2nd British Auto-ethnography Conference, Aberdeen

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A glorious autumn and I found myself driving five hours north to the grey coastal city of Aberdeen. Whilst much of the surrounding later developments are slightly drab, the university area is like a time warp that reminded me of Durham. 

The university is the fifth oldest in the UK and was stunning in places.

My reason for such a solo road trip was to attend a conference on auto-ethnography. When I first set out on my doctoral journey, I had never heard of it and would have been horrified at the thought of such a seemingly self indulgent approach. Yet, when I hit a place where my thesis had evolved and I was struggling to find out where it fitted, auto-ethnography stood out as being the answer. I had never wanted or tried to write in such a way it simply happened. 

Yet for the past three years of writing as an auto-ethnographer, I had never met another one. Did they really exist in flesh and blood or were they merely a construction of the matrix? Finally I got the chance to meet the small but emerging number of those who would lay claim to the form as their own. 

What struck me was the sheer diversity of people present. When I first walked into the room I noticed a group of middle aged women wearing black with bright scarves and either DMs or converse trainers on. I looked down at my own outfit of a black dress, pink scarf and black DMs boots and saw myself in those women gathered around the table, coffees in hand. Yet as more people arrived, the mix grew to include a broader spectrum of faces.

Some stances on auto-ethnography I struggled with. I personally find feminism a tough pill to swallow. I appreciate the origins of such a movement and their desire in wanting women to be valued and appreciated yet I feel the movement has largely remained stuck and could be seen as being oppressive  towards men and, in some cases, women too. The key note speaker, Professor Don Kulick, made the same point in his address with relation to the fate of Brazillian transgender prostitutes.  However not everyone was from a feminist back ground as other participants were writing about ethnic minority issues or wanting to express the voices of the disabled or oppressed. 

Gradually a sense of unease spread into my heart. My thesis, whilst seeking to make the voices of excluded young people heard, was also about my own feelings of being voiceless. Yet I am not oppressed. I am not from an ethnic minority. I am not poor. I fact I am a white middle class woman. A woman who attended a good school, went to a good university, has a mortgage and has a disposable income. I suddenly felt that my voice was one that people didn't want to hear, that I almost had no right to push my voice forward; I felt that people would assume that they knew what my voice was and had been over nearly drowned in a sea of people like me before.  

As I walked around the city, I kept dwelling on that feeling: where had it come from? Was it my anxiety of my identify as a researcher raising its head again? Was it self doubt? I found myself here:

I stood for some time watching the water flow by. The river was full of autumnal leaves gently rolling along on the surface jockeying for position in a giant game of Pooh sticks. Then I realised that I was wrong. The point of auto-ethnography is to hear the voice of the writer, to connect with the reader in a transient relationship. My voice, that of a teacher working where I do and experiencing what I have, is valid and is unheard. Added to that, if my white middle class female voice is the means to opening up the voices of the pupils in my class, then so be it.

I haven't posted a blog in a year. That fact saddened me a lot as I realised that I had silenced my own voice without knowing. This post ends that silence.