Reflexive project of the self

My paper with Patricia and John has, at last, found its way. There is a critical moment in a writing a paper when things start to flow. This one took us a long time as we spent many months reading, talking and writing bits of largely unconnected text. It got desparate as the deadline passed and we asked for a month's extension.

In our work we are purposefully stretching and crossing academic genre conventions by, among other things, presenting a paper in conjunction with a Wiki. The Wiki will be an ongoing text about remembering and forgetting in communities and supported by collaborative web2.0 technologies. It's a text that walks the talk as we remember and forget in our own community, supported by collaborative web2.0 technologies. The Wiki is an invitation for readers and reviewers to become collaborators of the text.

Inspired by the work of Carolyn Ellis we are using autoethnography as our research method. In the meantime I'm interested to trace my interest in autothnography which began last year when Lilia Efimova recommended a book by Ellis and where I went through the steps of being: curious, inspired, stimulated and resolved. Read Ellis and it's difficult to go back to being the same author you once were.

As I'm writing I am also cruising (again) through Anthony Giddens "Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age" His words resonate with our conversations about our process of writing the text:

"In the post-traditional order of modernity, and against the backdrop of new forms of mediated experience, self-identity becomes a reflexively organised endeavour. The reflexive project of the self, which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives, takes place in the context of multiple choices as filtered through abstract systems." (p.5)

And my body tingles as I get one of those rare rushes where everything in life all falls into place!

Tags: pratonarrative, CIRNPrato06, PhD, autoethnography