Composing an Autoethnographic Cartography of Blue: Becoming a Pharologist in and of the Academy

Blue

Blue-sky days should never go unremarked.

There is nothing quite so perfect as a blue sky for miles.

Except maybe a blue sky with a sparkling ocean below it, reminding you of the impossible, magical variety of blue.

Put a white lighthouse in the center. On a rugged red cliff or gray rock face.

A seagull, perfectly placed.

That’s just about the most magnificent sight I can imagine. Or have seen.

The kind of picture you want to frame.

Do you take a picture?

Do you close your eyes, and let the light live, imprinted, on the inside of your eyelids?

Do you breathe, deeply, as if you could somehow inhale that blue, that sparkle, that steadfastness?

Do you linger just a little longer, in case the light changes, and you might have the chance to begin again?

Do you wish you could live there?

I do. All of the above. Never mind that I have a job to go back to. Never mind that a person cannot be a lighthouse or a seagull.

I’m not in the picture.

But oh, that blue could swallow me happily whole.

Pharology

I love lighthouses.

I love that they exist to provide light. I love their majestic stature and quaint aura. I love how they pop up everywhere and in everything, once you start looking. I love that they stand, windswept, amid the gulls and the waves, in the place(s) I feel most at home.

I also love the academy.

I love its nobler intentions; I admire its devotion to the life of the mind. I love how it positions me in those volatile but lively waters where words, youth, art, and change meet. But, I cannot love the academy as purely as I love lighthouses. I cannot feel as at home here as I do sitting by the blue shoreline, with a lighthouse beam lighting up the sparkling sea.

Maps

Pharology: “the study of lighthouses and signal lights” (Gómez y Patiño, 2010, p. 41).

Autoethnography: “the use of personal experience to examine and/or critique cultural experience” (Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013, p. 22).

Cartography: “. . . literally the practice of making maps” (Chávez, 2009, p. 168).

Pharology: an artful practice of searching for, cataloging, and collecting lighthouses and lighthouse memorabilia.

Autoethnography: an artful practice of searching for, cataloging, and creating a place—maybe a home—in academic spaces.

Cartography: an artful practice of charting a course, finding a way, and leaving a trace that others might follow.

Autoethnography

I am working on becoming a pharologist, and it has been a welcome (temporary) shift in focus from my continual efforts to become in the academy. In this autoethnographic cartography, I argue for alternative embodied maps for academic life. Using my experiences as a budding pharologist, I bear witness to the cultural experience of academia through crafting a collaged autoethnography of mapping space. Navigating academic territory is not terribly unlike pharology. Each involves a search for safe harbor. In each, there are maps to be deciphered (some more muddling than others), mysteries to be solved, personal and cultural histories to contend with, and vast spaces to cross in all kinds of weather. There is research in dark rooms and on bright screens. There are stories to be told, through writing and art-making, and the often overwhelming work of composing a life in relation to others who may not share your passion or practice. There are even towers to climb.

Cartography

A colleague sent me a New York Times article about lighthouses that featured the following line: “There is something mysterious about a lighthouse, and in our modern age, when so much of the world is overmapped, so severely known, that mystery abides” (Vandermeer, 2014, p. 12). Never before had I thought the world “severely known,” and while I am sure Vandermeer means to say “of a great degree” (i.e., the world is so very known), other meanings hit me first. The world is strictly known, rigorously known, and harshly known (“Severe,” n.d.), and the academy has promoted such severity. Overmapping seems endemic to the academy; however, I wish to live not a severe academic life, but an alternative, equally academic story.

Blue

School has always felt like home to me. I love research and writing. I thrive on deciphering texts and engaging deep conversations. Love and home can be complicated, and nothing breeds complication more than the first few years of a professor’s career. In those early years, something shifted. I loved my work, my colleagues, my relationships with students, and the opportunities my institution presented. I felt immensely privileged to have found a tenure-track position in a very supportive department and institution. Yet, I felt dis-placed and off-balance, unable to get my footing. At the time, I couldn’t see that I was both anxious and depressed; I just knew I felt unmoored and at a loss for understanding why. I was deeply blue.

Pharology

Somehow, I had inherited or invented an unrealistic future narrative and taken it for an accurate road map: a road map filled with the quest for perfection and pride in unhealthy habits, like sleep deprivation and food consumption befitting a kindergartener. The knowledge I had acquired about how to “become” in the academy—as a woman and first-generation college student—felt too severe: the angles too sharp, the consequences of a wrong turn too intense. Fortunately, my tendency to dive from anxiety straight into work led me to a new kind of mapping. I set out on a quest for lighthouses, and pharology taught me to make my map by moving—to trust my sensuous knowledge despite cultural aversions to such trust. It reminded me that the academy does not have a monopoly on knowledge, and that it need not be so severe. Most importantly, it showed me that sometimes, the only way to get where you’re going is to focus on the light.

Maps

Did you know every lighthouse has a distinctive signal, at night and during the day?

It’s kind of poetic, in a “no two snowflakes are alike” kind of way.

(It’s also true.)

If they were all the same, no one would ever find their way.

Autoethnography

I love writing the way I love lighthouses. To borrow from Neilsen (1998), “Words have shaped, guided, informed, constrained, and told my life across many texts and many years” (p. 180). Writing heals, like when after one heart break or another, I fill page after page with emotions, writing with such force the paper tears. After, the world makes a little more sense, as if I have embedded its chaos in the pages, clearing the air. Of course, writing also brings frustration—when words seem unwilling or unavailable—but for me writing has mostly been a joyful and powerful mode of inquiry. As Richardson (2000) argues, writing is a core “research practice” through which “we can investigate how we construct the world” (p. 924). Perhaps this is why I have rewritten this essay so many times: With each draft, I learn(ed) something new.

I began my lighthouse project as an “arts-based autoethnography of place” (Mingé & Zimmerman, 2013, p. xiv) informed by performance ethnography. Hamera (2011) suggests the latter “offers the researcher a vocabulary for exploring the expressive elements of culture, a focus on embodiment as a crucial component of cultural analysis and a tool for representing scholarly engagement, and a critical, interventionist commitment to theory in/as practice” (p. 318). I was interested in the culture of lighthouses as expressed through communication, materiality, and art. Furthermore, performance ethnography requires “hands-on participation” and encourages “a view from ground level, in the thick of things” (Conquergood, 2002, p. 146). In the thick of things, where “arts-based” methods became important, is where I wanted to be, using my “affective experiences, senses, and emotions” to “explore the bounds of space and place” (Finley, 2011, p. 444). When Becker and Corey (2003) state, “In a country that is comprised of conquerors, immigrants, transplants, and others, place is often a contested and difficult concept to locate” (p. 213), they point to a general displacement of Americans. Immigrant and transplant through I am, I was unaccustomed to feeling “place-less.” Beginning this project, however, I felt displaced. I was searching for more than lighthouses. I was searching for a place to land.

Mingé and Zimmerman’s (2013) creative approach to mapping seemed a good beginning. Of their autoethnographic, sensuous, multimedia way of understanding space, place, and life experience, they state, “We come to know place experientially, engaging with our senses” (p. 14). Mingé and Zimmerman (2013) confess, “I was always told to start my work, my writing, where I am” (p. 51), reminding me of Madison’s (2005) advice:

Start where you are. The experiences in your life, both past and present, and who you are as a unique individual will lead you to certain questions about the world and certain problems about why things are the way they are. (p. 19)

I chose to study lighthouses because of whom and where I was (geographically); why not also attend to who I was becoming in the academy? Mingé and Zimmerman’s (2013) warning—“Starting where I am implies that I am not sure where I am going, at least not completely” (p. 48)—felt like an invitation. I told myself I would write my way somewhere.

I knew from the beginning that the research would be (auto)ethnographic, for I am part of lighthouse culture and this work was and is personal. However, as Pelias (2014) states, “Whenever we engage in research, we are offering a first-person narrative” (p. 7), and this one kept asserting itself alongside my other-oriented writing. This was where I was, and so where I began. Mingé and Zimmerman (2013) draw from autoethnography as a way of writing/mapping “the story of the self in culture” (p. 48). Holman Jones (2011) suggests autoethnography is

Setting a scene, telling a story, weaving intricate connections among life and art, experience and theory, evocation and explanation . . . and then letting go, hoping for readers who will bring the same careful attention to your words in the context of their own lives. (p. 208)

When autoethnography is done well, the connections are woven at “the nexus of personal experience and larger social issues” (Spry, 2011, p. 98). I weave connections standing with lighthouse keepers and friends, somewhere between ivory towers and those shining brightly from the shoreline. I use autoethnographic methods to weave new maps: textiles of fragments flowing from tired fingertips and fleeting flashes of inspiration. “Autoethnographic texts reveal the fractures, sutures, and seams of the text’s generation of self interacting with others in the context of researching lived experience” (Spry, 2011, p. 93). The fissures—like the prisms on a Fresnel lens ¹ —reveal maps of my experiences, maps to a kind of home.

Blue

I defended my dissertation.

Became “Dr.”

Flew to the tenure track

    (My belongings trailing behind

    On unknown highways)

I found myself

Lost in a city

I couldn’t sink into.

    (A wonderful city

   With green open spaces

    Blue sky

     The Atlantic Ocean)

      A drive

Away.

A city, nonetheless.

I had never lived

In a city and

   (turns out)

These country bones have a

  Hard

   Time

    Sinking into concrete.

I chose the suburbs.

I found community there

      And the freedom

   To move between.

I don’t think I’ll ever

Get used to the shiny

Class expectations

Of this place

Or the names

  Of the highways.

Four and a half years

I haven’t yet sunk  in.

Maps

Concrete and Dust: Mapping the Sexual Terrains of Los Angeles. Places mapped by friends. Places I have never been. Places I know too well. I clung to this book for a year, reading, re-reading. Its presence was comfort:

“I do not know if I will survive here” (p. 3).

“The weight of this new territory, expectations, people, social norms, rites and rituals that are not my own, shifts into insecurity that feels heavy. Fear leads me from place to place, from task to task” (p. 27).

“The ocean. I don’t see it enough. I live 12 miles from the ocean. And I won’t drive there. I want to avoid the bumper-to-bumper crawl” (p. 39).

Cartography

I have a propensity for getting lost. I get lost in parking lots, on my way to work, and (frequently) at academic conventions. In other words (this is embarrassing), you are reading an essay about mapping by someone who has no sense of direction. I am also obsessed with place or, at least, home. I am enamored with rootedness. I have no sense of direction, but a keen sense of place. I sink deeply, and love discovering places I might sink into. That is, if I can convince myself to set off for adventure in the first place. I was a bit surprised when I decided to travel the Jersey Shore studying lighthouses. I really didn’t know what I was getting into; I just knew I had questions about what made lighthouses so . . . so . . . what they are. I needed to know what it takes to save (a) light.

Blue

I couldn’t figure out why I felt so unmoored. I was living a bit of a dream academic life, with a tenure-track job, supportive colleagues, and amazing opportunities for travel and innovation. Many of my brilliant classmates had not found themselves in such positions. I worked hard to prove myself worthy of my role. And yet, I felt out of place; blue. Sure, there were the personal circumstances, but aren’t there always? I had always coped well. Sure, I was living in an urban area for the first time, and for a while I thought I just couldn’t feel comfortable here. But I found it was possible to form small town relationships in metropolitan spaces, and a more urban lifestyle grew on me. So, that wasn’t quite it, either.

I have always been anxiety prone (a family trait), so I blamed my anxiety on biology. And it had always kind of worked in my favor. I was energetic, always prepared, and eager. I worked hard and it paid off. I poured my nervous energy into my work and stayed relatively sane while also being productive. It was a weird but manageable win–win. Academics and artists are known for being a bit moody, and I fancied myself both, so I cast my depression as quirky but par for the course for a poetically minded professor. But, as I worked on becoming academic, I was slowly becoming more and more anxious, to the point that eventually I would retreat to the shower just to get away from my own thoughts. I needed to find a way out of the blue, but I didn’t even know how I had gotten there in the first place. Through the lighthouse search, however, I began to see the problem more clearly.

Performing pharologist allowed me to see myself more clearly in relation to others (as reflexive ethnography should). Working with participants who reminded me of home brought my regional, class, and gender identities to the fore. In the field, my positionality as a hardworking woman with a working class, ocean-side upbringing became an asset in ways it wasn’t always on our wealthy campus. Being in the field also made me anxious, because the stakes—publication and responsibility to the lighthouse community—felt so high. It was a perfect storm that laid bare my academic anxiety in the field and at home and my class anxiety in academia. I was a working-class woman in academia and a professor in a community of self-taught storytellers and lighthouse experts. I realized I had a serious, bidirectional case of what the popular press have coined “imposter syndrome.” ² I had become an unreliable narrator in my own story.

Cartography

Aside from the obvious relationship between lighthouses as navigational aids and (well) navigation, what can cartography give to an autoethnography? Mingé and Zimmerman’s (2013) maps—“mixed media and digital collages” (p. 15)—led me to reflect on my research as a process of mapping, or perhaps, being mapped. Maps have been a part of our lives for a long time (Caquard, 2011). They help us navigate our environments, they unite and divide, and (when they work) they get us “unlost.” If I could map my way out of deep blue into that more perfect kind, perhaps I could help others get unlost, too. Harley (1987) writes, “maps are fundamental tools helping the human mind make sense of its universe at various scales. Moreover, they are undoubtedly one of the oldest forms of human communication” (p. 1). Rodaway (1994) suggests that maps—at least, maps presenting “geographical knowledge”—share characteristics: (a) each map assumes “a certain view of the world,” (b) each “is a scale drawing not an exact reproduction,” and (c) a map “is also symbolic” (pp. 133-134). While “map” may call to mind what Caquard (2011) calls “grid maps, best illustrated by road maps” (p. 136), there are many kinds of maps, and these characteristics might help us understand even the least grid-like.

I am interested in mapping like Somerville’s (2013), which writes new stories on the land. She states,

A map is a story of Country that shapes our relationship to the known world. Maps guide our geographical explorations, near and far, and form the grounding of our thought. They are one of the most naturalized and taken-for-granted ways that our relationship to land is made. (p. 3)

Caquard (2011) argues that cartographers created maps from stories, and that storytellers have often relied on maps in their tellings. Like Somerville (2013), he argues that maps are not neutral, noting their role in “fictional nationalistic meta-narratives” used to control land (p. 136). Some maps lay heavy on the land, like giant transparencies whose colonizing ink seeps deep into its ground and its inhabitants. Maps are personal and political, whether or not we want them to be. Thankfully, “remapping” is possible (Chávez, 2009). Somerville (2013) has employed what she calls “deep mapping” working with Australian “Aboriginal artists to map their relationships to Country and water” in a way that effects “a representational reversal of the processes of colonization” (pp. 17-18), for example. Our challenge is to create alternative narratives of our environments, including the academy. This link between maps and narratives informs performative and autoethnographic explorations of place and space. Chávez (2009; who also argues for recognition of maps’ colonial functions) discusses cartography from a performative perspective, arguing that maps’ “stability” is not their only feature. She advocates for “performance cartography,” in which “storytelling is the mechanism utilized to map space and the subjectivities and identities it produces.” Performance cartography is an approach to (re)mapping based in storytelling and the “assumption . . . that space matters” (p. 168). While my remapping is distinct from hers, performance cartography is one way to articulate my journey as a pharologist. Throughout this essay I create word maps to guide me—through poetry, citations, and reflections—to a lighter shade of blue.

Pharology

The ancient Pharos of Alexandria—the first famous lighthouse—gifted us the term pharologist “for a person studying lighthouses” (Blake, 2007, p. 9), and of course “pharology” for the name of the field itself (Costa, 2012, p. 89; Gómez y Patiño, 2010, p. 41). More an enthusiasts’ practice than a discipline, pharology—which Barkham (2008) calls an “area of expertise” (p. 32)—involves studying and “visiting lighthouses around the world” (Brooke, 2008). I have met quite a few pharologists (more expert than myself), and can say that pharology includes not only touring lighthouses—sometimes after extensive research and adventures to get to them—but also taking photos, collecting information and artifacts, and even taking notes and writing accounts that would rival an ethnographer’s. Pharologists seek out isolated, obscure lights; plan their vacations around lighthouses; keep track of those they have visited; amass collections of photos, documents, and artifacts; and are often as knowledgeable about lighthouses as any academic about her or his chosen field.

Most explain their motivation as a passion for lighthouses (or a lighthouse). Pharology is a labor of love. It is not lucrative or glamorous (though some might find it exotic). One of my participants called his lighthouse work a “sacred duty.” It’s about the relationships developed with the lighthouse(s) and people. It’s about the adventure of discovery, the pleasure of keeping and writing history or creating aesthetic representations, and the duty to educate future generations. It is filled with hard work, long hours, and anxieties about the future and its fiscal, environmental, and cultural challenges. In other words, people become pharologists for a lot of the same reasons people become academics.

Autoethnography

Seemingly coincident with my own academic meltdown, I began noticing online articles about imposter syndrome in the academy (see, for example, Kasper, 2013). There have been pieces in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and on sites like Vitae. Bahn (2014) states that imposter syndrome “is an all-too-common affliction among academics,” pointing her readers to Clance and Imes’s (1978) writings about “imposter phenomenon.” They define it this way: “Women who experience the imposter phenomenon maintain a strong belief that they are not intelligent; in fact they are convinced that they have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise” (p. 241). They suggest these women experience “generalized anxiety, lack of self-confidence, depression, and frustration related to inability to meet self-imposed standards of achievement” (p. 242). The more I read about imposter phenomenon, the more it resonated. I didn’t necessarily feel less intelligent than my colleagues, but I certainly felt anxious about my ability to succeed. Coupled with my generally anxious state, this was a recipe for blue days.

In storying myself as someone who didn’t belong—in the city, at an expensive university, in the field, or in the academy—I was fueling my belief that I was an imposter. I worked harder while trying to perform some ideal academic self, reinforcing what Clance and O’Toole (1987) call “The Imposter Cycle” (p. 56). I realized some of this when, in the midst of researching lighthouses, I re-read Spry’s (2011) description of her earlier life in the academy “as an exhausting artifice” (pp. 96-98). Her words illuminated one source of my shadows. When I finally sat down with a bright blue pen and nine pages finally came tumbling out, I cried. I realized if I was going to thrive, I’d better spend more time searching for light.

Maps

I love landscapes. I have for a long time.

I am magnetically drawn to the aesthetics at the nexus of the natural and the human (animal):

  the seagull framed by the wind turbines across the bay,

   the old red barn in the middle of the hayfield,

    the brick factory overtaken by the forest down the gravel road.

Pharology

When I began, I was far from a pharologist. Sure, I had performed about (and as) lighthouses. I grew up near several. I knew they were an endangered species. Vandermeer (2014) says they have become “less necessary”; I would suggest they have been forgotten, like the Galápagos Penguin or the Blue Whale. Lighthouse Digest has kept a “Doomsday List” since 1993 (p. SR12). Lighthouses are disappearing. They are also absolutely fascinating and complex. Whole communities—true pharologists—come together to save them. When I moved within 2 hours of the coast and decided I would become a pharologist, for some reason, one of my first thoughts was, “I need a good camera.” This makes perfect sense, except I don’t know the foggiest thing about photography, and at the time had only once used a camera other than a point and shoot. The colleague who helped me order and (barely) understand the camera surely thought I had lost my mind. (Maybe I had?) But how could I study lighthouses and their landscapes without a camera? With my maps/navigational charts (i.e., the theories I had been collecting), a slightly dinged up but seaworthy vessel (myself), and technologies of observation (the camera, a digital audio recorder, iPad, iPhone, notebooks, pens, etc.), I outfitted myself for a journey as an ethnographer, tourist, seeker, and (neophyte) pharologist.

Maps

I became a solo traveler on a quest for light.

I found words to cling to.

I found light in towers, in the footprints of morning, in the brightness of friendly voices.

I learned to listen to my body, to space, and to others.

I learned that I map space into the fibers of my being, so that finding my way back becomes a winding, twisted affair, clinging to ropes of my own weaving, tugging on threads of memory coiled around the deep remembrance of place and architecture.

I learned, most importantly, that lighthouses only work if they are where they are supposed to be.

Fortunately, I was born to working-class parents who believed visiting historical sites and tourist destinations was formative, and learned the arts of museum-going, touristic photography, picnic lunches, and guestbook-signing at an early age. I distinctly remember the first cameras my sister and I brought on tour. Neon pink and yellow (this was the 1990s), they required 110 film cartridges, and we snapped photos of our family vacations as if visiting Paris. The magic of getting that film developed was an adventure in itself. Tourism and pharology call for photography. As Stephenson Shaffer (2004) argues, “. . . photographs serve as a reminder that tourism is indeed taking place. Photographs, like postcards, are visual reminders of the adventure” (pp. 149-150).

That magic is perhaps why, though I listened to advice about lighting, composition, settings, lenses, and file storage (and even practiced), I threw the rules away when I entered the field. I am not a photographer (not yet). I am an artist and an ethnographer. I had a camera. That, I figured, would have to be good enough. Trained in (auto)ethnography from within performance studies, I approached that summer as a tourist-ethnographer-performer, not only inspired by Shaffer (2004) but also by Alexander (2006), Bowman (2006), Denzin (2004), Jones (2002), Spry (2011), Tracy (2013), and many others. I toured, photographed, observed, interviewed, volunteered, collected documents and artifacts, wrote fieldnotes, organized and analyzed data, and spent a lot of time trying to write.

Blue

I was a child who lived in my own mind. The 5 years before my sister came along were formative. I had a vivid imagination, and the world “in there” felt more consequential to me than the world in front of me.

(I’m not sure I ever grew out of this, which may explain my propensity for getting lost.)

Put me on the water, let me set foot on a beach, or sit me on a train through a vast mountain landscape, in the presence of the blue, and I’ll be present as breath.

Just don’t interrupt me.

I’m making charts to guide me home.

Cartography

Although I find road maps befuddling, the idea of mapping space is deliciously enticing. My love of writing extends to a love of doodling through theoretical connections with arrows, lists, and lines in black ink. In Mingé and Zimmerman’s (2013) work, I glimpsed a kind of mapping that could lead me out of my “displacement” (p. 16). As they say, “(Dis)memberment creates an inability to articulate experience” (pp. 24-25). For a scholar/artist/writer, articulation is essential as breath. If I could symbolize my experience, perhaps I could re-member my way back home. Perhaps I could compose a differently livable academic life. Pharology taught me new ways to articulate. My participants taught me the virtue of perseverance, passion, and the art of making do. The lights taught me that history and location make work possible. Ocean taught me to trust my body’s rhythms. Landscape taught me about sensuous map-making, and photography instructed me in composition. These were my ingredients for re-membering a self.

Landscapes (and seascapes) fill me with a wonder that restores my soul; standing in front of an ocean, a mountain, valley, or meadow feels to me like inhaling poetry. As such, my travel photos rarely feature people. Still, when a friend commented that I have “a great sense of composition,” I was surprised. Upon reflection, I realized that this might be because I get to know places by their composition. I am rendered hopeless by maps, but my body remembers the form of a place. Once everything aligns—the angle of the buildings, the curve in the road by that farmhouse, that particular sea spray smell—I find my way. I will suddenly remember how the road only seems to dead end, recall the word on the page kissing other words, see the red door, or hear the creak of the patio swing. Taking photos of lighthouses helped me to realize that I navigate by way of sense-pictures. My sense of direction is actually “direction by sense.”

Pharology

According to Barnbaum (2010; a photographer), “‘Looking’ is one thing; ‘seeing’ is quite another. Two people can look at the same thing and one will see a great deal while the other sees nothing” (chap. 4, “Photographic Looking and Seeing” section). Becoming a pharologist meant learning to pay attention, to see my way, to trust my senses. This was a challenge, because as an imposter, I didn’t trust my navigation skills. I was no longer sure I knew how to “be” in the academy, or the field. I second-guessed most of my decisions. I operated out of fear.

And so, on the first morning of my first research day, I stood staring at my blue Corolla, terrified (and feeling quite silly). Indeed, the first leg of the trip felt disastrous. I left town without fueling up. (Surely there’d be a station just off the highway, right?) I hit traffic, stared at the gas gauge, and panicked for 30 miles. In a McDonald’s lot near the Atlantic City Expressway, in tears and on the phone with my very far away partner, I had an epiphany (or a panic attack). Here I was, nearly 30, incapable of driving in New Jersey. Aside from flights to and from conferences and my childhood home (and flying to graduate school with nothing but a suitcase), I had rarely traveled by myself. I was out of my comfort zone, and I felt ridiculous.

I don’t remember where I got gas (though I did), but I do remember that I was late, which I hate. I never left without getting gas again. I did get lost the next day, and the day after that. I drove miles out of my way because of a typo, parked adventurously, and sat, fuming, in traffic. I second-guessed myself again and again. I also learned to read Google maps, to juggle my recorder and steering wheel, to speak fieldnotes over Siri’s incessant voice. I was guided to my hotel by caring participants, because it was late and they protected me like they protect lighthouses. And I learned landmarks: that house, or that bridge, or that outlet mall, or that diner, or that promising bend in the road.

Maps

Pharology is a patterned performance of mobility. Lighthouses only work if they are where they are supposed to be, which means one must move oneself to see them. Visiting lighthouses requires driving, touring, and climbing. It is a tourist quest, something like Bowman’s (2006) search for Stonewall’s arm (though not as driven by chance). As he argues,

The particular direction of a given tourist performance will be shaped in part by the nature of the space or stage on which the performance occurs and the degree of control or direction given by the producers or stage managers [i.e., the folks who create and maintain the site]. (p. 118)

My movements were conditioned and directed by the sites and my goals. But almost every one of my visits—especially every “first” visit—went more or less the same way. Of course, “Each performance can never be exactly reproduced, and fixity of meaning must be continually striven for” (Bowman, 2006, p. 126). That is, if repetition is the goal. It wasn’t mine, and yet my fieldnotes reveal a repetitive, ritual mapping of each lighthouse (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The ritual movement of a lighthouse visit.

Step 1: Open Google Maps. Drive to the light. Stop to pee, unless you’re driving from the B&B (even then, sometimes).

Step 2: Get yourself, your things, and your camera bag together. Breathe.

Step 3: Step out of the car and stand there. Just stand there. Breathe. Notice how the lighthouse dominates the skyline. See the oil house, the gardens, the ocean. Notice how weirdly placed the lighthouse is. Notice how much your love for lights is growing. Take a picture.

(Take several.)

Step 4: Find the entrance (not always obvious) and walk into the lightkeeper’s house or tiny vestibule. Let your eyes adjust. Greet the person behind the desk, counter, cash register. Pay the fee. If you’re in a keeper’s house, wander, halfheartedly taking in the exhibits. Whatever you’re looking at, take pictures.

Step 5: Find the tower. Climb. Stop at landings. Take photos. Listen to the echoes of your feet and the voices of the ones climbing above and below. Or, just climb. Or, climb around others, jockeying for space on the narrow stair. Be patient.

Step 6: If you can, go outside. Do not stop to marvel at the architecture in the lanthorn room. Breathe. This is your 360° view . Soak it in. Take pictures, through the iron safety bars if necessary. They won’t begin to communicate what your eyes see, but take them anyway. Be nice to others doing the same. Try not to cringe when children talk too loudly. Reluctantly, return inside.

Step 7: Marvel at the architecture in the lanthorn room. Talk to the keeper on duty. Marvel at the Fresnel lens, if there is one. Take pictures.

Step 8: Wander down. Revisit the exhibits, spend a little time. Thank the person behind the desk, counter, and cash register.

Step 9: Wander the grounds. Notice the oil house, the gardens (spend a moment), and the ocean (breathe, again). Take pictures of the squirrels, the bees, or the kid’s handprint in the sidewalk.

Step 10: Walk back to the car. Turn around and just stand there. Breathe. Get in. Open Google Maps.

Drive.

Cartography

Then a funny thing happened. I began “to see things in areas [I] would have overlooked previously” (Barnbaum, 2010, chap. 4, “Photographic Looking and Seeing” section). I found joy in being surprised by lighthouses’ weird locations or amazing grounds or charming architecture. I noticed things I had missed, like the prevalence of graffiti, or the difference between signal patterns, or the way the lighthouse aura changed according to the sky’s color. Countless views stopped my breath—when the sun hit the water just so, or the grasses swayed with just the right rhythm—and the car, the recorder, the camera fell away. In those moments, I fell deeply in love.

Turns out, getting a little lost (and surviving) comforted me. The more time I spent near the shore, the more it felt like a home. In mapping lighthouses, I mapped a way out of academic depression. Pharology taught me to find light by teaching me how to find and appreciate lighthouses. Standing in their light, I composed an alternative academic self. I share Vandermeer’s (2014) lament that mystery is scarce in a world with so many maps. When he says “there is also a selfish part of me, the part that likes to be off the edge of the map, that feels the damaged lighthouse is somehow more authentic than the one that will be created through restoration” (p. SR12), I worry with him. But what if alternative mappings take us off the edge of the map in productive ways? What if we abandoned severe knowledge for something with more mess and mystery? What if severe knowledge became sensuous knowledge?

Maps

I

couldn’t

draw you a

map of the Jersey Coast

and its highways to save

my soul.

But I can tell you what the ocean looks like

from atop Cape May lighthouse,

or how the fading casino landscape

clings to the dunes around Absecon.

And I can paint you a word poem

of the gardens at Hereford Inlet.

Sing to you of sea gulls off of Sea Girt.

I got lost every time I drove to the Twin Lights,

but I can tell you how it feels to stand in its shadow,

and look out at NY harbor on a sparkling summer day.

I can feel the stories of old Sandy Hook vibrate in my bones if I close my eyes.

And I probably can’t help you smell the bay breeze from the top of Barnegat, but I can try.

Autoethnography

Visiting lighthouses is an inherently embodied experience. You do not go to a lighthouse just to see it; you go to a lighthouse to climb it. Blake (2007) argues that climbing “is the only way to fully appreciate the history, optics, architecture, and height of the tower, in addition to the smell and feel of the cool, dark interior space” (p. 11). Ascending a few stairs in a small live-in lighthouse or spiraling up a conical one is inescapably physical. Performance ethnography and tourism, like pharology, are embodied research practices. Tourism, too, makes “habits tough to maintain. The most ordinary of activities—taking a walk, having a conversation, eating a meal, going to the bathroom, sleeping—can become strange or difficult when one is on tour” (Bowman, 2006, p. 117). On tour, my body was omnipresent.

I wrote about finding bathrooms and coffee shops, sleeping exhaustedly in bed and breakfasts, and eating (namely breakfast, which was always delightful). Breakfasts fueled my busy days, and having a community to break bread with provided me with a tourist experience while deepening my community ties. My research deposited me a few blocks from the ocean—the place I feel most at home, and a place where I could run and do yoga. My knowledge of my body as an instrument was somatically deepened at the shore. The beach beckoned. The sun would stream into my adorable, tiny room (they were always tiny and adorable) early, and off I would go. There is nothing like running with the waves crashing in your ears and the sun rising over the water, and you haven’t experienced New Jersey boardwalks until you’ve felt their eerie (yet somehow perfect) emptiness at 6:00 a.m., with but a few runners and coffee drinkers for company.

I cherished these moments before breakfast, tours, interviews, photos, documents, and phone calls. They reminded me there was more to life than research; that self-care was a necessary part of this work. They opened me to the day, coaxing me to experience each lighthouse, interview, and chance encounter through my senses. As Rodaway (1994) reminds, “without our bodies we would have no geography—orientation, measure, locomotion, coherence” (p. 31). This is how I mapped lighthouse terrain: “The locomotion of the body allows it, with the aid of memory and expectation, to develop a wider ‘map’ of the environment through which it travels” (p. 32). I can still taste the B&B muffins, feel the sting where I scraped my knee (twice) on the boardwalk, and smell its mix of ocean air and stale fair food. These experiences mapped onto my body as I mapped the space, and taught me lessons about ethnography, tourism, and life. I learned to listen, to stop and notice, to enjoy good food when it’s presented, and to pick my feet up. I learned that ethnographers—all scholars—get to be tired sometimes. I learned that people, like lighthouses, only work when they are where they are supposed to be, but that sometimes that place can be within the landscape of one’s own skin.

Blue

I dove straight into the blue . . .

  gut first.

Snapshots and pieces of words float by.

(Did a ship wreck? Where have these fragments come from?)

Keep swimming

  into the wind and waves.

Don’t look up.

(There’s got to be a map here somewhere, right?)

Keep swimming.

Cartography

The day the autoethnographic damn broke was the day I began mapping my way back home. Doing (auto)ethnography—mapping the place(s) of self-constitution within cultural space—much like crafting a successful photograph or building a successful life, is a process of composition. “What, in fact, is composition?” Barnbaum (2010) asks, “The term is constantly used, seldom defined or discussed, rarely understood, yet never questioned. Try to define composition, and you will see how difficult it is” (chap. 2, para. 3). Like many terms we use in performance studies and beyond, “composition” is an “essentially contested concept” (Conquergood, 1995, p. 137). It is a practice, a performance: an action engaged by humans who often happen to be artists. “Composition is the artist’s way of bringing order into a non-ordered world” (Barnbaum, 2010, chap. 2, “How the Human Eyes See” section). Composition is putting the artist-scholar where she is supposed to be, so she can sense the form of the world she moves through, so she can see the lighthouse on the horizon, and so she can work, write, play, and laugh in the face of the deep blue.

Map

My maps are drawn

With bare eyes and a camera lens

The sounds of seagulls and children and stories breathed out

The scent of bread and breakfast muffins breathed in

Sea salt air

The vibration of memories in concrete, stone, and wood

My maps are voiced in the vernacular of the maritime.

My maps are personal and political.

Whether or not I want them to be.

Autoethnography

Neilsen (1998) muses, “It seemed as though the elusive nature of composing, like a butterfly in flight, held certain mysteries: could we, at least, capture and dissect it?” (p. 27). This is what I have tried to do: capture and dissect my composition of (part of) an academic life, in a way that might open paths for others. Interrogating my feelings of uncertainty and fear, linking them to imposter syndrome, has become central. Now that I can name it; however, I want to move beyond it. Whether I have imposter phenomenon or just the normal neuroses of all academics is not the point. The point is that so many of us suffer such feelings, yet we rarely talk about them. For me—a working-class girl who grew up to work in the academy, and at a predominantly wealthy university, the fear of being “found out” is real. I fear the gaps in my “cultural” (read, upper class) knowledge, or the value of my wardrobe, will be noticed and I will be found lacking. I wonder how a gal like me ended up here, fearing it will all disappear. From another angle, I worry at home (or in the field), that folks will overemphasize my “professor” identity and think me “too big for my britches,” too much like a “come from away.” The cultural expectations of each space leave me questioning my presentation of self. I feel a responsibility to remember the deep knowledge and culture instilled in me by those who raised me: a responsibility to know where I came from, to be an ambassador at least as much as a critic.

What I am trying to say is, I don’t want my “severe knowledge” to overtake the sensuous, embodied lessons learned in warm kitchens and along windswept coastlines. When I hear echoes of home in the words of my participants, when I see the same kind of lines mirrored in the faces of lighthouse keepers, I wonder what my academic training can teach them and us about these mysterious places. That’s a final element of my anxiety. I can only live healthfully and honestly in the academy if I honor my sensuous ways of knowing and being. There is no place in my scholastic soul for severe knowledge. My maps will always be a bit messy, but I think the academy can make space for them. It is vast and varied; there should be room for people of all backgrounds and for the study of many cultures and performances. The lessons I learned from pharology have helped shed light on how.

Pharology

Reaching the top of a lighthouse is a marvelous experience. From the tower, whether you can go outside, and whatever you are able to see, you get the feeling you’re seeing something you’re not supposed to. Never mind that the tourist before you saw that house or that inlet or that forest; the land- and seascape are always changing. This moment, this view, this scene, is yours. You feel at once enormous and insignificant. You position your camera and take some shots, knowing that what you capture will not compare with what your senses are experiencing. You wonder, through the lens of your eyes, if you should even pick up the camera. You realize what Barnbaum (2010) means when he says, “A good memory is better than a bad photograph any day!” (chap. 3, “Rules, Formulas, and Other Problems and Pitfalls” section). It’s not the proof, but the present, that matters. Ethnography, of course, requires proof—that you listened and witnessed, carefully reviewed and reflected, theorized and wrote. It might be words on a page or a body on a stage, but in many ways, it is the point. Your participants, your colleagues, and your sponsors expect critical compositions of your research journey. Your participants deserve at least that much. But maybe, just maybe, there is space for the story of you making it.

Autoethnographic Cartographies of Blue (What I Have Learned)

Sometimes you see your world more clearly by immersing yourself in another. When I set off to study lighthouses, I had no idea how it would change me. Becoming part of the lighthouse community (if I can be so bold to say this), a community in many ways like academia, was like looking in a magic cultural mirror. Seeing the similarities and differences illuminated the structural reasons for my anxieties. Becoming a pharologist showed me how to live through them, in community. Like the academy, the lighthouse community is a loose network joined by common interest and purpose. They have publications, meetings, and boards that govern and make decisions. Like most faculty I know, pharologists worry about economics and politics, work long hours, and care deeply about education. Some write grants, some mostly do day-to-day work, some make art, and some do all this and more. Most, like academics, got started because of an abiding passion. Unlike academics, however, the lighthouse community is unashamed about this passion. They wear it openly (sometimes, literally). They see nothing wrong with sensuous knowledge, and they get close to their “subjects” (lighthouses), even with all of the emotional and ethical challenges that bring. They demonstrate a perseverance and do-it-yourself ingenuity that our academic world could benefit from. Sure, there are power struggles. Where aren’t there? But these folks work together as a welcoming community, doing good works in their neighborhoods as a matter of course. They understand they must compete for resources, but believe the rising tide raises all boats. And they do all of this while preserving a love of storytelling and a touch of wonder alongside their lighthouses.

In the field I found myself asking, “Why can’t academia be more like this—more wonderful, beautiful, public, supportive, innovative, and passionate?” There are, of course, pockets where it is, and we must hold tightly to those. But even these seem to bump up against systematic barriers, like the rather invisible ones I ran into with my anxiety. I am not suggesting everything is negative (I wouldn’t want so deeply to stay, if I were). Nor do I believe academic life should be easy, or perfect, or free from difficult issues (quite the contrary). Rather, I want to argue for more conversation about these barriers and the unhealthy, unsustainable practices that uphold them. I agree with Ruth Barcan (2014), who argues that “feelings of fraudulence” are “a systematic feature of life in the late-modern academy” and that “if we continue to behave as though feelings of distress and fraudulence are unwarranted, private aberrations [sic] rather than logical responses to a fractured, competitive system, then we cannot make any effective progress on reforming the system itself” (n.p.). I am clearly not the only one who has felt anxiety or depression, and in an increasingly diverse, ever-changing academy, it seems we should talk about our anxieties and help each other through them. I have learned, through pharology, some clues for how to do so.

First, becoming a pharologist reminded me of the importance of movement. Living healthfully and happily in the academy (for me, and I suspect others) requires embodied movement in classrooms, on campus, and in non-academic areas as well. It requires movement through space—play, travel, going on tour, getting outside, and stepping outside of our comfort zones. We must make our own academic maps by moving; otherwise we will always feel lost. Second, pharology taught me to trust my sensuous, experiential knowledge in a deeper way, and to believe in the value of the knowledge I have gained from the academy and elsewhere, including my family and home, where there were few PhDs to be found. The pharologists I met are bright, resourceful, rigorous, often self-taught researchers, authors, artists, and educators. They produce valuable knowledge, just like many others outside the ivory tower, and they do so with ethical intentions. They reminded me that our knowledge should be sensuous, not severe.

Third, searching for light has become a metaphor of sorts. I have accepted the fact that, as a scholar and artist, I am much more interested in the light than the dark. I will not avoid critical questions, nor will I ignore the oppressive or harmful elements of our cultures and our communication, but I am motivated to create paths toward brighter ways of being. Fourth, I learned that we must make more room in the academic landscape for wonder, do-it-yourself ingenuity, artistic inquiry, getting lost, failure, and the poetry of everyday life. We need to make space for listening with our whole selves, and for talking about our fears and celebrating our successes—stopping to marvel at the view at the end of one climb before knocking ourselves down and starting another. If more of us can approach our work with the passion and dedication of a pharologist, keeping lights for each other to be guided by, perhaps navigating the landscape of academia might be a little bit smoother.

Finally, I have realized there is no single “correct” way to map one’s way through the academy, nor one best style through which to compose a scholastic life. (Yet, we often seem to act as if there is.) Somewhere along the way, I forgot that maps are not neutral, that they presume and perform “a certain view of the world,” are “scale drawing[s]” of reality, not reality itself, and also “symbolic” (Rodaway, 1994, pp. 133-134). That is, I forgot that I was not bound to a map not of my own making. My map—my “performance cartography” (Chávez, 2009)—is a fragmented autoethnographic research story. We need more examples of alternative maps and compositional styles, so those who come after us can make their own maps by moving. We need more scholarly and everyday discourse about anxiety, depression, imposter syndrome, and well-being more generally in our community. To remain silent about our challenges is to be culpable in their stigmatization. In bearing witness to my own experiences, I hope I have contributed positively to this discussion, and I invite others to follow.

Blue

What I have learned, at this point, is that mapping space and place is a difficult, varied, personal, and political act of knowing engaged in by individuals and communities alike—an act that has emotional and personal consequences.

What I have learned, at this point, is that people can only work if they are where they are supposed to be (psychically, as much as geographically) and can only speak from where they are.

What I have learned, at this point, is that lighthouses need people as much as people need lighthouses. Their advocates—the pharologists—need advocates. I needed to tend to my own sails before docking in the harbor and continuing to tend to their stories, their work, and their needs, but now . . .

I hear them calling me.

I’m putting myself in the picture.

And oh, that blue can swallow me happily whole.