Search

In this collaborative autoethnography, we unmask our experiences with sexual assault and harassment in academic contexts through the use of a note format. We describe moments characterized by shame and anger, as well as moments of disciplining when we called out untoward behavior. We call attention to bystanders by describing instances of sexual harassment and assault in an article that will be read primarily by academics. This represents a feminist response to sexual harassment and assault in the academy in the hopes of challenging the normalized behavior.

In this chapter, Adams, a gay cisman, provides an account of gay life as it has progressed through time, past the (arbitrary) age of 30. He describes moments of pain, resilience, and pride in order to challenge heteronormative expectations of relationships and promote new scripts for aging while/as gay. Adams demonstrates that gay life after 30 is possible and pleasurable.

In this definitive reference volume, almost fifty leading thinkers and practitioners of autoethnographic research-from four continents and a dozen disciplines-comprehensively cover its vision, opportunities and challenges. Chapters address the theory, history, and ethics of autoethnographic practice, representational and writing issues, the personal and relational concerns of the autoethnographer, and the link between researcher and social justice. A set of 13 exemplars show the use of these principles in action. Autoethnography is one of the most popularly practiced forms of qualitative research over the past 20 years, and this volume captures all its essential elements for graduate students and practicing researchers.

This chapter details the authors’ approach to doing autoethnographic research. After autoethnography is defined, its history and emergence are described within qualitative research in general and within psychology specifically. The chapter then proposes general guiding principles for those doing autoethnography, including using personal experience, acknowledging existing research, understanding and critiquing cultural experience, calling on insider knowledge, breaking silence, and maneuvering through pain, confusion, anger, and uncertainty. After a discussion of autoethnography as a process and as a product and as a method that can take a variety of representational forms, the chapter offers ways to evaluate and critique autoethnography. The chapter concludes with a discussion of autoethnography as an orientation to living and an approach that has the potential to make life better—for the writer, reader, participant, and larger culture.

A conversation between a mentor and mentee:MentorWhen do you plan on moving to Los Angeles? MenteeI moved back home to Chicago to work and save some money. My family is worried about L.A.—I know I ...

The author identifies key responsibilities in declaring, justifying, and advocating for autoethnography as an orientation to research, including the need to recognize various perspectives for doing autoethnography and establishing criteria for evaluating autoethnography.

In the past few decades, some ethnographers have approached going public with their ethnographic research. In particular, they began to investigate problems of significant interest, conduct fieldwork in everyday settings, and use both form and dissemination to engage nonacademic audiences. In this chapter, the authors discern characteristics of public ethnography and doing ethnography in public settings. They begin by defining “public ethnography” and illustrating the need to record happenings of contexts that cannot be easily captured with other research methods. They then discuss practices of always being in the field, observing others, taking notes, attending to everyday conversations, monitoring social media, synthesizing ideas, identifying injustices, and engaging extant research. They conclude by identifying considerations for crafting and disseminating representations of fieldwork for public, nonacademic audiences.

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 2009, I contacted an editor of one of the National Communication Association’s sanctioned journals to inquire about doing a literature review on transgender identities and experiences—a review t...

In Home, Uprooted, Devika Chawla combines personal/familial experiences with oral histories from refugees of the India–Pakistan Partition to offer compelling accounts of how people perform “home” a...

This essay is written in and as a queer fugue—a series of themes and variations on grief, on loss and remembering, on the constitutive and dispossessing dance of relationality, and on the possibilities of becoming and forgiving. It is an essay about public mourning, queer relationships, being undone by death and language, and about making a case for recognizing unrecognized and unspeakable grief. It is an essay that recognizes the debts we owe to those we’ve lost, celebrates the queer selves and lives we could not do without, and how the words and voices and lives of others who are not acknowledged as fully or equally human are significant and profound.

Situated against a pervasive and normative logic suggesting that bodies, and especially thin-and-fit bodies, matter most and ought to be attained, FatClub.com provokes a counterintuitive cultural scene. This virtual ethnography examines how members of the site jointly constitute community through an elaborate system of linguistic and embodied proweight cultural performances. In turn, these performances ecstatically cite, disidentify, and play with normative (gay male) health and beauty ideals. Moreover, they provide an exquisite instantiation of how culture and community are constraining, situated, and relative phenomena.

In this study, I describe the relationship between the Florida Aquarium's representation of a coral reef and the live reef that served as the model for the representation. I specifically illustrate how naming practices complicate the aquarium's stated purpose of environmental education. I conclude by suggesting ways the aquarium and other pro-environmental facilities can better manage environmental representation.

Familial experiences of sexuality, especially lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) sexualities, often have unique characteristics – characteristics that do not resemble the experiences of other identities such as gender, age, and ethnicity. With gender, for example, families often consist of men and women; being female or male is not necessarily deviant or inherently wrong, and there is an expectation that families will be composed of cisgender men and women.