OPEN: With Her Words, Poem (fig. 1). Her Words is a poetic autoethnographic response that portray an experience I had as a student in an Alter/Native Anthropology course during my first year as a junior transfer student in the autumn of 2017 at the University of Washington. The framework of the poem is inspired by Maiana Minahal’s Poem on Trying to Love without Fear and is an example of my experimentation with poetry, as an ethnographic methodology, in my responses to assignments and my experiences of learning within the dual sites of my independent research and my anthropology course. We had been assigned to read a chapter in Patricia Leavy’s book Method Meets Art: Art-Based Research Practice that discusses the values and practices of poetry …show more content…
To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance-to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession.”
It is this undoing and resisting my own resistance that I have chosen to remain in spaces where I work further to decolonize the construction of my “white identity” and to begin to examine in relationship with others the work that needs to be done within my own predominantly white community of Bainbridge Island. These experiences are important to include as they situate me in the present and inform the parameters that I aspire to in the research that I have done for my winter 2018 Ethnographic Field Techniques