ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an autoethnographic account of a ‘research life’ as an example of the reflexive self in action. Using notions of vulnerability and precarity, it is an account that recognizes the uncertainties, vulnerability, and contingencies of individuals’ lives across time and space. Ruth Behar suggests that the ethnographer who ‘makes herself vulnerable’ is more likely to be able to produce genuine insights into the human condition, while Nancy Ettlinger refers to the ‘intersecting governmentalities’ that give rise to precarity – governmentalities that operate not only at the structural/institutional level but at the level of embodied/affective social relations. We need, she says, to refuse the separation of spheres of life into politics, economics, family, work, and so on, and to reject the separation of rationality and emotions. Following these authors, and as a sociologist writing an autoethnography of a working life which examines experiences of precarity arising within and across private, public, and political spheres, I am giving due recognition to the intertwining of the biographical, the historical, and the social/structural. I demonstrate via reflexivity how my experience of academic work connects the personal and the political.
