The Other Side of the Fence: Seeing Black and White in a Small Southern Town

In this ethnographic short story, the author wrestles with personal intricacies of being White in American society, posing contradictions of identity and community and problematizing the quandary of speaking openly about race and racism. The story of her romantic involvement with an African American male while growing up White in a small southern town provides a venue by which to portray race relations in the rural South during the 1960s. Returning to this small town to visit in 1993 sets the stage to reflect on this experience and to compare race relations in urban university communities during the 1990s. Readers are invited into the author\u27s lived contradictory circumstances in the hopes that acknowledging and experiencing the experiences will help us figure out how to unthink and even unfeel processes that may perpetuate racism

"You do not live in my skin”: Embodiment, voice and the veteran

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record.In this paper we challenge the fundaments of academic engagement with, and representation of, veterans’ embodied experiences. Drawing on work we have undertaken at a number of recent conferences to open up the format of academic discourse to a more dialogue oriented form of engagement, we try to bring the same principles and problems into written discourse. This paper weaves between the monologic form of academic argument, and the open explorative form of the dialogue, in an attempt to question core assumptions about veteran identity. Both of us are concerned with the politics of claims to ‘know’ the veteran experience by researchers, policymakers and the media. The paper is an attempt to take seriously a politics of embodiment, of voice, and of listening as a way of fundamentally reorienting what we think we ‘know’ about veteran experience and how we go about our research. Above all this paper is an intervention. It is an attempt to go beyond using notions of ‘embodiment’ as a heuristic device, and to operationalise this analytic in a challenge to the limits and possibilities of academic forms of representation. We argue that we need new ways of generating knowledge about embodied experience and a different understanding of what knowing means in this context. We propose ‘the conversation’ as an alternative mode of research praxis

The only honest thing: autoethnography, reflexivity and small crises in fieldwork

There has been a rising acceptance of autoethnography in the past 15 years. Instead of studying social phenomena, in an appropriately reflexive way, some scholars have taken to researching themselves. Drawing on concrete examples from an ongoing ethnographic project, the paper contrasts the beneficial, even essential, practices of autobiographical and reflexive thinking about fieldwork with the narcissistic substitution of autoethnography for research