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The third millennium confronts academics of all disciplines of study with the exigency of addressing their emergent dilemmas as professionals in their fields through scholarly publications. This volume finds an outlet for such expressiveness in autoethnography, which helps to emancipate individuals, institutions, and societies through creating authentic relations between scholars and their writing. It explores the new relationships between scholars and their writing which the worldwide context of the SarsCov2 pandemic forced into being. The contributions here describe personal experiences related to the changes in their authors'approach to work in general, and to writing in particular, with an eye to how they may shed light upon the cultural and social dynamics upon the whole. The authors offer implicit criticism of the newly constructed social reality.

In Performative Memoir: The Methodology of a Creative Process, Theresa Carilli and Adrienne Viramontes construct a new genre of writing, performative memoir. Drawing on scholarship in performance studies and autoethnography, the authors outline a methodology for studying autoethnography, performance, and memoir in a new creative process. Carilli and Viramontes then demonstrate the process by creating their own performative memoirs, titled “Loving Crazy” and “Mexican Love,” and perform a close reading of each memoir to show how these theories can be applied to our own personal experiences and trauma. Scholars of performance studies, communication, media studies, cultural studies, and trauma studies will find this book particularly useful.

Reflecting on Autoethnographic and Phenomenological Experiences: A Caregiver's Journey is a unique critical qualitative inquiry study that uses the author's experience as a caregiver to his wife suffering from dementia as the basis of a critical autoethnography. It explores components of positive caregiving that may be not only melancholic and empirical, but also emotionally painful. The book employs multiple approaches that include critical narrative, phenomenology, autoethnography and experiential writing. Through a phenomenological lens of an insider that includes self- and other-hood, marriage, career, fatherhood, suicide, despair, triple grief, loss, caregiving, cooking, housekeeping, advocating mind reading, and encouraging, a narrative illustrating self-reflection on particular experiences is constructed. These culminating experiences result in first-hand and didactical understandings by the caregiver. Individual, personal, and subjective interpretation of relational happenings are explored. Reflective journaling and observations of the seasons of marital life seek to understand if and how shared experiences transcend multiple contexts and help the reader understand experiences of dementia. Reflecting on Autoethnographic and Phenomenological Experiences: A Caregiver's Journey is a volume that will be invaluable to qualitative inquiry researchers, autoethnographers, and those readers interested in the research of caregiving.Perfect for courses such as: Autoethnography | Advanced Qualitative Inquiry | Disability Studies | Educational Research | Research | Philosophy | Qualitative Research/Inquiry

This methods book will guide the reader through the process of conducting and producing an autoethnographic study through the understanding of self, other, and culture. Readers will be encouraged to follow hands-on, though not prescriptive, steps in data collection, analysis, and interpretation with self-reflective prewriting exercises and self-narrative writing exercises to produce their own autoethnographic work. Chang offers a variety of techniques for gathering data on the self—from diaries to culture grams to interviews with others—and shows how to transform this information into a study that looks for the connection with others present in a diverse world. She shows how the autoethnographic process promotes self-reflection, understanding of multicultural others, qualitative inquiry, and narrative writing. Samples of published autoethnographies provide exemplars for the novice researcher to follow.

Like all writing, biographies are interpretive. In Interpretive Autoethnography, Norman Denzin combines one of the oldest techniques in the social sciences with one of the newest. Bringing in elements of postmodernism and interpretive social science, he reexamines the biographical and autobiographical genres as methods for qualitative researchers. Grounded in theory and rigorous analysis, this accessible book points up the inherent weaknesses in traditional biographical forms and outlines a new way in which biographies should be conceptualized and shaped. The book provides a guide to the assumptions of the biographical method, to its key terms, and to the strategies for gathering and interpreting such materials. Denzin introduces the key concept of'epiphany,'or turning points in person's lives. A final chapter returns to autoethnography's primary purpose: to make sense of our fragmented lives.

Tami Spry provides a methodological introduction to the budding field of performative autoethnography. She intertwines three necessary elements comprising the process. First one must understand the body – navigating concepts of self, culture, language, class, race, gender, and physicality. The second task is to put that body on the page, assigning words for that body's sociocultural experiences. Finally, this merger of body and paper is lifted up to the stage, crafting a persona as a method of personal inquiry. These three stages are simultaneous and interdependent, and only in cultivating all three does performance autoethnography begin to take shape. Replete with examples and exercises, this is an important introductory work for autoethnographers and performance artists alike.

In departing from the traditional stance taken by anthropologists, who study'others'ethnographically, this timely book explores forms of self-inscription on the part of both the ethnographer and those'others'who are studied. Informed by developments in postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism, this is an original contribution to the growing dialogue across disciplinary boundaries. The chapters build upon recent reconsiderations of the uses and meaning of personal narrative to examine the ways in which selves and social forms are culturally constituted through biographical genres. Ethnic autobiography, self-reflexivity in ethnography, and native ethnography raise provocative questions about a range of issues for the contemporary scholar: authenticity of voice; ethnographic authority; and the degree to which autoethnography constitutes resistance to hegemonic bodies of discourse. Examined here in a variety of cultural and political contexts, writing about the self offers challenging insights into the construction and transformation of identities and cultural meanings.

Anthropological writings by anthropologists in the field have long been a valuable tool to the profession. But until now, the theoretical implications of its use have not been fully explored. Anthropology and Autobiography provides unique insights into the fieldwork, autobiographical materials and/or textual critiques of anthropologists, many of whose ethnographies are already familiar. It considers the role of the anthropologist as fieldworker and writer, examining the ways in which nationality, age, gender, and personal history influence the anthropologist's behavior towards the individuals he is observing. This volume also contributes to debates about reflexivity and the political responsibility of the anthropologist, who, as a participant, has traditionally made only stylized appearances in the academic text. The contributors examine their work among peoples in Africa, Japan, the Caribbean, Greece, Shetland, England, indigenous Australia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. Autobiography is developed alongside political, intellectual, and historical changes. The anthropologists confront and examine issues of racism, reciprocity and friendships. Anthropology and Autobiography will appeal to anthropologists and social scientists interested in ethnographic approaches, the self, reflexivity, qualitative methodology, and the production of texts.