Close to My Heart: Autoethnographic Approaches
Close to My Heart: Autoethnographic Approaches is a one-day creative research methods gathering that invites PGRs from across Sussex to explore diverse methodologies related to autoethnographic research. Through innovative and collaborative workshops, we will reflect on and attend to the challenges and joys of working with subject matters close to our hearts.
Building on the conversations and connections forged as part of the RLI-funded Close to My Heart: PGR Perspectives symposium (May 2024), Autoethnographic Approaches hopes to provide a supportive and generative space for PGRs to consider new ways of working autoethnographically across our different fields. Themes of exploration will include, but are not limited to, ethical questions and concerns around researcher identity, positionality and the role of lived experience in a research context, methods that attend to closeness/distance and strategies for reflexivity, ethical working practices and researcher self-care.
Sussex PGRs will be invited to lead workshop sessions in a Call for Participation that will be circulated in mid-March. Registration for the event will open in April when the confirmed schedule and programme will be announced.
We will close the day with a shared reflective session that undertakes reflexivity and collective autoethnography, focusing on transdisciplinary processes of collective critical reflection, documentation and meaning-making as we consider ways to apply new working methods to our own research practice and beyond. Adopting and applying collaborative approaches to a research methodology typically concerned with the self, Close to My Heart: Autoethnographic Approaches hopes to unravel the generative, collective potentialities that can emerge from looking inwards as a means to look outwards, situating our individual, personal experiences in the context of others; our commonalities and our differences.
Tea, coffee and lunch will be provided. A breakout space will be available in the Jane Attenborough Studio.
If you'd like to get involved and find out more, please email event organiser Tiffany Murphy (PGR in Drama, Theatre and Performance) at tm505@sussex.ac.uk.
This event is supported by the Sussex Researcher School's Researcher-led Initiative Fund.