On Friday June 1st 2018 I gave a talk to the Media Technology master’s students at Leiden University about two topics near and dear to my heart: creativity and autoethnography. The message I ended with was: If you can’t use autoethnography to complete a research product, you can still use it to enrich your research process. Abstract below:
Doing academic research in a creative way is key to uncovering new insights. As a creative researcher, are you really thinking outside the box? For example, have you ever imagined reflecting on and writing about your personal experience in order to better understand your research topic? In this talk I will discuss autoethnography, an approach that combines elements of autobiography and ethnography. We will discuss how autoethnography lets you embrace subjectivity, and in the process, challenges traditional notions of what academic research is.