Nicola W. Sochacka

Is This Research? Productive Tensions in Living the (Collaborative) Autoethnographic Process

We came to collaborative autoethnography quite by accident. In this methodological paper, we consider our experiences as we embraced a new methodology, taught and researched collaboratively in an interdisciplinary space, and grappled with how we might nestle our work in a journal with no history of publishing autoethnographies—all while becoming awakened to critiques against and arguments for autoethnographic research. Our discussions are presented along with portions of our lengthy e-mail correspondences written during our research process and center on two prominent facets of our research experience: interdisciplinarity and the research process. Entangled in our methodological unpacking, we highlight “Productive Tensions” that emerged from both our collaboration and reviewer feedback that is presented alongside our discussion. Through seeing these tensions as productive, we argue that embracing diverse perspectives can serve to strengthen the depth of engagement, quality, and potential impact of (collaborative) autoethnographic research.

Exploring shame in engineering education

Individual experiences of inclusion or exclusion are increasingly recognized for their relevance in relation to attracting and retaining diverse students in engineering programs. Referring to this emerging body of work, this article explores the emotion of shame as a psychological and sociological construct that might underpin student experiences of inclusion, exclusion, or belonging in engineering majors. To begin unpacking this underexplored concept in the engineering context, we draw on literature from psychology that conceptualizes shame as a construct of emotion with dynamics that greatly affect an individuals perceived experience. We also examine sociological perspectives on shame that attend to how this emotion exists in an intersubjective reality between an individual and his or her social context. Finally, we review the sparse literature in engineering education that explicitly mentions shame and examine a larger body of literature that suggests how engineering student experiences that can be understood as phenomena related shame. This survey of the literature points to the importance of considering shame in engineering education and, in its synthesis, provides the theoretical basis for future empirical studies.