Research Memories and Hauntings

Abstract

In this critical meta-authoethnography, the author returns to the site of an ethnography she conducted five years before in a U.S. high school. JanCarlos, then a fifteen-year-old student, had taken up the position of interviewer and asked the author about her experience of the April 16, 2007, school shootings at Virginia Tech. His question—“Were you there when that kid killed all of those people?”—disrupted traumatic memories. Because JanCarlos had experienced increasing trouble and bullying in school, the author shamefully wondered about his motives in asking about the violent event. In a published book chapter, she writes about the difficulties of the April 16 conversation, including her discomfort at losing control of the interview, as well as her fear, ignorance, and stereotypes about school violence and bullying. In the end, the conversation had transformed her research, inviting her to seek to establish vulnerable presence with participants, experience emotion as instructive, embrace remembering as research, interrogate power with intersectional analysis, and acknowledge limitations to knowledge production. Five years later, she returns to re-engage in conversation with JanCarlos. She layers more understandings to her previous analysis of the April 16 conversation, as well as gains insight into JanCarlos’s difficult school year, bullying, and home/community experiences. The author delves into personal and methodological concerns, concluding with how a critical autoethnographic method is a humanizing way to be more transparent about knowledge production.