{"id":{"repo_id":"toronto-retro","oai_identifier":"oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/140643"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/toronto-retro/oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/140643","repository":{"repo_id":"toronto-retro","name":"University of Toronto","base_url":"https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/server/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"How to Participate: A Multi-Genre Coming-of-Age Story of a Student Anthropologist","abstract":"In this dissertation I explore the role of the relational self in ethnographic research. The dissertation stems from ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Barcelona between 2018-2020 among anarchist community organizers who participated at an occupied courtyard in the center of the city. Departing from ethnographic practices that focus on representing other people’s experiences, I examine in this dissertation the unexpected effects, such as the recollection of childhood memories, that the ethnographic project had on me, and the effects that I and my project had on the people I worked with. Largely, this dissertation intervenes in academic discourse in general and anthropological discourse in particular that tends to abstract the researcher, or depersonalize them, from the research process. Instead, in this dissertation I use the relational self of the researcher to point toward some of the limits of scholarly knowledge production that tends to efface the self in favor of the object of inquiry, leaving unexplored how that object is created in relation to that self. I draw on several genres of writing including, but not limited to, autoethnography, poetry, scholarly prose, memoir, and diaristic journal entries. Doing so allows this dissertation to more fully represent aspects of the research experience that tend to not be fully capturable within academic prose, such as memories, hallucinations, fantasizes, ambiguous desires, and affects (especially negative affects). While this project draws on interdisciplinary perspectives such as decolonial, feminist, and queer theory—especially work that pays attention to affect and to the researcher’s subjectivity—it builds on the turn toward critiques of representation and reflexivity in anthropology in the 1980s and 90s. Returning to key founding figures of modern anthropology, especially to the interplay of Bronislaw Malinowski’s professional publications and his private fieldwork diaries, I argue that the maintenance of the boundary between the researcher’s self and the object of inquiry has been an important, though underexplored, aspect of anthropological knowledge production. The overdetermining impulse to represent the voices of “others” in anthropology allows us, I argue, to forget that we ourselves have to be accounted for in the research process and that to truly witness the lives of others we must be witnesses of our own life. While integrating the self in ethnographic research will manifest differently in different projects, in this dissertation I have used a story of myself to extend the radical politics of rethinking relation and of ways of knowing and thinking that my research participants in Barcelona taught me.","abstract_html":"In this dissertation I explore the role of the relational self in ethnographic research. The dissertation stems from ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Barcelona between 2018-2020 among anarchist community organizers who participated at an occupied courtyard in the center of the city. Departing from ethnographic practices that focus on representing other people’s experiences, I examine in this dissertation the unexpected effects, such as the recollection of childhood memories, that the ethnographic project had on me, and the effects that I and my project had on the people I worked with. Largely, this dissertation intervenes in academic discourse in general and anthropological discourse in particular that tends to abstract the researcher, or depersonalize them, from the research process. Instead, in this dissertation I use the relational self of the researcher to point toward some of the limits of scholarly knowledge production that tends to efface the self in favor of the object of inquiry, leaving unexplored how that object is created in relation to that self. I draw on several genres of writing including, but not limited to, autoethnography, poetry, scholarly prose, memoir, and diaristic journal entries. Doing so allows this dissertation to more fully represent aspects of the research experience that tend to not be fully capturable within academic prose, such as memories, hallucinations, fantasizes, ambiguous desires, and affects (especially negative affects). While this project draws on interdisciplinary perspectives such as decolonial, feminist, and queer theory—especially work that pays attention to affect and to the researcher’s subjectivity—it builds on the turn toward critiques of representation and reflexivity in anthropology in the 1980s and 90s. Returning to key founding figures of modern anthropology, especially to the interplay of Bronislaw Malinowski’s professional publications and his private fieldwork diaries, I argue that the maintenance of the boundary between the researcher’s self and the object of inquiry has been an important, though underexplored, aspect of anthropological knowledge production. The overdetermining impulse to represent the voices of “others” in anthropology allows us, I argue, to forget that we ourselves have to be accounted for in the research process and that to truly witness the lives of others we must be witnesses of our own life. While integrating the self in ethnographic research will manifest differently in different projects, in this dissertation I have used a story of myself to extend the radical politics of rethinking relation and of ways of knowing and thinking that my research participants in Barcelona taught me.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Brunson, Wesley"],"institution":null,"degree_name":null,"degree_level":null,"degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":"Anthropology","school":null,"contributors":[],"advisors":["Dave, Naisargi P"],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2024,"date_issued":"2024-11","date_published":"2024-11","updated_at":"2026-07-27T21:27:56Z","subjects":["Autoethnography","Ethnographic Poetry","Experimental Ethnographry","Literary Anthropology","Participant Observation","Subjectivity"],"languages":[],"rights":["Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International"],"rights_urls":["http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"http://hdl.handle.net/1807/140643","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier.uri"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor.advisor","label":"Advisor","values":["Dave, Naisargi P"]},{"key":"dc:contributor.department","label":"Department","values":["Anthropology"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Brunson, Wesley"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2024-11"]},{"key":"dc:date.accessioned","label":"Dc Date Accessioned","values":["2024-11-13T16:48:33Z"]},{"key":"dc:date.available","label":"Dc Date Available","values":["2024-11-13T16:48:33Z"]},{"key":"dc:date.issued","label":"Date","values":["2024-11"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["Thesis"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Autoethnography","Ethnographic Poetry","Experimental Ethnographry","Literary Anthropology","Participant Observation","Subjectivity"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International"]},{"key":"dc:rights.uri","label":"Rights URI","values":["http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier.uri","label":"Identifier URI","values":["http://hdl.handle.net/1807/140643"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description.abstract","label":"Abstract","values":["In this dissertation I explore the role of the relational self in ethnographic research. The dissertation stems from ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Barcelona between 2018-2020 among anarchist community organizers who participated at an occupied courtyard in the center of the city. Departing from ethnographic practices that focus on representing other people’s experiences, I examine in this dissertation the unexpected effects, such as the recollection of childhood memories, that the ethnographic project had on me, and the effects that I and my project had on the people I worked with. Largely, this dissertation intervenes in academic discourse in general and anthropological discourse in particular that tends to abstract the researcher, or depersonalize them, from the research process. Instead, in this dissertation I use the relational self of the researcher to point toward some of the limits of scholarly knowledge production that tends to efface the self in favor of the object of inquiry, leaving unexplored how that object is created in relation to that self. I draw on several genres of writing including, but not limited to, autoethnography, poetry, scholarly prose, memoir, and diaristic journal entries. Doing so allows this dissertation to more fully represent aspects of the research experience that tend to not be fully capturable within academic prose, such as memories, hallucinations, fantasizes, ambiguous desires, and affects (especially negative affects). While this project draws on interdisciplinary perspectives such as decolonial, feminist, and queer theory—especially work that pays attention to affect and to the researcher’s subjectivity—it builds on the turn toward critiques of representation and reflexivity in anthropology in the 1980s and 90s. Returning to key founding figures of modern anthropology, especially to the interplay of Bronislaw Malinowski’s professional publications and his private fieldwork diaries, I argue that the maintenance of the boundary between the researcher’s self and the object of inquiry has been an important, though underexplored, aspect of anthropological knowledge production. The overdetermining impulse to represent the voices of “others” in anthropology allows us, I argue, to forget that we ourselves have to be accounted for in the research process and that to truly witness the lives of others we must be witnesses of our own life. While integrating the self in ethnographic research will manifest differently in different projects, in this dissertation I have used a story of myself to extend the radical politics of rethinking relation and of ways of knowing and thinking that my research participants in Barcelona taught me."]},{"key":"dc:description.degree","label":"Dc Description Degree","values":["Ph.D."]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["How to Participate: A Multi-Genre Coming-of-Age Story of a Student Anthropologist"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor.advisor":["Dave, Naisargi P"],"dc:contributor.department":["Anthropology"],"dc:creator":["Brunson, Wesley"],"dc:date":["2024-11"],"dc:date.accessioned":["2024-11-13T16:48:33Z"],"dc:date.available":["2024-11-13T16:48:33Z"],"dc:date.issued":["2024-11"],"dc:description.abstract":["In this dissertation I explore the role of the relational self in ethnographic research. The dissertation stems from ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Barcelona between 2018-2020 among anarchist community organizers who participated at an occupied courtyard in the center of the city. Departing from ethnographic practices that focus on representing other people’s experiences, I examine in this dissertation the unexpected effects, such as the recollection of childhood memories, that the ethnographic project had on me, and the effects that I and my project had on the people I worked with. Largely, this dissertation intervenes in academic discourse in general and anthropological discourse in particular that tends to abstract the researcher, or depersonalize them, from the research process. Instead, in this dissertation I use the relational self of the researcher to point toward some of the limits of scholarly knowledge production that tends to efface the self in favor of the object of inquiry, leaving unexplored how that object is created in relation to that self. I draw on several genres of writing including, but not limited to, autoethnography, poetry, scholarly prose, memoir, and diaristic journal entries. Doing so allows this dissertation to more fully represent aspects of the research experience that tend to not be fully capturable within academic prose, such as memories, hallucinations, fantasizes, ambiguous desires, and affects (especially negative affects). While this project draws on interdisciplinary perspectives such as decolonial, feminist, and queer theory—especially work that pays attention to affect and to the researcher’s subjectivity—it builds on the turn toward critiques of representation and reflexivity in anthropology in the 1980s and 90s. Returning to key founding figures of modern anthropology, especially to the interplay of Bronislaw Malinowski’s professional publications and his private fieldwork diaries, I argue that the maintenance of the boundary between the researcher’s self and the object of inquiry has been an important, though underexplored, aspect of anthropological knowledge production. The overdetermining impulse to represent the voices of “others” in anthropology allows us, I argue, to forget that we ourselves have to be accounted for in the research process and that to truly witness the lives of others we must be witnesses of our own life. While integrating the self in ethnographic research will manifest differently in different projects, in this dissertation I have used a story of myself to extend the radical politics of rethinking relation and of ways of knowing and thinking that my research participants in Barcelona taught me."],"dc:description.degree":["Ph.D."],"dc:identifier.uri":["http://hdl.handle.net/1807/140643"],"dc:rights":["Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International"],"dc:rights.uri":["http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"],"dc:subject":["Autoethnography","Ethnographic Poetry","Experimental Ethnographry","Literary Anthropology","Participant Observation","Subjectivity"],"dc:title":["How to Participate: A Multi-Genre Coming-of-Age Story of a Student Anthropologist"],"dc:type":["Thesis"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-27T21:27:56Z"}