ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Graugaard suggests that reflexive auto-ethnography provides certain reflections and tools that are useful in breaking with the tradition of hit-and-run research, experienced as problematic and neo-colonial in Arctic communities. By providing three vignettes from her own fieldwork experiences in Greenland, she seeks to provide critical reflections on the relation between researcher and informant in the field, on the positionality of the researcher, and on resisting the reproduction of the “colonial gaze” by reversing it. Graugaard suggests that reflexive auto-ethnography can be a process and practice with the potential to challenge colonial self‒other relations, subject‒object, and researcher‒researched. While a reflexive auto-ethnographic approach does not necessarily lend itself as “collaborative,” Graugaard discusses how it can support collaborative research methodologies in the Arctic. Necessarily, employing the reflexive and auto does not, in itself, resolve power asymmetries in a research context; rather, it creates opportunity to acknowledge, explore, and expose the dynamics of positionality as a way to decolonize research—and perhaps pave the way for new participatory, collaborative approaches.
