Performative Autoethnography:

an epistemic framework for social change.

Marcia Braundy, PhD

CSCI/CCFI

Abstract

What is behind the resistance and impedance produced by men in the

integration of women in trades/technology training and work?

Raising the question, and reflecting/on the responses

illuminates some of the fears at the base. Expressing this through a

performative autoethnography opens up an epistemic framework for social

change.

As a social activist wending my way through a Ph.D., I wanted to discover vehicles for sharing the learnings with a wider audience, to engage in an interactive approach to knowledge production.

My standpoint is both as an insider, a researcher who has lived these working lives, and also as an outsider, the sex that is Other than male.

Our positionalities are complex. My research participants stories must be told both from their perspective, and also as they intersect with mine (Smith, 1999, p. 64). I have sought an epistemic event, one that evokes an “emotional understanding” (Ellis, 2000a) of the complexity of these lived lives.

I have found this in theatre.

Returning our reflections back, through public performance, to their communities of origin broadens the scope of their impact, providing for a spiral out of the closed system, opening the way for further reflection and change of practice: reflexive praxis.

Theoretical constructs

Performance as Epistemology:

• An epistemic framework for social change(Lather, 1986, 2001)

• Performance as an action site of learning, (Fels, 1998, p. 30)

Theoretical constructs:

Performative Autoethnography

Data as Evocation

Performance-based re/presentation of research(Gray, Ivonoffski, & Sinding, 2002; Gray et al., 2000; O'Riley, 2003; Saldana, 2003)

Sharing the stories to evoke an emotional understanding (Ellis, 2000, 2002; Bochner & Ellis, 2002 )

Evocation

provides a ‘space between’ the text and the reader, the actors and the audience,

in which new knowledge can be created and/or integrated.

The lens through which we come to understand (Ellis, 2000)

Evocative stories evoke subjectivity lessons for further conversation based on intimate

detail rather than abstracted facts.

The impression is one of a mirror, where the viewer may choose to look directly or obliquely, but engages with what is there in front of them.

To evoke an emotional understanding of how we come to know, researchers and readers must “get into the head of each of the people in the story—you have to get their experience—it becomes more difficult to vilify them…You are positioning yourself, and contextualizing their story” (Ellis, 2000)

“Things are revealed and constructed in interaction that might not be accomplished with one voice” (Ellis & Berger, 2002)

“[It] creates a liminal space wherein audience members are repositioned from passive spectators to active participants” (Phelan & Lane, 1998, p. 13).

When performance provokes, the actors and the audience engage and come to know more about the story, and more about themselves.

Performance is formulated as an action site of learning, evoking “an ecological interstanding that invites the co-evolving world(s) of performance and cognition in a transformative dance” (Fels, 1998, p. 30; 1999, p. 56)

It is through the tension created when someone allows the impact of someone else’s experience into their own consciousness that something occurs that can be called learning.

That impact can create danger.

The Stop (Appelbaum, 1995)

The concept of providing “the stop” is a good one: that moment of respite, alone with one’s self, in which to come to terms with the emotional impacts and reactions to performance.

The stop is not the negation of movement. It is movement itself, a form of movement away from the entrapment of automatic and associative thought, just as it is a movement toward an embodied awareness. The stop is a movement of transition (Appelbaum, p. 24)

A performance authorizes itself not through the citation of scholarly texts, but through its ability to evoke and invoke shared emotional experience and understanding between performer and audience (Denzin, 2003, p. 13).

“The truth is not born and does not reside in the head of an individual person; it is born of the dialogical intercourse between people in the collective search for truth" (Mikhail

Bakhtin, 1973, in Leggo, 1994)

The possibility for a public interpretation of actions that occur in more private circumstances requires that the “behaviour,” or the performance, be performed again, open to greater scrutiny and the potential for “reading the performance.” (Schechner, 1998)

“Theatre has the potential to present research material in a way that helps to clarify and transform social understandings; where insights occur because of the audience engagement with dramatic material, the potential for positive individual change is heightened” (Gray et al., 2000, p. 138).

“It is often said that a play only really exists when it is given life in performance; the text, the argument runs, is a mere shadow of any realisation” (Dollimore and

Sinfield:1985, p.130, in Goodman, 1998, p. 5)

What I found in male resistance

Themes emerged:• Competency• Socialization• Breadwinner• The need to be essential• Sexuality• Fear of Change• The meaning of tools

Theme: Competency

Theme: Breadwinner

Theme: Fear of Change

A conundrum:The meaning of tools

The play, Men & Women and Tools (Braundy, 2002) is a pedagogical intervention into the social construction of gender relations at the beginning of the twenty-first century.