Between Paradigms: Becoming a Pathological Optimist

Using an autoethnographic poststructural lens, I examined my academic journey in becoming a qualitative methodologist. I integrated my mentor's maxims such as, "the institution will not love you back," "prisoner of your words," "make plans; if they don't work, make new plans," "one has mentors and tormentors and both help shape us," "ever the opportunist," "strategic groveling," "a mosaic approach to mentoring" and "just get naked." Despite paradigmatic contradictions between my doctoral and postdoctoral experiences, I gained much from working between the polarities of the social science and biomedical discourse. In time, I became a "pathological optimist," one of the many lessons learned from an academic mentor that eventually led to my professorship. Keywords: Qualitative, Autoethnography, Mentoring, STEMM, Academia Live it - it's all you've got. Grab it, squeeze it, exult in it. Run with it. Fight for it. And when it tries to get away, Take it between your teeth and wrestle it! - Molly Carnes, MD, MS This is one of the quotes that I collected from my post-doctoral mentor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that I now use with my students during their data analysis. When I was a newcomer to Madison, I was struck by my physician-mentor's endless "one-liners" (cited in italics) that have contributed to my qualitative saga. This brief saga, defined here as a narrative of challenging exploits (Clark, 1972), is an autoethnography that may reflect histories of other researchers and educators who simply "love" qualitative research, in whatever discipline they find themselves. As I now teach qualitative methods, I struggle with what paradigmatic complexities are appropriate for students and novice researchers. For example, students often want to just do "frequencies" to find themes without regard to their theoretical framework to integrate the interpretation of their data. Methods Autoethnographies contain three elements: the autobiographical, the ethnographical, and the graphical or writing component. Pelias (2015) discusses the value of the story rather than theory noting that stories create space for "productive consideration and productive action" (p. 610) and "needed cultural work" (p. 611). This autobiographical story did "its work" (Sparkes, 2007) through personal memory, self-observational and self-reflexive data as I examined my emotions and behaviors within this particular cultural context (Grbich, 2013). I had collected a list of my mentors "one-liners" from her family and friends as well as my interactions with her over the years. This language "empowered" me, drove my research agenda, and contextualized and improved my life as I faced and reflected on my academic obstacles (Wadsworth, 2011; Wadsworth & Patton, 2011). One ethnographical approach presented by Van Maanen (2011) is the confessional tale, "a more transparent account of the field experience written from the researcher's perspective" (Willgens et al., 2016, p. 2384). As I wrote the chronology, the stories expanded through memory and self-reflexivity. The empowering "one-liners" became "interpretive act[s]" (p. 5) of "themeing the data" as I applied them in the form of themes with interpretive acts (subthemes) to my academic saga (Saldana, 2015) p. 159). These interpretive acts were a consistent reminder of the role of my mentor in how I interpreted and deconstructed my own experience. As I wrote my story, the cultural perspectives of these interpretive acts became known as this narrative in turn constructed me (Ellis, 1995). Chronological Narrative The institution will not love you back In 1988, I completed a Bachelor in Health Science in Physical Therapy. During the next 13 years I rose up through the ranks, starting as a hospital therapist, then senior therapist to a director of rehabilitation at a top-ranked for-profit hospital in a college community. …