Arctic Auto-Ethnography: Unsettling Colonial Research Relations

This chapter discusses how auto-ethnography can provide reflections and tools that are useful in breaking with the tradition of hit-and-run research, experienced as problematic and neocolonial in Arctic communities. By providing three vignettes from fieldwork experiences in Greenland, the chapter offers critical reflections on the relation between researcher and informant in the field, on the positionality of the researcher, and on resisting to reproduce the “colonial gaze” by reversing it. The chapter suggests that reflexivity and auto-ethnography can be a process and practice with the potential to challenge colonial Self-Other relations, subject-object, researcher-researched. While an auto-ethnographic approach does not necessarily lend itself as “collaborative”, the chapter discusses the ways in which it can support collaborative research methodologies in the Arctic. While employing reflexivity does not, in itself, resolve power asymmetries in a research context, it may create a possibility to acknowledge, explore, and expose the dynamics of positionality as a way to decolonizing research.