ABSTRACT
Autoethnography belongs to the social sciences and to qualitative methods. It is especially used when the researcher uses their first-person experience in their research, partly as a motivation, partly as an example of the phenomenon they are interested in (Ellis and Adams 2014). It is often used as a tool to go deep into understanding and problematising cultural experience, where insider and first-person knowledge can help break silences. This process may generate deep and strong emotions in the researchers who generously open their personal lives to research. My attempt here, compared to real autoethnographers, is admittedly very modest. But I tried to reconstruct my activities and involvement at the ias in the past years through my first-person experience because, as I shall try to explain in my text, what counts is not merely the output, but primarily and foremost the process and the environment in which an output is generated.
