Anurekha Chari-Wagh
Awareness of the Self is seen as an indispensable avenue to awareness of the social world. For there is no knowledge of the world that is not knowledge of our own experience with it and our relation with it. —Gouldner (1970: 179) This chapter addresses the possibilities, challenges, and dilemmas of doing autoethnography as a feminist research method and pedagogical tool. Feminist scholars have used autoethnography to interlink theory and experience, to emphasize how personal is political, both as a research method and as a pedagogical tool. Such an analysis has emphasized the ‘self ‘ as epistemologically significant. As Mills (1959: 7–8) stated, ‘The sociological imagination is the ability to understand the intersection of one's biography and other biographers within history and the present social structures you find yourself and others in…. In essence, it is understanding the private in public terms.’ Thus, autoethnography as a research method is organized around active and self-reflexive practices that engage with the researcher's vulnerability. Thus, it is a powerful methodological tool as it empowers not only the self but also the discipline and its practitioners, who do not hesitate to address either vulnerability and/or power (Mills, 1959). In similar ways, feminist pedagogy encourages students and teachers to become self-reflexive, own their experiences as learning tools, and challenge the idea of being just passive consumers of text. Such research and pedagogical practices that highlight addressing one's own experience as sites of knowledge production, while having immense transformational possibilities, also potentially lead to increased vulnerability of the teacher, researcher, and student as they engage with their ‘self ‘ sociologically.