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This paper aims to investigate learning, relatedness and ethics in research as question of personal responsibility. Positivist and postformalist approaches to research are considered in light of the perspectives and experiences of the researchers themselves.

These questions are considered through an autoethnography of postformalism based on the doctoral research of the author.

The conclusion of this work is that research inclusive of affect, reflexivity and the context in which the research takes place, allows for insights into organizational ethics that would otherwise not be possible. However, these approaches come at a personal and professional risk for the researcher. Truly authentic postformalist research demands a degree of hazard for the researcher, becoming both a way of living and an ethical choice.

This paper addresses the ongoing debate concerning the use of first-person research, in general, which has not received a warm welcome as a “serious” form of research, especially in the more conventional methodological circles. The conclusions open up new considerations for first-person methods, such as autoethnography.

Purpose: This chapter proposes narrative allyship across ability as a practice in which nondisabled researchers work with disabled nonresearchers to co-construct a process that centers and acts on the knowledge contained in and expressed by the lived experience of the disabled nonresearchers. This chapter situates narrative allyship across ability in the landscape of other participatory research practices, with a particular focus on oral history as a social justice praxis.

Approach: In order to explore the potential of this practice, the author outlines and reflects on both the methodology of her oral history graduate thesis work, a narrative project with self-advocates with Down syndrome, and includes and analyzes reflections about narrative allyship from a self-advocate with Down syndrome.

Findings: The author proposes three guiding principles for research as narrative allyship across ability, namely that such research further the interests of narrators as the narrators define them, optimize the autonomy of narrators, and tell stories with, instead of about, narrators.

Implications: This chapter suggests the promise of research praxis as a form of allyship: redressing inequality by addressing power, acknowledging expertise in subjugated knowledges, and connecting research practices to desires for social change or political outcomes. The author models methods by which others might include in their research narrative work across ability and demonstrates the particular value of knowledge produced when researchers attend to the lived expertise of those with disabilities. The practice of narrative allyship across ability has the potential to bring a wide range of experiences and modes of expression into the domains of research, history, policy, and culture that would otherwise exclude them.

Since the publication of Schon’s (1984) landmark text The Reflective Practitioner, there has been a surge in research literature demonstrating reflection as an essential “best practice” for teachers. However, it often feels as if reflection is forced into our lives or we happen upon it at inopportune times, creating a contradiction of un/predictability – it is touted as crucial but afforded only particular spaces or purposes, while it sneaks into our lives at inappropriate times. From our perspective, this indicates underlying flawed modernist and humanist logics at work in conceptualizations of teacher and teachers’ work –we cannot plan on bodies in motion being predictable, and just because reflection seems located in the mind, does not mean the human is solely involved in reflection. The purpose of this chapter is to explore reflexivity as un/predictable in order to generate new possibilities and potential that are not bound by modernism’s penchant toward structure and humanism’s myopic self-awareness. Via co/autoethnography, we present individual narratives illustrating our relationships with reflexivity in various spaces of our lives. By using various types of mirrors (e.g., classic mirror, interrogation mirror, window as mirror, water as mirror) as analytical devices, we illustrate reflexivity as embodied processes that emerge un/predictably as we traverse various geotemporal–political locations and engage with other human, non-human and material bodies. By recasting reflexivity as dynamic and fluid, we raise possibilities for spontaneously incorporating reflexivity into teaching–learning and research, thereby untethering critical reflection from modernist and humanist logics that attempt to corral reflection into discrete activities and truncate its potential for transforming praxis.