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Casting for Change:

The moment of casting is a crucial one in any media production. Casting the ‘right’ person shapes the narrative as much as the way in which the final product might be received by critics and audiences. For this article, casting—as the moment in which gender is hypervisible in its complex intersectional entanglement with class, race and sexuality—will be our gateway to exploring the dynamics of discussion of gender conventions and how we, as feminist scholars, might manoeuvre. To do so, we will test and triangulate three different forms of ethnographically inspired inquiry: 1) ‘collaborative autoethnography,’ to discuss male-to-female gender-bending comedies from the 1980s and 1990s, 2) ‘netnography’ of online discussions about the (potential) recasting of gendered legacy roles from Doctor Who to Mary Poppins, and 3) textual media analysis of content focusing on the casting of cisgender actors for transgender roles. Exploring the affordances and challenges of these three methods underlines the duty of care that is essential to feminist audience research. Moving across personal and anonymous, ‘real’ and ‘virtual,’ popular and professional discussion highlights how gender has been used and continues to be instrumentalised in lived audience experience and in audience research.

Researching the Mechanisms of Gossip in Organizations: From Fly on the Wall to Fly in the Soup

In this paper, I explored how to research a sensitive topic such as gossip in organizations and used a narrative approach to illustrate the methodological and ethical issues that come up when considering a variety of research methods. I first attempted to conduct an ethnographic research on a project group from a Dutch university undergoing a major change. At the very beginning of the project, as a participant observer, I struggled to remain an outsider, or a “fly on the wall.” But as issues of power came into play and access became increasingly problematic, I moved towards the role of an “observing participant.” Therefore, in order to research gossip and some of the hidden dimensions of organizational life, I turned to auto- and self-ethnography as a way to regain access and greater authenticity. While following this route presented its share of ethical and methodological issues, it also provided valuable insights that could be of value to researchers attempting to study sensitive topics such as gossip in organizations. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol23/iss7/18 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominiquedarmon/

Artistic Educational Commoning as a Laboratory of the Real

This article presents and discusses an extracurricular, co-constructed programme: “The Catalyst Club” as a form of Artistic Educational Commoning (AEC). Having been developed as part of a PhD research at Minerva Art Academy (Groningen, TheNetherlands), The Catalyst Club (TCC) explored new perspectives on the education of artists and designers in a globalized world and created alternative modes of operating in higher art education. It brought together students, alumni, teachers from a range of disciplines, and external participants. During developing TCC, the author occupied a dual role as researcher and participant, working together with others in an artistic co-creative process. TCC drew on and developed the methods relating to Collaborative Autoethnography, Participatory Action Research and Artistic Research. This study presents AEC as a communal effort to build spaces for learning and experimentation. They are created through interaction and cooperation, based on social relations and the production of shared values. As such it can offer a counterbalance to the extensive individualisation, instrumentalization, and commodification of communities in higher art education. The article formulates some recommendations on how AEC can reconnect the education of artists and designers with the role of the arts in wider technological, societal, and political contexts.

Professional and personal experiences as leverage for learning.

Poetic reflexivity and the birth of career writing

The intention of this chapter is to show how autoethnographic research might promote reflexivity among career professionals. We aim to answer the question: can writing one’s own life and career story assist career practitioners and researchers in identifying patterns, idiosyncrasies, vulnerabilities that will make them more aware of the elements that are fundamental to career construction and that have been mentioned in a variety of disparate places in the existing career literature? What interested us as career researchers and co-creators of the narrative approach Career Writing in considering the innovative intention of this book, was how writing our own career story could deepen our professional reflexivity and might also help others to do so. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22799-9_30 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reinekke-lengelle-phd-767a4322/

Living with loss

Each of us has a story that comes alive as we wake up in the morning, develops throughout the day, and holds layers of meaning as we lay our heads down at night – it might be called a narrative of our identity. When loss occurs, our story fragments into unfamiliar pieces, and who we identify as becomes scattered – sometimes even shattered. We must work to reconstruct meaning in our lives and to rebuild our identity. As leading author on this editorial, with an article of my own in this issue, I confronted this when my father died. I felt his story slipping away, becoming blurred, forgotten, and for some, erased – and the same held true for me. The chaos of my shattered identity exacerbated the deep pain of losing him and I experienced complicated grief. I had to reshape my narrative to remember the authentic parts of me and rebuild a new self in a fatherless world. This journey is in part what motivated me to become a symposium co-editor for the journal. All four of us editors of this special issue have experienced “living with loss” following the premature loss of either our father or spouse, and I wanted to see what lived experience and knowledge we could bring to the readers about loss in the fields of both guidance and counselling.