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In this article, I examine the construct of parental home or maher in my native language Marathi—as a social, emotional, cultural, spiritual, physical, and lived construct. Maher informs my struggle to comprehend the construct of home and its relationship to displacement, loss of familiarity, nostalgia, and the liminal. I juxtapose my experiences of being a newly married woman of Indian origin in the United States, with my experiences of being a new graduate student in a reputed North American university—both simultaneous life events. This article is an autoethnographical reflection on my negotiation of my marital and academic landscapes where I found my identity and ontological orientations challenged. The borderlands that resulted from geo-familial displacement and ontological displacement in academia intersected to create vantage points and liminal spaces that allowed me to explore, re-orient, and assert my ontological roots that are informed by Indian philosophy—specifically, the Advaita Vedanta approach. This article explores the power of art as research and the process of art-making as a process synchronous to researching to explore identity in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our speculative ethnography of Chinese student experience in the United States during COVID-19 weds the tradition of speculative fiction (exemplified by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler) and digital autoethnography. The study is two-pronged: First, we articulate/map the methodological merits of speculative and digital autoethnography as particularly conducive to the crisis context of COVID-19 and its accompanying social isolation; second, we deploy said methodology within a population of nine Chinese students "trapped" in the United States during the COVID-19 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]