The triple nexus between identity work and relationship-building

Abstract

One indicator of the efficacy of autoethnography is its capacity to inform and transform other dimensions of educational research projects, including conceptual frameworks, data analysis and program evaluation. This efficacy consolidates autoethnography’s location in the ‘front and centre’ of such research, and its function as generating elements of knowledge production that would otherwise remain tacit and invisible. This chapter demonstrates that proposition by presenting a collaborative autoethnography created by the two co-authors, both of whom held leadership roles at different times in coordinating a series of continuing education programs for Venezuelan engineers conducted by the Faculty of Engineering at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) in various manifestations between 1999 and 2006. The autoethnography is clustered around three enactments of the crucial nexus between identity work and relationship-building: the chapter’s conceptual framework; the principles underpinning the program design and development; and our critical reflection on our deployment of collaborative autoethnography in the chapter. The analysis developed here highlights the complex, contested and contextualised character of both identity work and relationship-building, and also of their biographically framed intersection.