Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 2 | Page 17

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objectified, “rational.”’17 Kim Etherington cites an e-mail from a colleague, who says of his
heartfelt, personal writing: ‘but it wasn’t academically appropriate! so it went out.’18 More
recently, Jess Moriarty wrote, of her own PhD experience, that she found ‘…academic work
had to be drained in order to be deemed worthy’,19 and that she was conscious of ‘academic
voices telling me to cancel this messiness and remain expert, objective’.20 Pnina MotzafiHaller’s words, written nearly 20 years ago, match my thoughts today: ‘Are such “critical
academic voices” effectively silencing me? How can I break through such silencing power?
What kind of “voice” can I claim?’21

Illustration 4: Edging Uncertainly

So this is the tightrope, along which I find myself edging with uncertainty. Thus I fear
that when I submit my thesis, I may find that in satisfying what I perceive to be the

17

Pnina Motzafi-Haller, ‘Writing Birthright: On native anthropologists and the politics of representation’
in Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the self and the social, ed. by D. E. Reed-Danahay (Oxford: Berg,
1997), 201.
18
Kim Etherington, Becoming a reflective researcher (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2004), 35.
19
Jess Moriarty, ‘Leaving the blood in: Experiences with an autoethnographic doctoral thesis’ in
Contemporary British autoethnography, ed. by N. P. Short, L. Turner & A. Grant (Rotterdam: Sense
Publishers, 2013), 63.
20
Ibid, 68.
21
Motzafi-Haller, ‘Writing Birthright: On native anthropologists and the politics of representation’, 198.