I recently presented a paper at a conference held at Deakin University in Melbourne. It was, and I was clear about it, a bit of a stretch for me. While I would have felt reasonably confident discussing civics and citizenship education, this conference had more of a bent towards ethnography and education. Still, in the interests of stretching my methodological wings, I was accepted to present an abstract and I developed a paper.
One of the things that I liked about the conference was that we submitted draft versions of our paper before the conference. The idea was that participants would read the papers and come prepared for a discussion that would take up most of the presenters slot.
That was well and good. I wrote a paper about critical research portraiture, which was a methodological technique that I employed in my fieldwork. I was trying to describe how it was a development of traditional ethnographical and critical ethnographical methods. In doing so, I tried to highlight the way I combined notions of multi-vocality and creative co-construction with the aesthetic sensibilities of research portraiture in order to produce research outputs that were accessible to a wide range of audiences.
It did not go down particularly well. The key issue, it would appear, would be that some of the more experienced academics were critical about research portraiture and my portrayal of it; in other words, perhaps what I was really talking about was just ‘good ethnography’. And, if that was not the case, then perhaps I needed to reconsider what I meant when I talked about ethnography.
This was a bit frustrating, especially as in the session beforehand we had all been talking about how slippery the notion of ethnography is – and, while many of these academics acknowledged that what I had done was ‘fantastic ethnography’ -they could not see how it was sufficiently different from any normal version of ethnography.
Fair enough. I think more reflection and consideration is required. After all, this is the reason I wanted to engage in the conference – to test my ideas out. I have another presentation on this topic at AARE in December – I intend to further develop my ideas and try it out then.