Doing poststructural ethnography in the life history of dropouts in South Korea: methodological ruminations on subjectivity, positionality and reflexivity

This paper addresses the issue of positionality in researching the researcher’s own culture and discusses its epistemological implications. Drawing on the researcher’s own field experience in which she entered teenage cultural space, this paper is an attempt at a self‐reflexive analysis of the relationships between the researcher and the participants (teenage youths, former dropouts). In so doing, it aims to discuss the methodological significance of the researcher’s subjectivity, positionality and reflexivity. The paper unpacks the researcher’s journey with first‐person voices, intending to illuminate a poststructural thesis regarding the knower’s implicatedness, multiple and shifting subjectivities, and the negotiated and situationally contingent nature of stories.