ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complications and tensions of researching a field which is not completely ‘strange’ to the researcher and in which they are not a complete Other. Rather what Bhabha (1994) terms a ‘third space’ is occupied, the position between the insider and outsider researcher. There has been extensive discussion regarding a researcher’s positionality and the possibility of mediating the effects of positioning in research. The focus of this discussion is a PhD journey which began with the expectation of understanding and representing the participants’ research to an acknowledgment of the limitations of what a researcher can know. The analysis of two autoethnographic narratives in this chapter aims to demonstrate the ways in which autoethnography can assist a researcher in their exploration and problematisation of their own construction of cultures when conducting research about cultures to which they are neither insiders nor outsiders.
