Autoethnography is a method for cultural research where you are using your own experiences, as a starting point or as examples of more general conditions. You are both the subject and the object of observation. Recently I tried this method in a Do-It-Yourself project, writing field-notes while working as a home fixer with hammer, screw driver and other tools. I found it to be rather tricky to describe manual work with regard to both body and mind. I also reflected on some differences and similarities between writing and DIY. The purpose of self-narrative experiments like this is to improve fieldwork and cultural analysis. By practicing autoethnography you may learn more about the research process and become more conscious of what is going on when you are doing observations and interpreting them.
During the H1N1 influenza pandemic 2009–2010 in Sweden, a mass-vaccination intervention was enacted as a precautionary measure. Half a year later, medical authorities reported an increased incidence of the life-long neurological disease narcolepsy, later firmly established as a side effect of the pandemic vaccine. Using interview material together with archived protocols, this article presents an analysis of two communities, the National Pandemic Group and the Narcolepsy Association. The aim is to discuss their respective ways of arguing for solidarity, herd immunity, social justice and claim for culpability of the state. Both communities face dilemmas, doubts and double-bind situations, but also perform politics and ethics for the future in mobilizing notions of solidarity and responsibility in their different narratives.
This article, emerging from a study of mobile Polish physicians currently working in Sweden, explores the doctors’ ethnography-like descriptions applying the categories of knowledge usually employed by the researchers. The primary material consists of 21 interviews. The term mobile everyday ethnography points out the particular epistemological condition induced by occupational mobility: a tendency to explore and describe settings and behaviours in cultural terms, oscillating between an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s estrangement. Some recurrent themes in the interviews concerning cultural frictions are presented, followed by a discussion of the specificity of mobile everyday ethnography: its basis in the pragmatics of everyday life, the predominant usage of the popular notion of “culture” and the professional self being the focal point.