Making sense of reflexivity

a posthumanistic account

Nina Lunkka

Katja Sutela

pp. 135-149

in: Anne B. Reinertsen (ed), Academic writing and identity constructions, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

This chapter provides a posthumanistic account in which we, two PhD students, work to make sense of our entanglements with reflexivity on our way to becoming academic researchers and writers. We question the concept of sensemaking as a cognitive process, and we look for ways in which sensemaking is unfolding from sociomaterial practices carried out in and around the work of academia. Considering sensemaking a material-discursive practice and applying duo-ethnographic and collaborative writing as a methodology, three practices – (1) conducting an article-based dissertation, (2) writing a research diary and (3) taking part in academic events – form the basis for analysis of our entanglements with reflexivity. We outline how the micro-entanglements of sociomateriality came to matter (in both senses of the word) to and for us as we engage with our becomingness as reflexive researchers and academic writers.