An Autoethnography of Becoming a Qualitative Researcher: A Dialogic View of Academic Development

An Autoethnography of Becoming a Qualitative Researcher chronicles Trude Klevan's personal experiences of her doctoral journey, with Alec Grant as an external academic resource and friend, and her subsequent entry into the neoliberal higher education environment. It gives a personal and intimate view of what it's like to become an academic.

This book is constructed as an extended dialogue which frequently utilizes email exchanges as data. Firmly grounded in the epistemic resource of friendship, it tells the story of the authors’ symbiotic academic growth around their critical understanding and knowledge of qualitative inquiry and the purposes of such knowledge. The tale told is of the unfolding of a close and mutually beneficial relationship, entangled within sometimes facilitative, sometimes problematic, environmental contexts. It uses these experiences to describe, explore, and critically interrogate some underlying themes of the philosophies, politics, and practices of qualitative inquiry, and of higher education. Disrupting conventional academic norms through their work, friendship, and correspondence, Trude and Alec offer a critical and epistemological view of what it's like to become a qualitative researcher, and how we can do things differently in higher education.

This book is suitable for all researchers and students, their supervisors, mentors, and teachers, and academics of qualitative research and autoethnography, and those interested in critiques of higher education.

Trude Klevan is Associate Professor of Mental Health at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Her main research interests are development and exploration of critical approaches in qualitative inquiry and the development of recovery-oriented and collaborative practices in the field of mental health.

Alec Grant is an independent scholar and author. He has been involved in autoethnography, narrative, qualitative, and critical inquiry for over 25 years. He is the recipient of the International Conference of Autoethnography (ICAE) 2020 Inaugural Lifetime Contribution Award, and his project for the foreseeable future is to make autoethnography more explicitly philosophical.