Inhabiting borders: autoethnographic reflections of PhD students in Colombia

ABSTRACT

This article examines our border experiences as PhD candidates developing transdisciplinary research in a Colombian public university. Its objective is to present our autoethnographic reflections by employing the borderlands theory as a framework to understand the emergence of physical and symbolic in-between spaces in which our experiences are situated. Our findings indicate that two elements affect our border experiences: the Colombian context, and practices and subjectivities. While the context is shaped by violence and neoliberalism, practices and subjectivities include our transdisciplinary formation and our research conducted with collaborators considered as ‘others.’ By discussing, examining, and interpreting our experiences, we underline the similarities and differences among them.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative autoethnography
• transdisciplinary research
• border subjects
• post-graduate education
• Latin America

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Melih Yaylı for proofreading the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This concept entails broadening the social relations world beyond the human itself including plants, animals, objects, and other entities. Theoretical developments have been done from Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour 2003), anthropology (Descola 2002; Kohn 2013; Ulloa 2009; Escobar 2016), and other perspectives (Holbraad, Henare, and Wastell 2006).

2 All translations from Spanish are ours.

3 A qualitative research method based on the participation of the subjects of research, on the collective construction and on orienting the academic practices towards action and social transformation (See more in: Fals-Borda 1997; Park 2005).