The Ethnographer Unbared: Looking at My Own History Book

Abstract

For this article, I have drawn from a project "Looking at Our Own History Book: Exploring Through the Stories of Aboriginal Women the Relationship Between Shame and the Problems with Alcohol", which I undertook in partnership with Aboriginal Australian counsellors, community workers, and women with whom they had worked. I conducted my research in urban and regional areas of Victoria, Australia from 2014-2017. In the article, I describe how listening to the women's first-hand accounts of practices associated with settler-colonisation impacted me, as researcher—both emotionally and in terms of my professional and social identity—and how the telling of their stories, particularly in relation to the concept of "shame", impacted how the women saw themselves. Approaching the research process as a shared act of becoming, the article adds to our understanding of how self-conscious emotions such as shame contribute to the problems researchers working in the area investigate, and provides a different approach to how they might best be addressed.