Performative Autoethnography: an epistemic framework for social change.

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Performative Autoethnography an epistemic
framework for social change.

• Marcia Braundy, PhD
• CSCI/CCFI

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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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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)

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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 )

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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.

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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.

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• 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
  storyyou have to get their experienceit becomes
  more difficult to vilify themYou are positioning
  yourself, and contextualizing their story
  (Ellis, 2000)

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

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

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

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• 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)

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• It is through the tension created when someone
  allows the impact of someone elses experience
  into their own consciousness that something
  occurs that can be called learning.
• That impact can create danger.

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The Stop (Appelbaum, 1995)

• The concept of providing the stop is a good
  one that moment of respite, alone with ones
  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)

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• 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).

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• 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)

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• 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)

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• 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).

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• 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 Sinfield1985, p.130,
  in Goodman, 1998, p. 5)

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What I found in male resistance

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

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Theme Competency
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Theme Breadwinner
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Theme Fear of Change
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A conundrumThe meaning of tools
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• 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.