Building on the conversations and connections forged as part of the RLI-funded Close to My Heart: PGR Perspectives (May 2024), a symposium exploring ethical considerations for postgraduate research relating to ‘closeness’ and researcher positionality, Close to My Heart: Autoethnographic Approaches proposes a more finely tuned focus on locating points of interdisciplinary intersection through exploring innovative autoethnographic methodologies. This event seeks to unravel the possibilities for connection that can emerge from situating our individual, personal experiences in the context of others, our commonalities and our differences, to consider new ways of working across our different fields of postgraduate study. After all, ‘the personal is political’. 

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.

Registration for the event is now open. Tea and coffee will be available from 09.30 in the Gardner Tower, and the event will start promptly at 10.00. Lunch will be provided in the ACCA cafe. During sessions, the Jane Attenborough Studio will be available as a dedicated quiet/breakout space. The finalised programme will be announced at the end of April.