narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

assured my interviewees a certain restoration of this imbalanced power position by
‘sharing’ stories rather than only ‘knowing’. If they wished they could interview me as
well after I interviewed them. Interestingly many did and quite excitedly, as I
experienced multiple times how it was to sit at the other side of the table being
interviewed, thereby dissolving the conventional binary division of the self and the other,
subject and the object, experience and reality, researcher and the researched. My autoethnographic
experience is intertwined with the ethics of ‘dialogical epistemology’
(Scholte, 1987 cited in Callaway, 1992) and ‘dialogical’ and ‘reflexive’ research
(Schrijvers, 1991: 169 cited in Heaphy, 2007: 45) that do not claim to erase the power
that arises between the researcher and the researched but reflexively negotiates with it.
Dialogical research with self critical reflection that the researcher’s subjectivity,
positionality and context of research shape the sociological narrative (Plummer, 1983;
Steier, 1991) of this research, lies at the heart of a ‘reflexive methodology’ that forms
the epistemological basis of this research.
It is important in this context to discuss the issue of, who represents whose life, and
how, as central topics of auto-ethnographic ethical concern. For the most part, autoethnography
has been assumed to be more “authentic” than straight ethnography. The
voice of the insider is assumed to be truer than that of the outsider in much debate
(Deck cited in Reed-Danahay, 1997: 7). According to Deck, the author of autoethnography
is the indigenous ethnographer, the native expert whose authentic
firsthand knowledge of the culture is sufficient to lend authority to the text. By similar
logic, Lejeune is also highly critical of outside ethnography in his discussion of autoethnography
(Lejeune, 1989 cited in Deborah et al, 1997: 7).
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