ABSTRACT
Between 2000 and 2005, several graduate students and the author worked collaboratively with Community Action Stops Abuse (CASA), a domestic abuse shelter. They wanted to do research that would be helpful to the organization and to our community in general. The author tells the story of taking Penny’s autoethnographic performance to the community of CASA. The story demonstrates a situation where research objectives and community goals are not the same and, indeed, may be incompatible. The story is part of The Ethnographic I, which the author published in 2004 as a methodological novel about doing autoethnography. The different perspectives she offer come from transcripts of the researchers’ discussions of what happened and transcripts of conversations the advocates at CASA had about the performance with graduate student researchers.
