This paper will focus on a particular aspect of work in progress towards a PhD in the Faculty of Development and Society at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. The PhD inquiry has two key aspects. At one level it as a broadly ethnographic account of the experiences of ‘disaffected’ boys and young men in former UK coal mining communities who are marginalised from education and are generally ‘socially excluded’ (Bright, 2009a) At another level, the research has a substantial autoethnographical element exploring the writer’s own relationship to these same communities, his own experience of educational disaffection and his own biographical journey as political/trade union activist, educator and researcher (Bright 2009b). Using the author's own experience of working in an autoethnographical mode as a casew study, the paper will look primarily at the question of whether and how the methodology of autoethnography can facilitate a deeper level of reflexivity in qualitative education research. In particular, and originally, it will question how autoethnography might encompass what has recently been identified as an 'affective turn' in social theory (Ticineto Clough, 2007). More specifically, it will address the question of autoethnography as a means of locating a researcher's 'affective' voice in what Thrift (2007) has referred to as a 'spatiality of feeling'. The relationship of autoethnography to ethnography will be considered conceptually and historically and autoethnography reviewed as an emergent mode of rhetoric and writing practice (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) that might generate potentially troublesome but possibly newly productive procedural, ethical, ontological, epistemological - even hauntological (Derrida, 1994) - considerations. The paper will regognise the tendency of auto/ethnography to ‘move back and forth between a wide ethnographic lens focusing on social and cultural aspects of experience, and a more personal lens exposing a researching self that moves by and through cultural interpretations that are often resisted’ (BRE, p 225-6, citing Ellis,1999.) and will argue the speficic relevance of this approach for practitioner research in the culturally diverse, post-colonial settings encountered in contemporary Europe. Additionally, there will be a consideration of the concrete forms an autoethnographical text - as a possibly double/multiple voiced mixed-media text, for example - might take. This will acknowledge Spry’s exciting suggestion that such a text might sit in a space in which “truth and reality are not fixed categories, where self-reflexive critique is sanctioned, and where heresy is viewed as liberatory’ (Spry, 2001, 711).

Autoethnography - an 'embodied methodological practice' (Spry, 2001) - provides a way of inscribing the self into any research text that aims to interrogate the ways in which selves and social forms are culturally constituted (Reed-Danahay, 1997). Drawing on a notion of autobiographical identity as a 'thoroughly grounded in experience and observation’ (Russell, 1999, p 276), auto/ethnography “partake[s] of the mood of metadiscourse... drawing attention to [its] linguistic and fictive nature...using the narrator as an inscribed figure within the text whose manipulation calls attention to authority structures" (Russell, p276 citing Fisher, 1986). Involving highly personalised accounts of an author’s experiences auto/ethnography has emerged as a 'tool to give greater attention to the ways in which the ethnographer interacts with the culture being researched’ It is ‘...a form of research that connects the personal with the cultural, situating the researching subject within specific social contexts’ (BRE, p 225)

The core research question examined here is whether the methodology of autoethnography has particular applicability to qualitative educational research in contemporary post-colonial European settings where the relationship between self and social is significantly problematic. In addition to adding to a developing body of published research by means of publication through the forum of ECER, the outcome will be a doctoral thesis. That thesis - an ethnographical study looking at youth disaffection and its relationship to political resistance in former coal mining communities in the UK - will include an autoethnographical element formalising the personal biographical voice of the author. The autoethnographical element will be represented through an experimental text form. This paper will review the emergent issues related to employing this methodology and will also exemplify some possible image/text forms that are being developed as a means of representation.