I am enrolled at the University of Stirling , undertaking a PhD. My goal is to achieve a Doctorate in Film and Media.
Sports documentaries, gender, class and emotion: an autoethnography.
Here’s a wee summary of what I will be researching:
My PhD research applies an innovative autoethnographic research methodology to sports documentaries for the first time, and the hope is for it to make a major contribution to knowledge in the field of TV and media studies. Focusing on films I directed for broadcast on television in Scotland, I will analyse gender, class and emotion (with a focus on trauma) from my point of view as a female filmmaker, interrogating how personal reflection aligns to society and culture; assessing where it sits within traditional theoretical frameworks. In addition, I will be using the reflexive tools of testimony, notebooks and digital editing footprints, exploring how my personal world has been altered as a consequence of the filmmaking process.
The PhD will ask these research questions.
- How can an autoethnography methodology be used to explore the intersection between my personal narrative and traditional research frameworks?
- What role does my background have in the desire to tell these stories and how have my perceptions of the research themes evolved in the filmmaking process?
- Did my directing impact on the contributors and their own perceptions of their legacy?
- In what ways can the filmmaking process be used as a tool for personal growth and reflection including analysing identity, politicisation and feminist reflections?
According to Ellis; ‘as an autoethnographer I am both the author and the focus of the story, the one who tells and the one who experiences, the observer and the observed, the creator and the created. I am the person at the intersection of the personal and the cultural, thinking and observing as an ethnographer and writing and describing as a storyteller’.
It is exactly the right approach for me.
Along the way, I’ll write about any significant milestones on my blog – which I know will be both extremely challenging but equally (I hope!) rewarding – and also post links below.
Margot McCuaig 