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Climate change impacts and stresses young people and although their pro-environmental behaviours have been studied their perspectives have not been widely heard. This creative output is a lo-fi comic engaging with themes of imagined alternative futures in climate fiction. It was constructed to provide an example of a multimodal text with a low barrier to entry for use in the classroom, to complement the study of solar punk texts. The methodology of an autoethnographic art provides a tool for reflection and provides a suitably rebellious outlet for their perspectives, a departure from factual poster assignments on environmental issues. This particular perzine discusses the challenges faced by young people in addressing environmental issues and sustainable practice with limited personal agency.
This chapter “listens in detail” to hybrid Latinx literary forms, including drama and spoken word poetry, as they respond to neoliberal anti-immigrant policy, whiteness, and homophobia from 1992 to our current global pandemic moment. The chapter registers how Latinx literature turns to hybrid texts that perform sound (language, accents, music), utilizing the sonic an agentive site to respond to neoliberal constructions of citizenship and to articulate new forms of belonging. Josefina López’s play Detained in the Desert (2010) shows the affective experiences of a second-generation Chicana tuning into border language, Spanish-language radio, and musical soundscapes to resist the racist and sexist profiling of her body in the aftermath of Arizona’s SB 1070. Tanya Saracho’s El Nogalar (2013) demonstrates how Latinx border communities wield silence as a strategy to survive narcoviolence. Virginia Grise’s Your Healing Is Killing (2021) amplifies the intersectional and structural traumas that shape BIPOC communities’ access to health care. These inequities speak to the continued need for collective self-care.
Employing autoethnography to examine two sets of texts, I present an understanding of voice politics. The first set includes all published addresses by CPSA presidents. In these texts, I identify dominant narratives about what political science is and who political scientists are. I also identify a tradition of some presidents expanding the discipline by giving voice to the marginalized and oppressed. The second set of texts comes from my family. Exploring several family stories reveals a disconnect between dominant concepts and themes within our discipline and experiences of human suffering, resistance and resilience. This disconnect clarifies my motivations for pursuing studies in political science and employing political science skills as acts of solidarity. Exploring these texts in parallel helps me clarify what, in my view, should be the fundamental concerns of political science: humans, their relationships of domination and subordination and the voices of those who suffer oppression and seek liberation.
This paper explores the intersection of physical health and recovery-oriented approaches in psychosis, offering a unique perspective through autoethnography. By combining personal experience with a broader analysis of existing mental health frameworks, the paper highlights the often overlooked importance of physical health in the recovery process for individuals with psychosis. The autoethnographic narrative reveals the complex challenges posed by antipsychotic medications, including weight gain and metabolic complications, and their impact on overall well-being. It emphasizes the dual stigma of mental health challenges and weight gain, highlighting the need for a more integrated, holistic approach to mental health care. Recommendations include enhanced education for healthcare providers, personalized care plans, and a multidisciplinary approach aimed at bridging the gap between physical and mental health in psychosis recovery.
Biodesign is emerging as a radical design approach with great potential for the ecological turn, finally endorsed by some first academic courses providing designers with hybrid skills to embrace scientific disciplines. However, the resulting professional figure, the biodesigner, still needs to be better defined in the academic and grey literature, also considering the different and multiple facets that working between design and science may entail. This study presents four case studies of research through design (RTD), addressed by the author as an autoethnographic form of inquiry to clarify the roles a biodesigner could assume, emphasising the differences in methods, tools and workplaces, which inevitably affect the Biodesign outcomes. The author analyses her role as a biodesigner and designer in lab, working in teams and environments requiring different degrees of interdisciplinarity. Far from adopting a speculative approach, the RTDs focus on sustainable Material Design and Biodesign solutions that might be feasible in the short run, aiming to test the designer’s abilities in enriching scientific research and investigating the role and contribution designers can play in scientific contexts of different intensities. The study demonstrates the possibility of a reciprocal knowledge transfer between design and science, highlighting the potential of the designerly way of knowing in bringing innovation to the scientific field.
The recording studio is a performance setting in which popular music performers often produce multiple takes, using particular strategies to vary outcomes in search of the 'perfect take'. However, repetition offers the opportunity to discover the unexplored liminality between what we expect to hear and what is performed. Observing multiple takes of one's own recorded performance within the temporal limits of a vocal recording session yields qualitative data to create an ethnography of both the process and the Work itself. Presenting artefacts from a recording session in conjunction with an autoethnographic text provides a demonstration of how evolving external cues, and internal cognitive scripts interact with technology and social conventions in the recording studio to impact a popular music musician's performance and, in effect, the creation of a new Work.
My role as a university-based, general classroom music teacher educator in England has become unclear, exacerbated by policies that have undermined the field of classroom music in schools and the role of universities in teacher education. Using self-critical inquiry enacted as critically reflexive autoethnography, I interrogated my professional practice to rethink my pedagogic identity. Theoretical perspectives, drawn from Bernstein and Bourdieu, were used to chart my shifting identity. This paper introduces a theorised model to illustrate a range of pedagogic identities for Key Stage 3 (KS3) general classroom music teacher education.
Edited by
Cecilia McCallum, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil,Silvia Posocco, Birkbeck College, University of London,Martin Fotta, Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences
This chapter aims to trace some of the relations between anthropology and trans studies around the definition of the category “transgender.” Doubling as a category of analysis and a lived experience, the transgender category opens up long-standing conceptual, critical, and methodological tensions between trans studies and anthropology, producing aligned and yet divergent understandings of gender, representation, identity, and cultural production. Yet drawing on the connections between these disciplines, the chapter also describes how, through ethnography, both are becoming increasingly proximate, particularly as transitioning comes to be understood to fundamentally challenge deterministic models of gender experience.
‘How does one establish and maintain a metal band?’, ‘how does a metal band produce music?’ or ‘how does it feel to be on the stage, with hundreds of people you need to win over?’ are questions a musicologist cannot answer beyond generalisations based on secondary and/or tertiary accounts since they are usually without the means to maintain the proximity to observe, let alone experiencing first-hand. For most academics, making music is a recreational process that they need as a contrast to their research life. Thus, few have investigated the ‘private life’ of a small musical unit we call the band in general, or the metal band in particular. This chapter focuses on the joy and despair of metal musicianship, picking up new skills, and experiencing all kinds of professional and personal conflicts embedded within the metal scene of Istanbul, Turkey. The experience captured in the historiography of the metal band is handled to define the thematic context by articulating phases of metal music-making: formation, songwriting, recording, gigging, publishing and reception. The author intends to assume the stance of a film director rather than a camera to provide thick description and analysis using the habitual tools of social sciences.
From the local color boom to university multiculturalism, the minority short story has been central to transformations bringing new classes of writers and content into American letters. This chapter outlines the promises and failures of the form to racially democratize the literary marketplace. It highlights the possibilities minority writers developed within these limitations. Zora Neale Hurston, Zitkála-Šá, and Winnifred Eaton deflected White audiences and their ethnographic expectations. Their frame tales challenged framings by White gatekeepers. Their feints force scholars to rethink autoethnographic fictions as savvy ethnographies of White audiences. These strategies persist in the multicultural era with writers such as Rattawut Lapcharoensap and Edward P. Jones. However, the short story has shifted from a commercial to an educational form: the easily teachable nugget of diversity. Meanwhile, audiences for ethnic authenticity now include many highly educated minorities. Sandra Cisneros, Nam Le, and others navigate this shifting map, revealing new freedoms and constraints.
Although ageing is personally relevant to many if not most gerontologists, a reflexive perspective is largely absent from gerontological scholarship. This paper employs duoethnography, a variant of autoethnography, to explore how experiences related to growing older have informed the authors' teaching and scholarship in the field of ageing. Duoethnography involves putting two autoethnographies into conversation, promoting dynamic self-understandings and generating new insights through dialogue. The co-authors first reflected on their journeys to date in the field, including on how the personification of ageing has shifted our perspective. Then we shared our narratives and made some initial revisions based on each other's feedback. Next, we collaboratively identified and discussed three broad, connective themes: the differing yet central role of gender in our narratives, teaching and generativity, and the pedagogical and personal challenges associated with ageism. Our reflections and dialogue deepened our understanding of these issues central to studying and teaching about ageing. The kind of reflective practice that we model could be a vital resource for bridging the gap between theory and practice, researcher and researched.
“My Archive,” as depicted in this chapter, documents the author’s wealth of experience as a “scholar and researcher, teacher and mentor” in the form of a dialogue with his past to interrogate African studies and, in particular, Yoruba history. With a natural life experience, the author having lived in both colonial and postcolonial Africa, the chapter investigates and interrogates the cultural history of Africa (with focus on the Yoruba) vis-à-vis its evolution into modernity. Autoethnography is noteworthy a narrative of (parts of) self. It is composed of primary sources of two facets – the author’s life works and cultural collections. The archive also, via the latter, interrogates the two colonially imposed eco-political systems of capitalism and socialism as with other cultural impositions and their far-reaching consequences. Each chapter’s categorization is summarized at the latter part of the chapter.
Autoethnography—a methodology that foregrounds personal experience both during research and in writing about it—is a useful keyword for scholars working in Africa and the diaspora. Mara and Thompson argue that by exploring new forms of writing and engaging in critical self-reflexivity regarding (shifting) positionalities, autoethnography—particularly collaborative approaches—is vital to ongoing efforts to decolonize African Studies. Mara and Thompson propose changes necessary for the development of Africanist autoethnography as a Keyword, and some hopeful indicators that these changes are already underway, including a small but growing body of Africanist autoethnographic work.
This chapter explores the challenges Black women face in the US academy as outsiders within these institutional spaces. The author situates the discussion in the relevant literature as well as her experiences as a foreign-born Black faculty member in a predominantly White US higher education context. Beyond problem identification, the chapter advances an application of autoethnography as a useful strategy for inviting White women and others of difference into the space of this lived experience. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the process of engaging in autoethnographic work has the capacity to change us as relational individuals within communities, and the ways in which this work can provoke participants to act to create more equitable and inclusive academic spaces.
When examining video ethnographic data, as well as interviews, and fieldnotes, the researcher examines the situated nature of participants’ production of identity elements in action and interaction through the analysis of the various kinds of mediated action on the micro level. In addition, the researcher can utilize the analytical tool, layers of discourse, in order to analyze the immediate identity element production (produced in the moment), link it to the continuous identity element production (produced within and with the networks of the participant), and link it to the general identity element production (produced within and with institutions and/or society that the performer belongs to). Thereby situated identity elements can clearly be shown to link to the concrete socio-historically and socioculturally embeddedness on the meso and the macro levels. In this chapter, we shall exemplify these analytical tools through two transcripts depicting one participant from a larger ethnographically informed study.
This autoethnography explores a dance scholar's previous choreographic trajectory, positioning the author's career within the sixties and seventies Black Arts Movement for social change. I explore several iterations of my dance lecture-demonstration in particular, which was produced over two decades and three continents, demonstrating how temporal and spatial shifts affect the content and context of a choreographic work. Additionally, I explore my shift into arts producing through my national dance initiative that helped define the work of eighties Black choreographers in the postmodern dance movement. The result is a consideration of how being Black, female, and a dancer provides a particular sociohistorical lens.
This article revisits a paper and from an autoethnographic/critical reflective biographical approach re-examines seven cultural notions or myths, which may encourage ageism. It is framed within my experiential knowledge of caring for my ageing parents, with the tensions and challenges around problematising the value of expertise based on experience, communication, grief, and autonomy and freedom versus safety. The commentary emphasises that by analysing the impact of our personal life experiences, we can start to understand both the intended and unintended consequences of policy and practice affecting those in the fourth age. As a social work educator, I wanted to reflect upon how my tacit experiential knowledge, if made explicit, could impact upon my own and others’ learning. The recent death of my father has allowed for a period of reflection on my own caring and indeed my professional social work experience, knowledge, skills and practice. It is argued that the ageing process is unequal as class and socio-economic factors, i.e. geography, age, gender, religion and ethnicity, all play parts in determining how someone ages, and indeed upon the care an individual older person receives. A fuller understanding of negotiating the role of one stakeholder, that of a family carer in the ageing process, is elicited in this paper.
This chapter provides an autoethnographic account of the use of AAE from an African American middle-class perspective. Reflecting on some of the tensions and expectations that inform my own identity performance, I examine the quantitative distribution of several salient AAE features within my stylistic repertoire and discuss how such distributions inform assumptions about middle-class AAE and our understanding of intraspeaker variation.
Chapter 3 looks at trends in intercultural language teaching and learning and presents findings from two studies focused on teachers’ intercultural teaching practices. It draws on research to offer implications for the enhancement of intercultural competence in the classroom and teachers’ reflectivity on their intercultural awareness.
The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore the political potential of visual autoethnography. I do so through my experience of working as a Swiss Army officer in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Drawing on my own photographs I examine how an appreciation of everyday aesthetic sensibilities can open up new ways of thinking about security dilemmas. I argue that visual autoethnography can be insightful not because it offers better or even authentic views – it cannot – but because it has the potential to reveal how prevailing political discourses are so widely rehearsed and accepted that we no longer see their partial, political, and often problematic nature. I illustrate this potential in two ways: (1) how a self-reflective engagement with my own photographs of the DMZ reveals the deeply entrenched role of militarised masculinities; (2) how my positionality and my photographs of everyday life in North Korea show that prevailing security discourses are highly particular and biased, even though they are used to justify seemingly objective policy decisions.