I maintain the position that this blog you are reading, (currently) entitled, ‘An (Auto)ethnographer’s Tale’ (WordPress, 2016): https://anautoethnographerstale.com serves several scholarly purposes (note: Holman Jones, 2005 criterion highlighted in bold):

1) Extending reach/ opportunities for participation/ reciprocity and engagement beyond institution e.g. hypothes.is (Disrupted Journal Media Practice http://journal.disruptivemedia.org.uk experiment). Dialogue as a space for debate and negotiation.

2) Platform for researcher reflexivity, citationality as a strategy for dialogue (not “mastery”). See point 1.

3) Attempts to connect to others (researchers/ academics/ teachers etc.) as a mode of bridging both personal and professional tensions as (Taylor et. al 2014) ‘a third space.’ The dissemination of more personalized artefacts (e.g. photographs, poems, embedded moving image links etc.) enhance communication with others by storying the researcher journey. Evocation and emotion as incitements to action.

4) A digital blog is free from word count; such an unstructured form of researcher voice (personal narrative/ storytelling) would neither prove as visually effective nor as permissible in a text-based published journal article.

5) Platform to host, analyze and exhibit data with a focus on balancing out both process and outcome(s) as a flattened structure. Engaged embodiment as a condition for change.

I suggest here in my research context that the scholarly blog-as-

method can be aligned within a post-structural (influences include writings

on Bakhtin 1984, C. Wright Mills 1959, Sartre 1963, Law 2004 and more

recently Denzin 2014) framework and represents a more honest approach to

interpreting and managing social science data in an educational setting.

However, I acknowledge unresolved issues remain:

• What are the possibilities and counter-arguments against the blog-as-method proposition?
• Can a researcher blog be considered a reliable and legitimate (triangulating) method of working?

So, what do you think? Are you in or out?

Be involved and join in the wider conversation: http://journal.disruptivemedia.org.uk

All you need to do is set up a Hypothes.is account (takes 2 minutes) and use the tag disruptedjournal followed by an additional tag relating to your conversational thread (themes are located on the site).