Changing Consciousness: Autoethnographic Mapping in a Dialog Group

This article introduces a pedagogical tool for raising critical consciousness and nurturing resistance to discrimination. "Autoethnographic mapping," integrating guided cognitive mapping and autoethnographies, has been implemented for a decade now within the framework of a college course occasioning dialogue between Palestinian Arab and Jewish students in Israel. Participants using the tool in an extended encounter between students from groups embroiled in political conflict have begun to theorize the microgeographies and stories of their everyday existence, gaining nuanced, non-standard insights into how conflict informs lives and selves. Employing the technique in the contact zone of guided encounters, students tend to re-inscribe identities upon a socio-political context, discovering the fluidity of belonging and destabilizing discursive structures. The paper outlines the course, sketches the tool and its theoretical underpinnings and describes some of the results it's achieved through a spectrum of illustrative instances.