ABSTRACT
Young children develop an inner relationship to objects in the world through their function, going on to share their understanding of the world and its objects by imitating the sounds or actions of these objects rather than using the more abstract nouns used by adults. For children, the noun may be perceived as a whole range of actions and sounds captured or trapped inside one word, the verb effectively frozen by language. Traditionally, qualitative researchers have engaged with abstract activities involving coding and analysing data, mirroring the more positivist approach taken by the scientific community in their research. The well-travelled pathways of conventional research that call upon researchers to adopt prescribed formats, such as writing a literature review or analysing data, do not find a comfortable fit with the intentions of autoethnographic writing. Autoethnography seeks to light fires in research as opposed to filling buckets.
