LIFE UNDER CONSTRUCTION: AUTOETHNOGRAPHY OF A RESEARCHER

Abstract

We all construct our lives. That is, our lives are consciously and unconsciously created, enacted, by each of us, day by day, fabricated from our hopes, dreams, beliefs, expectations, social interactions, reflections, daydreams, attitudes, values, and, equally critically, our social locations. It is critical to know, recounting autobiographically my professional journey, that my social location is white, female, southern, the descendant of mountain people, clanny and taciturn with strangers, and Georgia redclay farmers, freeholders, cotton growers and pine resin contractors. For those for whom birth order matters (one brand of psychologists), I am my father’s fourth child of five, the first girl. The fact that we construct our lives—create, enact, make them up as we go—does not alter the fact that there are very real, tangible material circumstances to our lives. I grew up in Tampa, Florida, a very real physical place, a far sleepier and dreamier place, it seems, than the booming city I find today, and often spent parts of summers on my father’s farm outside Baxley, Georgia, a farmstead left to him and his brothers as an inheritance by his mother, with a farmhouse occupied by my father’s aunt, my greataunt Laura, and her third husband. I loved those summers, even with no indoor plumbing or running water, and found Aunt Laura and Uncle “Pat” Patterson bonny company for a gangly kid. On the farm, I learned a