I have settled into researching spoken word poetry performances through the lens of autoethnography. To be specific, the analysis comes from predominantly U.S poets who perform at Button Poetry Live events based in middle America. I chose Olivia Gatwood’s Alternate Universe Poem to write about here because, at face value, it spoke to where I was at with a relationship in my life. Secondly, Alternate Universe speaks greatly to a young woman’s experience in current Western culture and society. In turn, the feedback on my essay showed Gatwood’s strong-soft words resonated with young women. I have been analysing my own experience as a fan of spoken word performance, and as a creator of essays for spoken word fans through autoethnographic journaling and notetaking.
Epiphanies come in the chipping away of research, and in the ongoing unpacking of autobiographical and ethnographic research. My three main epiphanies are:
- Time management
- Heightened academic research on autoethnography
- Dedication to content creation
The four most important observations for content creation of my DA are
- Deconstructing our own analysis frameworks
- Consistency; regular performance of DA
- Quality over Quantity
- Persona-orientated production of content
In analysing my ethnographic epiphanies, the academic journal Journey to Ethnographic Research by Leah Shagrir has been most instrumental. Reading Shagrir’s research develops my understanding of data analysis and in the analysis of my personal experience researching. I will continue to look further into Shagrir’s study of Ethnography, and the studies of Genzuk (2003) and Shlaksy and Alpert (2007) to deepen my understanding.
Ethnographic research investigates societies and cultures by examining human, interpersonal social and cultural aspects in all their complexities. (Shagrir, 2017)
Combining an analysis of data and using the researcher’s interpretation is the clockwork behind ethnography. An idea that I find useful while working on data collection, is that ethnography can be looked at as a product of academic text that presents research findings to the public world. Ethnography plays an important role in focusing on the natural surroundings of cultural systems like community, society, groups, and organisations. Without academic ethnographic research, we could not study as accurately the behaviours, norms and beliefs that make up human patterns and human phenomena, expressed in practice. (Shagrir, 2017)
For an analytical framework of my data, I as a researcher, should pay attention to my experiences, thoughts and emotions, and understand that they do affect my interpretations, conclusions and research outcomes. (Shalaksy and Alpert, 2007) Additionally, it is not possible to encode or categorise information early on during research, instead, true structures of data only emerge from research findings. (Genzuk, 2003)
In analysis of data, I must be able to distinguish between events in different contexts, recognise different components of findings, and identify the similarities and disparities between them.
Playing an active role as a content-developing, online persona is important. Consumers of my DA should feel like my essays are a regular, reappearing presence. A consistent appearance should be balanced with the idea of quality over quantity, however, to sustain a fanbase, there must be enough content to consume. Creating a vibrant, persona-orientated DA is extremely important, and also needs to be supported by content creation. To move towards the fruition of my ideal DA, I must enact Goffman’s idea: The performance of a persona is shaped by prior knowledge, and is continually reassembled and performed. (Goffman, 1959)
References
Genzuk, M. (2003). A synthesis of ethnographic research. Occasional Papers Series . Retrieved from http://www-bcf.usc.edu/ * genzuk/Ethnographic_Research.pdf
Shagrir, Leah. Journey to Ethnographic Research, Springer International Publishing AG, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=4722277.
Created from uow on 2021-11-13 17:12:03.
Khan, S., 2020. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). Public Culture, 32(2), pp.397-404.
Shlasky, S., & Alpert, B. (2007). Ways of writing qualitative research from deconstructing reality to its construction as a text . Tel Aviv: Mofet Institute.
Shagrir, Leah. Journey to Ethnographic Research, Springer International Publishing AG, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=4722277.
Created from uow on 2021-11-13 17:19:13.
Shagrir, L., 2017. Journey to Ethnographic Research. SpringerBriefs in Education,.
YouTube.com – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7A66iZQXNh4&t=461s
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