Telling Stories to Hear Autoethnography: Researching women's lives in northern Pakistan

Stories about sewing machines are not usually the stuff of geographies, although stories and narratives offer potential as a geographic method. In this article, I examine the ways that story telling is a reflexive representational strategy, becoming a text for analysis that can be complemented by field research methods. I examine a story about sewing machines to suggest how it can be an analytical tool for postcolonial research, conveying what may be called the ‘real’ effects of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization in the lives of the women I researched in northern Pakistan. This method of representation makes more transparent the extent of women's participation in constructing ‘my’ narrative and research.