Topics in Interdisciplinary Queer Studies: Autoethnography (PHD804)

Content

This three-day course will introduce PhD candidates to the methodology, methods and ethics of autoethnography from the perspective of interdisciplinary queer studies. Whereas autoethnography typically is concerned with making sense of life aspects from a writer’s point of view within its broader temporal, social and political contexts, a queer(ing of) autoethnography offers important additional dimensions to contemporary research practices and epistemologies: First and foremost it is attuned to the politics of narrative production and reproduction in academic texts and research practice. Secondly, focus is not simply with narrating one’s positions and experiences for the purpose of researcher reflexivity, but - and more importantly - it critically considers the production and maintaining of researcher positions and situatedness as necessarily embedded in a range of complex power structures and relations of inequality, discourses of difference, and intersecting identifications (conscious and unconscious). A queer/ing (of) autoethnography, crucially, builds on coalitional knowledges, intersectional epistemologies, and in turn, the imaginaries and genealogies of decolonizing pathways towards structural change, healing, prosperity and wellbeing.

In sum, as an interdisciplinary methodological perspective queer autoethnography offers tools for crafting ways of seeing, doing and knowing that allow for sense-making, for navigating complex inter/disciplinary landscapes of subjects and objects, belonging, marginalization and exclusion, humanity and inhumanity, and modalities of life itself: human and non-human species,  as well as the built and natural environments. Autoethnographical perspectives are timely and important in contemporary research training, given the broader debates about what constitutes scientific rigor, positionality, power hierarchies, and the relative use of personal experience.

The course offers a comprehensive introduction to the qualitative methodology of autoethnography and its queering possibilities, proceeds with in-depth discussions of topical areas of interests in contemporary sexuality research from a queer perspective, with formulations such as taxonomies, movements, (homo)nation/alisms, colonialism and racism, heteronormativity, and other relevant structures of violence and power.

Learning outcome

Knowledge

• Attain an advanced understanding of queer autoethnography as a methodological and epistemological framework.
• Understand the main characteristics of the politics of ethics and positionality in queer autoethnography.
• Identify autoethnographic concepts, theories and methodologies relevant to candidates' own dissertations.
• Identify contemporary debates about autoethnography, its concepts, ethics, and practices.

Skills

• Analyze and critically discuss queer autoethnography as a methodological and epistemological framework, for own research and more generally.
• Analyze autoethnography is relation to the ethics of citational politics.
• Identify, apply and justify queer autoethnography as a methodological and ethical framing to own research project.
• Through reflective processes contribute to the identification and to analyze methodological challenges in autoethnographic research practices, from a queer studies perspective.

Competence

• Apply queer autoethnography as a methodological and epistemological framework in academic and societal debates.
• Demonstrate writing skills relevant to your field/s.
• Recognize queer autoethnography in interdisciplinary debates about knowledge production and transformational learning, in academic as well as activist and everyday contexts.

Required prerequisite knowledge

Recommended prerequisites

The course is open to PhD students already enrolled in a PhD program, in Norway or internationally. PhD candidates who can demonstrate that their projects are of particular relevance to the course topic, will be given preference. 

When registering for the course, please submit a 300-500 word abstract that outlines your PhD project and how it relates to queer autoethnography.

Exam

Course teacher(s)

Course coordinator:

Method of work

The course consists of lectures, seminars, group work, presentations and writing exercises. PhD candidates taking this course must attend a three-day study programme. This course requires students to present on their doctoral project and participate actively in discussions. The produced material will be used as a basis for group work and plenary sessions.

The course coordinator will facilitate a common digital learning platform on Canvas.

Recommended number of participants: 15.

Open for

Course assessment

Standard evaluation in accordance with University guidelines.

Course Paper.

Literature