Doing Online Collaborative Autoethnography During the Pandemic to Research Academic Precarity.

In this entry, we provide a self-reflexive account of our experience of doing online collaborative autoethnography during the COVID-19 pandemic. We came together to share our respective experiences of precarity as academics and as researchers who study precarity within the creative industries. We arrived at this collaborative autoethnographic approach through a feminist lens, as we considered that a cooperative piece of work would allow us to better understand our experiences and situate them within the wider context of UK Higher Education. Moreover, we held that collaborative production of knowledge reflects our feminist epistemological stance. Specifically, as a research method, collaborative auto-ethnography allows for epistemic and academic reflexivity. In other words, it allowed us to make sense of our roles as researchers and how our positionality is linked to the creative industries we were researching. Although the pandemic has been a time of isolation and trauma, it has also meant that fostering remote relationships has never been easier. Our epistemologies, ethics, and research interests paved the way for an online collaborative autoethnographic approach, very much imposed by the conditions of the pandemic, which, however, contributed to a reflexive exercise that mirrors the situation of precarious academics researching precarious creative professions. In this entry, we outline the benefits of using online methods and discuss some of the practicalities of carrying out collaborative auto-ethnography online. We discuss the ethical implications of doing this work online and the impact that collaborating online has had on our work.