Wunderkammers, photographs, and growing up Southern: a visual semiotic analysis of self-identity through autoethnography
Date
2011
Authors
Ownby, Terry D., author
Quick, Don, advisor
Geiger, Wendy, committee member
Banning, James H., committee member
Anderson, Sharon K., committee member
Dickinson, Greg, committee member
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Abstract
By using the civil rights era within a segregated South as a cultural backdrop for this dissertation, I explored the construction of self-identity through narrative text and photographs in the form of a visual autoethnography. Specifically, this study had a two-fold mission: First to explore my self-identity in relation to my Southern culture through narrative text and photographs as primary data; and second, to apply a combined-methods approach in order to paint a complete and holistic portrait of my self-identity construction. Using an overarching notion of Barthesian visual semiotics, I have taken a combined-methods approach by using traditional ethnographic research techniques to produce an autoethnographic narrative with a critical visual methodology in order to draw meaning from a university gallery showing of my photographic exhibition titled: Wunderkammer: Specimen views of my postmodern life . The resultant analyses of narrative text and photographs revealed an underlying sub-text of significant racial encounters as well as several social and institutional ideological issues that contributed to my self-identity construction and acculturational journey. Implications from this particular methodological design indicate usefulness not only in photography programs, but also in allied disciplines such as communication, cultural and media studies, education, sociology, or anthropology. This study contributes its voice to the conversations about autoethnography and self-identity construction through researcher-participant generated photographs.
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Subject
ethnography
visual semiotics
visual autoethnography
narrative
research methods
communication