Free for students from IKH, RUC and Danish Doctoral Schools within the Humanities. All other PhD students are welcome at the price of 2.400 DKR.

Registration is online via : https://events.ruc.dk/Autoethnographic

The deadline for registration is March 25th. Applicants will receive notice of acceptance via email by mid-April.

Please check under the Languages and preparation section for details about the 3 texts you should submit as part of the online registration and application.

Preparation Reading course literature (will be sent out in April). We expect you to read a limited number of papers by other PhD students.

Contact Please contact PhD administrator Marianne Sloth Hansen for practical and administrative questions at msha@ruc.dk. Please contact Associate Professor Lisbeth Frølunde at lisbethf@ruc.dk for questions regarding the course and preparation.

External teachers:

Arthur P. Bochner (Ph.D. Bowling Green State University) is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida, USA. He has published more than 100 articles and book chapters as well as two award winning books, Coming to Narrative: A Personal History of Paradigm Change in the Human Sciences (AltaMira Press, 2014) and (with Carolyn Ellis) Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories (Routledge, 2016). He is a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association (NCA) and served as President of NCA in 2007. He has received lifetime achievement awards from the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry and the Ethnography Division of NCA. He has received seven endowed awards for his scholarship and teaching including NCA’s Charles Woolbert Award, Bernard J. Brommel Award for pioneering research in family communication, the Samuel Becker Distinguished Service Award, and the McKnight Foundation’s William R. Jones Most Valuable Doctoral Mentor Award for mentoring minority students.

Carolyn Ellis (Ph. D. Stony Brook University) is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida, USA. She has established an international reputation for her contributions to autoethnography and the narrative study of human life. Dr. Ellis has published seven monographs, six edited books, and more than 150 articles, chapters, and review essays. She has edited two book series and presented keynote addresses and workshops in sixteen countries. Her most recent book is Final Negotiations: A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness Expanded and Revised Edition. Her numerous national and international lifetime career, scholarly, mentoring and book and article awards include the Charles H. Woolbert Research Award and the Distinguished Scholar Award, both from the National Communication Association (NCA), The Legacy Lifetime Award and best book and article awards from NCA’s Ethnography Division, a Lifetime Achievement Award in Qualitative Inquiry and a best book award from the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois.

Oscar Hemer is Professor of Journalistic and Literary Creation at Malmö University, Sweden. Dr. Philos. in Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo (2011) on the dissertation "Fiction and Truth in Transition: Writing the present past in South Africa and Argentina" (Lit Verlag, 2012). Writer of several novels and has more than twenty years of experience as an arts journalist and editor. Coordinator of the one-year Master program "Communication for Development" since its inception in 2000. Among his latest work are the novel Misiones (2014), which finalizes his Argentina Trilogy (Cosmos Aska, 2000; Santiago 2007), and the anthology Memory on Trial (2015), which he co-edited with Anders Hög Hansen and Thomas Tufte. He was a visiting research fellow at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in 2015, and he is currently doing research on South Africa.

About the course

The main objective of the course is to support the participants' reflections and active text production for the PhD thesis. This course introduces various autoethnographic approaches that highlight the complexity of the researcher's voices, roles and relations with others in the research field, as well as provide perspectives on power and ethical, affective, bodily, cultural, social and historical dimensions. Teachers will exemplify autoethnographic methods based on different theoretical foundations and ontological, epistemological and ethical premises.

Autoethnography covers well-known sociological and humanistic methods for critical-reflexive introspection on the researcher's role. It offers new narrative, visual and performative approaches for writing about personal experience or telling from her or his own subjectivity. Common to auto-ethnographic approaches is that the researcher is clear about having a presence in the field and in the text, often by using a first-person narrative. Autoethnographic texts cross genres and media, e.g. from poetry, personal essays, short stories, visualizations (e.g. photos, comics or impressionist drawings) to performative texts, and classical and journalistic academic genres.

In short, we will work on issues such as:

• What do the different autoethnographic methods do in terms of impacting the researcher's reflection and reflexivity?

• How can the researcher become clear about his or her own involvement in creating, feeling, sensing and understanding research and knowledge processes using autoethnography?

• How can autoethnographic genres and media be used by the individual course participant in a PhD thesis and how can the chosen genres be positioned in the spectrum of approaches?

The course includes lectures and writing workshop time for autoethnographic text production. The groups are facilitated by the external teachers in collaboration with researchers from RUC. Students are expected to read the papers in his or her group prior to the course.

Program:

DAY 1 (June 19th) Charting a path into autoethnography

09.30-09.45 Welcome to the course - Ida Willig, Rikke Andreassen, Lisbeth Frølunde, Roskilde University

09.45-10.15 How was autoethnography relevant for my Ph.D. work? A variety of approaches to integrating autoethnography are presented by recent Ph.D. students. Reflections on presenting autoethnography and experiences with integrating, evaluating and defending. The factual – documentary – literary – visual – affective – where are the boundaries? Thesis will be available for browsing. Includes time for Q and A.

10:15-10:30: Break

10.30- 10.55 Visual practices in auto-ethnography Lisbeth Frølunde, Roskilde University The lecture concerns visual autoethnographic practices with focus on graphic medicine (graphic novels about the personal experience of illness, as seen and told by patients, caregivers, family).

10.55-11.15 Embodied experiences as autoethnographic material Rikke Andreassen, Roskilde University

11:15-11:30: Break

11.30-12.15 Exploring the relations between ethnography and literary writing as research-based knowledge. Oscar Hemer, Malmø University

12.15-13.00 Lunch

13.00-14.00 Introduction to workshop groups and start of reflexive text writing exercise Facilitator: Oscar Hemer Co-facilitators: Lisbeth Frølunde, Rikke Andreassen, RUC Students divide into smaller, consistent writing groups based on course submissions.

14.00-16.30 Workshop time Oscar Hemer, Lisbeth Frølunde and Rikke Andreassen are facilitators in the smaller groups. The workshop time plan integrates periods of intensive writing with feedback time.

DAY 2 (June 20th) Evocative Autoethnography: Reflexivity and Relational Ethics Carolyn Ellis & Art Bochner teach day 2. Co-facilitators: Lisbeth Frølunde (Rikke Andreassen)

09.30-09.50 Review of day 1 and introduction to day 2. Organization of feedback to each student on autoethnographic paper drafts.

10-11:15: The Rise of Evocative Autoethnography 11:15-11:30: Break 11:30-12:15: “Maternal Connections”: An Exemplar of Evocative Autoethnography

12:15-13:00: Lunch

13:00-16:30: Writing Workshop Carolyn Ellis & Art Bochner, with Lisbeth Frølunde and Rikke Andreassen, are facilitators in the smaller groups.

18.30: Dinner and social event in Copenhagen

DAY 3 (June 21st) Compassionate Autoethnography: Connecting, Caring, and Collaborating Carolyn Ellis & Art Bochner teach day 3. Co-facilitators: Lisbeth Frølunde (Rikke Andreassen)

09.30-09.50 Review of day 2 and introduction to day 3.

10:00-11:00: Public Lecture: Compassionate Autoethnography and Purifying Conversation

11:15-12:15: Discussion of Lecture: Focus on issues of writing at the interface of social science and humanities, performance, memory, truth, and compassion (includes discussion of three stories sent in advance for students to read).

12:15-13:00: Lunch

13:00-15:00: Workshop on Storytelling Carolyn Ellis & Art Bochner, with Lisbeth Frølunde and Rikke Andreassen, are facilitators in the smaller groups. 15:00-16:00: Performances by students

16:00-16:30: Final evaluation

Languages and preparation

The course lectures will be held mainly in English during the mornings. The afternoon is for writing in your chosen language (English, Danish, Swedish or Norwegian). We will match students in smaller writing groups and facilitate text production and feedback processes. The descriptions and examples of empirical materials, such as observations, memory work, videos, photos, etc., will be used as points of departure for writing. The first day has morning lectures in Danish / Scandinavian, while lectures on the second and third day are in English. The afternoon workshop text production sessions will be in English and Danish / Scandinavian languages.

Students have to submit a pdf - as part of the online registration - with the following 3 texts in the application:

1) A letter of motivation in a Scandinavian language or English, 1-2 pages long. Please explain what motivates you to apply for the course, what you want to learn, and how you foresee that the autoethnographic approaches covered in this course can help you to develop your research project.

2) An autoethnographic paper draft, preferably in English. The paper can be an excerpt from the thesis (as draft or work in progress) outlining considerations on how and why to use autoethnography, and reflecting on methodology in relation to own plans for using autoethnography and/or actual experience with using autoetnography. It should be 5-6 pages length (max. 13.200 characters, not including references). These autoethnographic paper drafts will be reviewed for application as well as be read by teachers in order to prepare individual response. All students who write in English will get feedback from Carolyn Ellis or Art Bochner on their papers. An applicant may write the paper in your native Scandinavian language – it simply limits how many can read it. If you write a paper in a Scandinavian language, feedback will be from Lisbeth Frølunde (or Rikke Andreassen).

3) A “description” of your empirical materials, 1-3 pages long, in a Scandinavian language or English. The term description is meant in the widest sense – the empirical materials can be excerpts of your actual observations, sketches, photos, notes, interviews, research log book, video diary, memory work, or other materials from field studies. We recommend “raw” empirical materials. The course participants work with these empirical materials in the afternoon writing workshop sessions as a way to develop a relevant autoethnographic approach for the PhD thesis. Do include a 2-3 introductory sentences about the materials (who, when, where, what, why, how gathered or created).

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You can download a preliminary list of course literature in Conferencemanager: https://events.ruc.dk/Autoethnographic