Sophie Tama
Biographic Data
| ID | 127992 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sophie Tama |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sophie |
| FAMILY NAME | Tama |
| SIGNATURE | TAMA S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Carleton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8517-5736 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Autoethnography Is a Difficult Delivery
Impaired Autoethnography
In this piece I reflect on various forms of impairment and resistance and speculate on their generative potential
Conscripted Collaborators: Family Matters in Autoethnography
In this collaborative piece, an autoethnographer discusses the ethics of her children’s appearance in her own work, in conversation with one of her (now adult) daughters. Ethical frameworks that approach public exposure primarily as a potential source of harm offer an insufficient frame for the relational effects of stories that bring our personal lifeworlds into our professional publications. Some forms of borrowing, even theft, can hover betwee…
Tricky Stories: Settler-Academic Reflections on Anti-Colonial Teaching
Personal stories and storytelling often appear as part of an effort to decolonize our approaches to teaching and learning. However, it can be difficult to develop adequately Indigenous-informed, anti-colonial storytelling practices, especially for non-Indigenous settler–academics and would-be allies situated in colonial institutions. The lessons learned from feminist or anti-oppressive narrative-based pedagogies might help but they do not account…
Performance Autoethnography, Critical Inquiry, and the Future of Icqi: Three ‘Truths’ and a Lie
This paper discusses the functions and features of performance autoethnography and critical inquiry and offers a range of suggestions for their future development. It calls for an expanded, inclusive view of the self, the social, and the more-than-human world, and it questions what constitutes useful research. It proposes taking a relational turn, approaching inquiry from within, and expanding the range of representation so we can speak more mean…
Moving Pieces
This piece offers a handful of poems written over the past few years, during a time of profound departures, pivots, and journeys that have mostly happened within the innocuous orbits of everyday life in familiar spaces. They might provide a micro-scale situated examination of self/other care-giving dynamics or add to the feminist conversation around academic subjectivity and slow scholarship or sketch a terrain that pieces together into an impres…
The Shadow Manifesto
When I was writing my dissertation, my wise supervisor advised me to ‘aim for defendable’. In this piece, I have done the opposite. I could defend its indefensibility by framing it as an example of ‘dirty writing’ (Pullen & Rhodes, 2008), built to make room for the raw, uncertain, and intemperate – but that move seems a little contradictory. Rather than looking for a rational argument, readers might like to pay attention to the thoughts and feeli…
Justice! Ay! Ay! Ayotzinapa: A Challenge for New Critical Qualitative Inquiry
My Imaginary Friend: Writing, Community, and Responsibility
I have a problem with collaborative writing; the words themselves put me on edge. This piece follows the line of that affect down and through identity, agency, power, intimacy, responsibility, representation, and the creative process. It leaves a trail of words like breadcrumbs. From outer space, perhaps they trace the shape of the other, my lover, my imaginary friend, a cipher saying something about someone I might be
Researcher as Hostess: Power, Gender, Loss, and Cookies
Researcher as Hostess: Power,Gender,Loss, and Cookies Sophie Tamas An act of hospitality can only be poetic. —Jacques Derrida.1 I am at my desk staring down my doctoral research groups. There are decisions I cannot take to make or break these meetings of survivors and service providers working their way through abuse. My partner is around the corner in the bath, reading. Baby? If I make poppy seed cake with chocolate ganache two kinds of grapes a…
Telling
Testimony-the process of narrating yourself before a witness-lies at the heart of qualitative research and therapy. In both, the authors seek stories we can live in, trying on analytic frames to make sense of experience. Testimonial acts may be seen as the engine of personal and social change and our primary source of knowledge. However, particularly in contexts of trauma and difference, testimony may be troubled by our discursive constraints and…
Intimate (Dis)connections: Research, Therapy, and “Real” Life
One nuanced argument threaded through the articles in this special issue is that in both therapy and qualitative inquiry there is the possibility-and risk-that testimony will bring "connection." Such connection might be with others, with oneself, and/or with meaning. Connection often appears as the good that we pursue in research that cannot produce objective truth and therapies that cannot promise healing. But what is connection, and what does i…
Autoethnography, Ethics, and Making Your Baby Cry
How do we evaluate and justify the effect of our autoethnographic work on others? The author uses the story of her daughters’ responses to her doctoral research on spousal abuse to open up difficult questions of harm versus benefit and intent versus impact. Although an ethic of care seems morally appealing, it may not adequately manage the risks and demands of writing from and about abuse. In such fields, empathy can be a dangerous liability. Rat…
Biting the Tongue that Speaks You: (Re)writing Survivor Narratives
How do we speak usefully about unspeakable things? This paper draws on my doctoral research with survivors of spousal abuse and subsequent book to address the methodological and ethical challenges of producing knowledge within and from sites of trauma. Writing what we cannot know, in spaces where we have lost trust in language, connection and cohesive modernist subjectivity raises complex representational challenges. This paper explores the limit…
Three Ways to Lose Your Epistemology
This piece offers an autoethnographic examination of the unraveling of epistemic certainty. The reader is offered three stories of falling, which explain the author's loss of knowing as a result of education, trauma, or apostacy. The aporias and assumptions in each story are teased out as we explore what they profess, where they fall silent, and how they understand uncertainty. Rather than determining which story is true, the text asks ethical an…
Sketchy Rendering: Seeing an Other
This piece probes the limits and ethics of representation from the perspective of the scrutinized other. The author uses the lens of her experience as a figure drawing model to illuminate some of the foundational dilemmas in qualitative research. This evocative account examines issues of power, embodiment, purpose, expertise, egalitarianism, and mastery. What does our nakedness actually reveal? Why do we perform exposure? What are the obligations…
Biting the Tongue that Speaks You: (Re)writing Survivor Narratives
How do we speak usefully about unspeakable things? This paper draws on my doctoral research with survivors of spousal abuse and subsequent book to address the methodological and ethical challenges of producing knowledge within and from sites of trauma. Writing what we cannot know, in spaces where we have lost trust in language, connection and cohesive modernist subjectivity raises complex representational challenges. This paper explores the limit…
My Imaginary Friend: Writing, Community, and Responsibility
I have a problem with collaborative writing; the words themselves put me on edge. This piece follows the line of that affect down and through identity, agency, power, intimacy, responsibility, representation, and the creative process. It leaves a trail of words like breadcrumbs. From outer space, perhaps they trace the shape of the other, my lover, my imaginary friend, a cipher saying something about someone I might be
Justice! Ay! Ay! Ayotzinapa: A Challenge for New Critical Qualitative Inquiry
Telling
Testimony-the process of narrating yourself before a witness-lies at the heart of qualitative research and therapy. In both, the authors seek stories we can live in, trying on analytic frames to make sense of experience. Testimonial acts may be seen as the engine of personal and social change and our primary source of knowledge. However, particularly in contexts of trauma and difference, testimony may be troubled by our discursive constraints and…
Intimate (Dis)connections: Research, Therapy, and “Real” Life
One nuanced argument threaded through the articles in this special issue is that in both therapy and qualitative inquiry there is the possibility-and risk-that testimony will bring "connection." Such connection might be with others, with oneself, and/or with meaning. Connection often appears as the good that we pursue in research that cannot produce objective truth and therapies that cannot promise healing. But what is connection, and what does i…
Sketchy Rendering: Seeing an Other
This piece probes the limits and ethics of representation from the perspective of the scrutinized other. The author uses the lens of her experience as a figure drawing model to illuminate some of the foundational dilemmas in qualitative research. This evocative account examines issues of power, embodiment, purpose, expertise, egalitarianism, and mastery. What does our nakedness actually reveal? Why do we perform exposure? What are the obligations…
Three Ways to Lose Your Epistemology
This piece offers an autoethnographic examination of the unraveling of epistemic certainty. The reader is offered three stories of falling, which explain the author's loss of knowing as a result of education, trauma, or apostacy. The aporias and assumptions in each story are teased out as we explore what they profess, where they fall silent, and how they understand uncertainty. Rather than determining which story is true, the text asks ethical an…
Sketchy Rendering: Seeing an Other
This piece probes the limits and ethics of representation from the perspective of the scrutinized other. The author uses the lens of her experience as a figure drawing model to illuminate some of the foundational dilemmas in qualitative research. This evocative account examines issues of power, embodiment, purpose, expertise, egalitarianism, and mastery. What does our nakedness actually reveal? Why do we perform exposure? What are the obligations…
Autoethnography, Ethics, and Making Your Baby Cry
How do we evaluate and justify the effect of our autoethnographic work on others? The author uses the story of her daughters’ responses to her doctoral research on spousal abuse to open up difficult questions of harm versus benefit and intent versus impact. Although an ethic of care seems morally appealing, it may not adequately manage the risks and demands of writing from and about abuse. In such fields, empathy can be a dangerous liability. Rat…
Biting the Tongue that Speaks You: (Re)writing Survivor Narratives
How do we speak usefully about unspeakable things? This paper draws on my doctoral research with survivors of spousal abuse and subsequent book to address the methodological and ethical challenges of producing knowledge within and from sites of trauma. Writing what we cannot know, in spaces where we have lost trust in language, connection and cohesive modernist subjectivity raises complex representational challenges. This paper explores the limit…
Researcher as Hostess: Power, Gender, Loss, and Cookies
Researcher as Hostess: Power,Gender,Loss, and Cookies Sophie Tamas An act of hospitality can only be poetic. —Jacques Derrida.1 I am at my desk staring down my doctoral research groups. There are decisions I cannot take to make or break these meetings of survivors and service providers working their way through abuse. My partner is around the corner in the bath, reading. Baby? If I make poppy seed cake with chocolate ganache two kinds of grapes a…
Telling
Testimony-the process of narrating yourself before a witness-lies at the heart of qualitative research and therapy. In both, the authors seek stories we can live in, trying on analytic frames to make sense of experience. Testimonial acts may be seen as the engine of personal and social change and our primary source of knowledge. However, particularly in contexts of trauma and difference, testimony may be troubled by our discursive constraints and…
Intimate (Dis)connections: Research, Therapy, and “Real” Life
One nuanced argument threaded through the articles in this special issue is that in both therapy and qualitative inquiry there is the possibility-and risk-that testimony will bring "connection." Such connection might be with others, with oneself, and/or with meaning. Connection often appears as the good that we pursue in research that cannot produce objective truth and therapies that cannot promise healing. But what is connection, and what does i…
My Imaginary Friend: Writing, Community, and Responsibility
I have a problem with collaborative writing; the words themselves put me on edge. This piece follows the line of that affect down and through identity, agency, power, intimacy, responsibility, representation, and the creative process. It leaves a trail of words like breadcrumbs. From outer space, perhaps they trace the shape of the other, my lover, my imaginary friend, a cipher saying something about someone I might be
Justice! Ay! Ay! Ayotzinapa: A Challenge for New Critical Qualitative Inquiry
The Shadow Manifesto
When I was writing my dissertation, my wise supervisor advised me to ‘aim for defendable’. In this piece, I have done the opposite. I could defend its indefensibility by framing it as an example of ‘dirty writing’ (Pullen & Rhodes, 2008), built to make room for the raw, uncertain, and intemperate – but that move seems a little contradictory. Rather than looking for a rational argument, readers might like to pay attention to the thoughts and feeli…
Performance Autoethnography, Critical Inquiry, and the Future of Icqi: Three ‘Truths’ and a Lie
This paper discusses the functions and features of performance autoethnography and critical inquiry and offers a range of suggestions for their future development. It calls for an expanded, inclusive view of the self, the social, and the more-than-human world, and it questions what constitutes useful research. It proposes taking a relational turn, approaching inquiry from within, and expanding the range of representation so we can speak more mean…
Moving Pieces
This piece offers a handful of poems written over the past few years, during a time of profound departures, pivots, and journeys that have mostly happened within the innocuous orbits of everyday life in familiar spaces. They might provide a micro-scale situated examination of self/other care-giving dynamics or add to the feminist conversation around academic subjectivity and slow scholarship or sketch a terrain that pieces together into an impres…
Tricky Stories: Settler-Academic Reflections on Anti-Colonial Teaching
Personal stories and storytelling often appear as part of an effort to decolonize our approaches to teaching and learning. However, it can be difficult to develop adequately Indigenous-informed, anti-colonial storytelling practices, especially for non-Indigenous settler–academics and would-be allies situated in colonial institutions. The lessons learned from feminist or anti-oppressive narrative-based pedagogies might help but they do not account…
Conscripted Collaborators: Family Matters in Autoethnography
In this collaborative piece, an autoethnographer discusses the ethics of her children’s appearance in her own work, in conversation with one of her (now adult) daughters. Ethical frameworks that approach public exposure primarily as a potential source of harm offer an insufficient frame for the relational effects of stories that bring our personal lifeworlds into our professional publications. Some forms of borrowing, even theft, can hover betwee…
Impaired Autoethnography
In this piece I reflect on various forms of impairment and resistance and speculate on their generative potential
Autoethnography Is a Difficult Delivery
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Art (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Autoethnography (6 works)