Introduction & Background

7/26/08: I woke up several times tonight with sentences running through my mind as I have done since I decided to finish my dissertation before the end of 2008. Or were the sentences in my brain?

[When I do patient teaching with my patients who are experiencing psychosis, I’m careful to talk up the brain and how distorted perceptions are a product of malfunction at the cellular level of the brain just as blood sugars run rampant in diabetes when pancreatic cells are out of whack. I do this in an attempt to “normalize” the psychosis and its treatment with antipsychotic medications. Each time I deliver this teaching I hold my breath lest the patient should ask me what seems like the obvious question: “my perceptions are distorted from what?” When that question comes I know I’m going to have to wade into the existential murk, or else end the interview with “that’s a good question, let’s pick up there when we next speak…” This matters to me because I'm pretty sure my perceptions have been distorted by graduate school. But I digress.]

Wherever the sentences were, I finally got out of bed this morning at 01:23 which is early for me ;->. I’ve been getting up at 03:33 for the last 6 weeks, working on my research, re-running my data, refining sentences. This is my pattern when I have course work due. I’ve hired a dissertation dominatrix to push me to stay focused on my research. She was a classmate who managed to shoot her way out of Dodge as we call graduation in the medical informatics program. She gets a bonus if I graduate in December of 2008. I get a polite email from her each Monday asking what I’ve done in the past week and congratulating me on all the work I’ve done so far. This week she reminded me not to cycle through my data again, as tempting as it is to do so. [Just revise that last paper, the other two papers are accepted, you’ve done enough work she said.] I don’t know what she’s going to say when I tell her I’ve started a new study.

The sentences that got me out of bed this morning are from an autoethnographic study I have not been writing ever since I read about autoethnography several years ago in the Denzin & Lincoln (2003). [I long ago trained my brain to do this—work in the background like a computer on projects that might be worthwhile but are unrelated to current work.] I considered doing an autoethnographic study for my dissertation research but feared I’d never get a job as a nursing or informatics collich perfessor if I did that sort of project. I settled instead for a discourse analysis which seemed daring enough.

I’ve decided to use my sentences this morning and begin an autoethnography of my dissertation research process and cross my fingers that this paper will be accepted as one of the remaining papers required for completion of my dissertation contract. I want to do this because at the end of spring quarter 2008, I found the methods paper that I should have written (Baker et al., 2008). I should have written it on my own topic of course. It is an excellent paper on combining critical discourse analysis with corpus linguistics. In spite of the fact that two well known senior researchers are coauthors on this paper, I expect myself to have written it on my own approach before they did! I’m almost positive that this paper is the impetus behind my dreams of sentences from the autoethnography I wasn’t writing before now. I do not have permission to write an autoethnography for one of my dissertation papers but I doubt anyone will mind. I will still have to revise that methods paper but need this autoE process to clean off my neurons.

Ellis and Bochner (2003) define autoethnography as an “autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the cultural to the personal. Back and forth autoethnographers gaze, first through an ethnographic wide angle lens focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations (p.209)(Ellis & Bochner, 2003).”

Patton states that in autoethnography, the primary data source is personal experience and reflection, the goal is to gain insight into a culture by examining one’s own experiences (Patton & Patton, 2002).

Holman Jones states that autoethnography is”Making a text present. Demanding attention and participation. Implicating all involved. Refusing closure or categorization…believing that words matter and that writing toward the moment when the point of creating autoethnographic texts is to change the world (Holman Jones, 2005).” [BTW it is a good idea to buy the updated Denzin & Lincoln Qualitative Research Handbook. Some of the chapters are new.]

Saukko understands self reflexive autoethnography in terms of Foucault’s work on technologies of the self, and describes two goals of self reflexive autoethnography: 1) to relate an experience, and 2) to critically investigate the discourses that have constituted that experience (p. 84-85) (Saukko, 2003). This description of autoethnography resonates the most for this project because I first encountered Foucault’s Discipline & Punish in my first quarter of master’s studies in nursing and have struggled with Foucault throughout my graduate work. Reading Discipline & Punish lead me to ultimately select discourse analysis for my dissertation method but also to pursue doctoral studies in medical informatics.

In this autoethnographic study I plan to write about my experience of going from bedside psychiatric nurse to doctoral candidate. My goal for this work is to learn more about the interaction of the culture of Lisa Trigg with the cultures of psychiatric and academic nursing and medical informatics. My dissertation has been a hybrid research project and it is my intention that this autoethnography will help me to further integrate [and fragment] my research project. I also wish it to allow me to recall who I was before graduate school and come to terms which who I have become as a result of graduate school.

I plan to use what I consider to be my own writing style in this study, the style that I consciously cultivated through my training as a poet. In my poetic work, I developed what I called “formulas” for honest writing in my various collections. I devised my writing rules more for their impact on me than on my readers long before I had ever heard of Foucault or technologies of the self.

I do not perceive an orderly world that follows rules of grammar, or rules of any kind for that matter. There are rules but I see them consistently ignored or violated. I devised my writing rules to help me express the fractured world I do perceive as much as that is possible. Most of the phrases in my poetic work must come from my own life or I must overhear it where possible. They must be found phrases.

I make use of word games when they work in the text and sometimes when they don’t work. I intentionally misspell words sometimes in my poetic work [see college professor above]. Because they are intentional misspellings, I do not always misspell them the same way and do not always misspell them at all. I allow my errant thoughts and remarks and sometimes those of other people to enter my narratives, but I usually bracket them, literally, as I have in the first paragraph of this study. I do not use quotation marks in my poetic work except under duress because they are ugly and never accurate. I do not always use complete sentences. When I think or speak of what others or I have said, it’s never with quotation marks, but always with he said, she said, I said. In my own writing I do the same. I edit for beauty and truthiness by testing each sentence and paragraph by reading it out loud. I now have the means to record myself reading out loud and plan to do so for this project.

Sometimes I make new temporary or transient rules which I later drop. I devised my writing rules to draw my readers into my own culture. I want to fracture the word-world like an egg, a geode, a skull. I want to create new language. Other people follow sports. Later I found narrative therapy which has a similar purpose and much later, of course Foucault.

07/27/08: Since this is an autoethnography I will of course use my own life for this work. I will seek insight in the artifacts of my graduate work—papers, emails, class notes, etc. I will also blog each section because blogging has become a mainstay in my writing life. This means that I will be able to add photographs, links, ability to leave comments, etc.