Abstract
This article discusses the uses of collaborative autoethnography (CAE) as a tool for reflecting on fieldwork experiences conducted as part of a restudy of two ethnographic studies by Pearl Jephcott from 1954 and 1964. We approach CAE in a novel way; through “dialogic exchange” which is presented as transcript excerpts. Through this, we demonstrate two major contributions: (a) that “past” researchers are present, despite their contemporaneous “absence,” in ethnographic restudies as collaborators and (b) the importance and effectiveness of dialogic processes for qualitative research practice. Overall, this reveals new dimensions for consideration in ethnographic restudies and CAE.
Keywords
Introduction
As sociological researchers, writers, and teachers, we have been immersed in autobiographical methods (see Goodwin and Parsons, 2021; Goodwin et al. 2022) and have revisited and restudied lost sociological studies, including past ethnographies (see Goodwin et al., 2022; Goodwin and O’Connor, 2014; Goodwin and O’Connor, 2019). During this time, we have produced and written up field notes and observations and, in turn, used these to inform data analysis in line with standard conventions in qualitative research practice. Yet, despite being immersed in data and practice, we had never previously or systematically examined our fieldwork insights and experiences through intentional, collaborative dialogue. We had not purposefully discussed the fieldwork to critically explore our different but shared experiences in the same research sites. Shared as we were co-located in the same research spaces but different as we experienced the field “differently” given our overlapping but distinct interests, backgrounds, preoccupations or epistemological and ontological proclivities. We do so here as by examining our conversations about fieldwork visits to the sites of two forgotten studies by Pearl Jephcott (1900–1980)—The Social Background of Delinquency (Jephcott et al., 1954) and A Troubled Area (Jephcott, 1964) (see Goodwin et al., 2022)—we hope to advance the literature and discussions on collaborative autoethnography (CAE)/writing in three ways. First, we explore how our CAE emerged as part of an ethnographic fieldwork process and consider its potential as an analytical aid or evocative tool to demonstrate the methodological potential of dialogic exchanges further. Second, revealing and discussing CAE as an additional dimension for consideration when conducting restudies of past research. Third, to extend arguments about the situated and relational ontology of research (specifically research “sites”). Although CAE has been applied to various social phenomena and experiences (Hernandez and Ngunjiri, 2013; Martinez & Merlino, 2014; Noel et al., 2023), as far as we can discern, it has not been used to consider fieldwork experiences specifically and neither has it been used as a dialogic tool—that is, a tool where the aim is to engage in and produce dialogic exchanges, rather than a written narrative. Our approach allows for the co-construction of meaning, knowledge, and understanding about the field, which takes us beyond the standard iterative comparison of field notes.
The remainder of the discussion is structured as follows. First, consider how we situate our work as CAE. We then provide a brief outline of the original studies being revisited. This provides context on the theoretical, empirical, and practical antecedents to our current work. This is followed by excerpts from the CAE transcripts structured around three key themes. We conclude this article with a discussion showing how what has been done here contributes to the continually developing field of CAE, fieldwork practice, and sociological restudies. The use of dialogic exchanges are central to this.
Situating Our Approach Via/as CAE
Starting Points
As suggested above, it is important from the outset to emphasize the notion of “emerged” or “emergent” collaborative autoethnographic practice and the idea of intention. Unlike others, we did not begin the research process with the intention of undertaking a CAE. For example, we did not consciously follow a prescribed set of fundamental “set of tenets” (see Norris, 2016 and Beattie, 2024) to structure our work. Instead, our approach emerged as part of something we were doing. We found walking, talking, discussing, and reflecting in the field helpful as a set of activities. These practices were transformative as a reciprocal process of uncovering, reflecting upon, sharing and scrutinizing meaning. As such, we wanted to understand and consider our practice further and share our fieldwork experiences, hopeful that our “fieldwork stories” might support others (see Douglas & Carless, 2014). It is here where intentionality occurred—to understand and share, our approach was to record and transcribe a series of intentional conversations about the fieldwork. In so doing, we came to position CAE/writing as a core aspect of our joint fieldwork experiences, and the sharing of our conversations (hopefully) demonstrates how our reciprocal, polyvocal dialogic exchanges (Chang, et al., 2013; Fowler, 2024; Norris, 2016) could be used to enhance understanding, facilitate insights, and enable reflection on collaborative working in the field.
Situating Our Approach
A key feature of understanding was to situate our approach in the context of what others have done. As suggested above, our starting point was not a systematic review of existing approaches to CAE. We were not aligned with any of the myriad approaches or orientations; instead, we engaged in joint fieldwork and field-walking practices that facilitated discussion as we progressed. These discussions, relating to sights, sounds, observations, images, thoughts, and reflections, often served as a “differences engine,” highlighting or challenging aspects of our individual knowledge, interpretations, and the meanings we derived. So, where does our approach fit within the broader CAE and collaborative writing literature? Where do we differ and what are the implications of our approach? These are not straightforward questions to answer, given that both autoethnography and CAE have overlapping variations and iterations based on numerous orientations and innovations in research practice. However, some approaches have been instructive in situating and orienting our approach.
First, dialogic CAE (see, for example, Chang et al., 2013; Gale & Wyatt, 2012; Gale et al., 2013; Hernandez et al., 2017; Hernández & Ngunjiri, 2013; Moreira & Diversi, 2014; Wyatt & Gale, 2014) which emphasizes the co-construction of meaning via continuing conversation, dialogue or writing to examine shared narratives and experiences critically. For example, we drew on Chang et al.’s (2013, p. 17) work with CAE being a qualitative research method that is simultaneously collaborative, ethnographic, and autobiographical. The collaboration enables us to “examine shared experiences” (Noel et al., 2023, p. 1) and build upon and share each other’s stories. It is ethnographic as it is an immersive process that benefits from iterative revisiting and reflection. It is autobiographical as it is informed by the researcher’s biographical starting points and experiences, and how researchers engage, observe, and reflect may differ slightly depending on these. Indeed, autobiographical starting points shape orientations to the field and inform what “information” can be gathered or understood there. As suggested above, we recognized the need to consider further how the researchers involved in this project engage differently in “the field” despite simultaneously being in and “experiencing” the same fieldwork activity. This has significant implications for what we understand the “field” in ethnography to be (Boll, 2023) and how ethnographers, particularly, understand, and narrate the “reality” of the field (Martinez & Merlino, 2014). CAE, as a practice, pushes us to actively grapple with and take seriously “the different perceptions that can exist about the same event” (Martinez & Merlino, 2014: 990) and to interrogate the interpretations and “representations stuck to our brains with the thick glue of culture” (Martinez & Merlino, 2014, p. 996).
Second, the consideration of practices from duoethnography. Norris (2016), building on a long-standing exploration of collaborative research practices (see, for example, Norris, 2008; Sawyer & Norris, 2009), outlines duoethnography as a dialogic, polyvocal, disruptive, difference-focused, transformative, and audience-oriented methodology. It is a collaborative research approach “in which two or more researchers of difference juxtapose their life histories to provide multiple understandings of the world” (Norris 2016:9). Through this mutual and reciprocal dialogic exchange about and through research, where the voices of the researchers are not obfuscated as singular, meanings emerge, transform, and are shared. “One is to learn about oneself from the other” (Norris 2016, p. 9), and that learning is shared via stories. Although we cannot claim to have adopted the duoethnographic approach entirely, its undergirding tenets, as Norris (2016) hoped, have provided some relevant guidance to help us position and understand our own emergent practices around collaboration in the field. Like Norris (2016), on our CAE we also focused on differences in our understanding and how we narrated shared but different fieldwork realities. We recognized the value of polyvocality (see Chindaliya et al., 2024) by retaining our voices rather than summarizing, distilling, condensing, or favoring one voice over another. Transformative by deriving new understanding and serving as a check and challenge on a priori viewpoints and established knowledge. Audience-oriented, as we were keen to share what we had done.
Finally, our restudies and field-walking involved a close “engagement” with the fieldwork, writing and practices of the original author, Pearl Jephcott. To situate our work fully, we needed to consider questions regarding “who” the collaborators are/were in the field and in “our” fieldwork. As Leitch (2020) highlights, collaborative processes often involve individuals whose names may not appear in publications or funding applications and whose “presence” may not be contemporaneous with the research activity. In addition, “collaborations with the dead, raises a series of crucial questions about the nature of collaboration, creation, agency, and independence” (Leitch 2020, p. 19). Or Denzin’s (2013, p. 125) view that CAE can be a “co-production of an autoethnographic text by two or more writers, often separated by time and distance.” So, is our work in collaboration with Pearl? Others working directly with the CAE field have also considered the co-presence of others in their writing practices and the process and implications of writing and “collaborating with absent others” or being “haunted by ghosts” (Pineau, 2013, p. 459). Likewise, Douglas and Carless (2014, p. 304) highlight how their collaborative writing and thinking started “side by side.” We were “side by side” but also “tied” to a collaborator, simultaneously present and absent in our walks around long-forgotten research sites. Indeed, although Pearl Jephcott died aged 80 in 1980 (and so could not be physically co-present) her legacy, intentions, preferences and fieldwork practices significantly influenced how we structured and understood our revisits and reconstructions of the field. Perhaps this also speaks to polyvocality and recognizing Pearl as one of the multiple voices in the research. This is especially important for us given that her work, and therefore her “voice” had become lost. While engagement with researchers (primarily through linking to theory and employing research practices) from the past is evident in current practice, there is, to our knowledge, limited exploration of how this engagement constitutes a collaboration “in the field” as part of the restudy project specifically. Unlike others who are writing with “ghosts” or imagined others (see Davenport, 2022; Lewis & Gorman, 2025; Mills, [1960] 2000; Pineau, 2013; Taylor, 2003), we are also walking with, thinking through, revisiting with, reimagining and repositioning in the form of reciprocal dialogic exchange (see Goodwin and Parsons, 2021). Again, sharing our experiences might have broader relevance to those involved in similar collaborative work.
Our Approach: Between the Field and Elsewhere
We have been reworking and revisiting Pearl Jephcott’s The Social Background of Delinquency (1954) and A Troubled Area (1964) (Goodwin et al., 2022) to reimagine the original work and consider the contemporary relevance of Jephcott’s findings and research practices (see Goodwin, 2018; Goodwin and O’Connor 2014, 2019). At their heart, the two books are deeply rooted, fully immersive, ethnographic, community-based studies published 10 years apart. For example, in The Social Background of Delinquency (1954), Jephcott sought to test the hypothesis that within specific working-class areas, different behavioral standards are upheld. The ethnographic fieldwork was undertaken in “Radby” or Hucknall in Nottinghamshire. 1 The data collection included interviews with residents comparing personal histories to explore the standards of conduct in working-class homes and what Jephcott described as ’the playroom method,’ where she encouraged local children to use art to provide a fuller picture of the lives of local residents. Jephcott’s analysis revealed that individuals and groups of streets in the area had very specific and well-defined subcultures associated very directly with delinquency, challenging the dominant discourse of “bad behaviour” as an individual pathological failure. The second study, A Troubled Area: Notes on Notting Hill, considers ‘the causes of the general malaise of North Kensington’ 2 (Jephcott, 1964, p. 18)—an area synonymous with the race riots of 1958. Here, using ethnographic observation, life histories, photographs, and home occupancy data, Jephcott richly located the origins of racial tension in economic injustice, the problems of multioccupancy, the lack of provision for children and adolescents, alongside the lived experiences of “the residents from overseas” (Jephcott, 1964, p. 80).
Entering the “Field”
As both of these studies by Jephcott were place-based community studies, a key prerequisite for restudying them is to revisit the physical sites and to walk the field (see Goodwin and O’Connor, 2014). Walking the field allows researchers to understand the original research site, orient themselves to the spatial characteristics of the site and to record any temporal changes. It allows an initial comparison of “then” and “now” as well as revealing potential insights about the period “in-between” original study and restudy. To that end, our restudies began with field trips and days spent walking the research field as it was described in the books. We spent two full days walking the streets of Notting Hill, London, which is the original research site “Notting Dale” in A Troubled Area (Jephcott, 1964). In the book, Pearl defines her primary research as within a 7-minute walk of the Ladbroke Grove London Underground Station. Using this key landmark, we walked 7 minutes in all directions, and we photographed both the route and the extremities at “seven minutes.” The 7-minute circle encompassed diverse areas, from the tourist areas around Portobello Road, the affluent regenerated townhouses of Notting Hill, to the social housing estates on the margins, including the Lancaster West Estate and the destroyed Grenfell Tower. 3 Our visits coincided with two of the hottest days of that year in 2022, which meant the field walking was physically and mentally demanding, eliciting mild heat stroke in one of us and impacting the ways we captured and reflected. As Verbuyst and Galazka (2023, p. 1) argue, “ethnography does not always go as planned.”
We also spent two full days in Hucknall, the original research site of “Radby” in The Social Background of Delinquency. The original manuscript contained an annotated map of the area highlighting key research sites and streets. We overlaid Pearl’s 1954 maps onto a contemporary UK ordnance survey map to ensure that we had the correct location and to provide an initial visual scan of how the area had changed. For example, the collieries have now disappeared, and certain areas, roads and estates contracted or expanded. One challenge in re-constructing this particular site was the lack of street names on Jephcott’s original map and the use of pseudonyms for the streets in the study. We painstakingly pieced together the geographic information from the original study, with the various maps across time, to figure out exactly which streets had been looked at. During our trips to the area, detailed photographic and written records were kept. This enabled us to make some initial observations about major changes and continuities in the area. Key locations mentioned in the original study—including the Working Men’s Club, the Post Office, the local Pubs, the collieries and the sites of closed factories—were also identified, mapped and visited. As well as walking, we also spent time in the local coffee shop observing the passers by, listening to the cadence and content of conversations of those around us and generally got a “feel” for the place and the people who lived there. We walked and drove up and down the streets identified from the original study. Opportunities arose to strike up a direct conversation, such as when we passed a husband and wife working on a car in their driveway, and we asked them generally about the area and their perceptions of change and transformation.
Commencing CAE—Looking Down
During the field walking we discussed our approach and rationale; our hopes for the restudies and directions we wanted to take it in; points of interest or significance in the field sites; and broader issues. We discussed particularly how “familiar” the areas were (or weren’t) as well as how we were attempting to follow in Pearl’s literal and methodological footsteps. How had Pearl felt when she walked the field, what had her initial observations been? These somewhat informal fieldwork discussions were what prompted the decision to do a CAE, specifically as a series of intentional conversations. The conversations were a way to further interrogate our assumptions about the field sites and how this seemed to be informed by our existing “knowledge” and experience of the world. As Boll suggests:
The clear distinction between “the field” and “the researcher” is an idealization: The researcher is never only “the researcher,” but simultaneously participant of other practices and member of other social worlds and groups. (Boll, 2023, p. 1)
One of the most compelling examples of this was when John stopped Laurie and said “look at this,” pointing to the ground, “this is a coal hole.” Laurie commented that they had not even thought about “looking down.” It became clear that we were both looking at different things, noticing different details, and that this was not simply a “neutral” process of observation but was informed by our biographical starting-points and the “knowledge” we brought into the field with us. Our dialogic exchange, then, began with establishing sameness and difference between us, and between “going native” and “coming home” (Boll, 2023:2).
Comments on Process—Conversations and Dialogic Exchanges About the Field
Following our field site visits, between June—September 2022, we conducted a CAE in the form of four intentional conversations, which were audio-recorded and transcribed, resulting in excess of 27,000 words. We refered to these intentional conversations as dialogic exchanges, which begins to build further on research the two authors completed on the life and work of Nelson Sullivan (Goodwin and Parsons, 2021) and which one of the authors has been completing on Pearl Jephcott, with others (see Goodwin et al., 2022; Goodwin and O’Connor, 2014, 2016). In “dialogic exchanges” the emphasis is on sharing experience (as a form of “authenticity”) and building empathetic connection across time and space, as well as establishing feelings of “familiar” and “strange” in relation to the field.
We approached the conversations with a broad framework: (a) to use a CAE approach based on dialogic exchanges and (b) to discuss and reflect on our different experiences of the field and how this informs understanding of the field. Beyond this, the discussion was unplanned. In many ways, we had “rehearsed” and developed some aspects of the discussion iteratively through our field visits, where we discussed ideas as we encountered the different sites. This is arguably akin to writers of CAE who complete drafts of writing and go over their ideas together before agreeing a finished, final narrative. The finished narrative we offer as part of our CAE is the dialogue, presented below in the form of transcript excerpts, gathered around three key areas identified when we reviewed the transcripts in preparation for this article; “Starting Points,” “Biographical Intersections—the familiar and the strange,” and “Pearl Jephcott as Collaborator.” The quantity of dialogue produced was extensive and has not all been able to be included here, so it is worth acknowledging that there is much further this narrative could go, and other themes that have been left out.
Including the transcript excerpts directly, rather than transforming these into a written narrative, is intentional. Our CAE prioritized dialogic exchanges and the ways speech, conversation and listening is a collaborative, knowledge-building activity. This perhaps challenges conventional understandings of CAEs (and academic research practices more generally), which as far as we can tell have focussed on the production of written narratives rather than dialogic exchanges. Nonetheless, the below excerpts can be considered as a form of narrative. To aid readers in reading the excerpts we have made some minor edits to the text, including adding important details or information sign-posts in square brackets. In one or two areas, we have removed sections containing personal details which identify people (such as neighbors or relatives) and anything which identified specific addresses or other personal details we would not want to share here. One of the challenges of working with dialogue is that it has its own conventions which do not translate well into the written format. However, we have tried to keep edits to a minimum so that readers can follow the flow of conversation as it emerges/emerged. Minimal edits allow the cadence and quality of speech and dialogue to appear fairly “natural.” This retains a sense of authenticity, where the original conversations had meaning, order and purpose, which we respect, while looking at it retrospectively. In prioritizing the dialogic over and above the written, we follow others who have used autoethnographic approaches that emphasize “challenging the normative structure of systems of knowledge” (Wakeman, 2014, p. 706). In this case, challenging the predominance of written narratives over and above dialogue. As you will see, the excerpts begin as a form of story-sharing and eventually take on the form of a critique, especially of depersonalisation in academia, such as through writing and naming practices.
Following ‘The Footsteps’: Intentional Conversations about the Field
Initial Exchanges
A1: . . ..So it’s that idea that although we are doing it together and we have a kind of common understanding, we also have different understandings and perspectives because of our own experience. We do not revisit the sites of previous research without preconceived ideas, experiences, perceptions and so forth. We’ve read descriptions of the areas; we’ve engaged with other materials, such as maps and films, that give us insights before our feet stepped on the ground. In terms of our autoethnographic experiences. . .we’ve also experienced homes, housing and community ourselves, which inevitably shape the lens through which we will look at these field research sites. We look at the houses and homes through a lens that tries to make them familiar to us. We look for what is familiar or strange and consider the areas in terms of how they relate to our experiences, how they differ from our experiences, or how they match our expectations or challenge them.
. . .on this, I come to Pearl Jephcott at a different point to you. We’ve engaged with it differently, and maybe I’ve got a more emotional attachment to Pearl than others, so does that make sense? So what the idea would be is that it’s not only about talking through what we see; it’s also talking about what we experienced and how our own prior experiences shape that experience. . .So again, the fact that we originally come from different intellectual and academic backgrounds, I think, is good because that. . .the difference engine gives you that kind of creative process. The deeper learning and understanding come from the dialogical exchange about the images…
A2: . . .I think in a way autoethnography I think needs an element of collaboration or. . .it can become quite enclosed. . . The one thing in my mind I keep coming back to is, as one example, we were noticing different things, and we also had like you said, different stocks of knowledge. So, you pointed out coal holes. . .whereas I had not even really looked down at the. . .I hadn’t really looked at the pavement at all, but you had noticed that and could tell a story about the coal holes, and then there may have been different things for me. I can’t remember any, but. . .and it’s what happens when you bring that different information together.
A1: . . . I also like the idea of this process of. . .it’s like check and challenge and reflection and understanding and meaning-making through that iterative collaborative process. That seems to. . .that makes a lot of sense to me.
A2: . . .one of the things I’ve always believed in is that creativity doesn’t happen by an individual person alone; creativity occurs in exchange with others. So I think we sometimes operate under the belief that individuals are individually creative, but actually, when you think more. I suppose you start to realize that there’s a whole cast of characters what you [Author A] called Milgram’s invisible threads that actually feed into what seems to be an individual’s process and actually we already know this, but it may be something that we would want to write about is when you. . .you can understand autoethnography as an ethnography of the self, and that’s very individualistic and obviously some of the critiques of it are that it’s narcissistic, but actually I think our starting point for autobiography and autoethnography is “the auto,” the self is social and not just like oh I’m connected to other people but deeply–
A1: Yeah, even in our autoethnographic practice, it is the recognition that it is relational and social; it’s not hermetically sealed uniqueness. . . . gain insight from group sharing and providing support to interrogate the topics of interest for a common purpose. So, for us, in this context, the common purpose is understanding the value and benefit of returning to the field. In the case of Notting Hill, it’s the process of demarcating what the field actually is because that’s not fully clear in the book beyond the 7 minutes. In the case of Radby, it’s about matching what we see on the ground to that quite rudimentary map and so on.
Biographical Intersections—The “Familiar” and the “Strange”
A1: . . . Radby had got more of a familiarity. . .it had more in common with where I grew up both in terms of what the houses were like and just in terms of the feel of the place, it felt working class, you could almost feel the kind of legacy of mining and all that kind of stuff. Now that’s an intangible. . .that’s kind of intuition, that’s, you know, also based on prior knowledge, but I can’t help that feeling. So anyway, there’s a familiarity there, so for me I grew up in Chesterfield 4 and I lived in a terraced house with my parents until the age of 18. That terraced house, 5 right up until my early teenage years, backed onto a gas works. So originally, it was a place where gas was made from. . .it was extracted from coal, and then it just became like kind of workshop depot and down the bottom of the road were two big gasometers that were used to store gas. So sometimes you’d get quite odd smells where we lived. . . I lived in a terraced house. . . It was a two up, two down plus a kitchen, originally three upstairs, actually my dad converted the back bedroom into a bathroom and divided another bedroom into two smaller bedrooms for me and my sister when we were kids. So that’s the kind of house that I always felt comfortable with, so when we moved to Leicester 6 . . . . [when we] came to move to Leicester, I remember people saying to us “oh you need to look here,” [but we] ended up looking for that kind of familiarity, the same type of house that we’d always had, or lived in, and so we ended up in Newfoundpool [a Leicester suburb] in a terraced house, two up two down, kitchen and a bathroom and a small back garden and it was. . .I thought. . .my mum and dad thought it was a great house, it was a great house because it was quite similar to their house. They had a slightly bigger garden than we’d got, but it was. . .I thought that was a great house to live in, and we lived there for about seven years, and then we wanted a slightly bigger house, thinking about children and all that kind of stuff, and so moved to where we live now, purely on the basis [of the road name]. But I remember feeling really odd about it because my dad had helped us renovate the terraced house on Rowan Street, and I was saying my dad’s really disappointed that we’re leaving this house; we put so much into it, he’s going to be really disappointed. . .I felt a bit awkward explaining it to him, but the first thing my dad said is ‘oh you’ll have room for a greenhouse.’ So, he was well up for it, and so. . .I’ve only ever lived in those three places. . .and my dad still lives in exactly the same house that he and my mum lived in; me and my sister were born in, literally born in; we were both born in the front room. He’s still there, and we go back there periodically because obviously going for the football and stuff, and for me, that is. . .although my home is home, that’s also home because that’s where I grew up, although I’ve lived elsewhere for a lot longer. So, for me, thinking about what we’ve observed, I think I said this yesterday: I felt more comfortable with that kind of housing in Radby, I also feel more at home in South Wigston 7 when we do walking tours there. You know, its rows of terraced streets, I can’t think of another word, it’s familiar, there’s a kind of. . . it’s reassuring, you know what to expect, you know what the houses are going to be like, and also you might have an idea of what the people are like who live in those houses, but that’s again. . .there’s no substantive basis for making those assumptions. But it’s that familiarity; there’s a comfort with it. I contrast my housing experience to what we saw in London, and that’s just so far removed, like multiple occupancies, three stories, once very kind of gentry. . .them houses are gentry that had gone through decline. Then you know regentrification and London itself is very different, very, very different to my experience. So, like I said, you could almost. . .when the French talk about food and wine, they talk about terroir, don’t they, that kind of earth and soil and stuff like that. It’s that intuition, it’s that feeling of I know what Radby is like, I know what it’s like, I know what the people are like, there’s that yeah comfort and familiarity. London is completely different. It’s completely different in terms of housing, it’s completely different I suppose, because the population is more transient, it’s different because it’s not dominated by a single industry.
A2: So I think our experiences of housing are in stark contrast if you know what I mean, so I was born in Beaumont Leys [a Leicester suburb], I lived there until I was 2 so I’ve no recollection of that but I have now seen the house because I obviously went back there with my mum. My first memories are the house that we had that was in Wigston which was a terrace. I think it had 3 bedrooms upstairs, but I’ve lived in a terrace which I’ll talk about in a minute later down the line and I remember that the bedroom that I had was what I think was a converted bathroom, it had been converted into a bedroom, so there were 3 bedrooms upstairs and we lived there from when I was 2 or 3 until I think I was 7 or 8 but I don’t have the exact ages down if you know what I mean. We lived next to the railway line so you know when you come out of South Wigston, go past the big Tesco 8 that’s there now, you go over the bridge where. . .what’s there now, it used to be the Drums 9 . . .I think its Cromwell now, something like that, you come over the bridge and immediately after the bridge you can go right into the swimming baths, or you can go left down Clark’s Road, we lived on Clark’s Road, it is immediately after. . .just at the end of the bridge so you used the word transient earlier, that’s what that space was, there was a row of terraced houses, then there was a little road that you could walk up and the railway line was there almost running parallel with our road and then at the very end of our road was factories, I have no idea what they did, we used to like maybe walk up there sometimes, me and my sister would walk up there but I don’t know what they did, what they were for, so yeah that’s kind of what that was like. Yeah, I have some memories of that place, it had a garden, but it was very small, it was a very small like slabbed garden if that makes sense. We had an alleyway. . .I can’t remember if the alley was linked to our house or to our next-door neighbor. . .I liked running up and down the alleyway, I don’t know why, it had like an arch between the 2 houses and yeah that was. . .I didn’t live there for long enough to really have any other memories, and then we moved to the—again talk about transient spaces, the Enderby/Narborough [Leicester suburbs] area and the reason I say that is because our address changed multiple times to be Enderby or Narborough and depending on who you talked to would depend on whether or not it was Enderby or Narborough [. . .] That house had 4 bedrooms, one was an extension, and it was a very weird extension that ran the full length of the house, so it was this weird, long, thin room and that was my bedroom. It had. . .downstairs it had a lounge, kitchen and there was a garage as well. It felt humongous when we went from the terrace to that house, we were like wow we’ve got all this space. The garden was really big compared to what we had and I remember we were all like wow this is massive, this is a massive house, but I’ve again been back since and I cannot believe how small it looks from the outside, but it felt so huge to us when we moved in. We lived there. . .I lived there then until I was 18 and left to go to university in Canterbury, my mum moved out of that house about 10 years ago. . .
. . . So yeah, and then I mean since. . .not including the houses I lived at in Canterbury when I was university, I’ve lived in 3. . .1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. . .I’ve possibly lived in 9 different houses since leaving university. . .
. . .So for me the experience of going to Radby and Nottingham. . . Notting Hill sorry, were similar because I had no pre-ideas really about what they would be like. For me it was just like I wonder what these are like, oh I wonder what these are like, and not really having any assumptions. I don’t know if that’s the right way to describe it, but I felt equally familiar and unfamiliar in both places. With Notting Hill, my instant connection weirdly I think I said this to you at the time, were those 3 story townhouses were reminiscent of like Georgian, Jane Austen style and I. . .that was a connection for me because that was a link I could make to those kinds of houses. . .
Pearl Jephcott as Collaborator
A2: . . .it makes me think a lot about the work we’ve done with Nelson [Sullivan] (Goodwin and Parsons, 2021) because, for me, there are two things. One is who are the collaborators in a collaborative autoethnography. Well, there’s me, and there’s you, but there’s also the photos. There’s Pearl Jephcott, her studies. She is not here physically, but she is a collaborator.
A1: A collaborator, nonetheless, yeah.
A2: The place, Radby, the place Notting Hill, and obviously, they aren’t static things that can just come and sit down and have a conversation with us, but you can collaborate with documents, I think. I think that’s what I’m trying to say, and I think that’s where we started getting to with Nelson, that there was an exchange between us, the videos, Nelson that is sort of not two people sat in a room but is still a collaboration nonetheless.
A1: . . . I also like this idea of Pearl as a collaborator. I’d not thought about it in those terms. So she is omnipresent in all this work despite dying in 1980. She’s omnipresent, she has an influence and it’s. . .so then it goes back to the idea of understanding what we think her work was and what we think her orientation was and how that shapes our orientation. . . Again, that perception of Pearl is challenged slightly [others were] less accepting of the idea that Pearl was non-judgmental. . .I think that Pearl just basically documented what she saw.
A2: . . .I don’t actually know what her class background really is, but she comes across as middle class but not in a way that. . .I don’t think she is judgmental; I just think she has a class habitus. 10 We all have a class habitus, and you can’t. . .no one will ever be a blank slate in relation to. . .but the thing with Pearl is that she didn’t use them to judge. . .use to judge the participants; she just offered observations on what she was understanding and seeing in the field.
A1: Well, she can’t be blamed for her own class habitus, that’s as it is so her background is her father was an auctioneer and grew up in a really nice house in Alcester, went to the local grammar school, went to university aged 18 which for a woman at that time is quite significant. The thing that I think she. . .I think this is because of her experience as a youth worker; she doesn’t use her own class background as a lens through which to interpret the experiences of others. She would not document people’s lives in the way that she does if she had done that. . .. None of her books are morality tales; none of it is about ‘oh they shouldn’t do this and they shouldn’t do that..’ . .they are documenting what people said, how people were. . .I mean some of the descriptions about male sexuality on the opening parts of that they’re quite. . .they pull no punches for their time. They’re quite explicit and quite detailed.
A2: I really believe that if you were that way inclined, you could interpret some of Pearl’s observations as having this middle-class morality. I think that reading is possible, but I think it’s wrong because. . .everything that she talks about are like actually fundamental human rights like everyone should have access to safe and like. . .what’s the word. . .appropriate housing, adequate housing sorry, is not a middle-class value or a middle-class. . .do you know what I’m saying. But I can see why people would want to make that interpretation, but I don’t. . .I think it’s wrong. I don’t think it’s correct, actually. . ..
A1: So I really like this idea of being a collaborator. . .
A2: I always think about this when I read any literature at all, any research, any articles or whatever, I always try and think of myself as being in conversation with that person which is why I don’t like reading literature because the way that it often gets. . .that academics often write, not all of them but most of them, is quite inaccessible and you think well okay I can’t have a conversation with this person because if you were having that conversation sat down like this, I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. So we wouldn’t be able to have a conversation so. . .that’s why I personally have got that hang up about accessibility of writing. But because you are in conversation, if you were speaking together with [Norbert] Elias about that topic, what could you say together?
A1: So, what do you think about this? So there are two bits to this then; one is because of what we’ve read and what we teach she informs our practice, but then the idea of a conversation. . .so there are two aspects to that; one is we are in a dialogic exchange with her written work and with her archive material, but I wonder and again this speculation, for Pearl the kind of. . .when the books were published they were only conversations that were half had because of her own particular contractual and academic status. So she puts this stuff out, but there isn’t really a response.
A2: Sorry, the Notting Hill one, there’s that letter in the back, a letter or a report from someone in the local council or something that says, oh well, it was very dismissive actually in this letter, which is an indication of how her work was probably being received.
A1: So yeah, and there’s the book review as well, isn’t there about how naïve it would be to make recommendations that communities can’t resolve only governments can? So what engagement, what conversation there was with her is quite dismissive, so in that sense, they’re almost like letters from another time. They are these documents of life that we can now engage with and see the value of that other people didn’t have. So, revisiting the field also becomes part of that conversation, and we’re trying to understand and re-ask questions similar but different from what she asked. We’re asking questions around has it changed?
A2: This is where the hauntology stuff comes in because you are. . .I mean I know it’s quite a cheesy phrase, but when you retrace some of these footsteps. . .isn’t it amazing to think that so and so would have been here and passed through here in these historical sites, but that is part of the. . .power, the wrong word but that’s part of the. . .what’s the word? The usefulness of doing it, the benefit of doing it, that you can walk in somebody’s footsteps.
A1: . . .I mean, that’s what I get from archival stuff; it’s also that sense of actually having a tangible connection to the people that you’re writing and researching about. . . I get that with Pearl particularly, you know, the signed copies of the books that were sold, the fact that I’ve got those, the fact that I know she held them, and she signed them, and she put those front points in them gives me enormous pleasure which is bizarre because I don’t know her. I’ve never met her, although I feel I know her.
A2: Well, I think it’s a different way of knowing, right? So, it’s. . .you get information. . .not even information, but you get knowledge, you get to know something through holding something that somebody else held. Some people would see that as verging into the realm of weird superstition, but actually, it is evocative. There is an experience that takes place, and it may not be that you had the same feeling when you held the book Pearl had signed that Pearl would have had, but you can. . .
. . . one of the things that you often hear about people that do this kind of work, so maybe genealogy, for example, is the. . .they’re looking for certainty in some way and I think it’s important that I don’t think either of us or probably lots of others are the same, are looking for certainty about Pearl, I’m not looking where’s that treasure chest that’s going to reveal what she really meant, that’s not what it is, we’re not looking to understand 100% through and through what exactly did Pearl mean by that, what exactly was her perspective on that, that’s not what’s happening it’s not a treasure hunt if you know what I mean.
A1: Well, if anything, however you read the work, however you engage in the conversation with Pearl, actually what happens is you get some answers, but you also get a lot more questions. So, in relation to A Troubled Area, one of the things we’ve said quite consistently is there is contemporary relevance in what she wrote then for now. What we need to answer, the question we’ve got to answer if you take Grenfell, is how they got from the point at which Pearl writes about the area then, to where it is now because there’s a massive transformation process. . .she documents it at that particular point in time before that big estate is built. Before a lot of those houses were demolished, before Grenfell, we’ve seen the kind of continuities around errant landlords, multiple occupancy, poverty, race, but the area did change and its asking that. . .she doesn’t answer it, but actually reading her work prompts the other question how did we get from that to this, how did this come to be, how did we get from there to here? Because I’m sure, although not uncritically, given what she writes in Homes in High Flats, she would have seen the modernisation to some extent as being quite a positive thing. She wouldn’t have seen or predicted that the modernisation of that area would have simply perpetuated the same types of disadvantage going forward or maybe she did. Maybe . . . I don’t think . . . there’s no . . . I don’t think any cross reference exists between Homes in High Flats and the troubled area. But maybe what you get in Homes In High Flats is starting to answer some of those questions partly. But you’re right we’re not looking for that. There’s no definitive answer; in fact, there are insights that she offers, but it does generate a lot more questions. So I think the idea of an author as a collaborator, research collaborator, I think is really interesting . . .
A2: I think that’s where, when writing the Nelson Sullivan paper and doing the sort of work with his videos, that . . . I think that started us down this road. Well maybe not because you’ve been doing it for a long time, like Searching for Pearl’s paper reading that made me think a lot about this kind of thing. So there was that, and then there was the Nelson work because he did the leg work, he did the data collection in a way, Nelson . . . sorry I’m going slightly off track here, but he was like an ethnographer, and then we’ve come to it later and engaged with it again and yeah. . .I don’t know where I’m going with that, but yeah . . .
A1: No so I’m thinking back to the book, so there were. . .in the book that I was looking at three authors, and they share their experience; what we’re actually pointing to is in the Nelson paper, Nelson is the third participant. In this work, Pearl is the third participant, but their participation is limited to particular contributions, which is, in his case, it’s the films; in Pearl’s case, it’s the books, the diaries, and the documents, but they are contributing to that collaborative autoethnography because they are prompting us to ask questions of what they did. We are interrogating what they did. They can’t participate in the iterative process, but they are participants, nonetheless.
A2: Yeah, I think as well there’s a broader question or broader issue of what’s seen as valuable, so probably . . . personally, I think that at the minute, the trend is . . . the trend in sociology is that it’s more valuable if it’s direct from the horse’s mouth if you like. So, because Pearl Jephcott isn’t sitting in front of us telling us this, somehow, we should be more suspect of what we can glean from her as a collaborator, but I think there’s something really important about seeing the value in artifacts, documentation . . .
I was going to say . . . something I was thinking we could do as we were talking was imagine we are having a conversation with Pearl . . .
A1: So then you could have “a talking to” or in conversation with –
A2: Because the thing is when you get to know somebody, you know how they might react to something, and I’m not saying that we. . .you in terms of Pearl, you may be at that point, I don’t think I am, but you get to understand what they might say. You imagine. . . it’s very sociological to think that you might imagine what Cooley (?) and Mead and all of them lot, they would say that this is the case that you start to imagine what people might say about something. I don’t think it’s for now, but it surely is something we could use I don’t know.
A1: . . .so Pearl as a collaborator, it kind of resolves a dilemma I’ve had. It goes back to the review of the paper, it goes back to something that somebody . . . challenged me on, it was me using Pearl’s first name and not referring to her as Pearl Jephcott, or Jephcott, and using Pearl’s name in what I wrote and it was odd because I’d never ever thought about it, I’d never thought about it as being problematic at all. Their analysis was its kind of demeaning to her, it’s about power, it’s about over-familiarity, all those kinds of things. Whereas actually, I’d never seen it in those kinds of terms at all, at all, and actually this idea of being a collaborator with somebody, everything I said earlier on about collaborative autoethnography is about reducing power, reducing the kind of. . .those imbalances, why wouldn’t I call her Pearl.
A2: I think there’s something really interesting about names that I think . . . working in universities, academia, and research is quite weird, which is that you get referred to by your surname. . .. . .for me I find the whole idea of being referred to by my family name . . . actually quite rude . . . so for me referring to her Pearl actually recognizes her as an individual, not as one of the Jephcott’s. It recognizes her . . . sorry it’s something I feel very strongly about. It recognizes Pearl as an individual because being referred to by your surname completely depersonalizes everything. I think that depersonalisation is something these kinds of methods are challenging.
Discussion: Revealing New Dimensions Through Emergence, Exchange, and Potentialities
As Noel suggests the aim of CAE is “co-constructing narratives” (Noel et al., 2023, p. 1). In this CAE, we have produced a co-constructed narrative through intentional conversation, which we describe as dialogic exchanges. Central to this was the sharing of knowledge and experience and especially of sharing stories and perspectives. As Frank (2010) suggests
the commitment . . . is not to summarize findings—an undialogical word, with its implication of ending the conversation and taking a position apart from and above it—but rather to open continuing possibilities of listening and of responding to what is heard. (Frank, 2012, p. 37)
This is crucial in restudies where the original intentions, hopes, and objectives of past researchers can sometimes only be guessed at and where the voices and perspectives of past researchers cannot be presumed or imposed by the contemporary research team. Based on this, the dialogic stories connect people offered here are emergent, rather than complete. The “conversation” has no real beginning (Pearl Jephcott was researching before we were born and was herself building on work already completed in the area of community studies) and the “conversation” remains unfinished. In the dialogue above, there are thoughts without end, sentences that do not close and points that are left open. Some of the evident gaps and limits in the dialogue show where the original researchers’ views and perspectives are absent, for example, in our attempt to explain and understand how Jephcott’s social class background may have orientated her to the field work, without being able to hear from Jephcott herself.
The emergent nature of this exchange creates an open door for readers and listeners—collaborators—to make interpretations and add their own thoughts, ideas, and stories. This also provided space for a shared dialogue to emerge, where the participants (the two authors here) could collaboratively build ideas through exchange, turn-taking and building on each other’s points. Rather than seeing these gaps and unfinished thoughts and ideas as problems to resolve, we see them as crucial parts of a dialogic exchange process of knowledge-production which opens new lines of inquiry to follow and closes down others. Inspired by Bakunin (McLaughlin, 2002) and psychosocial scholars (Bollas, 1995), we see this as a combination of creativity (opening, bringing together and following some ideas) and destruction (closing down, breaking apart or not following others) which is central to experience. We argue that this is also central to research processes, where we are always dealing with potentialities, not actualities.
Presenting our dialogue here provides some degree of transparency about how research insights are established and what insights are potentially overlooked or not followed-up in the process. It also starts to capture the layered back and forth of knowledge-production, which is akin to storytelling, and which is embodied and emotive. As seen in the transcripts, both researchers describe things they feel strongly about (“sorry I have strong feelings about this”) and articulate preferences (“I really like that”). We agree with Hernandez et al. that it was clear in this process how “collaborative autoethnography creates a sense of togetherness; a “’we,’ in the midst of celebrating ‘I’” (Hernandez et al., 2017, p. 251). By sharing some of our own biographical stories, including our feelings and preferences, as well as drawing in stories about Pearl Jephcott, shared understanding could be built. As Frank argues, this is the power of storytelling as stories connect people (Frank, 2010). The practice of sharing stories was something that, as research collaborators, we have engaged in frequently. Journeys to research field sites, for example, in the car or on the train, were a prime moment to share happenings, events and stories with each other, and because of the nature of the research we’ve been undertaking, there have been lots of opportunities for this. In this particular example, sharing stories facilitated the interplay of strangeness and familiarity, of being both insider and outsider, that ethnographers navigate before, during and after research, in a kind of endless cycle between “going native” and “coming home” (Boll, 2023, p. 2).
As such, we argue that a dialogic exchange-based CAE is good academic practice and emphasizes how researchers and research communities must engage in an endless back-and-forth and dialogue with each other. We reference a “cast of characters” in the dialogue, for example, from Pearl Jephcott, C. Wright Mills, Norbert Elias, Stanley Milgram and others. This dialogue occurs whether we are temporally and spatially contemporaneous to each other or not. For example, in the way that we have tried to “dialogue” and collaborate with Pearl Jephcott in this project (and others, for example see Goodwin and O’Connor, 2016), even though she died in 1980. As we suggest in the dialogue presented above, it is not about searching for answers but working together in establishing new questions. Or, to put it another way, revealing new insights and potentialities about reality. Based on this, the dialogic CAE presented here pushes at the boundaries of sociological methodology and reveals new dimensions for consideration in ongoing, qualitative knowledge-production and inquiry.
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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The re-study fieldwork which underpins the Collaborative Autoethnography presented here was funded by British Academy small research grants (2021-2023) and the Univeristy of Leicester College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities Research Infrastructure Call (2022).
