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Overall, the cultural and artistic practices that continue to surround hitchhiking subcultures are largely untapped by serious scholastic research. This paper, deliberately non-linear, explores the haptic dimensions of hitchhiking. We use this mode of travel to make certain observations about our late-modern, or cosmopolitan age, as well as about some of the subcultures surrounding adventurous, competitive, and alternative transport. The piece is grounded in a form of duo-auto-ethnography, inspired by the experiences of two authors who are well-versed in this practice, but who have still not met in person. The paper argues that one of the main lessons to arise from the era of mass hitchhiking during the mid-twentieth century is that the types of sensory knowledge acquired and passed on by hitchhikers themselves are unique in their spatio-temporal potential for being imaginatively transformed into tools for shaping wider socio-political projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background In rare diseases, limited access to services and rare disease experts may force families to act as medical advocates for their child; they can volunteer to support clinician-initiated research or initiate and lead research themselves. Ketotic Hypoglycemia International (KHI) is a new, global organization for families affected by idiopathic ketotic hypoglycemia (IKH) and is run solely by volunteers. Doing research together, families and international experts in a collaborative process such as at KHI, also referred to as patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) or extreme citizen science, is often praised for its positive effects on the research and the stakeholders involved. Methods We used auto-ethnographic narratives from parents and medical professionals in KHI to report on their experiences with co-produced health research. All co-authors wrote down their experiences in relation to three topics: time invested, work invested and power dynamics. Results Whilst the parents and health care professionals felt a new hope for (their) children with IKH, they also felt pressure to contribute time or to be flexible in how and when they dedicated time towards the organization. The power dynamics were characterised by a change in the relationship between the parents and medical experts; the parent being taught by the expert shifted to the expert learning from the lived experience of the parent. Both parents and medical experts struggled with maintaining boundaries and safeguarding their mental health. Conclusion Our findings call for the need to secure and prioritize funding for patient organizations, to enable them to create the sustainable architecture required for meaningful PPIE within these organizations. The morals and often deeply personal reasons for engaging with voluntary work in health research, can lead to overstepping of boundaries. As a result of our research, we call for the development of ethics of care guidelines within collaborative health research.

AbstractIn this auto-ethnographic study, I examine the tensions in conducting leisure research with communities experiencing trauma as a survivor of trauma. I use diary entries taken during times of coping with my mother’s illnesses, and during a two-week period working with Syrian refugee families in Lebanon, to explore narratives of leisure as a means to heal and belong. Results from a narrative analysis reflect (1) renegotiating an empathetic researcher identity after trauma; and (2) affordance for safe leisure and opportunities to heal. These narratives contribute to enriching understandings of self-compassion within leisure research, with a focus on the capacity for leisure researchers to meaningfully engage with their experiences to deepen their engagement with families. It is my hope findings from this study can aid researchers in reflecting on their own trauma and healing journeys – and in doing so strengthen their capacities to care for others and themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In rare diseases, limited access to services and rare disease experts may force families to act as medical advocates for their child; they can volunteer to support clinician-initiated research or initiate and lead research themselves. Ketotic Hypoglycemia International (KHI) is a new, global organization for families affected by idiopathic ketotic hypoglycemia (IKH) and is run solely by volunteers. Doing research together, families and international experts in a collaborative process such as at KHI, also referred to as patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) or extreme citizen science, is often praised for its positive effects on the research and the stakeholders involved. Methods: We used auto-ethnographic narratives from parents and medical professionals in KHI to report on their experiences with co-produced health research. All co-authors wrote down their experiences in relation to three topics: time invested, work invested and power dynamics. Results: Whilst the parents and health care professionals felt a new hope for (their) children with IKH, they also felt pressure to contribute time or to be flexible in how and when they dedicated time towards the organization. The power dynamics were characterised by a change in the relationship between the parents and medical experts; the parent being taught by the expert shifted to the expert learning from the lived experience of the parent. Both parents and medical experts struggled with maintaining boundaries and safeguarding their mental health. Conclusion: Our findings call for the need to secure and prioritize funding for patient organizations, to enable them to create the sustainable architecture required for meaningful PPIE within these organizations. The morals and often deeply personal reasons for engaging with voluntary work in health research, can lead to overstepping of boundaries. As a result of our research, we call for the development of ethics of care guidelines within collaborative health research. Plain English Summary: When confronted with a rare disease it is often hard to access information and or medical experts for help. Parents of children affected by idiopathic ketotic hypoglycemia (IKH) have joined in a patient-led organisation to initiate and lead research that could give answers to their medical questions and worries. Medical experts have been invited to join the organisation as members of the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). When people report on health research conducted in collaboration with patients and or members of the public, they mostly mention positive outcomes. At KHI, some people had left the organisation and we had to deal with some difficult situations; so, we wanted to document and understand these challenges. Nine members of KHI, parents and medical experts, wrote down their stories, using three topics to guide their narrative: time invested, work invested and power dynamics at KHI. Parents and medical experts felt a new hope for (their) children with IKH when working for KHI but they also felt pressured to work at all hours and at the cost of time with their families or their own health. The stories revealed that parents felt less important compared to medical experts, but also that the relationship between parents and experts changed from the parent being taught by the expert, to the expert starting to learn from the lived experience of the parent. To make these collaborations successful we plead for funding for patient-led organisation and ethical guidelines to safeguard volunteers (both medical and lay people). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2020, rapper Megan Thee Stallion was shot by her then boyfriend Tory Lanez, a fellow rapper. The incident brought to the surface (again) a long, ongoing conversation about the experiences of Black women survivors of intimate partner violence, much like other high-profile cases (e.g., Tina Turner) have done before. Specifically, these cases show how Black men particularly can uphold patriarchal violence in intimate or romantic contexts. Moreover, these cases show the tensions that can arise when survivors seek help from law enforcement. For example, the idea of racial loyalty and not calling the police on a Black man and how this affects the options available to Black women. In other words, Black women often have nowhere to turn for help when they experience violence. In this article, I employ Black Feminist Autoethnography as a methodological framework to analyze a personal instance of road rage where I was attacked, to explore how Black women survivors make meaning of their experiences, the thought process behind their decision to involve the police, how Black men uphold patriarchal violence in non-intimate contexts, and how Black women resist or refuse to accept the violence. This analysis reveals the raced and gendered components underlying the private/public nature of interpersonal violence experienced by Black women and the relationship between intimate and non-intimate interpersonal violence. Implications for qualitative social work research and practice include the use of Black Feminist Autoethnography as a methodological framework to identify areas of empowerment, strength, and support for survivors of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of the experiences of five individuals who explore their unique relationship between music and spirituality. Each participant critically narrates their faith and beliefs and explores how these relate to their experiences with music. The paper begins with a brief exposition of the literature concerning music and spirituality and the linkages between the two. The methodology combines narrative and auto-ethnography, underpinned by a phenomenological approach to reflection on experiences. Using deep self-analysis, the five authors derive and discover lessons concerning their own relationship between faith, spirituality, and music. These are then analysed to produce common themes concerning the intertwining of spirituality with music. Finally, the conclusions present a novel contribution which includes lessons on how through self-exploration, one can use music and spirituality to repair and ultimately enrich the soul. The paper exposes the interplay between faith, spirituality and music, which will be of general interest and provide inspiration to those who intend to use music to enrich their lives and heal themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article describes an unexpected methodological shift made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic during doctoral research, and exemplifies reflexivity in action whilst negotiating my complex positionality as both a researcher and a social worker. The first UK national lockdown was announced after I had conducted 3 months of ethnographic data collection in a local authority adult social work team, thus halting my research. As society shut down, face-to-face research was paused overnight, however, the local authority continued to provide essential services and support. Forging a path forward, I successfully gained a job practising as a social worker within the team and completed a supplementary ethics application to include auto-ethnographic data which would complement the existing ethnography. Although practicing reflexivity and analysing positionality are established and encouraged parts of ethnographic research, how a researcher actively conducts them varies and usually remains unseen. Methodologies are often presented in a sanitised and polished manner, depriving the reader of the messy yet informative reality of research. This article draws upon fieldnotes to practically illustrate and bring this reflexivity on positionality to the fore. As I move from participant-observer to complete-participant, the findings zoom in on my experience of navigating positionality, revealing a micro picture of the details and subtleties of this process. This unexpected research journey enhanced my level of intimacy with the phenomenon, the research site, and the participants. Overall, this example of enacting reflexivity helps to bridge the gap between how positionality is theorised and how it actively practiced. Finally, this article is a call for more open, deeper, and continual reflexivity on our positionality as researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epistemic injustice towards Indigenous women is a global reality. In South Africa (SA) and beyond, Black pain is a recognized experience. "Coloured" pain is less familiar terrain since "Coloured" identity is accepted by some South Africans but rejected by others. Racial identities, however, often manifest as a material reality in society, shaping the life possibilities and potentialities of people. "Coloured" women have experienced limited upward mobility in post-Apartheid SA, and experiences of non-belonging accompany "Coloured" consciousness, collectively and individually. Claims attached to Khoi-Coloured heritage are growing more assertive in the current body politic and concentrated in provinces like the Western Cape in SA. Hidden by African patriarchal claims, the voices and politics of women with Khoi lineage are once again hidden in post-Apartheid SA. Many different stigmas are attached to such women, stigmas that are insufficiently explored and deconstructed in scholarly work. How much of this Khoi-Coloured condition entails a peculiar experience of pain and deprivation? How do we access Khoi (and San) lineage given a fragmented and absent archival political history, and do personal autoethnographies provide a way into a deeper understanding of these socio-cultural identities? Drawing on the experience of a historical figure, Krotoa, this paper argues that the "Coloured" African Matriarch is a decolonial African universal in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yarning is a trusted, culturally integral way of creating new knowledge that is different from focus groups. This article is a reflection piece from an Aboriginal Researcher engaging with Indigenous Standpoint and auto-ethnographic approaches to explore how yarning interfaces with Indigenous data sovereignty. It is argued through the themes of deep listening, tension, relationality, and power—from memories and lived experiences—that yarning upholds the rights of Indigenous data sovereignty because it enables intimacy, connection, and recognition of cultural knowledge holders.IMPLICATIONSIndigenous Data Sovereignty recognises the rights of Indigenous people to determine the means of collection, ownership, and dissemination of data pertaining to Indigenous Peoples.The level of intimacy and connection between First Nations Peoples obtained through yarning is at risk of being compromised if non-Indigenous researchers conflate yarning with focus groups.Indigenous Data Sovereignty recognises the rights of Indigenous people to determine the means of collection, ownership, and dissemination of data pertaining to Indigenous Peoples.The level of intimacy and connection between First Nations Peoples obtained through yarning is at risk of being compromised if non-Indigenous researchers conflate yarning with focus groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading is not only a mental decoding activity but also a social, material, bodily, and affective practice. It is learned; changes over time; varies across situations; and is crucial for academic institutions. Nonetheless, academics practice reading largely individually. Yet, reading remains an undervalued part of how professional research (work) is done. In this paper, we take a practice-oriented approach: How is reading enacted as a seemingly self-evident academic technique? Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and collective auto-ethnographic reflections of our readings in the RUSTlab at Ruhr University Bochum, we explore how reading is structured with respect to different goals--be it for critique, fun, teaching, or writing. We consider aspects of the material infrastructure such as pens and (missing) couches, and analyze how situations, bodies, and settings enact and afford different modes of reading. We organize the modes of reading into reading about, reading around, and reading aloud. This paper argues that reading is a craft that requires care and companionship, and that it matters who gets to read, when and where reading is done, and what the legitimate excuses for not reading are. We polemicize that academics would do well to bring reading practices from the individualized margins to the heart of collective exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overall, the cultural and artistic practices that continue to surround hitchhiking subcultures are largely untapped by serious scholastic research. This paper, deliberately non-linear, explores the haptic dimensions of hitchhiking. We use this mode of travel to make certain observations about our late-modern, or cosmopolitan age, as well as about some of the subcultures surrounding adventurous, competitive, and alternative transport. The piece is grounded in a form of duo-auto-ethnography, inspired by the experiences of two authors who are well-versed in this practice, but who have still not met in person. The paper argues that one of the main lessons to arise from the era of mass hitchhiking during the mid-twentieth century is that the types of sensory knowledge acquired and passed on by hitchhikers themselves are unique in their spatio-temporal potential for being imaginatively transformed into tools for shaping wider socio-political projects.

In this article, I reflect on the process of understanding and my strategies of reporting in the context of a three-year ethnographic study on non-monogamous sex and relationships in Belgium, which included interviews and participant observation in various dating sites and in support groups for people in consensual non-monogamous relationships. I draw the contours of what a research ethics that creates space for the researcher's embodied learning, and learning through sexual-intimate relationships in particular, might look like, centralizing the concept of vulnerability. An ethics of intersubjective vulnerability not only has the potential to constitute an epistemological position from which to conduct critical analyses that aims at producing multidimensional and embodied understanding of power relations, it also constitutes a space of political contestation and a position from which to start to envision alternative possibilities to the neoliberal values that have pervaded society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on notions of the embodied archive in diaspora art, with a particular focus on my situated knowledge and positionality as a diasporic artist of mixed Turkish and Austrian heritage who lives in the United Kingdom. Taking my multilingual video performance Surya Namaz (2018) as a case study, I address the question of roots, ancestry or lineage that arose in the making of the video through writing with the practice, and critically explore the pitfalls of self-othering, the trope of the return and the problematic position of the Spivak's native informant in the context of diaspora art. Reflecting on the multiplicity of voices and encounters that shaped the making of Surya Namaz, I highlight the potential of Relation to resist an essentialist conception of identity while exploring the body as diasporic archive and site of multiple belongings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This autoethnography seeks to open up for re-interpretation and debate three topics that feature within social work practice, research, and education: firstly the value and use of metaphor in understanding practice, secondly approaches to social work reflective writing, and thirdly the issue of poverty and its significance and impact in child and family social work. Metaphors can be valuable in framing understanding of issues within social work practice and advocating for change. Three metaphors have been particularly used in understanding the relationship between social work practice and poverty: The Invisibility of Poverty, The Elephant in the Room, and The Wallpaper of Practice. The three Parts of this autoethnography each adopt a different approach to autoethnographic writing and addresses and unsettles one of these metaphors. The first part adopts a narrative-reflective-analytical approach conventional to reflective writing in social work. The second and third parts adopt poetic and post-humanist approaches, respectively. It is proposed that adopting autoethnography as a methodology challenges the uncritical application of metaphor to situated practice and thereby prevents interpretive foreclosure. 'Writing against' objectified social work knowledge may assist in opening up practice to more challenging critical reflection and re-interpretation. Juxtaposing these three parts demonstrates the potential of non-conventional autoethnographic approaches to provide opportunities for deeper reflection on the experiences of doing social work within the context of poverty than conventional approaches to reflective writing. Furthermore, they indicate a need to reconsider how well these metaphors reflect social work practice experience with poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart home technology is expected to be widespread in the future and to accommodate a green transition to reduce and time-shift energy consumption. However, smart technologies also have social consequences, which are important to understand. At a basic level, we need to know more about learning to live with these technologies and how they influence our everyday practices and routines. Providing in-depth longitudinal insights into these processes, this paper presents an auto-ethnography of living with smart home technology: a 20-month diary kept by one of the authors. The paper uses theories of practice to investigate details of learning processes when interacting with three selected technologies: smart alarm and lighting management, smart control of heating, and a smart electric vehicle (EV). Theories of learning have a well-established tradition within theories of practice, and the concept of "knowing how to go on" and the concept of practical intelligibility are central in this work. This paper investigates the adoption of new smart technologies and how they interact with learning processes in different material and social contexts. Such an approach can lay the groundwork for further empirical research with a broader set of materials. It can also provide knowledge to assist in the design of better technologies and in developing policies and regulations to promote this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use auto‐netnography data to explore my experiences of self‐tracking with my Apple watch to uncover some of the ways in which the materiality of self‐tracking led me to experience an intensified form of surveillance around my body. The paper contributes to literature within digital geographies which considers the blurring of online and offline boundaries. I consider this in relation to auto‐netnography and auto‐ethnography to question the distinction between the two. I contribute to debates in fat studies around the blurring of the personal and researcher identity when supporting the Health at Every Size Approach, furthering these debates by exemplifying how the materiality of self‐tracking can intensify feelings of guilt and shame when researching the body. The paper concludes with some ethical recommendations for self‐care in the research process, arguing that future research should consider how the researcher should hold space to deal with the unintended emotional consequences that may come from research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of everyday life has gained attention across various disciplines in the context of modernity. This study utilizes Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to explore the everyday experiences of residents in the Xiguan Community, a historically significant residential area in western Guangzhou undergoing urbanization and tourism development. Adopting an emic perspective, this study employed auto-ethnography to depict the daily rhythms and spatially embodied experiences of the author, a native resident of the Xiguan Community. By incorporating reflective and self-narrative elements and comparing them across generations, this approach provides first-hand knowledge and self-awareness. This research offers an insider's comprehensive understanding of the effects of urbanization and tourism on residents' everyday lives. Informed by Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis, this analysis incorporates spatial and temporal dimensions, with a specific emphasis on residents' experiences of spatial embodiment and their engagement with everyday rhythms. The study reveals two key findings: First, urbanization and the commodification of landscapes have created a constructed "the present" in traditional communities, displacing the meaningful "existence" of everyday life. Certain spaces within these communities have detached from residents' everyday lives, serving urban and tourism purposes, and leading to partial alienation in spatial and temporal dimensions. These spaces represent the simulacra and fragments of residents' everyday lives, lacking subjectivity, temporality, and wholeness. Over time, the "existence" that embodies the meaning of residents' everyday lives has been squeezed out by structural forces such as urban renewal and community tourism. For tourists, these landscapes may serve only as replicas of attractions, devoid of the essence of residents' everyday lives. For the residents, these community spaces have become manifestations of instrumental rationality and commodification. Second, this study highlights that traditional community residents' bodies are disciplined and governed by the instrumental rationality of urban production and the invisible rhythms of the tourism industry. In large cities, the significance of individual bodies in traditional urban communities is often overlooked, as bodies become tools for creating value through work. Individuals adjust their everyday rhythms based on urban settings' production rationality and efficiency priorities. This undermines the bodily rhythms that align with natural cycles and prompts residents to distance themselves from traditional communities. While the older generation in the Xiguan Community experiences overlapping leisure time and shares community spaces, fostering solid social relationships, the younger generation faces longer working hours, extended commuting distances, and more individualized leisure time. As a result, there is a lack of synchronization in leisure rhythms among neighbors. The embodied rhythms of traditional community residents have shifted from a state of harmony with natural rhythms and community spaces to being governed by the instrumental rationality of urban production and invisible rhythms of the tourism industry. This study provides an emic and longitudinal perspective to the investigation of spatial experiences and embodied rhythms in urban and tourism development. The use of autoethnography amplifies residents' voices and calls for greater consideration of local daily life. These findings emphasize the importance of incorporating residents' everyday experiences into the planning and development of sustainable communities and tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the imaginary about migrant kin destinations and the lives of the family members left behind. It reflects on the mechanisms of connection to places the subject has never been that knows through stories told by people whom themselves have never been but have experienced separation and loss as remaining behind in a family characterized by a history of emigration. Through self-reflexive auto-ethnography, this article focuses on the development of virtual ties to imagined places through the establishment of emotional geographies in the second generation left behind. The paper engages with the theorization of two stages in the lives of those who remain in the homeland: (In)-decision to stay, (Re)-solution to stay, which can result in Hesitation about staying in second generation left behind and eventually can lead to an Exit-action. Applying the concept of 'familial habitus', it demonstrates how in belonging to a family affected by displacement, stories about distant kin operate as living entities that form bonds with people, places, events with which the subject is unfamiliar. The social remittances provided through visits back can enhance the left behind exitus and emancipation opening for a potential liminoid experience of break with the limitations of patriarchal culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article* discusses the tolerance of violence. Specifically, it explores the way violence is enacted and perpetuated in residential education in Latvia. The article explores the perception and experience of violence in these schools by combining ethnographic fieldwork and autoethnographic data. Violence within the institution coalesces around three main aspects of experience: violence as necessary for regulating relationships, the embodiment of violence, and the expression of institutional violence. I illustrate how the application of violence is often justified as developing independence in students and by offering opportunities that mask the role of the school system in the reproduction of inequality in society. I conclude with an exploration of how the tolerance of violence arises from reproduction of an unequal social order that is maintained through the duplicitous position of the residential school as simultaneously necessary and unnecessary, closed and open, violent and nurturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading is not only a mental decoding activity but also a social, material, bodily, and affective practice. It is learned; changes over time; varies across situations; and is crucial for academic institutions. Nonetheless, academics practice reading largely individually. Yet, reading remains an undervalued part of how professional research (work) is done. In this paper, we take a practice-oriented approach: How is reading enacted as a seemingly self-evident academic technique? Drawing on Science & Technology Studies and collective auto-ethnographic reflections of our readings in the RUSTlab at Ruhr University Bochum, we explore how reading is structured with respect to different goals—be it for critique, fun, teaching, or writing. We consider aspects of the material infrastructure such as pens and (missing) couches, and analyze how situations, bodies, and settings enact and afford different modes of reading. We organize the modes of reading into reading about, reading around, and reading aloud. This paper argues that reading is a craft that requires care and companionship, and that it matters who gets to read, when and where reading is done, and what the legitimate excuses for not reading are. We polemicize that academics would do well to bring reading practices from the individualized margins to the heart of collective exchange.

This paper presents a study of the experiences of five individuals who explore their unique relationship between music and spirituality. Each participant critically narrates their faith and beliefs and explores how these relate to their experiences with music. The paper begins with a brief exposition of the literature concerning music and spirituality and the linkages between the two. The methodology combines narrative and auto-ethnography, underpinned by a phenomenological approach to reflection on experiences. Using deep self-analysis, the five authors derive and discover lessons concerning their own relationship between faith, spirituality, and music. These are then analysed to produce common themes concerning the intertwining of spirituality with music. Finally, the conclusions present a novel contribution which includes lessons on how through self-exploration, one can use music and spirituality to repair and ultimately enrich the soul. The paper exposes the interplay between faith, spirituality and music, which will be of general interest and provide inspiration to those who intend to use music to enrich their lives and heal themselves.

Abstract There is an increased interest from both researchers and knowledge users to partner in research to generate meaningful research ideas, implement research projects, and disseminate research findings. There is accumulating research evidence to suggest the benefits of engaging children/youth with disabilities and their parents/families in research partnerships; however, less is known about the benefits of, and challenges to, engaging organizations as partners in research. The purpose of this commentary is to reflect on successful organizational partnership experiences from the perspectives of researchers at an internationally-recognized childhood disability research centre (CanChild), and to identify and share key ingredients for developing partnerships between organizations and academic institutions. A companion study is underway to examine partnership experiences with CanChild from the partners’ perspective. Four CanChild researchers and two co-facilitators participated in a collaborative auto-ethnography approach to share experiences with organizational research partnerships and to reflect, interpret, and synthesize common themes and lessons learned. The researchers and facilitators met virtually via Zoom for 105 min. Researchers were asked to discuss the following: the formation of their organizational partnerships; if/how partnerships evolved over time; if/how partnerships were sustained; and lessons learned about benefits and challenges to building research partnerships with organizations. The meeting was recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed by the facilitators to identify and synthesize common experiences and reflections. Multiple rounds of asynchronous reflection and feedback supported refinement of the final set of analytic themes. Researchers agreed that partnerships with organizations should be formed through a mutual interest, and that partnerships evolved by branching to include new organizations and researchers, while also involving trainees. Researchers identified the importance of defining roles and responsibilities of key individuals within each partnering group to sustain the partnership. Lessons learned from organizational partnerships included reciprocity between the partnering organization and academic institution, leveraging small pockets of funds to sustain a partnership over time, and building a strong rapport with individuals in a partnership. This commentary summarized lessons-learned and provided recommendations for researchers and organizations to consider when forming, growing, and sustaining research partnerships over time.

Scholarly conversations on immigration and racial classifications suggest that how migrants get racially classified by host societies reflects historical, socio-cultural, demographic and political peculiarities of the receiving countries. How migrants are racially categorized, for example, differs between the US, South Africa and Brazil. This paper builds these theoretical and empirical debates and conversations by making comparisons on how I am racially perceived in South Africa as ‘Coloured’ and how I would be racially classified in the US context as ‘Black’. The ideology one-drop rule classifies all Eritreans (including myself), Ethiopians and Somalis, in the US under the broad racial rubric ‘Black’ despite variations in phenotypic appearance. In South Africa, due to my curly hair texture, facial features and fair skin tone, I am usually socially perceived as ‘Coloured’, a category absent in the US, due to the absence of the principle of one drop rule. Drawing on secondary literature, my own experiences with racialization and the experiences of migrants in the US, I develop an analytical concept of ‘regionalizing race’, which I hope scholars of migration and racialization will adopt in analyzing and interpreting how migrants are differentially racially classified in different national contexts.

We are now at a transition point in autism conceptualisation, science, and clinical practise, where phenomenology could play a key role. This paper takes a broad view of the history of phenomenological perspectives on the autism concept and how this has evolved over time, including contemporaneous theory and methods. Early inquiry from a clinical perspective within the tradition of classical continental phenomenology, linked closely to the consideration of schizophrenia, is contrasted with emerging observations of child development and a period in the second half of the twentieth century of scientific inquiry into a behavioural autistic phenotype where there was little or no phenomenological aspect; a phenotype that has determined the recent scientific and clinical conceptualisation of autism within current nosology. We then mark a more recent reawakening of interdisciplinary interest in subjective experience and phenomenological inquiry, which itself coincides with the increasing prominence and salience of the neurodiversity movement, autistic advocacy, and critical autism studies. We review this emerging phenomenological work alongside a contemporaneous clinical phenomenology perspective and representations of autistic experience from within the extensive literature (including life writing) from autistic people themselves; all perspectives that we argue need now be brought into juxtaposition and dialogue as the field moves forward. We argue from this for a future which could build on such accounts at a greater scale, working toward a more co-constructed, systematic, representative, and empirical autistic phenomenology, which would include citizen and participatory science approaches. Success in this would not only mean that autistic experience and subjectivity would be re-integrated back into a shared understanding of the autism concept, but we also argue that there could be the eventual goal of an enhanced descriptive nosology, in which key subjective and phenomenological experiences, discriminating for autism, could be identified alongside current behavioural and developmental descriptors. Such progress could have major benefits, including increased mutual empathy and common language between professionals and the autistic community, the provision of crucial new foci for research through aspects of autistic experience previously neglected, and potential new supportive innovations for healthcare and education. We outline a programme and methodological considerations to this end.

In this article, we contest globalised notions of data as 'universally' beneficial, necessary and 'evidence-based'. We do so by drawing upon narrative accounts of the problematic ways data impact educators researching and working in university and schooling settings over time and in varied national contexts. We reveal how data are transient and often erroneous, even as data appear omnipresent and omnipotent. Employing an auto-ethnographic storytelling approach, we draw upon our diverse experiences as educators working within and across multiple national and subnational contexts – in England, Singapore, Bangladesh and Australia – to reflect on how data have reconstituted and recalibrated our experiences in school and university settings. We seek to break the 'myth' of data – that we cannot live without the supposedly complete construction of work and life that dominant, reductive assemblages of data provide. In doing so, we argue for the reimagination and demystification of broader data regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Age practices and their ritualized actions have been primarily based on the creation of sacred spaces through immediate interaction, proximity, affect, healing, bodily engagement, and emotional exchange. In the COVID 19 pandemic context, however, such spiritual intimacy has been challenged if not compromised. New Age practitioners have faced the necessity to become ritually and spiritually innovative and establish new forms of sacred spaces to accommodate their performances. Drawing on long-term fieldwork on the theme of New Age spirituality and healing in Lisbon, Portugal, and Athens, Greece, this article offers an account of how New Age spiritual creativity was performed in the context of the pandemic, while exploring how different yet intertwined sacred spaces are created, and the role that (auto)ethnographic embodiment and research knowledge plays in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the affective worlds of its two authors and our responses to personally significant moments when confronting the transatlantic slavery discourses of Liverpool. Inspired by non-representational thinking and the concept of affective atmosphere, we consider our traditional values and beliefs, rooted in the Chinese philosophical understanding of humanism, and reveal how these conflicted with the encountered slavery discourses and shaped the (non)representations of affective experience in slavery spaces. Our experiences suggest that affective encounters in these slavery spaces appear to represent a highly nuanced, complex and personalised assemblage of sensing, feeling and affecting, and some parts arrive much faster than our thoughts, reflections and rationalisation, but can be easily overlooked in verbal representations. This autoethnography further highlights the significance of visitors' personal characteristics (identity, gender, bodily capacity, and cultural values), their interaction with multiple-sensory input in the setting and the rhythms of drifting, in shaping affective conflicts and reconciliations at the newly-encountered components, situations and relations. This study also offers practical implications in terms of experience design and the destination management of dark and slavery tourism sites. Our experiences provide novel insights into why and how tourists interact with and make sense of the designed setting and objects around them, which can further inform tourism managers about their visitors' needs, motivations, desires and expectations. The findings and method of this study support the human-centered approach to dark tourism, suggesting that visitors' experiences as human beings rather than simply as consumers can inform such design. We should not only consider visitors' cognitive and emotional involvement in the place but also their embodied and deeper affective responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This auto-ethnographic essay draws upon Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge to discuss the condition of Indian women in the Humanities in academia today. While acknowledging the encouragingly gender-inclusive projections in India's National Education Policy vision statement from 2020, I argue for more probing engagement with the concrete reality of being a woman teacher and researcher in the increasingly competitive and corporatized milieu of higher education. My methodology has been a close reading of the NEP's vision statement to analyze recurrences of terms and concepts as pointers to its discursive field. I argue that this policy statement implicitly envisions an empowered new-age Indian woman teacher, notionally mother to all her pupils, aiding their awakening intuitively from the very heart of her experiences, skills, and memories. Against this somewhat idealized feminine ecology of the NEP in principle and spirit, I juxtapose the actual everyday choices and struggles of women in academic positions. Does the decolonization of education in spirit also impart actual transformative agency to women academics? Will women be listened to? Not one essential woman, but heterogeneous women--women across different strata, identities, professional spaces, and ideologies? Above all, my essay probes the challenges and dividends of transitioning to a more home-grown teaching and research methodology derived from current Western academic models. For instance, what forms and lines of interdisciplinarity could best serve the interest of quality control in research and teaching? In the third and last section, I argue that women are equal contributors in the discourse of academics in the future. We are committed stakeholders that can help enhance collective performance and efficiency in ways that are commensurate and compatible with our particular needs, contexts, restraints, aptitudes, and encumbrances. I conclude my essay by urging colleagues in academia, women and men, to recognize that we can truly deliver on this challenge only in a spirit of intellectual, ethical, and interpersonal collaboration and collegiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, author and artist Meena Murugesan analyzes their creative process and research in the making of Dravidian Futurities, a multi-channel video installation with live performance. Methodologies of auto-ethnography, visual aesthetics, embodied movement practices, Tamil historiographies, queer futurities, caste analysis, and poetics are applied to treat the issues at hand. Dravidian Futurities draws connections between communities of South Indian and Sri Lankan Shudra and Dalit caste backgrounds, Dravidian, and Afro-Indian peoples, depending on the historical era examined. As someone of the Shudra caste, the author draws connections between agriculture, land, and earth, as being rooted in Shudra identities, and in opposition to brahminical systems. Therefore, the movement forms of somatics, improvisation, and nature-based embodiment practices are investigated as possible embodied inroads to grapple with caste within brahminized bharatanatyam. Notions of futurity and place-making are unearthed from the depths of the Indian Ocean with a hypothetical sunken landmass called Lemuria or Kumari Kandam that might have once connected South India, Sri Lanka, and Madagascar. Dravidian Futurities also dreams into existence this speculative landmass as a possible utopia we might co-build, similar to that which Dalit mystic saint Guru Ravidas imagined five hundred years ago with Begumpura ("land without sorrow") as a casteless, stateless utopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This autoethnography chronicles an Afro-Polynesian femme scholar's struggle to secure funding for research due to bureaucratic violence and the strategic potential of Lordean counterstorying to write a way free for Black and Brown scholar-activists and community-based projects. Extending the work of previous scholars who discuss counterstory and institutional violence, this work uses re-imagination and creativity to mobilize radical research agendas geared towards empowering and amplifying community-based literacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Could the standardisation of language narrow disparities in achievement in education amongst people of different social class, and within and across ethnicities and genders, and could this have implications for injustices and inequities in wider society? In analysing socio-economic diversity through the lens of its correlation with language, this paper examines how the standardisation of language could be used as a means to reduce such diversity. It examines links between the standardisation of language, and the reduction of inequalities between socio-economic groups, in regard to achievement in education. It also examines the correlation between language and social class, and propensity towards being a perpetrator and/or victim of hostility and violence, as well as their relationship with health and life expectancy etc. The paper further examines the effect of the use of technology and teaching methods on the acquisition of knowledge, and how this impacts upon children of different social class within the learning environment. In order to help address some of these questions, an auto-ethnographic methodology is adopted with the aim of being able to explore, and reflect upon, personal experience, and to be able to weave greater understanding and connections between apparently disparate factors related to diversity, all through the lens of language and its relationship to aspects of culture relating to social class. Amongst its conclusions, the paper argues that the standardisation and enhancement of spoken language would narrow the disparities in academic achievement between socio-economic groups. The paper also argues that in order to challenge inequitable power structures which have arisen from historical injustices, then rather than concentrating on under-representation of groups of people within high status positions in society, the focus of diversity should be directed towards challenging the over representation, in a range of settings, of groups of people within low status positions in society.

“Cell-Out” is a performance, a collaborative investigative enactment of physical, spatial, and communicative mobility in urban areas, and an exploration of walking in the digital city through shifts of space, attention, and time. Claudia Brazzale and Leslie Satin approach walking as dancers whose embodied practices are based largely in Western contemporary dance techniques and somatic / contemplative forms, including early post-modern dance's cultivation of pedestrian movement; their scholarly work is grounded in autobiography and auto-ethnography. The piece centers on a series of compositional scores in which each writer directs the other toward specific actions, places, and areas of focus. Other parts of the piece contextualize and arise from these scores, weaving through the authors' scholarship on dance and space and flowing into their art lives and personal experience. Brazzale's and Satin's explorations of walking and writing as experiential, affective, digressive, phenomenological, anatomical, performative, mnemonic, and analytical emerge from and create a kind of double memoir, enacting their long-term, long-distance relationship and acknowledging the digital tools that support and (re)produce their intimacy--even as the Coronavirus pandemic, which erupted as they were completing their piece, dismantled intimacy worldwide.