As both my Action Research Project, and the project on taste that I am leading for the Level 4 students, relate to exploring positionality in both teaching and illustration practice, auto-ethnographic research methodologies felt like an appropriate starting point. Initially accessing Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject (2000), which explores how the discourses of qualitative research can be used to imagine and create a free and democratic society,1 I felt rather encouraged — lofty motivations during the IP unit not only hoped for the initiation of a learning community, but for that learning community to hold the power to challenge, subvert, or change industry bias.
Next, I was recommended an exercise in free writing by my peer, Peony Gent, from Autoethnography Study Toolkit (Yu Lun Eve Lin, 2023),2 which follows Jennifer Moon (2004)’s framework for reflective writing.3 I have often encouraged free-writing processes in the classroom myself, when students are struggling to respond to a workshop writing task. It is for this reason that I was taken by surprise when I completely ceased up during the free-writing task[s] offered via the Autoethnography toolkit. Engaging with this methodology in the renewed position of being a student has made me completely question how much structure and conceptual underpinning should be offered to students when approaching potentially open-ended tasks. It has also made me question how realistic it is to think that learning at this level could indeed hold the potential for creating a free democratic society,4 bringing me back to the Ghislaine Leung quote that continually refreshes it’s offer…
“Freedom is often conflated with autonomy, but dependence is perhaps less the incarcerator than the liberator. I am free with support, not without. […] I am as dependent as you are and this is not an issue because care exists socially, is required and reciprocated a thousand times over in a moment. That I fail to acknowledge this is the price I pay when I misattribute agency to individual life, as identity in a monological sense, in my vivid financialised disincorporated life.“5
I am free with support, not without! Free-writing doesn’t offer me enough support!
Although grateful for this resource, I knew I needed to continue the search for a resource in auto-ethnography that would have a tighter focus to both the student body and myself. In the spirit of ‘context-sensitive’ thinking, I ventured to the LCC zine archive to see if any independent publishers had anything to offer. This is what I came across:
Lorde, A. (Date Unknown) Questionnaire to Oneself, LCC Zines Collection, Folder 81
Begin by journaling and answering these questions:
1. What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have
words, yet?”]
2. What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]
3. What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your
own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? [List as many
as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow. And the day after.]
4. If we have been “socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for
language and definition,” ask yourself: “What’s the worst that could happen
to me if I tell this truth?” [So, answer this today. And every day.]
Adapted from “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,”
collected in The Cancer Journals.
Afterward:
— Pair and share questionnaire; what did you write down and why?
— Doing this is being honest with ourselves and where we are at; looking
at what we are facing right now; sharing these problems with someone else
to maybe lessen the burden a little bit
— Invitations
+ What is hard about sharing our personal experiences with people?
What is something easy?
+ What is a time you shared something and really felt like you were seen?
+ How can you continue/work on being honest with yourself and others?
+ Recognizing the human dignity in others and the power of storytelling;
we become closer to others and understand people more
Check-out:
Share something you need to do and something you want to do this weekend6
It felt so pertinent for Audré Lorde to discuss the ‘silencing’ nature of everyday tyrannies through her questionnaire, as throughout the IP unit (as I was researching course content in relation to industry bias), I just couldn’t find a word as simple as ‘silence’, or even ‘tyranny’ to guide my thinking on the nature of the perpetuated power imbalance present in late capitalist illustration career landscapes. Engaging in Audré Lorde’s exercise also took my mind in so many directions — one of my favourites being in the direction of something I ‘want'[ed] to do this weekend — this prompt felt completely synonymous with Emma Warren’s case for valuing everyday culture[s]7 and took a lot of the pressure away from the daunting gravity of ‘social justice issues’ and ‘tyrannies’. The personal is always political.
A note, then, on exactly how ‘context-sensitive’ research methodologies should be — why did Audré Lorde’s questionnaire work for me? Was it the sensitive structuring? Or was it — what felt like — the discovery of a friend, or solidarity, in the democratic setting of a zine archive — relating back to Guglielmo Rossi’s You Must Live Your Politics? 8
Either way, it became increasingly clear that actioning this rationale for research methods meant offering the methods themselves directly to the students in the form of structured questions, prompts, activities, and resources — in as democratic and friendly a setting as possible.
- Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S.(Eds.) Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject, Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd Ed.), Sage Publications ↩︎
- Lin, Yu Lun (2023) Autoethnography Study Toolkit, UAL Research Online <https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/20529/> [Last accessed February 2024] ↩︎
- Moon, Jennifer (2004) A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning, Routledge <https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/id/eprint/12995/1/4215.pdf> [Last accessed February 2024] ↩︎
- Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S.(Eds.) Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject, Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd Ed.), Sage Publications ↩︎
- Ghislaine Leung, Bosses, London/ Brussels: Divided Publishing (2023), p.1 ↩︎
- Lorde, A. (Date Unknown) Questionnaire to Oneself, LCC Zines Collection, Folder 81 ↩︎
- Warren, E. (2020) Document Your Culture, London: Sweet Machine Publishing p.18—19 ↩︎
- Rossi, G. (2023) You Must Live Your Politics in Agitprop Notes, London: MayDay Rooms p.103—111 ↩︎