Researcher Vulnerability in Doing Collaborative Autoethnography: Moving to a Post-Qualitative Stance

Abstract

As educational researchers, we hold monthly meetings to discuss our methodological and personal feelings and uncertainties while transitioning from a qualitative to a post-qualitative stance, which involved using artistic/cartographic methods. This shift affected us, unveiling our professional and personal vulnerability. In an exercise of collaborative autoethnography, in this text we describe what it meant for us to engage in this type of study and how the resulting shift in our academic logic, which was originally grounded in more traditional orthodoxies, made us vulnerable and uncomfortable, thus allowing a more ethical investigation. Through these processes we reveal the effect of a research process that placed us in an uncomfortable situation, which in turn allowed new questions to emerge. Finally, we reclaim the need to make not only these professional tensions public but perhaps our failures as well.