Edinburgh Napier University

  Last year, I bought a former plumber’s van and built myself a campervan. Then I reflected on the experience —including writing about it in scholarly spaces— as a learning ‘journey’ and as a series of identity negotiations. There was the everyday sexism I encountered and countered, and there were the ways in which I noticed, and performed, various expert identities. There were also the mechanics (pun intended) of learning among and from mechanics, as well as the mechanics of learning in self-directed ways, often by trial and error. Those were some of the things I reflected on, informally and unsanctioned by university ethics committees or formal research protocols. To build the campervan, I rented space in a diesel mechanic’s workshop and, necessarily, I frequented home-improvement stores and auto-parts stores. But my phenotype is of a sedentary, middle-aged, academic woman, and my assigned script, at least when it comes to hands-on tasks like jigsawing complex templates or building a self-contained plumbing system, is ‘helpless and hopeless’. My technical and personal legitimacy, therefore, needed constant and conscious performance in the face of gendered assumptions. This included being asked, when buying automotive cabling, what it was I’d been “sent to get”, and, when buying drill bits, what it was I was “trying to do” (the men ahead of me in the queue were asked what it was they “were doing”). In contrast, in the hypermasculine environment of the workshop itself, I was invited into a kind, caring community of mechanics. These professionals had nothing to prove to me, although there were certain discourse norms that I negotiated there too. I did not set out to research any of this. And yet the insights generated are invaluable in understanding identity as performance. In ethnography, researchers ostensibly seek out natural settings, but then they bring their audio recorders and their ethics forms and their protocols, turning them into unnatural settings. The diesel workshop, in contrast, was accidental ethnography; perhaps natural ethnography. And this multimedia performance text discusses the issues natural ethnography presents, drawing on Lisa Tillman’s Friendship as Method.