Abstract
The bricolage of discourses that is part of the mystory approach offers a way to make sense of disparate resources relevant to the study of everyday life. These resources can include popular culture and social media materials, interviews and observations, and academic literature. Here, I explain what mystory is, as well as how and why I fused together personal (autoethnographic), popular and different kinds of academic discourses as bricolage. By layering difference discourses (popular, field-based, academic) with personal reflections (memory), I created coherent narratives that explicitly answered research questions. By weaving these different discourses into distinct patterns of thinking and writing, I found a way to balance my voice alongside the voices of my research participants and other artifacts of their world of cafés, roasteries, coffee, and the Internet to overcome writers’ block. As such, this is also a story of how I found my voice through autoethnography.
Introduction
The power of autoethnography to provide voice is well noted in the literature (Adams et al., 2022; Chawla, 2022; Denzin, 2018; Ellis et al., 2011; Iosefo et al., 2021; Raimondi et al., 2020). For example, the inclusion of the autobiographical facilitates the exploration of new types of knowledge and embraces consideration of the researchers’ subject position within the research process both of which can be very empowering in finding a more authentic authorial voice (Denzin, 2014; Bochner & Ellis, 2021; Iosefo et al., 2021; Madison, 2012). It is also well established that one of the purposes of autoethnography is to provide a platform for voices likely to be marginalized in mainstream academic publications (Gale & Wyatt, 2019; Herrmann & Adams, 2020; Raimondi et al., 2020). These include authorial voices presenting the personal and subjective, as well as the voices of groups that are minoritized in wider society, such as Indigenous groups (Denzin, 2018; Iosefo et al., 2021). Collaborative autoethnography extends the capacity of autoethnography to give voice by including the accounts of non-academics (Lapadat, 2017), reinforcing the capacity of autoethnographic practice of “bringing diverse knowledges further into the academy” (Iosefo et al., 2021, p. 4).
During my research into the work identity of baristas, I experienced a form of writer’s block that stemmed from encounters with bullying behavior within academia and within my research field; and personal struggles in locating myself within my research field as an expert. My ability to overcome the writer’s block was further challenged by historical trauma linked to the challenges I have experienced and still experience due to my dyslexia in making sense of the world. The struggles manifested most strongly when I realized that despite my best attempts at research, I was not able to present an authoritative account, nor did I feel I could provide definitive answers on the barista work identity. These feelings intensified when I was sifting through and reflecting on the difference voices and diverse experiences identified as relevant in my exploration of the barista work identity and their everyday life work contexts of cafés and roasteries. Struggles that were only resolved when I found a way to honor the different voices I had encountered and collected while maintaining my own sense of voice. Chawla (2022) shares a similar experience of stuck-ness where the overwhelm from processing multiple sources of evidence was resolved through walking and writing as autoethnographic practice. I personally overcame my writers block and found my voice through using principles of the mystory approach (Ulmer, 1989, 1994, 2003) alongside the practice of autoethnography (Denzin, 2014, 2018) in the write up of my research.
Mystory is a technique of creation that emphasizing unification of the personal, popular, and expert discourses. The method of giving weight to these three different forms of knowledge offered a way to make sense of all the stories that I encountered; to connect legitimately to popular culture as part of my focus on everyday life. Mystory, with its emphasis on the personal or autoethnographic, also enabled me to be cognisant of my positionality to and within the research. Placing me, the researcher, at the center but not as an authority but as another participant allowed me to enage in analyzing my findings in a hermeneutic and heuristic way. To do this, I drew on my memories both creatively and analytically, using academic literature triangulated with empirical information (key informant interviews, observation/participant observation, and life history interviews), personal memories, and popular culture (websites, blogs, television, movies, and other media; Denzin, 2014; Madison, 2012; Troutman, 2011; Ulmer, 1989).
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how I found my voice by engaging in the sense-making practices that are a part of mystory. In using some of the principles of mystory, I found a way to balance my voice alongside the voices of my participants, coffee industry social media commentators, journalists, and fellow researchers to make sense of and successfully express my research findings. First, I explain how I encountered mystory and what the practice of mystory involves. Second, I outline the connections between autoethnography and mystory. Third, I discuss my specific application of mystory and autoethnography as an analytical and writing approach.
My Research Project
It is important to foreground this article with an explanation of my research. The overall purpose of my research was to analyze the shifts to the service economy and consumer society in light of the work contexts and identities of baristas. The following paragraphs briefly outline my research questions, methods, and key findings. Essentially, I wished to examine the arguments that we have shifted to a consumer society and service economy and think through the implications of these shifts in particular for the nature of work. Given my social justice labor studies and adult education training, I wanted to focus on non-unionized employees and the connections between learning and work identities. Given my personal background as a service worker, I also wanted to better understand the nature of interactive service work. To do this, I drew on a case study of the emergence and development of the occupational identity of coffee-makers or baristas in Western developed contexts. Specifically, I asked, What insights can the barista work identity and the work context of cafés provide about: (1) the shift to and the nature of work in the consumer society and service economy; (2) the embodied labour process, identity formation and learning of service workers; (3) the revival of artisanship, and the notion of craft, and (4) the rise in non-standard employment and the emerging precariat class. (Piercy, 2018, pp. 8–9)
My study into the café and roastery context included four life history interviews with baristas using an approach developed at the University of Roskilde Graduate School of Lifelong Learning (Olesen, 2015; Olesen & Weber, 2001), 12 key informant interviews with roasters, baristas, trainers and franchise managers, and participant observation at key industry events and internal roastery practices in New Zealand, Denmark, Britain, and the United States.
My key findings included the following observations. First, the different work identities within a specific occupation contribute to the heterogeneity of service workers and service work. This heterogeneity, in turn, obscures the range of skills utilized in the technical and presentational labor mobilized in service work. The skills are also obscured by the social and practice-based nature of knowledge transmission in service work occupations like that of baristas, as well as by the dynamic and shifting alliances that may occur in the triadic relationship of customer, workers, and employer/manager. Such social and practice-based knowledge transmission is common to the concept of craft. This presents a contradiction because craft-based language is being used to make the skills of service workers more visible.
Second, the different work identities stem from the different business strategies deployed by business owners and managers and only some business strategies allow baristas to embrace both the language and practices of craft and artisanship. Third, interactive service workers are involved in providing labor or work that is more complex than is socially understood and recognized. This complexity stems from the ways in which presentational labor is commodified, appropriated, and mobilized in the workplace within the spaces of the organizational context, internal practices, and the service encounter. Fourth, the way service workers are managed by employers and perceived by customers also reinforces and promotes compliance with insecure and precarious employment practices. As the conditions of precarious work continue to spread, the employment relationship is being altered in relation to consumption practices.
Overall, based on the shifts in employment relations, I argue that we are moving toward a labor market and society shaped by the practices of the consumer society, as well as the traditional production-based economy. However, the increasing influence of consumption practices stems more from neoliberal inspired changes in employment relationships than the consumer society emphasis on agentic identity projects, which represent limited opportunities to resist capitalism and associated structures.
Mystory as Pedagogy
Ulmer’s (1989, 1994, 2003) mystory approach is a practice that is centered on pedagogy—on learning, adaptation, and invention. It is a technique focused on discovery rather than the production of knowledge. It is about invention, a style of thinking and composition designed to facilitate creativity on the part of both the reader and the writer (Gye, 2003; Troutman, 2011; Ulmer, 1989, 2003). In this sense, it is similar to the emphasis within autoethnography of writing with (Adams et al., 2022).
I first learnt about mystory through a conversation about teaching third year students. It was a discussion between fellow teachers struggling with their desire to increase their students’ engagement with academic literature. As we exchanged commentary on our frustrations, my mentor explained a specific assignment he was using, a “mystory.” The assignment had three parts to it that the students worked on separately where all parts were on the same subject area. The first part began with the student selecting a significant moment from their life that evoked awareness of how structure may impact on them personally (connecting here also to the sociological imagination 1 ; Mills, 1970). The point was for the student to write up a justification of their decision as a personal account focused on an aspect of structure (class, race, gender, sexuality).
Once the first part was completed and the account graded with feedback, students were then asked to produce the second part, but this time filtered through an interview with an older family member. The purpose of the interview was to ask about the family member’s lived experience of the structure. The interview introduced historical knowledge, allowing observations to be made about how the impact of the selected structure has changed over time. The findings needed to be written up, graded and so on before the final part of the assignment. The third part, and the focus of our discussion, was on the last written account, which drew on academic discussions of the selected structure. I was intrigued by the assignment’s focus on the creation of three different accounts on the same topic. My mentor shared extracts of Ulmer’s (1989) teletheory with me, so that I could deepen my understanding of the assignment, and how the assemblage of the three forms of information were connected to the idea of mystory.
Ulmer’s (1989) theorization of the mystory approach is a form of grammatology called teletheory. He argues that there is a need to respond to the shift to the video age, where the role of media as a form of knowledge production and as a location of knowledge was becoming more important (Ulmer, 1989). One of Ulmer’s (1994) intentions with mystory is to help students move from literacy to electracy, to shift from one form of apparatus (written text) to another (video/television/media based). As such, it is also an approach “that seeks to challenge conventional forms of academic writing and knowing” (Rath, 2009, p. 150).
Ulmer (1994, 2003) presents electracy as a new form of literacy, one designed to understand the apparatus of the electronic or in later publications the digital age. It is a form of literacy that encompasses video, media, image rather than just words. Electracy is also a form of literacy that supports students/mystory creators to engage with different kinds of text and discourse selected, created, and curated in response to the electronic age (Gye, 2003; Troutman, 2011). Mystory, as a practice of electracy, therefore, offers a way to engage in a university context with new genres of writing such as “blogs, vlogs, YouTube videos, online fanzines and character-limited text messaging (a.k.a. “tweets” (Troutman, 2011, p. xxi)
Ulmer (1989) draws from Lacan to discuss how mystory can be used to adapt interactions between the imaginary and the symbolic by bringing together “discourses of specialized disciplines, popular culture, and autobiography” (p. 120). Thus, a mystory is the juxtaposition of different levels of discourse—“expert, popular and personal” or “private, public and learned spaces of culture” (Ulmer, 1989, p. 129). Ulmer (1989) also draws on psycho-analysis, which places the experience of emotions at its core. Strong feelings become the prompt for story-telling through the selection of stories/epiphanies that hold the “the sting of memory” (Ulmer, 1989, p. 209). Therefore, emotional as well as cognitive modes of thinking inform the creative and self-reflective practice of mystory (Piercy, 2018; Rath, 2009; Troutman, 2011).
Ulmer’s (1989) writing is also indebted to Derrida and Barthes. As such, the technique is framed by the principles of post-modern pastiche and non-linear presentation in the production of the mystory. The aim of the writing is not the production of a linear and chronological narrative; rather it is focused on pattern detection and production style that emphasizes those patterns (Ulmer, 1989, 1994). It is also a form of writing that moves away from hermeneutical processes of interpretation to heuristic processes of invention. Troutman (2011) quotes Arroyo (2009) to describe the shift to heuretics or the construction of disassociated parts into patterns of rhizomatic assemblage: The logic of heuretics emerges through writing when writers construct patterns from disassociated parts. These patterns are not known in advance and emerge through the act of writing itself. . . Both the conceptual age and convergence culture require heuretical thinking and writing, and both place tremendous value on inventing new ideas by reassembling the old in different ways. (pp. 246–247; cited in Troutman, p. xx emphasis in source)
The text produced is therefore “rhizomatic, dialogic and susceptible to constant modification” (Rath, 2009, p. 150).
Despite these principles, Ulmer’s mystory technique is difficult to define because the nature of post-modernism is to be open and imprecise. It is also difficult to define because the practice itself is designed to move away from presenting definitive positions on the subject(s) being written about (Rath, 2009). Furthermore, Ulmer’s mystory technique has taken on slightly different forms as his ideas have evolved. For example, in an update to address the digital age Ulmer (2003) suggests mystories should be presented as hypertext on webpages to enhance the shift to electracy. This format also more easily allows the creation of a bricolage that includes text alongside “images, audio clips, mash-ups, and video images” (Troutman, 2011, p. xi).
Producing a more codified pedagogical technique Ulmer (2003) invites students to produce hypertext mystory focusing in turn on the following four images or topic areas: career, family, entertainment, and community. The first task is to narrow your focus on the career image and to reflect upon it until you forge a sense of your identity. Consideration of the next image prompt of family extends the map of identity and thought; reflection on socialization allows both being (identity) and becoming (experience and movement) to be a part of that identity exploration. Entertainment, the third image prompt, is also relevant to becoming. Consideration of entertainment or popular culture includes the imaginary because pictures, like text, also require active reading, but the viewer is left to fill in the gaps. Reflecting on community or the culture and ideology that you grew up within is the fourth image prompt. Consideration of this prompt may cause discomfort, as the ideologies that shape identity change over time making the disconnect between different versions of ourselves more visible. Furthermore, engaging with these ideologies allows the incorporation of the unconscious into the creation of the mystory (Manuel, 2021; Troutman, 2011). Therefore, these techniques are also used to more deeply know the self through the process of interpellation (Troutman, 2011).
The Practice of Mystory
In relation to Ulmer’s earlier work, Gye (2003) states there are normally four to five different types of knowledge that are combined through the account of the autobiographical experience. These are “history, herstory, mystery, my story and envois. 2 Each element contributes part of itself to the invention of the word mystory and each element deals in part with the concerns of mystoriography.” Thus, mystory is the title of the work and mystoriography is the practice (Ulmer, 1989, cited in Gye, 2003, section Hyperlogic, invention, and the electronic apparatus, para. 5).
There are parallels here to the three tasks set by my mentor for his students. History comes from the interview with the older family member. This task serves not just as an invitation to include historical material in the “mystory,” but for the student to reflect on the past in relation to their personal present. Ulmer has stated that mystory is simply another form of herstory (Ulmer, 2014). Herstory, a concept that emerged from the second wave of feminism (Colman, 2015; Doyle, 2001; Rostek, 2021) was about reimaging historical accounts—to develop historical accounts that emphasized the role of women but also introduced the validity of experience and narrative as legitimate forms of knowledge. Inspired by herstory, Ulmer explains that the focusing on the personal, the individual, allows for the creation of a unique interpretation of historical moments (Ulmer, 2014). Herstory, then, relates to the first part in the assignment, the personal account of experiencing structure.
Both of these historically focused tasks also relate to the process of mystery—of being open to inference and conjecture but also of making intuitive leaps, which relate to the third part of the assignment, making connections to academic literature (Gye, 2003). These intuitive leaps related to the patterns that emerge (interpretation) from comparing your own account with your family member’s recollections and then in turn what is in the literature are creating knowledge rather than preserving it (Rath, 2009; Troutman, 2011). These intuitive leaps are based on the development of trust in the patterns detected and the belief that the patterns are valid in themselves for the creation of the mystory. This kind of conjecture is the thinking students need to engage in, to reach for the third part of the assignment of connecting their personal accounts to literature. As the student’s personal account becomes the conduit for making connections to history and then to academic literature, the student’s life is written in and through the research practices, process, and product. Ulmer refers to these layers of connections as sets of relays and explains that the thinking involved is conduction. Gye (2003, Hyperlogic, invention and the electronic apparatus, para. 14) explains further that . . . conduction involves a movement between things. Where abduction, deduction and induction all involve a relation between the general and the particular, conduction remains at the level of the particular. The mystoriographer is not concerned with getting to the bottom of things, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, but rather in seeing the possibility of connections between things without having to expand or reduce particularities to general principles.
The shift outlined by Gye (2003) is expressed by Ulmer as the movement from hermeneutical (Sherlock Holmes) to heuristic thinking (creation; Troutman, 2011).
Connected to the consideration of academic literature is envois, the last element of mystory, an end point that brings us back to the principles of knowledge and validity more familiar to the halls of academe. Ulmer (1989) argues that the inclusion of the personal into the research and writing process remains a basis on which to engage in praxis, to develop theory from the particular. The creation by the mystoriographer is then a process of theorization, as it is in the act of the writing process itself that patterns emerge. The writer, or the mystoriographer, is therefore both the subject and the producer of mystory. It is this argument that positions the technique as being more than pedagogy or the shift from literacy to electracy. Mystory is a research and reflexive practice in and of itself, and this is how Denzin (2014, 2018) and others, such as Magolda (1999), Gye (2003), and Rath (2009) have used it to produce layered texts (Ronai, 1995).
A layered text in accordance with the practice of Ronai (1995) is characterized by the inclusion of three asterisks presented between the different discourses. However, sharp distinctions in authorial voice can also be used, as can different presentational styles using italics or negative space. These techniques stem from the publication practices of autoethnography. Another connection between autoethnography and mystory is made by Denzin (2014, 2018). Denzin (2014) argues that the epiphanies of life, the (self-identified) significant moments that cut to the core of a person’s identity, are the basis of an autoethnographic approach to mystory. Thus, it is the usage and emphasis on autobiography that fuses the mystory approach to autoethnography, but one of a particular kind that is grounded in recollections rather than the present (Denzin, 2014; Giorgio, 2013).
I can see the value in encouraging students to engage in electracy. After all, it was pedagogy that drew me to mystory. However, it is Ulmer’s (1989) invitation to consider experience through the juxtaposition of different levels of discourse—“expert, popular and personal”—that captured my attention, as I felt it offered a way for me to deal with the disparate voices from my research findings. In particular, it offered a way for me to reconsider the role of the researcher’s authorial voice, a reconsideration I chose to deepen through the application of autoethnographic practices. Before I share my personal take on being a mystoriographer, I will explain more about the links between the practices of autoethnography and mystory.
Autoethnography and Mystory
In contrast to the more prescriptive emphases within the mystory pedagogy and combination of discourses, autoethnography is a permissive, varied and wide-ranging approach to research, performance, and writing practices. As with the mystory approach, at the core of autoethnography is an emphasis on the personal. However, autoethnography is delineated from other forms of autobiographical or life writing by leading scholars in the field (Adams et al., 2021, 2022; Ellis et al., 2011; Herrmann & Adams, 2020). Adams et al. (2021) argue that “It centralizes auto (self) and involves creative composition (graph). Systematic engagement with culture (ethnos) distinguishes autoethnography from autobiography” (p. 3). The engagement with culture and the structures that shape the story being told, allow autoethnographers to demonstrate “how power works to dominate and marginalize particular groups within society” (Cummings, 2021, p. 155). This critical approach, grounded in Indigenous and queer autoethnographic practices as liberatory projects (Cummings, 2021; Denzin, 2018; Iosefo et al., 2021; Tamas, 2018), resonates with Ulmer’s emphasis on the exploration of the cultural context of the personal in relation to academic discourse as well as popular culture.
Autoethnographers engage in identity work, whereby they “reframe and re-story experiences in ways that leverage positionality and can build agency and empowerment” (Adams et al., 2021, p. 2). The personal is shared to create resonance and enable empathetic and potentially transformative connections with readers. Rather than explain how generalizations can be made from the sharing of experience, the aim of autoethnography is to invite others to learn from the personal stories within and through the autoethnographic practices (Adams et al., 2021; Denzin, 2014).
The intention of the creators of autoethnography, Art Bochner and Carolyn Ellis (2021), was to develop “a humane, qualitative field of inquiry that required us to develop caring relationships with others instead of standing apart from them in the name of objectivity and rigor” (p. 252). The legacy of Ellis and Bochner’s work is illustrated by the ever-growing community of academics who choose to take risks and challenge the traditions positivist philosophy and practice (science) by writing autoethnographic accounts of their experiences (Bochner & Ellis, 2021; also see Ellis et al., 2011; Jago, 2021; Raimondi et al., 2020; Wyatt, 2020). Another important author in this field is Norman Denzin, and it is Denzin (2014, 2018) who explicitly connects autoethnography to the mystory approach.
Denzin’s explanation of interpretive (Denzin, 2014) and performance (Denzin, 2018) autoethnography is deeply indebted to Ulmer’s (1989) text on teletheory. In contrast to Ulmer’s emphasis on the use of mystory to build students’ electracy, Denzin (2014, 2018) uses mystory to describe a way of writing and thinking that is shaped by and through the ways that autoethnographers draw on personal experiences grounded in popular culture, which can and should also be analyzed by drawing on academic discourse to reflect on structure and power relations. Denzin is not alone in making this connection between popular culture and autoethnography. For example, Adams has also written about drawing popular culture into autoethnographic accounts (Adams et al., 2022; Herrmann & Adams, 2020). In fact, Herrmann and Adams (2020) argue that the integration and interrogation of popular culture is a core part of the “ethno” in autoethnography.
In his approach to autoethnography through mystory, Denzin (2014, 2018) argues for accounts that are produced as layered texts (Ronai, 1995), which combine different types of discourse (popular, personal, disciplinary) to make clear connections to structure and power relations. Ulmer (1989), who also produced layered text in his mystory example Derrida at the Little Bighorn, presents different types of discourses that are not transparently connected to each other, signaled by different authorial voice, headings and font size, indentations and italics (for other examples, see Denzin, 2014, 2018; Magolda, 1999; Rath, 2009). The absence of writing that explicitly connects the different texts together allows the reader to take an active role in engaging in sense-making of the text rather than being a passive receiver. This kind of practice resonates with the emphasis within autoethnographic writing on the idea of writing with—that when you are crafting your autoethnographic account, you do so aware of your audience and their potential reactions (Adams et al., 2022; Gale & Wyatt, 2019).
Denzin (2014) argues for a form of triangulation between performance, process, and analysis to achieve and include structural analysis in an autoethnographic account. He offers four different types of biographical knowledge that can be used to do this. The first kind of biographical knowledge comes from Denzin’s (2014) assertion that performance texts that are multileveled and can be “written, staged and performed” (p. 31). The second form of biographical knowledge is personal experiences presented in connection to a life story. The third kind is a collection of autobiographical stories selected in relation to a common theme. The fourth type is a cross-case analysis of materials collected that focus on the process being studied rather than people’s stories.
Considering how autoethnographic practices expand and change over time, there are also other approaches to autoethnography that overlap with the mystory approach, for example, Atay’s (2020) advocacy for cyber or digital autoethnography (also see Iosefo et al., 2021). Just as Ulmer (2003) turns to hypertext to encourage the production of mystories that use multimedia as a form of electracy, Atay argues that there is a need for a form of autoethnography that acknowledges our digital lives. They argue that “our identities and realities are becoming increasingly mediated and digitalized. Hence, our autoethnographies need to take into account the more fragmentary self that social media facilitates, whereby identities are patched together and are a mixture of (cyber)experiences, (cyber)stories, and (cyber/mediated) representations” (Atay, 2020, p. 272).
Atay outlines three different types of cyber or digital autoethnography. The first is more aligned with traditional text-based autoethnography, where the ethno aspect would focus on the interrogation of the cyber and digital aspects of the self (auto). The second is closer to the mystory emphasis on hypertext and multimedia in presentation, where the graph or craft of autoethnography responds to and potentially also be composed within the context of virtual reality and/or writing as cyborg or avatar. The third form of cyber autoethnography would take the extensive “life writing” that many of us engage in as part of our social media lives as a form of autoethnography in and of itself, one that represents writing as fragmentary but also with the capacity for convergence and co-construction (responses to posts; Atay, 2020, p. 273). As such, Atay’s (2020) advocacy for the inclusion of our digital presence, self, and lives could be seen as a call to autoethnographers to shift from literacy to electracy. The notion of autoethnography as a process of drawing together fragments is also core to Wyatt’s (2020) use of memory and emphasis on the body. This inclusion of affect in Wyatt’s work also connects the conductive and heuristic nature of mystory.
Like the mystory approach, autoethnographic writing can also be deeply steeped in academic sources. For instance, drawing on the work of Adams & Holman Jones (2008, 2011) and Holman Jones & Adams (2010). Cummings (2021) uses a style of autoethnographic writing that presents, “narratives in a non-linear fashion alongside theory; [whereby] the theory validates the stories, and the theory is validated by the experiences in the narratives” (p. 156). Sparkes (2002, 2021) also engages in multiple movements between personal stories and academic (theoretical literature). Sparkes’ (2002, 2021) autoethnographic accounts are not presented as layered texts, nor do they focus solely on the personal account. Instead, the personal stories and insights are grounded in and connected to the research and thinking of others.
While it could be argued that mystory is more formulaic and in practice focused on pedagogy not research, Ulmer’s ideas about knowledge are also located within the practices of autoethnography. Indeed, autoethnography is also about pedagogy, as presenting students with autoethnographic accounts helps them engage with knowledge differently and critically using mind, body, and emotion (Denzin, 2018; Tamas, 2018; Wyatt, 2020). By fusing the two in my research and writing approach, I have been able to take ownership of my research process and output and by doing so find a way through it, by beginning first with what I can own the personal.
Being a Mystoriographer
Given the importance of social media blogs, journalistic accounts, and television programs to my fieldwork, that mystory offered a way of thinking and writing that justified rather than rejected their inclusion in “research” was a lifeline for me in terms of finding a way to not just acknowledge, but draw on, these important voices in the world of coffee. The use of academic theory and literature in autoethnographic writing also illustrated to me how the mystory emphasis on academic discourse meant I could still hold true to the academic requirement to ground research in the work of others. The mystory approach gave me a way to move away from the traditional composition of “research” as literature review, method, findings, and discussion. I realized that I could create a combination of discourses that also enables a form of triangulation that stretches, confirms, or challenges insights found in the field and in extant literature. To do this, I wove together scholarly literature, popular culture, and my time in the field with insights drawn from my memory, my history/herstory taken from my everyday life as an academic, teacher, former retail worker, student, and avid coffee consumer. By drawing together these discourses, I generated insights designed to illuminate the complexity of everyday life–taking a pluralist rather than essentialist stance. Taking this stance released me from the pressure to be authoritative and definitive, allowing me to being to be unstuck.
Inspired by Ulmer (1989), Denzin (2014), Sparkes (2002), Jenks (2002), and many others, I plunged back into the exploration of my fieldwork findings; popular culture, as well as my own position pushed me to reconsider and seek out further meaning in academic texts. This iterative relay of conductive thinking, central to the heuristic approach that writers are exhorted to take in the creation and production of mystories, is akin to the wayfinding/walking (Chawla, 2022; Iosefo et al., 2021) sense of grappling, seeking meaning through movement, through pathfinding. It is this form of sense-making, core to mystory and autoethnography, that allowed me to revisit my field materials in conjunction with my personal history and academic literature and led to development of my authorial voice and my use of mystory as an analytical approach. This form of practice in thinking and writing made complete and utter sense in relation to my personal forms of dyslexic thinking.
Before I describe further my use of the mystory approach, it is important to mention the aspects of mystory that I did not adopt. For example, I did not present mystory as hypertext, nor did I use the approach to incorporate interactive media sources. In this sense, my commitment to electracy was based around the use of web-based sources, for example, blogs and Instagram posts to extend my understanding of participant accounts. Also, while I included aspects of mystery, I presented more tightly woven and connected accounts shaped by the need to address specific research questions. Therefore, even though the different voices were woven together, the different topics of my research were shaped along specific thematic and theoretical perspectives stemming as much from a hermeneutical as heuristic approach. In this sense, it could be argued that I did not engage in mystory. However, I did maintain a strong focus on melding the personal, popular, and academic in my thinking and writing, including history, herstory, mystory, and envois. Influenced by other autoethnographic accounts, in particular, Jenks (2002) exploration of writing fieldnotes, I also chose to weave together not just the personal, popular, and academic, but field-based discourses. By doing so, I was able to honor the different empirical voices that had been shared with me, alongside those of academia and my own.
Analytically, I drew on the mystory approach to reconsider my empirical information in an iterative process. For example, I used my different identities and the memories that shaped them, as still points (epiphanies) to construct a narrative that would become a basis to answer my research questions. Forming an iterative relay (conductive), these themes or patterns were then reconsidered in light of the key informant interviews, life histories, and participant observations. Connections were then made to my insights from the academic literature (expert), considering the issues of service work and consumption in order to forge new patterns of thinking. These connections were then re-interrogated in relation to my observations of the intersecting communities of practice (CoPs), which contribute to the barista work identity and included literature from popular culture, blogs, and books written by industry players and journalists (popular culture). Immersing myself in academic literature as part of the writing process ensured my findings were examined from a range of perspectives other than my own. In this sense, I was engaging in Denzin’s (2014) fourth aspect of triangulation cross-case analysis or the graph (Herrmann & Adams, 2020).
My epiphanies were selected based on the way that my different identities intersected with the subject material I considered, to answer my questions on the barista work identity case study, as well as broader questions on consumer society and the service economy. These epiphanies included my everyday life experiences of coffee culture in Wellington that inspired my case study selection of baristas (2000); experiences of being in the field in the United States reconsidering my findings through participant observation (2015); studies into the shift from production into consumption/marketing work practices that inspired by desire to understand the consumer society (1997); use of coffee culture as a pedagogical device when teaching pre-degree students about culture as a noun and a process (2003); personal work life history in retail and my undergraduate and post-graduate studies in labor studies that inspired my desire to better understand the service work labor process and service economy (1995–1999); personal journey in coffee consumption (late 1990s to ongoing); personal observations of a hospitality service worker in a hotel through the lens of my PhD (2014); personal observations about baristas’ presentational labor; and, personal journey of hope—baristas as artisans—and despair—baristas as precariats in my research investigation.
These epiphanic moments, and epiphanic reflections about my research and the process of doing it combined with epiphanic memories of my work life history and student life enabled me to bring my positionality and identity into my research process and writing. Based on this iterative process, the threads from each of the different types of discourse were then woven into a coherent set of narratives. In this sense, my practice was still partially heuristic (Troutman, 2011; Ulmer, 1989) by allowing the writing process to have room for discovery (Chawla, 2022; Iosefo et al., 2021). In making these choices, I was influenced by a Hannah Arendt quote, “What is important for me is to understand. For me, writing is a matter of seeking this understanding, part of the process of understanding” (Gaus, 1964). Writing also became my way of seeking and gaining deeper understandings: understandings of my case study—the barista work identity—and also, through the mystory emphasis on memory, understandings of myself as a researcher, academic, and former service worker.
My identification of patterns between my everyday life identities and my research enquiry led to the creation of overarching stories designed to provide resonance. These narratives, in which others may recognize threads of their own experiences, are a form of validation that connects to and makes sense of everyday experience. Thus, readers will continue to connect to and be able to extrapolate from my findings and consider their own place in the consumer society, service economy, coffee and café culture, as well as academia. I also drew on the sociological imagination to highlight connections between structure and agency.
The incorporation of academic texts was presented in bricolage accounts that moved between my personal voice, voices from the field, and from popular culture in a structure designed to answer specific research questions. By using mystory and autoethnography, my presentation of these answers was grounded in some sense of incompleteness and plurality as I sought to acknowledge that these stories will continue to evolve beyond the boundaries of my research. By doing so, I also created a sense of mystery that is part of the mystory approach. This also served to aid in my struggle to locate myself as an expert as the approach emphasized and gave permission to be incomplete, to illustrate that there are still many stories to tell, despite the need to answer specific research questions.
However, like other aspects of autoethnography, presenting answers with gaps is a risk when speaking to academic communities. Hence, my decision too also takes a hermeneutical approach. I drew on a range of materials or stories from both primary and secondary sources to serve as a form of triangulation between story and theory (Denzin, 2014; Ulmer, 1989). The validity of my answers therefore stemmed from the way my thinking and writing enabled me to highlight connections, patterns, or threads between individual biography and structural changes discussed in academic literature thematically to answer specific questions.
My purpose in making these connections was to discuss how workers experience their work and resolve the contradictions that structure raises, revealing the possibilities of agentic behavior–including its limits. For example, one of the patterns or threads I identified was the interplay between agency and resistance. As a consumer, I had engaged with the narratives of the slow movement and took heart from the movement’s statement of resistance to industrial capitalism and mass production. However, as an academic when I examined literature on the consumer society and slow food, I had to let go of my personal passion. In my critical reflection, I needed to acknowledge the limitations exposed by the middle-class co-option of resistance and the slow movement’s appropriation of peasant food and values. These tensions and the practice of appropriation reflected in the slow movement were also part of the power relations that I had observed in the field, between baristas who were able to exercise and perform in ways associated with artisanship and the larger number of baristas who were much more constrained by the organizational contexts in which they work (Piercy, 2018).
Academic arguments about the consumer society’s reconceptualization of identity (re)formation as an agentic and reflexive project exercised through consumption practices helped me make sense of the brand narratives different businesses embody to attract particular kinds of customers. This is an observation that resonated with the role of business models, leading to differences in the barista work identit(ies). An examination of consumer culture and consumption practices pushed me to maintain a sense of becoming, of pluralism, as brand narratives cannot just be imposed on customers: they are co-constructed. Thus, even though the capacity to exercise consumption choices is not evenly distributed throughout society, this does not negate consumers’ and workers’ opportunities to engage in the practices of de-commodification, resisting capitalism’s imposition of commodity fetishism (Piercy, 2018).
In sum, the mystory technique gave me permission to weave together my insights as a researcher and as a frequent coffee consumer, (personal) material from blogs, television programs and journalistic literature (popular), material from academic literature with stories from the field. The capacity to meld these discourses provided a way for me to make sense of but also highlight the different types of information I had accessed, to make sense not just of the barista work identity, but the barista work identities (Piercy, 2018).
Conclusion
Mystory and autoethnography in all its diversity reflect epistemologies that challenge traditional understandings of how knowledge is produced and communicated. Both approaches offer ways of connecting to the particular, but do so cognisant of structure and the power relations that shape experience. For me, struggling to deal with the overwhelm of fieldwork and voices from social media, and popular culture, mystory offered a way to legitimize popular and personal knowledge alongside the kinds of disciplinary knowledge traditionally privileged as authoritative. In the shift to electracy and digital life, mystory and autoethnography also offer a way to make sense of not just who we are, but how we cultivate different identities online for a myriad of purposes (Atay, 2020).
Mystory and autoethnography also invite the reader in as an active participant rather than a passive recipient of written communication. In doing so, these approaches emphasize the agency of all parties to and within the communication. As such, mystory and autoethnography feature communication that affects on creator and audience (Gale & Wyatt, 2019). Given their transgressive positioning, both approaches are associated with a post-positivist world and both are considered to be risky strategies for publication (Ellis et al., 2011; Jago, 2021; Raimondi et al., 2020). However, if the approaches feel right, as aspects of the mystory approach did to me, then these approaches feel like the only appropriate path to take (Jago, 2021). Given the proliferation of autoethnography in academic writing, I am not alone in feeling this way and furthermore the vast number of these publications indicate that some shifts are occurring in what is considered legitimate to the work of academics (Adams et al., 2022; Herrmann & Adams, 2020).
In sharing my approach, I have demonstrated how mystory’s emphasis on heuristic thinking enabled me to analyze my empirical material by weaving it together with the disparate and at times excluded voices of the personal and popular alongside the more traditional voice of the academic. My decision to balance my voice alongside the voices of my research participants and other symbols to make sense of my research findings enabled me to overcome my writer’s block.
As the researcher, I took ownership of my positionality toward and within my research. This was achieved by my exploration of autoethnographic accounts that traced my journey through the research process as student, service worker, teacher, and researcher. The personal stories that I shared were explicitly connected to structure by emphasizing the presence of gender and class in my life and in the field. My stories also included personal reflections on academic argument, and together they served to provide core threads through which different discourses were woven together to create coherent narratives. I layered insights from my empirical context alongside those from the academic literature in terms of theory and additional empirical studies of baristas, cafés, and coffee, building toward the answers to my research questions. The selection and curation of these threads of insight combined aspects of hermeneutics with the aim of also leaving room for heuristic discovery, highlighting how mystory is a way of thinking and writing that encompass the auto (self or personal), the ethno (analysis and critique), and the graph (crafted communicative account).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
