Narrative Mining: Story, Assemblage, and the Troubling of Identity

Post-structural autoethnography is untidy. Our ability to write about our own experience is hindered both by the very idea of “the self” as well as by the hope that, even if such a thing exists, we could possibly know it. Rather than abnegate self-writing, however, in this chapter the author uses the construct of story-as-identity in order to create a kind of map of the self – a map that can be used to trouble tidy notions of the autonomous “I”. Specifically operating out of a context of racial identity, the author – a white man – (re)tells several stories from his experience, introducing three questions that are central to the idea he is calling narrative mining: a method to get behind the paradox of post-structural autoethnography (Gannon 2006) and the barriers to autoethnography (Wamsted 2012). In this act, he is accessing something close to an authentic self – not what we say we believe about who we are, but something approaching our actual operating systems. Two stories are (re)told – the story of his first racial memory and the story of his first black friend – and a demonstration of how autoethnographers could trouble tidy notions of the self is provided in the form of an exploration of the three questions. The chapter closes with a look at how narrative mining could be of benefit not only to autoethnographers but also to the education community writ large; operating in alterity is a fundamental skill for the public school teacher, and this method could be a powerful tool for both pre- and in-service teachers.