Conference Agenda

This paper explores the complex positionality of a researcher who shares cultural, gender, and educational backgrounds with research participants. Drawing on autoethnography (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011), this article focuses on how researchers balance empathy with maintaining their positionality in studying the mental health experiences of Chinese female university students. The article also reflects on the impact of positionality on data interpretation and meaning-making. This study aims to explore the ethical and methodological challenges that arise when personal empathy and research neutrality intersect, as well as the importance of reflective practice for maintaining positionality when researching sensitive topics.

This paper is a byproduct of my doctoral research. During my doctoral research, I found maintaining the positionality of a researcher challenging, especially when exploring sensitive topics such as participants' mental health experiences or experiences related to racism. Recognizing this, I approached myself as the research subject and, using autoethnography (Etherington, 2004), began conducting auxiliary research to identify appropriate methods for maintaining positionality. I carefully documented my reflections after each interview and also conducted psychological consultations, recording my insights immediately in my research notebooks (Anderson, 2006). These constituted my research data. The findings suggest that researcher identity and cultural context influence the co-construction of narratives (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015), fostering deeper connections while also introducing ethical complexities.

This article argues that positionality should be viewed as a resource for research, not a constraint. By integrating reflexivity and autoethnography, this study proposes an ethically sensitive framework for interpreting mental health narratives within culturally familiar contexts. This research also offers new insights into reflexivity, researcher identity, and methodological innovation in qualitative research.

This presentation adopts a co-autoethnographic approach in which we, as co-authors, reflect on our doctoral journeys as ethnic minority “outsiders” navigating a white, Western, neoliberal academic environment. Our positionalities as first-generation, self-funded female doctoral students from ethnically and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds shaped our shared struggles in negotiating academic culture, belonging, and career progression. Central to our narrative is the concept of peer generosity—the informal networks of solidarity, care, and shared values that sustained us throughout our PhD journeys.

While existing literature increasingly addresses inequalities faced by racial and ethnic minorities in academia, much of it focuses on those already in academic posts. Far less attention has been given to doctoral students aspiring to enter these spaces (Mattocks & Briscoe-Palmer, 2016). The PhD represents a critical threshold in academic pathways, where peer relationships can profoundly influence well-being, persistence, and identity development (Dericks et al., 2019; Williams et al., 2017). Although supervisory relationships are well-documented (Young et al., 2019), the informal peer networks that provide emotional and intellectual sustenance remain underexplored.

Our co-autoethnographic study draws on three years of recorded conversations and reflective journals, analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. This process allowed us to identify recurring themes of mutual support, cultural expectations, academic hierarchies, and the emotional labour embedded in peer mentoring. Through collaborative reflection, we illuminate how peer generosity countered institutional alienation and fostered resilience, empathy, and belonging.

By situating our personal experiences within broader systemic contexts, this presentation highlights the transformative potential of informal peer support among doctoral students. We argue that peer generosity offers a decolonial framework for reimagining academic relationships—one that values collectivism over competition and nurtures more inclusive, equitable spaces for marginalized scholars within higher education.

In this presentation, I explore my encounter with questions around “ownership” and “authorship,” and the contradictions that emerge from signifiers such as “I,” “we,” and “us” (Gale & Wyatt, 2016, p. 5), as I entangle my stories with those of my research participants. By assembling what Holman Jones (2016, p. 10) calls a “troubled we,” I examine a dialogical approach that explores mine and the participants’ narratives together, in order to inquire into a space that is shared yet marked by difference.

Further, I consider how autoethnographic writing—developed in response to particular encounters or moments of resonance within the interviews—can act as an opening that draws me back into the affective texture of the conversation. Placing these writings in relation to the interviews allows me to examine how meaning is negotiated, interrupted, and reconfigured between researcher and participant. These pieces do not seek to interpret the interviewee’s account but to consider how the researcher’s affective and reflective engagement shapes what the interview comes to mean, highlighting how self and other are mutually shaped through the research process.

I argue that this discontinuous and fragmentary mode of writing functions as a methodological tool for working with interviews. It allows the researcher to stay with moments of uncertainty, and tension rather than translating them into stable themes. This approach challenges the expectation that qualitative research should resolve ambiguity, showing instead how meaning and self are continually shaped through the act of writing.

This presentation builds on my ongoing autoethnographic project exploring the intersections of family history, race, and state policy in Australia. Drawing on the life story recounted by my grandmother, I trace the hidden histories of my maternal ancestors, revealing a family narrative that challenges conventional understandings of race, class, and belonging in Australian society. In July 2025, months after publishing my first paper on this topic, I conducted further archival research in Sydney, uncovering new records that illuminate the lived consequences of the White Australia Policy as both a legal framework and a racial project. The archival records I have uncovered over time reveal that my ancestors—stemming from an interracial marriage between a man from Canton, China, and a white woman born into extreme poverty—experienced forced family separation, with two generations of children removed from their parents and placed in institutions and foster care.

By situating the story of my family within broader frameworks of racial formation, this work highlights how state policies shaped—and often fractured—the lives of non-white Australians, including multiracial families whose histories were subsequently erased or sanitized in familial and public narratives. The presentation will reflect on the emotional labor and ethical considerations of uncovering family secrets through archival research, demonstrating how autoethnography enables both methodological rigor and narrative care while at the same time necessitating emotional resilience for the researcher. I also aim to illuminate how the sanitized, austere spaces of state archives—governed by public rules and rigid policies—create a challenging and emotionally charged context when one is tracing the very ways that same state harmed one’s own family. Finally, I hope to demonstrate the potential of combining family stories with archival evidence to surface hidden truths, complicate national myths of identity, and contribute to critical understandings of race, belonging, and policy in historical and contemporary Australia.

This paper is an invitation to explore what I have come to call creative-relational self-inquiry, a painful-playful process of self re-search which I engaged in for my doctoral thesis (Liwanag 2023). Building upon my use of writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson 2000) and autoethnography, and following the footsteps of those who believe in “the ‘creative-relational’ as a dynamic conceptual frame for vibrant, incisive research” (Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry 2023), I heeded the call of serious play (Mazzei 2007; Tudor and Wyatt 2023), where I learned the value of surrendering to anything and everything, trusting and believing that even not knowing, getting lost, falling apart and failing can become productive forces that give birth to new knowledge. In this process, which largely took place at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I met my shadows at play and they soon became my re-search collaborators. With them, I discovered the power of Donald Winnicott’s (2016, 439) words – that in life’s “sophisticated game of hide-and-seek… it is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.” By showing you my shadow collection, handpicked photos that now adorn a wall in my bedroom, I allow you to take a peek into myself and my shadows, and the spaces between and within us, hoping that you will join us as we play.