An autoethnographic exploration of hybrid identities within education
Jennifer Clutterbuck · 2022
I offer my story as a way of interrogating innovations around the understanding of ourselves and of the governance of data infrastructures. My doctoral research centred on exploring OneSchool, which is a student information management system a data infrastructure built and used in state schools in Queensland, Australia. When I visited my participating schools, I was introduced as: “This is Jen—she’s OneSchool”. I was not a data infrastructure, and yet those who worked on the School Management Systems project became so connected to each other and associated with the project that in some ways we became synonymous with the system. When introduced as “OneSchool”, I was amused and a little frustrated. I was visiting a school as a doctoral researcher and not as a Queensland Department of Education employee. My story starts six years later, with the hunch that the six-word comment, although unexplored at the time, was important, and remains important. Exploring the diffracted/intra-active becoming of Jen-as-OneSchool allows me to reflect on other identities that I developed and shed along the way. In doing so, I alert those who seek to research within their own spaces of the benefits and risks of being an insider researcher or autoethnographer.