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Resumo

In this essay, I engage in autoethnographic reflection on my role as a native researcher, addressing questions and issues related to evaluating a researcher's complete-membership in Critical Complete-Member Ethnography (CCME). I revisit CCME as a critical communication research method and introduce two contextual elements –the geopolitics of transnational mobility and cultural belongingness– to enhance the depth of self-reflection that CCME can encourage researchers to undertake. Specifically, I discuss these two components within the framework of nativeness, as these factors often involve the challenges faced by international researchers when they claim their native or insider position upon returning to their non-Western homelands to conduct ethnography. In my autoethnographic reflection, I draw on my fieldwork experience in South Korea as an instance, focusing on different conditions that destabilized my native position: institutional regulations of crossing the border during the global pandemic, my growing feeling of in-betweenness, and my performance of U.S. academic membership in the field. Through reflection, I demonstrate that nativeness is not consistently given or entitled but changing and fluctuating in different times and contexts. Ultimately, I argue that in-flux aspects of my native position complicate and expand methodological considerations for determining and accessing a researcher's complete-membership and their epistemological intimacy with their communities in CCME.

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