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Marie-Noëlle Albert
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Making science out of one’s own practice

Attribution

Marie-Noëlle Albert contributed to the development and the formalisation of autopraxeography. This site does not present her as the sole inventor of the method: several of the founding texts are co-signed, and the exact attribution remains to be clarified with her.

Autopraxeography is a first-person research method: a practitioner builds scientific knowledge out of their own experience, through a play of successive reflexivities and a dialogue with theories drawn from several disciplines.

This is not autobiography. It is an equipped approach for turning a lived practice into legitimate knowledge — including, and perhaps above all, a difficult practice.

Origins

Where the method comes from

The method does not appear all at once. It is built over some fifteen years, in answer to a precise question: on what conditions does a practitioner’s account become scientific knowledge?

Its foundation is pragmatic constructivism, inherited from Marie-José Avenier — her thesis supervisor — and, beyond her, from Jean-Louis Le Moigne. Valid knowledge does not descend from theory towards the field: it is built within experience, then legitimated through rigorous work putting it in dialogue with existing theories.

The intermediate stages can be traced in the publications: the narrative paradigm and visualization tools around 2006-2009; autobiographical research and its epistemological legitimation in 2011-2013; the experiential testimonio in 2014; then, from 2017 onwards, the method named as such.

  1. 2006 – 2009Narrative paradigm, accounts, visualization tools
  2. 2011 – 2013Autobiographical research and epistemological legitimation
  3. 2014Experiential testimonio, with Marie-Michèle Couture
  4. 2017Autopraxeography is named
  5. 2023Extension: taking a step back from vulnerability
  6. 2023Collective and interdisciplinary version, in open access

SourcesCairn — publications de Marie-Noëlle AlbertÉruditHAL — recherche « Marie-Noëlle Albert »Recherches qualitatives — archives en libre accès

The process

Four movements, and a loop

The description that follows is a synthesis written for this site from the publications listed below. It is not an official protocol.

  1. 01

    Naive writing

    The starting point is not a research question but a narrative: what was lived, written down before any theoretical shaping. One is not yet writing in order to demonstrate.

  2. 02

    Epistemic work

    The narrative is then taken up again, questioned, held in tension with theories drawn from several disciplines. It is this work that separates the method from testimony: the material becomes an object.

  3. 03

    Building generic knowledge

    From singular experience, transferable propositions are drawn — not laws, but knowledge that is useful to other practitioners in other situations.

  4. 04

    Recursivity

    The process does not stop there: the knowledge built transforms the way the initial experience is seen, and that experience is written again. It is a loop, in the sense complexity thinking gives to the word.

SourcesCairn — publications de Marie-Noëlle AlbertHAL — recherche « Marie-Noëlle Albert »OpenAlex — A5089632508

Distinctions

What autopraxeography is not

The method is defined as much by what it sets itself apart from as by what it proposes.
Autobiography
Autobiography tells a life and is sufficient unto itself. Autopraxeography does not stop at the narrative: it equips it in order to draw knowledge from it, and gives an account of how it does so.
Autoethnography
Autoethnography sheds light on a culture through the lived experience of the researcher. Autopraxeography starts from practice — praxis — and aims at knowledge that can be acted upon in management, within an explicitly claimed pragmatic constructivist epistemology.
Professional testimony
Testimony holds its value from its authenticity. Autopraxeography must in addition demonstrate the validity of what it builds: that is the question that has occupied Marie-Noëlle Albert for twenty years.

Uses and limits

Uses

  • Understanding from the inside an experience that outside observation misses — entrepreneurship, business transfer, running an organization.
  • Allowing a researcher who is also a director to make her double position a resource rather than a conflict of interest.
  • Taking a step back from a lived situation of vulnerability, without reducing it to testimony or neutralising it.
  • Building knowledge together with practitioners, with an interdisciplinary and collective aim.
  • Training researchers: several master’s theses make use of the method.

Limits

  • The question of validity is never settled once and for all: it has to be taken up again in every piece of research, which is demanding.
  • The risk of complacency is real. Epistemic work and confrontation with theory are its counterweight; they are not optional.
  • The method presupposes substantial practical experience. It is not available to anyone who has no praxis to question.
  • Its reception varies according to disciplinary traditions and according to journals.

This reading of the uses and the limits is proposed by this site on the basis of the publications. It asks to be discussed with the author.

Key texts

The publications that build the method

See the 13 works attached to this axis

Transmission

The method is taught

2 master’s theses supervised by Marie-Noëlle Albert carry the words “une autopraxéographie” explicitly in their titles. It is the best sign of vitality a method can have: it is not merely proposed, it is taken up.

All the supervised work

  • 2023Facteurs d'appropriation des projets de développement rural par les bénéficiaires en Haïti : une autopraxéographieRodeley Pierre
  • 2022L'impact du comportement du leader authentique sur le bien-être au travail : une autopraxéographieWedad Basma Hilali

SourcesSémaphore — dépôt institutionnel de l'UQAR