Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Note on Terminology
- About the Author
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Beyond the Wall
- 1 Reimagining a Black Art Infused Criminology
- 2 The People Speak: The Importance of Black Arts Movements
- 3 Shadow People: Black Crime Fiction as Counter-Narrative
- 4 Staging the Truth: Black Theatre and the Politics of Black Criminality
- 5 Beyond The Wire: The Racialization of Crime in Film and TV
- 6 Strange Fruit: Black Music (Re)presenting the Race and Crime
- 7 Of Mules and Men: Oral Storytelling and the Racialization of Crime
- 8 Seeing the Story: Visual Art and the Racialization of Crime
- 9 Speaking Data and Telling Stories
- 10 Locating the Researcher: (Auto)-Ethnography, Race, and the Researcher
- 11 Towards a Black Arts Infused Criminology
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Locating the Researcher: (Auto)-Ethnography, Race, and the Researcher
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2021
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Note on Terminology
- About the Author
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Beyond the Wall
- 1 Reimagining a Black Art Infused Criminology
- 2 The People Speak: The Importance of Black Arts Movements
- 3 Shadow People: Black Crime Fiction as Counter-Narrative
- 4 Staging the Truth: Black Theatre and the Politics of Black Criminality
- 5 Beyond The Wire: The Racialization of Crime in Film and TV
- 6 Strange Fruit: Black Music (Re)presenting the Race and Crime
- 7 Of Mules and Men: Oral Storytelling and the Racialization of Crime
- 8 Seeing the Story: Visual Art and the Racialization of Crime
- 9 Speaking Data and Telling Stories
- 10 Locating the Researcher: (Auto)-Ethnography, Race, and the Researcher
- 11 Towards a Black Arts Infused Criminology
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chapter summary
This chapter calls for the embodied elements of the researcher's reflexive and auto ethnographic accounts to become both audible and visible through the expression of a ‘performed story’. By immersing myself in the world of my own story and sharing it, I am making myself accountable to those I have engaged with along the way. Reflexivity and auto-ethnography, therefore, become acts of self-referral designed to generate some level of accountability between the researcher and the subjects of the inquiry.
Presentation of self
Mauthner and Doucet (2003) argue that though the importance of being reflexive is acknowledged within social science research, the difficulties, practicalities, and methods of doing it are rarely addressed. Thus, the implications of current theoretical and philosophical discussions about reflexivity, epistemology, and the construction of knowledge for empirical sociological research practice, specifically the analysis of qualitative data, remain underdeveloped. Mauthner and Doucet further argue that data analysis methods are not mere neutral techniques, but are imbued with theoretical, epistemological, and ontological assumptions – including conceptions of subjects and subjectivities, and understandings of how knowledge is constructed and produced. Similarly, Dean (2017) argues that reflexivity is vital in social research projects, but there remains relatively little advice on how to execute it in practice. Dean further calls for social science researchers to embrace the importance of thinking reflexively. Reflexivity is a vital source of my own continuing development given the complex nature of conducting race-specific research as a black male criminologist from an inner city background. Presenting ‘self ‘ in research, therefore, becomes an important modus operandi for researchers wanting to explore how a black art infused criminology can enhance or hinder notions of the academic identity. When an individual breaks the law, they are arrested, face a (performed) trial in front of an audience (jury), where characters (witnesses) are called into a staged scene (courtroom) to present both sides of the accused's life and behaviours (backstory). The resulting outcome is either freedom, or loss of liberty, if found guilty. Goffman's (1959) notion of the ‘presentation of self ‘ similarly acts as a ‘researcher's metaphor’ when presenting embodied experiences through performance.
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- Information
- Reimagining Black Art and CriminologyA New Criminological Imagination, pp. 139 - 150Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2021