Southern Celts, a practice-led PhD research project, explores how women and men with Irish and Scottish backgrounds live out their cultural connections with the homelands of Ireland and Scotland in the Pacific in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
A narrative inquiry, it uses narrative and autoethnography as method and text, challenging the binary of a self/society split and the boundary between objective and
subjective (Reed-Danahay 1997, p.2). The project aims to gain understanding of individuals, cultures and societies by focusing on personal experience, the researcher’s and others, and applying ‘critical, analytical and interpretive
eyes’ (Chang 2008 p.49). With the researcher as ‘the epistemological and ontological nexus’ of the research
(Spry 2001), this presentation looks at how postmodern, post structural understandings of the discursive construction of cultures and identities (Fong & Chuang 2004, Liu, Creanor, McIntosh, &Teaiwa 2005, Norton 2000, Weedon 1997 2004) have influenced the collection of 38 interviews, both ‘lived and told stories’ (Clandinin &Rosiek 2007) from around New Zealand and the creation of a
book of interviews which is the artefact created as a part of the PhD project. Integral to this is Writing as Method of inquiry (Richardson 2000, Richardson & St Pierre
2005) and Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) three frames of Narrative Inquiry: time past, present and future, place, and the intersection of the personal and the social.