is informed by both of these perspectives. We reflect on our experiences, centred in our institutional/professional context, and are critical about their implications, how our individual experiences might reflect others’ and therefore provide a deeper understanding of academic literacy practices. As we will make visible in this study of our own writing and histories as ethnographers within the field of academic literacies, autoethnography is framed by the following definition by Adams et al. (2015):

The term autoethnography invokes the self (auto), culture (ethno), and writing (graphy). When we do autoethnography, we study and write culture from the perspective of the self. (…) we look inward-into our identities, thoughts, feelings and experiences-and outward-into our relationships, communities, and cultures. (ADAMS et al., 2015, p. 46).

While this definition captures our perspective on ethnography, autoethnography has been criticized by scholars from other disciplines. For instance, Delamont (2007), writing as a sociologist, presents six arguments against autoethnography: “it cannot fight familiarity, it cannot be published ethically, it is experiential and not analytic, it focuses on the wrong side of the power divide, [...] it abrogates our duty to go out and collect data, [...] [and] we are not interesting enough to be the subject matter of sociology”. She further characterizes this form of ethnography as being “literary and intellectually lazy” as it is essentially based on the reflection of the ethnographer. This critique dismisses the work of introspection, the value of ‘making the familiar strange’, and the process of analysing one’s own experiences in a social and cultural context in a way that can provide understanding of issues others might be facing. The work of the academics discussed below shows the weakness of Delamont’s arguments and makes visible why we frame autoethnography from our perspective as ethnographers of literacy as a conceptually grounded approach in the study of culture.

3. AUTOETHNOGRAPHERS AS CRITICAL RESEARCHERS

In this section, we present studies that make visible how academic autoethnographers develop critiques of their context through their personal accounts of the effects of the structural conditions of higher education. These demonstrate, among other things, that academics do not necessarily always fall on the ‘wrong side’ of the power divide as Delamont claims. This work includes, for instance, Meneley and Young’s (2005) collection of essays, some of which engage directly in constructing and theorizing aspects of the institutional university context, including peer review, research funding, and the implicit values built into community-building practices of student employment in US universities. The focus on the institutional histories of the authors makes visible not only the factors shaping their writing practices but also the situated nature of the institutional structures that frame the lives of writers and students.

Strathern’s (2000) edited collection focuses on one particular aspect of the institutional structures that Meneley and Young (2015) engage with, with contributions analysing how an audit culture and the associated accountability practices within particular institutions are shaping academics’ experiences and thus what they produce. Mendick (2014) adds further insights into the challenges facing academics in her reflection on her experiences of productivity pressures and online communication, that led to her identifying problematic connections between both ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ scholarship and the neoliberal model of the university.

Thomson’s (2017) autoethnography focuses on the institutional structures of education systems as experienced through her own personal career history through a range of senior leadership positions. She identifies the contradictions (and rewards) associated with a desire to change and improve the academic system by succeeding within it. Her reflections provide insight into how feminist ideals about making a difference can unintentionally become appropriated by the existing power structures when people become part of the systems that they seek to change. She shows how such tensions can be navigated within higher education by holding onto a moral rationale for writing and publishing, in the teeth of performativity demands, and by building research relationships with others who share these moral perspectives.

Badley (2014) provides additional insights into writing and academic career success, in his reflections on his relationship with writing through his long academic career, moving from a relatively unfocused ‘scrabbling’ and ‘scribbling’, through writers block and serious illness, to a more productive ‘scribing’ and ‘scrubbing’ (writing and editing) phase in later years, highlighting and challenging the dominant managerialist and neoliberal perspectives in universities through the lens of his writing experience. The particular value of this work is in providing specific and personalised explanations of the real effects of structural conditions, both on academics themselves and on their processes of teaching, writing and producing knowledge.

An especially evocative critical account is provided by Warren (2017), who focuses on how technologies of performance management associated with the national research evaluation system in the UK, the Research Excellence Framework (REF), produce academics as neoliberal subjects. Warren identifies the structures of normativity within which this operates and the potential harm this can cause individuals, particularly through the intensification of work and its justification within dominant discourses. He tells a powerful personal story of his embodied experiences of anxiety and dissociation, while he was still desperately attempting to enact the identity of a responsible, efficient, competent academic, and traces this crisis back to operating under the constant evaluation of academic normativity. Adopting a similarly evocative approach, Ellis (2011) uses novelistic techniques of dialogue with real and imagined voices and evocation of personal experience to reflect on the stress, burnout and overload that she and her colleagues and friends experience in their working lives. Where much of the work cited here connects personal experiences explicitly to well-developed theoretical models of the neoliberal university, Ellis’ critique of structural conditions is left implicit.

4. DIVERSE AUTOETHNOGRAPHERS: SHIFTING THE FOCUS FROM OBJECTS TO RESEARCHING SUBJECTS

In this section, we present autoethnographic critiques of challenges experienced by particular groups of academics. The studies present, draw on, and inscribe, the experiences of people who are in different ways minoritized and disempowered in higher education. One critical study by Maritz and Prinsloo (2015) reflects on their identities as queer academics in South Africa, using a co-created ethnographic narrative to provide insight into their complex biographical journeys through ongoing processes and cycles of becoming. Mayuzumi et al.’s (2007) dialogic autoethnographic paper adds further understandings of the potential afforded by co-construction in autoethnography. Their process of collective reflection as a group of international graduate students challenges stereotypes around Japanese women students, simplistic notions of culture and multiculturalism, and the constructed invisibility they have faced in classrooms, and explores the potential of collaborative dialogue for healing. Their process of constructing a collective autoethnography, representing multiple social and academic experiences, adds further insights into how “autoethnography” lays the potential for developing collective understandings of critical issues by reformulating the reference of the author --- from object to researching subject.

Hernandez et al. (2015) adds further insights into the value of autoethnographic perspectives in understanding the impact of diverse participants in particular social spaces. These researchers reflect on their academic careers as “foreign-born female faculty of colour”, identifying the strategies that they used to succeed in US higher education, and the value of cultivating a unique standpoint which combines outsider and insider identities. Such accounts bring to light experiences and voices which are otherwise under-represented in accounts of academic practices, developing critique where appropriate but also showing the writers’ own agency in their lives and careers.

The studies in this section, therefore, have made visible the power of collective biographies in critically examining the lived experiences of the authors (not author). This perspective is one that guided our own work reported in later sections. Like the authors here, we co-constructed our autoethnographic accounts to make visible the core concepts which inform, in our case, our developing understandings of the particular aspects of academic literacies which our accounts centre on.

5. AUTOETHNOGRAPHIES OF DOCTORAL RESEARCH

Doing a PhD is a key phase in the development of academic literacies and identities. It is the point of transition between a student and a researcher identity. Autoethnographies of this process bear witness to the intensity and identity-transformative nature of the PhD experience, and can help us to understand the particular significance of individuals’ lives, histories and emotional experiences in this part of the academic career process, as academic literacy practices are being acquired and developed. Stanley (2014) makes the point that little is known about the diversity of the personal, embodied, lived emotions and experiences of PhD candidates. She draws on ‘travel zines’ written during her own PhD to share her journey as a mature distance-education PhD student, with the metaphor of ‘journey’ having added meaning for her as a member of the backpacker community. By exploring her own difficulties and anxieties in depth, she hopes to help other students and supervisors experiencing challenges. She calls for a new genre of academic literature in which students provide ‘travel narratives’ of their research experiences. Eisenbach (2013) draws on journal entries and vignettes to convey the tensions she experienced completing her doctorate as a new mother while also working full-time as a teaching assistant, seeking to open up discussion around the needs of graduate students who are also parents. Such autoethnographies use creative writing and multimodal approaches to convey aspects of the challenges of doing a PhD which are not as easily evoked by more conventional forms of academic writing. Our understandings of the development of academics’ literacy practices through the different phases of their careers can be enriched by such work.

6. AUTOETHNOGRAPHIES OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

This section reviews work which focuses on the contribution of autoethnography for understanding how academics develop the literacies and identities associated with teaching and learning. Warren (2011) calls for an autoethnographic approach to be built into our reflexive teaching development, showing through reflection on his own teaching history the value of understanding what we as teachers bring to the classroom. Trahar (2013) analyses the development of her own teaching and supervision practices, illustrated - as so often in autoethnographic accounts - with short narrative descriptions of key moments, presented as ‘scenes’, followed by an autoethnographic account of her own academic development as a teacher and researcher. By adopting this approach, she implicitly challenges the traditions of Western critical scholarship and research that she is explicitly interrogating her teaching of in the article. In such work, the reflection on the experiences of the self that is characteristic of autoethnography serves as a basis for the development of a model of pedagogy which recognises the significance of the person and their practices and histories in the learning and teaching interaction.

Bennett et al. (2015) use a group autoethnography to explore their complex professional and academic identities as ‘Scholarship of Teaching and Learning’ academics working in academic support centres, combining identities as disciplinary researchers and teachers, generalist academic literacies teachers, and scholars of educational research. They build an account based on collecting many first-person narratives and identifying patterns across them to produce a multi-vocal narrative of feeling misunderstood and invisible within the broader university, stagnating within a hidden disciplinary identity, and not truly embodying the identity of an educational researcher. Despite the difficulties of articulating these different aspects of identity, their account also identifies the potential of the ambiguous space in which they belonged, and the value of creating a shared sense of identity through the very process of naming and articulating this ‘chimaeric’ identity. Here, again, autoethnography provides a basis for a powerful critique of taken-for-granted aspects of academia - in this case, hierarchies of disciplinary identity - which additionally contains within it possibilities for resistance.

7. AUTOETHNOGRAPHIES OF PARTICULAR ACADEMIC PRACTICES

In the previous sections, we have presented studies that focused on critiques of the institutional and structural contexts of higher education, and on the social contexts and processes shaping academics’ identities and careers. In this section, we shift the focus to explore autoethnographies that focus on quite specific and particular academic practices. The new academic literacy practices associated with digital communication forms one area where autoethnography has made a contribution to our understanding. Davies and Merchant (2007), for instance, provide a reflective account of their experiences of academic blogging in the early days of blogs, exploring how blogs operate as new types of interactive texts. This study was undertaken to identify the potential different functions that blogs can have as part of broader academic life. In another study, lisahunter (2015) reflects more broadly on the relationship between academia and technology, describing in particular the painful ‘smarts’ associated with participation in the digital world. lisahunter explores the negative emotional responses associated with many aspects of technology, supported by detailed extracts of digital data, and the implications of such ‘smarts’ for the developing nature of academic work. In studies like these, autoethnography provides a way to explore the practices and implications of new digital spaces of writing in academia, addressing both the new possibilities they afford for academic writing, and the potential positive and negative effects people can experience as they engage in them.

Learmonth and Humphreys (2011) focus on conferences as a site for academic work. In their autobiographic work, they reflect on different kinds of academic conferences, using a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ motif to contrast the instrumental ‘careerist’ setup of the Academy of Management conference with the Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, which aims to explore knowledge for its own sake. They then adopt a critical stance towards their own accounts and question the validity of their original positions, identifying the implicitly careerist motivations behind the very writing of such an article and highlighting the importance of subjecting tales of the academic self to critique and analysis. Here, autoethnographies challenge representations of academic conferences as rarefied spaces for knowledge exchange, bringing to light their messy, embodied, interpersonal aspects and how academics negotiate these while at the same time communicating about their research.

8. AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AND RESEARCHER REFLEXIVITY

Inevitably, researching oneself and one’s own context raises questions of researcher reflexivity. Several academic autoethnographies take a further reflexive step into reflecting on the nature of autoethnography itself. Most of these texts bring together writing in traditional academic genres with short personal narratives, such as Wall (2006), in which the author weaves her own experiences of learning about and positioning herself within authoethnographic research into an overview of the field. Meerwald (2013) reflects on her shifting positions as researcher, researched, and both. She argues that such blurring of distinctions is part of what provides autoethnography with “transgressive power” (p. 46) to question assumptions, displacing the centrality of the researcher’s voice, legitimising the voices of participants, and highlighting the constructed nature of the resultant text. She illustrates these arguments with brief narratives throughout the text, and argues for the value of inserting the researcher autoethnographically into research narratives more generally. Walton (2004) reflects on his experience of becoming an Oxford University Proctor. He uses this as a platform for reflecting on issues of generalisability and debates and critiques around the nature of autoethnography, particularly the status of data and validity in autoethnographic accounts - what he calls “an autoethnography of the process of thinking about autoethnography” (p. 415). Such work demonstrates the potential of autoethnographic reflexive approaches for strengthening the rigour of research through bringing to light and questioning the role of the researcher in its constitution.

An extension of reflexivity beyond the individual to reflexivity about the autoethnographic approach itself can be seen in autoethnographies which reflect on the challenges raised by the autoethnographic approach for more traditional methods of research. Doloriert and Sambrook have published several reflections on the experience of Doloriert’s successful achievement of an autoethnographic PhD, which was pursued in a traditional business school with little experience in evaluating autoethnographic approaches. In Doloriert and Sambrook (2009), they explore issues of ethics, anonymity, and the dilemmas faced by the autoethnographer, producing a fictionalized account based on traumatic real-life events which focalises difficult issues around how much to reveal of the self when writing an autoethnography. In Doloriert and Sambrook (2011) the focus is on the experimentation with textual form. Using vignettes of personal experiences, they identify the importance of key individuals in negotiating the traditions and regulations of the school and institution, and explore broader questions about the validity of textual experimentation within autoethnography and how quality can and should be evaluated in relation to autoethnographic work. Holt (2003) identifies conflicting discourses in reviewers’ comments on an autoethnographic article, and crafts a fictionalised dialogue between researchers sympathetic to and suspicious of autoethnography to foreground issues around verification and the use of the self as a data source. Again, we see in these works how autoethnography enables the use of alternative forms of writing to convey deeper understandings of the issues and challenges which emerge when challenging the norms of the academy. The current paper forms one written representation of our shared reflexivity about our academic histories and practices, showing how we can interpret our own experiences in relation to the literature reviewed to develop our understandings of the importance, particularly, of place and of community in our writing histories.

9. ACADEMIC WRITING IN PLACE

We now move on to bring together reflections on the literature with accounts of our own experiences, in relation to some key concepts which have emerged from both of these, which we will argue are important in understanding academic literacy practices and to which an autoethnographic approach can bring particular insights. One key issue which autoethnographic work can be particularly sensitive to is the significance of material place in writing, something which can easily be overlooked by approaches to writing which focus more on texts and writing processes. Essén and Värlander (2013), combining analytic autoethnography of their own experiences with data from conversations with 18 other researchers, highlight the embodied nature of scientific writing and the physical nature of intellectual work. They claim that this contrasts with much of the work in academic literacies and practice theory which provides important analyses of social and discursive contexts, but less understanding of the embodied and material nature of writing. Understanding writing from a phenomenological perspective as a physical performance rather than an abstract act of reasoning, some of the physical, spatial elements they identify as important include: the physical manipulation and re-arrangement of representations; bodily and emotional states as part of the meaning-making process; and the tools and places of writing practices. Making a similar argument for the importance of place, Powell (2014, p. 179) reviews five relevant papers which are “a testament to the far-reaching ways that locations and writing continue to inhabit our consciousnesses as writing professionals”, with material context and physical locations being important in relation to both how writers write and how audiences read.

Geographers have extensively discussed the notions of place and space and the distinction between these two, adopting different perspectives on this (MCMULLAN, 2018; AGNEW, 2011; LEFEBRE & NICHOLSON-SMITH, 1991). Here, we align with Agnew (2011) whose work presents a thorough review of these concepts, distinguishing between them as follows:

In the simplest sense place refers to either a location somewhere or to the occupation of that location. The first sense is of having an address and the second is about living at that address. Sometimes this distinction is pushed further to separate the physical place from the phenomenal space in which the place is located. Thus place becomes a particular or lived space. Location then refers to the fact that places must be located somewhere. Place is specific and location (or space) is general. (p.4)

Based on these arguments, we will refer to place as the physical space where an academic works, and space to the phenomenal experience of that place, i.e. seeing the space as a lived landscape within which a piece of writing is produced. This distinction works for us as we aim to understand both the physical space (place) and the space in which the writing is produced in relation to our identity as writers. We want to highlight the significance of place, conceptualised in this physical sense, in the writer’s phenomenal experience of having a focused space opened up for writing.

In our own experiences, we have found place to be a particularly important yet easily overlooked factor influencing our writing processes. It was a shared interest in exploring the significance of place in academic writing which first led us to think about writing together.

10. THE ROOTS OF THE AUTHORS’ AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC WORK

The literature presented above framed a series of issues in engaging in autoethnographic work located in the cultural contexts of academia that have informed the processes and theoretical insights presented in this paper. One key aspect of our approach here is the collective nature of our work, and the shared participation in academic sites that led to our collaboration. This article had its genesis, in part, at a conference we both attended.

Both:It was early in 2019 when we met up at the conference Ethnographies of academic writing, held at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. In our brief catch up over lunch, we both talked about our recently finished work, i.e. Karin’s research on academics writing (TUSTING et al., 2019), and Pamela’s autoethnography (OLMOS-LÓPEZ, 2019). We both included space as being relevant in a writer’s actual production of writing, yet we approached it from different directions. Tusting et al. (2019) discuss space as the actual physical place where academics carry out their writing, how they organise their desks, offices or home studios, while Olmos-López (2019) reflects not only on the geographical place, but also on the emotional space that inspired her to write. In that moment, it became clear that we wanted and needed to explore the notion of place further.

Being in a place that was away from the responsibilities of our home institutions in Britain and Mexico, in a third country, surrounded by colleagues who shared a research interest in academic writing, provided us with the space to begin exploring the concepts of space and place further, in relationship to our own experiences and those of others attending this meeting. One thing that this dialogic space afforded us was the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of who had access to this space. We realize that access to spaces like this conference is privileged, and is by no means shared equally across academia. Yet attending such conferences is a required dimension of career development.

11. PLACE AND LANGUAGE CHOICE

The differences in our places for writing raised further reflection on a key factor that shaped our writing processes, the role of the language(s) that we sought to write in, a topic that was raised throughout this meeting. Thus, the discussion we initiated between us in this place also focused on language choice, another issue which affords privilege to some over others and which has been explored through autoethnographic approaches. The conference took place in Spain but had English as its main language, highlighting how, on an international level, academic writing involves choices of language which are framed within the global dominance of English in the academic sphere. This power imbalance was challenged when the keynote speaker, Theresa Lillis, delivered a masterful presentation which was fully bilingual in English and Spanish in every aspect (oral presentation, slides and handouts). Comparing our experiences across national contexts has made us more aware of the differing pressures around the choice of language for writing academic work.

The language choice dimension of our discussion was grounded in Pamela’s experience of negotiating academic literacies across contexts and in two languages. In the following description of her historical experiences in different countries, she illustrates the complexities associated with moving from carrying out a doctorate in the UK, an English dominant academic context, then returning to the national context of Mexico. In the biographical text that follows, she brings attention to the fact that in Mexico, while publishing in English is highly valued, publishing and generally working as an academic in Spanish is also an underlying institutional expectation.

Pamela: In 2016 when I moved back to Mexico, my home country, I felt misplaced and without an identity. I now needed to write in both English and Spanish. In my autoethnography, published early 2019, I describe the switching back and forth between these two languages, and how I feel my identity was also switching. I must confess that my written academic Spanish was poor. I knew how to do it, but it was long ago since I had written academically in Spanish, or even sent a formal email in Spanish. The struggle I find most challenging for me is the actual talking or writing in Spanish about my research. I find it very hard to explain a theme that I have appropriated in English. All my degrees have been done in English language, even when I was living in Mexico. Thus, it has been a challenge for me to express myself academically in Spanish.

Pamela’s experiences highlight the importance of institutional expectations about the language of academic writing to her developing identity as a researcher, and the challenges of negotiating these from within her own personal history.

A review of related literature led to the identification of a similar argument by Gentil and Séror (2014). While not orienting explicitly towards autoethnography, they adopted a “dialogic self-case study design” which has many commonalities with autoethnography to address questions around how they work multilingually. In this study, they contrast their experiences of working and writing as bilingual and biliterate academics in a unilingual and a bilingual university in Canada. Their rigorous approach to researching this question drew on autobiographies of their own literacy histories, presented analysis of their publishing records, compared the text histories of specific publications in different languages, and presented analysis of university and policy documentation to set their own experiences in broader context. Their work provides important insights into the ways academics negotiate biliteracy in different contexts, particularly in relation to the different systems of regulation and reward operating in the two university contexts.

12. WRITING IN SHARED PLACES

Arising from our shared interest in place, we have been sensitive throughout the process to the spaces and places in which this paper has been written. It was particularly important to have the opportunity to share the same place and space, first at the conference mentioned above and then later in Lancaster putting the first draft of the paper together, as well as to have access to the affordances of digital technologies later which allowed us to have virtual discussions.

Both : The first stages of writing this paper brought us together in the same physical space, as Pamela travelled from Mexico to Lancaster for a short research visit. Some sections were written in the university library (Pamela), in the kitchen (Karin), in Pamela’s Air B’n’B looking out over Lancaster castle, and together in Karin’s office on campus, listening to the voices of PhD students celebrating successes in the break-out space outside. We encountered challenges in understanding the different ways we approached laying out the structure of a paper and approaching the process of writing in a limited amount of time; being in the same physical space as we worked on this together helped us to address these challenges through enabling shared focus on computer screens and constant communication and reflections on the process we were going through. Later, our collaborative work continued across continents, with the affordances of Skype enabling face to face communication, although this was complicated by the limitations of working across very different time zones.

Reflecting on our shared experiences of writing has foregrounded for both of us the value of being able to share space when engaged in collaborative writing, and the value (and challenges) of new digital technologies which facilitate synchronous working on texts at a great distance.

The sense of space we have has developed in the continuum of self-reflexion and awareness of our writing in place and what it has meant for us. Orley’s (2009) research illustrates a methodology for analysing place in detail and its importance in the writing process. She emphasises self-reflexion and awareness of the self in place. When a place is lived and the writer engages with it, its environment and their self being in the space is what makes the writing meaningful. Pamela’s experiences of space and place in her writing history illustrate the importance for her of this interaction between place, writing and writer identity. Having had the opportunity to develop an understanding of the kinds of writing spaces which she found most productive while living in the UK, her move back to Mexico raised unexpected challenges arising from the physicality of her experience of writing in place.

Pamela: I realised for the first time that place is important for me to write during the writing up of my PhD thesis. I was then living in Lancaster. The experience of going to a remote place in a Scottish Island for a writing retreat (OLMOS-LÓPEZ, 2019) was a changing personal experience that brought changes in my writing and as a person. The idea of isolation and being disconnected in a landscape of nature, green spaces and blue of the sea, gave the perfect space for me to find myself and to write. The journey of writing my PhD thesis, each chapter in a remote place (OLMOS-LÓPEZ, paper in process) was fulfilling. I felt I had found myself as a writer and none could stop me writing.

After returning to Mexico, I feel misplaced for my writing space. My green and deep blue have gone; the silence and quietness of the remote place that allowed me to explore my inner self and deep reflections are gone; the remoteness and luxury of being disconnected from the web, from people is also gone. I am now surrounded by much more people, in a culture where silence is not particularly their best trait, buildings, traffic, noise, warm weather. I had been struggling to find my writing space. In my job, I have a shared office next to five other shared offices. The building has small windows on the top of the walls, and you can hear from them the traffic jam of the adjacent road. It is in a second floor, in a fragile building due to the relatively frequent earthquakes. I was there in the latest major earthquake (Mw 7.1) in 2017. I can only tell that after that, I go there only when it is really needed. In my search for a space, I have visited several cafes with nice ambience, but they all play background music; that is something that does not happen everywhere in the UK. When I thought I had found a lovely coffee place with crystal windows as walls and facing a lovely garden, they shut it down. I managed to start a paper there. The body was written in the UK, but I went back to the café for the conclusion and that’s when they informed me the café was closing. My home office is the one which is serving me as a good place now. I face a garden and in the working at home days, the neighbourhood can be a bit quiet. Interestingly, my writing, such as this, is mostly happening in my magical green spots. I frequently travel between Mexico and the UK and I still have my writing retreats in the remote Scottish islands, and in my very much missed Lancaster. My place now, my writing space is now that, me coming and going.

Virginia Woolf (1929) considered having a room of one’s own to be essential to a writer. This room provides the writer with a sense of their own space and freedom. However, in an academic’s life having the literal room of one’s own might not mean having the freedom or space they need to produce their writing. As we have reported elsewhere, academics’ life in the office involves many other activities apart from writing and doing research (TUSTING et al, 2019). Charteris et al.’s (2016) collective study of three academics addresses the physical and figurative spaces of writing in higher education. Their discussion of the ‘politics of location’ of university life draws on the importance of power and subjectivity in relation to academic spaces, from communal spaces to individual offices. The ‘politics of location’ of higher education interacts with the broader politics of location in our family and cultural contexts to influence our writing lives, as Karin’s account below demonstrates.

Karin: I am increasingly conscious of the need to protect a space for writing that is clearly defined as being free from other demands and explicitly devoted to writing. Reflecting on my practices over the past few years, I realise that I have used different strategies to find such protected writing spaces.

For several years, when I found myself in a very intense period of having both a young family and a new lecturing position, my only regular writing space was in the early morning hours before the world woke up, sitting in an armchair with a laptop balanced on a folding table and my typing arms curved around a sleeping cat. This space was fragile though, with early-waking children apt to disturb it unpredictably. I became used to writing only a few hundred words at a time, and sticking them together when I could. And the pace of writing early in the morning, doing a full working day, and dealing with the family in the evening could only be sustained for a limited period. Eventually, exhaustion set in and the prospect of looking at my laptop at 5 a.m. became unimaginable - for a while.

I am now fortunate to have my own peaceful office to work in in my Department, and much of my writing does indeed take place here. However, as we know, many academics find that their most productive spaces for writing are away from the offices where they are subject to interruptions from students and colleagues. Such interruptions (of course not necessarily unwelcome ones!) are indeed a regular feature of my life in my “official” working space. But writing from home, while now easier, is still not straightforward. My “home office” consists of a laptop balanced on a pile of cookery books in the kitchen to raise it up to eye level. Domestic demands from children and housework are ever-present and hard to escape from in that context.

Autoethnographic accounts of personal experiences of writing in place bring to light, therefore, the importance of embodied personal experiences of place as part of the writing process, while also opening up discussion of the social and political structures within which those places are situated.

13. TEAM AUTOETHNOGRAPHY

As can be seen from the co-constructed autoethnographies discussed earlier, one important way to develop reflexivity in autoethnography is to expand beyond a single individual and introduce a team approach. Given that ‘autoethnography’ has traditionally been defined as the ethnography of the self, the notion of a ‘team autoethnography’ might seem self-contradictory. However, in a multi-researcher project, particularly in research which focuses on academic contexts and practices, there is much to be gained by incorporating autoethnography as one element of the team’s approach.

There is an extensive research literature on team ethnographies which draws on researchers’ experiences to provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of approaching ethnography as a team, rather than as a lone researcher. Although these methodological contributions do not tend to explicitly identify as team autoethnographies, they share the systematic reflection on one’s own academic experience shown by the academic autoethnographies above.

20 years ago, Woods et al. (2000) identified a move towards teams becoming more extensively a feature of ethnographic research. They provide a typology of teams, distinguishing between project, federated, and whole teams. They reflect on their experience of being part of an ethnographic research team for six years across five funded projects, identifying a range of advantages including increasing the amount of research which can be done, supporting one another, and enabling dialogue about interpretation between team members.

Other subsequent work on team ethnography has similarly highlighted its benefits. Evans et al. (2016) argue for the value of team ethnography in improving the validity of fieldwork, particularly for new ethnographers or for the study of large, complex and distributed contemporary research sites like organizations. Schlesinger et al. (2015) critically examine their experiences of carrying out a three-person team ethnography of a Scottish cultural agency. research team. Strengths of the team approach include each researcher being able to develop different types of knowledge about the setting, as a result of the different relationships they built on the ground, and different personal characteristics like gender and academic status. Scales et al. (2011) reflect on their experiences of carrying out an ethnography focusing on in-patient dementia care which had both individual and team ethnography phases. Because of the two phases, they are able to compare the divergent perspectives highlighted by the initial individual phase with the later phase, following a period of collaborative analysis, where the team were working with broadened perspectives, enriched by the systematic comparison with the other researchers’ phase I fieldnotes.

Gerstl-Pepin and Gunzenhauser (2002), in contrast, identify some of the challenges which team ethnography generates, particularly in relation to interpretation, when the team members come from different personal and research backgrounds and have different roles. Their very large team, which carried out a collaborative ethnographic evaluation of an extensive schools programme across 27 schools over 4 years, included three principal investigators and 19 graduate students. The diverse interpretations of the different team members enriched the knowledge produced by the project, but added to its complexity, producing a more diffuse and ambiguous set of findings than might otherwise have been the case. Similarly, Bikker et al. (2017) identify the advantages of team ethnography in enabling the collection of data in several settings simultaneously, and in allowing the researchers to learn from each others’ experiences in order to develop more holistic interpretations; but they also highlight challenges, including constructing shared understandings, balancing standardised and flexible approaches to data collection, and maintaining trust through regular contact and reflexive discussions. Clerke and Hopwood (2014) in a book-length account of their experiences of team ethnography focus on the asymmetries built into their team, and the challenges and benefits which this brought.

Within linguistic ethnography, Creese and colleagues’ extensive body of work on team ethnography reflects on different aspects of the team ethnographic process, particularly focusing on team ethnography in multilingual settings (CREESE & BLACKLEDGE, 2010). They explore, among other things, issues that arise when teams communicate around and develop fieldnotes (CREESE et al. 2008), the multiplicity of voice within processes of analysis (CREESE & BLACKLEDGE 2012), researcher identities (CREESE et al. 2009) and reflexivity and vignettes (CREESE et al. 2016). In the same research tradition, Gregory et al. (2012) argue for the value of an iterative, dialogic process around field narratives. As they researched faith and literacy with a large and diverse research team, sharing and commenting on one another’s research narratives enabled the team to make explicit what was implicit in initial accounts, to learn through comparisons of each others’ narratives, and to communicate more effectively with the outside world.

Beneito-Montagut et al. (2017) explore the value of digital tools in sustaining collaborative ethnography. They consider how fieldwork, fieldnotes, and the construction of the ethnographic object can be supported by the use of digital data, particularly in team ethnographic projects conducted in a digital environment. Emails, video chats, and cloud file sharing were used in their research to enable ongoing team communication. Fieldnotes were made by one researcher and commented on digitally by the others, a process which elicited vulnerability but also enabled ongoing rich interaction with the ethnographic data by distant team members.

Autoethnographic reflection on team research provides, therefore, an important means of learning from research experiences in teams and gaining insights into the strengths and weaknesses of adopting such an approach. Our own experiences demonstrate how autoethnography can be an intrinsic and valuable part of team research on academic writing. In 2015, a team of researchers at Lancaster University (David Barton, Ibrar Bhatt, Mary Hamilton, Sharon McCulloch and myself, Karin Tusting) began an investigation into academics’ writing practices in the contemporary university workplace in the UK in which we incorporated aspects of team autoethnography throughout the research. The research stemmed from our observations of the impact of the changes that have taken place in UK higher education in recent years on academics’ working lives, including changes in the funding system; increased marketisation of higher education (MOLESWORTH et al., 2011); growth in the senior management cadre (and their salaries, HUTTON 2019), associated with a shift towards more centrally-driven managerialist approaches (DEEM et al., 2007); and greater competition between universities, drawing on quantified assessments of research and teaching quality (LOCKE, 2010). Rapidly developing digital communications technologies have also played a transformative role in how teaching and writing take place in higher education.

Our project explored these issues through detailed study of academics’ writing practices, informed by literacy studies (BARTON, 2007) and sociomaterial theory (FENWICK et al., 2011). We were interested in all aspects of academics’ writing, including writing related to research, teaching, service and administrative aspects of academics’ roles. We worked with core academics across different universities and disciplines. We interviewed them several times, including interviews focusing on their general practices and places of work; their ‘technobiographies’ (BARTON & LEE, 2013), the history of engagement with tools and technologies through their writing lives; and ‘day in the life’ interviews which drew on records of their writing on specific days. We collected detailed data on their writing processes, using a ‘screen in screen’ approach (BHATT & DE ROOCK, 2013) to record their practices on computers. And we interviewed their colleagues and collaborators about their own writing practices. The research developed better understandings of a range of aspects of academics’ writing practices, including the time and space of academics writing; tensions between disciplinary and managerial values systems; the effects of changing digital technologies and of social media on writing practices and choices; and the importance of relationships and collaboration, in writing and in learning new writing practices. (For more detail on the project overall, see Tusting et al. 2019.)

As academics ourselves, we included in the project autoethnographic data collection processes which enabled us to bring our own personal insights and experiences to enrich the understandings we were developing through working with our participants. This was important for two reasons. Firstly, we were subject to all the same structural changes, processes and pressures that we were seeking to investigate in relation to our participants. Incorporating reflection on our own writing practices and locating them within these broader aspects of higher education could help us to enrich our understanding. Secondly, there is an important element of reflexivity to consider when researching practices which are very close to one’s own. ‘Stepping back’ from our own practices by including them as part of our ethnographic dataset allowed us to develop sensitivity to those places where we might be imposing interpretations from our own experiences on data from other people which did not necessarily support those interpretations.

We carried out our autoethnography of our writing practices using a number of different data collection strategies. We kept fieldnotes at different times through the project using a shared online notes program to reflect on and engage in dialogue around our everyday writing experiences. At our fortnightly project meetings, we had regular discussion and reflection about how the issues emerging from the data collection resonated (or did not) with our own academic literacies experiences and histories.

We also interviewed one another, using the same semi-structured interview schedules and resources that we were using with the project participants. This served several purposes. As interviewees, we were placed in a similar (and similarly vulnerable) position to the participants we were working with. Being interviewed using our own interview schedules provided us with greater insights into what it is actually like to talk about the detail of your own writing practices. We discovered, for instance, how difficult it could be to remember specific examples or the particularities of recent writing days. Sometimes we found that the seemingly banal questions about what writing we had carried out, when, under what conditions, could generate powerfully personal and emotional memories and responses. We experienced the challenges of talking about our writing collaborations and our working relationships without revealing details about our colleagues that we did not necessarily feel we had the authority to share.

As researchers, incorporating autoethnography into our research process helped us to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of our data collection approach, what understandings the interviews could and could not generate about academic writing, where the ‘holes’ might be in our data and why they might be there. This autoethnographic process therefore helped to develop our sensitivity as interviewers, as well as providing insights into our later interpretations of the academic writing practices represented in the other datasets we collected.

14. MENTORING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Much of what has been said above, including discussions of co-constructed autoethnographies, writing groups, and team ethnography, demonstrate the value of supportive interpersonal relationships between writers and researchers. The development of this kind of mentoring relationship has been identified as being one fruitful and productive way in which researchers can be supported in their writing. Mentoring occurs at different levels according to the relationship of the people involved. Autoethnography and collaborative autoethnography have explored the many levels of mentoring (BOOTH et al., 2016; MALIN & HACKMAN, 2016; CHANG et al., 2014; MOORE et al., 2013; HELLSTEN et al., 2011; GURVITCH et al., 2008).

The aims of mentoring can be simply to provide support to the individuals involved, but can also include collaborative research, including writing together, or jointly performing teaching or administrative tasks. There is also common learning; Liden et al. (2013: 641) define mentorship as a “reciprocal learning relationship, embedded in rapidly changing work and organizational contexts”. In this research, we understand mentorship as a reciprocal learning relationship between friends-colleagues with common research interests.

The traditional view of mentoring points to a ‘one-sided hierarchical relationship’ where the mentee is seen as a protégé and the experienced mentor guides the protégé. Early career researchers (ECR) are often assigned into a mentoring relationship when they first enter an institution, so that they gain support, and adapt and integrate easily to their academic scholarly community (BOEREN et al., 2015; BOTTOMS et al., 2013). Indeed, mentoring is seen to be especially advisable for academics in a tenure track position, facing particular pressures on writing and publication. Other researchers, however, see mentoring with a wider perspective in terms of who the participants of the mentorship are. For example, there has been research focusing on (peer) mentoring between faculty members (SMITH et al, 2013; JOHNSON, 2012; DRISCOLL et al, 2008), mentoring early career researchers (BOEREN et al., 2015; BOTTOMS et al. 2013) and working on different aspects of mentorship such as identity (HALL & BURNS, 2009; OHNSON, 2003), gender (MOORE & SCARDUZIO, 2013; JOHNSON, 2012; DRISCOLL et al. 2009), and race (CHANG et al. 2014; MCCARTHER et al. 2012).

Higher education is a site where cultures meet, as people from all over the world look for education or work in other countries. In many cases this can lead to difficult issues for the person who is inserting themselves into the academic community. This academic brings within themselves beliefs, values, and different orientations regarding their home and past academic practices which makes the transition in many cases a struggle. Navigating the issues of language choice raised above in their writing can also be a challenge. Mentoring can add benefits in such a case by supporting the new colleague to find their place in the community not only academically but also at other diverse levels (MCCARTHER et al., 2012; CHANG et al. 2014). Mentoring can be beneficial in this context, as it can soften the transition while providing learning about the new cultural practices and exchanging academic experiences. Intercultural mentorship though requires willingness, trust and respect of both parties to learn about their culture(s) (MERRIWEATHER & MORGAN, 2013).

Johnson’s (2012) research on peer mentoring in the academy also gives us a clear view of mentoring between colleagues who originally did not work together, but whose paths met in academia, before they ended up working in the same institution. There, they developed mentorship and an enduring friendship. We identify with Johnson’s narration in some ways and particularly with her insights on mentorship, as “a positive relationship between people that promotes their growth, creativity, and discovery of their appropriate place in the academic profession” (p. 977). She goes on to suggest that mentorship is a good opportunity for alumni to remain connected to their institutions once they graduate.

This is in a way what we have both experienced. When framing this article, we became more conscious of the important element of mentoring in our shared history. In our case, it has been our interest in our shared field of researching academic literacies which has driven the mentorship relationship, rather than the often-discussed more instrumental reasons for mentoring Early Career Researchers (ECR).

Both : Our relationship of mentorship started when Pamela was a doctoral student at Lancaster University back in 2011. Karin has been a member of the Literacy Research Discussion Group (LRDG) at the University since 1996, and it was in the LRDG meetings where we met. Our shared interest in the discussion and development of writer’s authorial identity research (back then Pamela’s thesis topic) led us to have academic talks over coffee a few times during Pamela’s doctoral studies. Those were very enriching to her research as well as for herself as a writer.

Our work institutional contexts do not put us as members of the same faculty; we now live in different countries, Karin in the UK, and Pamela in Mexico. But our research interest has put us together to explore our autoethnographies in terms of our academic literacies. Three years have passed since Pamela finished her degree, but still those friendly academic coffees take place, and a few encounters in conferences have occurred. We noticed our common interests were not only in academic literacies, but also in autoethnography. Then, we decided to jump into the adventure of writing a paper.

On reflection, we can see that a long-term process of mentorship has been happening in our friend-colleague relationship. Little were we aware of the benefits of mentorship as pointed by Booth et al. (2016) in their autoethnographic work, i.e. that peer mentoring enhances the mentors’ own learning, fosters more reflective practices, and supports teaching and research experience, among other benefits related to organising, managing, and networking. Summing this up, we can identify ourselves as having experienced informal mentoring over several years where friendship, communication, trust and a set of shared values have been developing. By writing our co-authored paper now, we are materialising and becoming aware of the mutual learning shaping our identities as ethnographers in academic literacies.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have reviewed autoethnographic research into academic life, and illustrated this with reflections on aspects of our own research trajectories, focusing particularly on place, team research, and mentoring. Through doing this work, we have reframed some of our understandings around our own academic writing histories. We have become more aware of the importance of being conscious around writing spaces, both in the physical sense and the metaphorical sense, and how finding the right writing space evolves parallel with effective writing time. What the ‘right’ writing space means varies from researcher to researcher, and changes in different contexts, at different points in people’s lives, and according to the piece of writing that they are working on. We have articulated the benefits of adopting a team autoethnographic research approach in research on academic literacies. And we have understood mentoring in a new way, as a process of shared learning in the writing process.

In writing this paper together, we learned new approaches to managing time and space, collaborative work, and our mentoring relationship. These have opened up for both of us new possibilities for ways to carry out academic writing. This collaborative process has provided us with a less individually-pressured alternative to the usual model of the lone researcher and their computer. We hope to have shown through this article, both through the engagement with literature and through the personal reflections we have shared, the value of adopting an autoethnographic approach in providing additional perspectives for understanding academic literacy practices.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  22 May 2020
• Date of issue
  Jan-Apr 2020

History

• Received
  26 Sept 2019
• Accepted
  13 Dec 2019
• Published
  28 Feb 2020