What has stand-up ever done for autoethnography?
Workshop by Dr Jonathan Wyatt
On the 28th April Department staff and PhD students enjoyed a lively and creative workshop by narrative inquirer, Dr Jonathan Wyatt, senior lecturer, Edinburgh University. The title What has stand-up ever done for autoethnography? provoked a hugely engaging discussion followed by writing exercises and claims that explored the place of affect in autoethnography; our expectations of truth, ethics; repetition; the task in each to move, teach, critique, politicise. Drawing on insights from Deleuze and Guattari, new materialism and affect theory Jonathan’s work “attend[s] to the here-and-now, flesh-to-flesh presence of bodies in rooms, the ebbs and flows of energy, how tension builds and is released, and how affect – humour, sadness, anger, more – happens. How it erupts” (Wyatt, 2017). The workshop’s attention to affect, and materiality -sweat, heat, stage, lights, noise – in stand-up, sensitised all present to how these elements can both challenge and extend autoethnography as a relational methodology.
Jonathan Wyatt is Director of the new Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry.