Uncharted Waters: An autoethnographic study of the experience of collaborating with a mental health service user

Autoethnographic exploration of power and emotion in the context of working as an academic/researcher who is also a mental health nurse with a person who had been a service user. Drawing on Ahmed's work on the politics of emotion, and conceptualising our positions as discursively constructed, I develop an analysis of three phases of our relationship; meeting, 'collaborating', and ending. Exploring my experience of the journey I focus on the space between us, what Fine (1994) calls the self-other hyphen. I develop autoethnographic poems from my data and present these with analytic narrative.