When
research is so connected to personal interest, experience, and familiarity that
objectivity becomes a moveable feast,
the line between documentation and invention blurs to near-invisibility. John
Freeman asks what it means to locate oneself
into research findings and narrative reports, and what happens when one's self
goes further and becomes the
research.



Subjecting received truths to a series of hard questions, readers are taken on a journey through self-performance; traumatic memoir; the lure of weasel words; emotional
evocation; the vagaries of memory; creative nonfiction; cultural appropriation;
illusion masquerading as truth and the complex ethics of university
research.




Case studies from international
autoethnographers run through the book and appendices provide invaluable advice
to university researchers and supervisors. The result is a work that sheds new
light on forms of narrative research that connect writers' personal stories to
the participatory cultures under investigation.