Online seminar series - New Methodologies: Narrative, Time, and Everyday Experiences - Session 3

Built to Break: An Introduction to Theoretical Auto-Ethnography

Organised by Dr Brian McDonough, Solent University

In this presentation, I develop Carspecken’s (1996) Critical Qualitative Research (CQR) from his book Critical Ethnography in Educational Research. Drawing on Habermas’ (1971, 1984, 1985) articulation of knowledge-constitutive interests and communicative rationality, Carspecken articulates critical theory as knowledge that is essentially interested in emancipation.

As an educator, mathematician, and musician, I am interested in songwriting’s methodological potential in forming and deconstructing emancipatory knowledge. In a limited way, music can express what cannot be said directly. To demonstrate, I will begin the talk with a moment of silence. A song my father wrote (Sand and Love) recollects non-communicable states with imagery of perpetual waves crashing into stony shores.

Together, silence and song motivate a theoretical understanding of communicative rationality as an embodied rhythm in synthesis and deconstruction. An “I” speaks to a “you” who listens. Researchers who have questioned what it means to speak, write, listen, or read – important methodological questions – will be interested in this theoretical contribution. I will conclude this talk by enacting those rhythms in a song I wrote recently (Built to Break). The complete talk shall be a movement between silence, song, and theory – concluding with a song that recollects and extends the movement.

I hope to represent and thereby actualize the self-propagating ‘wave’ of emancipatory knowledge. However, I will leave the last song as grist for the interpretive grind. Unfinished and tremulous, I seek to disrupt the distinction between theory and data to produce the genre I call theoretical auto-ethnography.

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Call for contributors

This online seminar series centres on innovations in research methods and methodologies and is open to scholars with novel approaches to researching narrative, time, and everyday experiences.

Drawing on how we can best understand peoples’ experiences and the places and organisations people encounter, this interdisciplinary seminar series brings together scholars from social and human sciences who have developed or adapted new methodologies for understanding everyday life, with a particular focus on making sense of narratives and time.

Contributors who have a novel method or approach to doing research are particularly welcome, as well as those with unique approaches to unravelling the stories of peoples’ lives, by showcasing the rhythms or flow of human activity, or even its measurement, such as the ordering, sequencing, or close examination of everyday life.

If you are interested in contributing to the series, please email brian.mcdonough@solent.ac.uk.