Autoethnographic Storywork in practice: exploring researcher positionality – a story of being, becoming, and belonging
Authors: Lenz, T.
Journal: Journal of Creative Research Methods
Publication Date: 13/04/2026
Publisher: Bristol University Press Digital
DOI: 10.1332/30502969Y2026D000000025
Abstract:This article develops Autoethnographic Storywork as a significant original methodological contribution to creative qualitative research, offering an ethically accountable way of engaging researcher positionality that deliberately steps beyond the epistemic boundaries of Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic (WEIRD) scholarship. Drawing on autoethnography, critical positionality theory, and Indigenous Storywork principles, the article articulates Autoethnographic Storywork as a relational, embodied, and storied mode of enquiry that resists extractive research practices and static identity disclosures. Through the autoethnographic story The Little Gothling, the article demonstrates how knowledge can be generated through story without being reduced to thematic fragments or subjected to conventional analytic control. The story functions as both artefact and analysis, enacting a form of meaning-making that is dialogical, situated, and accountable to relationships across time. Ethical accountability is reframed beyond procedural ethics as a sustained relational commitment to stories, to those whose knowledge informs the work, and to readers who engage with it. By explicitly challenging colonial research structures that have marginalised story, embodiment, spirituality, and relational knowing, this article reopens methodological pathways long deemed out of bounds within WEIRD academia. It argues that Autoethnographic Storywork offers a rigorous and ethically grounded alternative for exploring academic identity, researcher becoming, and positionality, with implications for creative qualitative research methodologies across disciplines.
Source: Manual