Abstract
This thesis is about the journey of a filmmaker, storyteller and creative practitioner who found her voice, and her place in academia, through story. The work presents an autoethnographic account of the use of a storytelling and filmmaking process to overcome the challenges of marginalisation in society and in an academic environment. Through the development and application of a collaborative storytelling and filmmaking process with marginalised youth, which was developed over many years of working with students and communities, the researcher has, somewhat unexpectedly, discovered ways to overcome her own marginalisation in South African academic environments.
The thesis aims to highlight how intensely personal narrative processes can bring participants to a realisation of the fluidity of assigned identities and stereotypes, and how reworking personal experiences into film scripts can assist in constructing new visions of diverse identities.
In alignment with these aims, the thesis is presented in the form of a screenplay which focuses on key experiences along the way. The screenplay sections, or acts, are interspersed with theoretical interludes, narrative vignettes and personal journal entries. The theoretical intersections offer the reader the opportunity to reflect on the issues raised by the narrative in each act, and are written in the form of conversations with key collaborators: friends, colleagues and academics who comment on particular aspects of the specific section. The final act is a reflection on the researcher’s story and experiences and brings together the different strands of the researcher’s journey.
As such, the autoethnography is a hybrid between evocative autoethnography as articulated by Carolyn Ellis1, and the analytical approach of Leon Anderson2. Therefore, the thesis can be seen as a “reflexive performance narrative”3, cast in the evocative mould of the screenplay form, and through consistent reflection, blurring the boundaries between “text, representation, criticism”4. The work is aimed at giving the reader insight into the use of personal narrative in the research process to overcome the marginalisation of creative practices and methodologies in traditional research environments.When reading the thesis and comparing their lives to the researcher’s, readers can “provide theoretical validation,” build social knowledge and answer the call to action which Denzin5 regards as the core of the transgressive, performative autoethnography: members of the wider...
D.Litt. et Phil. (Film and Television Studies)