Standing In the Wake: A Critical Auto/Ethnographic Exercise on Reflexivity

Using the metaphor of “standing in the wake” to represent a time after experience for critical reflection, this performative and autoethnographic text uses reflexivity as both the subject and the method of engagement, to explore the nature of reflexivity in ethnographic research; as well as the idiosyncratic and diverse ways in which ethnographers enact reflexivity in relation to definitional orientations and intents of ethnography itself. The essay is structured around three movements: “In the Wake of the Preconference: Per Se,” “In the Wake of Silence: Eulogies in/as Reflective Methodologies,” and “In the Wake of What’s Next: An Afterward in/ as/on Reflexivity.”