- Title
- "You can't say that at SAHANZ": critical nearness and the role of autoethnography in architectural history
- Creator
- McLaughlan, Rebecca; Freeman, Cristina Garduno
- Relation
- The 36th SAHANZ Conference. Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 36, Distance Looks Back (University of Sydney 10-13 July, 2019) p. 258-272
- Relation
- https://www.sahanz.net/publications/papers/you-cant-say-that-at-sahanz-critical-nearness-and-the-role-of-autoethnography-in-architectural-history/
- Publisher
- SAHANZ: Society of Architectural Historians, Australia & New Zealand
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- If distance (or objectivity) is the scholarly discipline of architectural history, then what is the role of nearness; does it suggest an undisciplined or less rigorous standpoint? Kim Roberts (2019) challenges this artificial division by focusing not just on the reception of architecture by audiences, but also on her own subjective responses as a researcher. In this paper, we too consider the proclivities of accepted historiographic cultures. We reflect critically on the relationship between architectural history and its historians through the methodological frame of autoethnography which foregrounds personal experience as an explicit component of the sense-making process of research. Autoethnography navigates distance and nearness to critically connect the personal to the cultural, in the process unlocking conversations normally excluded from academic literature. Our reflection is informed by critical analysis and our own autoethnographies of articles on the periphery of the field by respected scholars including: Naomi Stead (2009 and 2010), Karen Burns (2010), Christine Phillips (2011), Arijit Sen (2013), Roy Brockington and Nela Cicmil (2016), and most recently by Kim Roberts (2019) and Maria Tumarkin (2019). Our paper respects the genres we traverse; it is structured by SAHANZ's convention of distance; and intercepted by the first-person closeness of autoethnography. Our paper is also a dialogical response to the scholars we focus on. While autoethnography may appear to be less rigorous than analytical criticism, we argue it offers new and significant dimensions for architectural histories and historians, and their audiences.
- Subject
- autoethnography; subjectivity; situated practice; disciplinary convention; research culture
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1448100
- Identifier
- uon:43311
- Language
- eng
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