A Stranger Here Myself
AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY | EDUCATION | JOURNALISM | TRANSMEDIA DIGITAL PUBLISHING in POST-COVID-19 CHINA [A WORK IN PROGRESS]
I am a “foreign teacher” by occupation, an English as a Foreign Language [EFL] education professional and former SAR Research Fellow at Australia’s National Film & Sound Archive [NFSA] currently living and working in (mainland) China, where I have been a university teacher / researcher throughout the Covid-19 pandemic to date. I first arrived in China, in Xinjiang [XUAR], in 2011/09: remaining in XUAR over one year (with a mid-semester return to my home country of Australia, and during the second semester of which I commenced an MTESOL by distance and incorporated my learning into pedagogic practice in media res), I taught EFL Oral English-based Inter-Cultural Communication to Han, Uygur and Kazakh students in accordance with then CPC Ministry of Education [MOE] language policies specific to XUAR (eg. Sunuodula, 2011: Ahat, 2013). To which: In the decade since (to the time of writing), I have worked in both the tertiary and private, corporate EFL education sectors (in Shandong and Shanghai); before my current tertiary position under the unique stakeholder circumstances of China’s Covid-19 “emergency response” and the recent regulation of the corporate EdTech sector.
During the pandemic, I was prohibited by the Australian government from returning to my home country and, being abroad, also denied Covid-19 relief payments. So too, my father was denied “elective” surgery in order to keep hospital beds unoccupied in reserve for a potential wave of younger patients (who never eventuated, the beds remaining open to date) until he passed away in 2021/11 without ever receiving the needed surgery. These events were experienced by me - in tandem with Western mainstream media [MSM] disinformation over XUAR (the “forced labor in Xinjiang” as methodological “genocide” narrative) - as a paradigm shift in identity construction in which I had to re-conceptualize myself, firstly shedding any prior nationalistic allegiance1. Although I am not Chinese, neither do I any longer thus consider myself Australian (except by accident of birth: my parents were European post-WW2 refugees, my father’s childhood spent in his native Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation). Hence, it is regarding this greater (inherently problematic) identity politics prism, specifically in relation to foreign teacher “agency” in relation to China’s National EFL Curriculum Reform Agenda (Yang & Clarke, 2018), that I commenced A Stranger Here Myself as an independent, currently self-funded venture into auto-ethnographic trans-media digital publishing.
Yang & Clarke (2018) in particular herein interest me because of its official integration of specifically auto-ethnographic modes of inquiry into Chinese tertiary EFL research methodologies as begun by Bin, (2015) and Liu et.al (2015). Indeed into this is now gradually being factored the advocacy for language teacher identity research of Cheung et.al (2015), who isolate the importance of pre-service and formative in-service experience in the globalization of teacher identity, research into specific Covid-19 EFL teacher identity construction having recently commenced with Liu, Ruan & Wang (2021), albeit Chinese not foreign teacher based. Given the early career focus in Yang & Clarke (2018), it is for me thus especially interesting to note both that 1) primary foreigner authored general ethnographic inquiry into XUAR (Byler, 2018) is informed by pre-existing interviewee selection biases indebted to Western neo-Liberal identity politics, and that 2) there is an absence of any specific XUAR related foreign EFL teacher auto-ethnography. Hence, in my adoption of both critical reflection and discourse analysis into the praxis-based research methodology for A Stranger Here Myself, I hope that by utilizing auto-biographical foreign EFL teacher lived experience of formative pedagogic practice in XUAR, the biases clouding and deliberately distorting current Western mainstream media [MSM] discourse on XUAR can be re-contextualized and even deconstructed, as I believe is a necessity, however politicized that may make the resultant personal narrative.
In this context of personalized politicization is, perhaps, Boylorn & Orbe (2020)’s incorporation of inter-sectionality in critical auto-ethnography, i.e. “how multiple identities simultaneously are manifested within interactions with others” (p. 18). However, the recent splintering and politicization of “identity politics” - pre-determined by individualist neo-Liberal socio-political agendas / biases masquerading under the umbrella designation “social justice” - must also be addressed from my position within a collectivist culture: such “identity” is a construct from which I sit at some remove. Indeed it is a construct which I have found - as a foreigner in China and thus myself in some factors “Other” to the dominant population (in an ironic inversion of neo-Colonial meta-textual deconstruction within anthropological discourses) - to be transitional (except in key demographic delimiters) and ultimately longitudinal.
As a construct, this personal “identity” is (and has been) thus subject to transformative experience: in the critical auto-ethnographic research context in which I use it then, specifically to reflective participant-observation praxis. Hence, my starting point for this independent critical auto-ethnography is the circumstance of my formative in-service teaching experience as a participant-observer: as a foreign EFL teacher in XUAR over one year, reflectively informed by a decade long subsequent career experience in Chinese EFL, in both the CPC government-run tertiary and private, corporate education sectors. Where this is politicized, however, is my position in relation to the current Western (US) narrative on “forced labor in Xinjiang” as constituting “genocide”. It is just that, a narrative. And like any narrative, it must be deconstructed: a process I tentatively began some months ago with a work-in-progress temporarily extracted here:
REFERENCES