4th European Congress of Qualitative Enquiry: QI towards sustainability - Sustaining affinities; relational ethical decisions for an adoptee doing autoethnography.

Description

When writing an autoethnography about adoptive family relationships, fundamental decisions had to be taken concerning how much of the interactions between myself and kin I should share, alongside what to share, or indeed what to omit. In guiding and encouraging such autoethnographic decisions, I suggest it is extremely valuable to identify reflexivity’s of discomfort (Pillow 2003) from personal narratives. Adoption reunion can create vulnerabilities as well as potentially haunting remembrances of past events for kin (Behar, 1996; Coles 2011). Being mindful of how these may cause discomfort, influenced my autoethnographic decisions, whilst at the same time attempted to protect and sustain potentially fragile inter-personal relationships.

For these reasons, I seek to balance and sustain my need to be consistent toward my kin, whether we are together or estranged, in preserving convictions they entrusted to me. Additionally I also attempt to be consistent in making sense of interactions between my self and my adoptive kin and my self and birth kin. In this way I hope to provide an insight into the ways in which I have worked through and anticipated relational ethical decisions (Tolich 2010).

Period	5 Feb 2020 → 7 Feb 2020
Event title	4th European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry: QI towards Sustainability
Event type	Conference
Location	St Juliens, MaltaShow on map