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This story tells about an accident that occurred at the 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. The first author presents her autoethnography of her partner’s fall and her subsequent reaction. Then to complicate and deepen her telling, she crafts a second multivoiced account from the responses of eight people who were part of the event. The participants’ stories are juxtaposed to tell a multivoiced tale and to theorize what happened in an experience-near mode. Twice-told multivoiced autoethnography brings other voices, subjectivities, and interpretations into our autoethnographic accounts, providing a collective consciousness and offering the possibility of initiating conversations about the values of care and empathy connected with the project of autoethnography.

This article describes how autoethnography, a research method that uses—and even foregrounds—personal experience, can be used as a method for studying families. We first define autoethnography, describe orientations to autoethnographic research, and review research that has used autoethnography as a method for studying families. Although autoethnography has numerous strengths, four qualities make it especially suitable for doing family research. We describe how autoethnography can allow researchers to offer insider accounts of families; study everyday, unexpected experiences of families, especially as they face unique or difficult situations; write against limited extant research about families; and make research more accessible to nonacademic audiences. We conclude by offering criteria for evaluating autoethnography, including risks and limitations of the method.

In “Seeking Father” ( Adams, 2006 ), I used a relational perspective to understand the relationship I have with my father—a perspective that conceived of our relationship as a co-constitutive endeavor in which we each affected the other, and a perspective that showed how our conflict emerged as a product of joint interaction, of us being, working, and relating—together. In this project, I continue a similar trajectory. I use a relational perspective to describe moments when my father and I miss each other—moments when I long for him and when I perceive him to long for me, moments when we fail to connect, moments when we hurt and are hurt by each other but neither one of us ever deciding to quit, moments in which we practice stifling communicative patterns and moments in which we both seek love. May be we’re both in love, somehow.

“truth” is an issue of public discussion, research, and everyday performance. Processes of navigating truth, however, are obscure and often unknown. In this project, the authors highlight truth(s) of written life texts. They conceive of truth as a rather than the “rhetorical device” to use for evaluating personal research and believe that demanding factual, historical truth-of-life research is faulty and problematic. By illustrating how genre, trust, memory, and confession influence truth telling, the authors hope to question and enhance truth-related conversations.

If we use stories as “equipment for living,” as tools to understand, negotiate, and make sense of situations we encounter, then a discussion of narrative ethics is a relevant, if not required, endeavor. In other words, if we learn how to think, feel, and interact with society via narratives, we also learn ethical ways of being with others, “correct” and “appropriate” ways that serve as foundations for many of our interactions. This latter epistemological assumption guides this study. In this article, the author synthesizes ethical themes of life research, themes of narrative privilege, media, and evaluative criteria. He then illustrates how these themes influence narrative inquiry.

Tension plagues the relationship between the author and his father when it comes to golf- and gay-related issues. The author is also stuck between two canonical stories, one that says he must work things out to fulfill his responsibilities as a son and another that tells him to let go, to realize that he “can’t choose his relatives,” and to view the relationship as a waste of time. In this project, the author uses a relational paradigm to reframe the father-son relationship in which he finds himself immersed. He’s a victim, so is his father. He’s an oppressor, so is his father. They victimize and oppress together, simultaneously hurting and being hurt while never deciding to quit. The story is about the troubled relationship that separates them. It’s a story of sexuality and sport, of gayness and hegemonic masculinity, of a fag and his golf clubs. It’s a story of love and hate.

If critical autoethnographers identify and attempt to remedy personal/cultural offenses, then they should also discuss how to live with individuals— themselves included—who have been complicit in and/or committed these offenses. One way critical autoethnographers can do so is through the concept of forgiveness. In this article, I first describe characteristics of forgiveness and establish relationships between forgiveness and critical autoethnography. I then offer three brief critical autoethnographies, each of which illustrates offenses I have experienced in educational contexts.

In this article, the authors provide a context for, and an introduction to, the contributions in this special issue on sons and fathers. After alluding to the rich heritage of literature on sons and fathers, the authors propose three themes that run through this collection: the continuing significance of son-father relationships, the act of writing such relationships into being, and the “clunky intimacy” conveyed. They follow this with an outline of the lines of inquiry contained within each of the subsequent articles, and conclude by drawing attention to the absences left within and by this issue.