Stacy Holman Jones

Marc Pruyn

This book addresses and demonstrates the importance of critical approaches to autoethnography, particularly the commitment that such approaches make to theorizing the personal and to creating work that embodies a social justice ethos. Arts-based and practice-led approaches to this work allow the explanatory power of critical theory to be linked with creative, aesthetically engaging, and personal examples of the ideas at work. By making use of personal stories, critical autoethnography also allows for commenting on, critiquing, and transforming damaging and unjust cultural beliefs and practices by questioning and problematizing the relationships of power that are bound up in these selves, cultures and practices. The essays in this volume provide readers with work that demonstrates how critical autoethnography offers researchers and scholars across multiple disciplines a method for creatively putting critical theory into action. The book will be vital reading for students, researchers and scholars working in the fields of education, communication studies, sociology and cultural anthropology, and the performing arts.

Critical Autoethnography, Performance, and Pedagogy

Creative Selves / Creative Cultures

Anne Harris

Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies invites readers to think with affect about performance, pedagogies and their inherent activist, embodied and collective natures. It works across multiple spheres to help readers understand how to deploy affective approaches rather than to simply think with affect theory about traditional methods. The book is structured and curated across three main thematic sections: affective movements, methods and pedagogies, each of which treats the core explorations of affect and performance through a different perspective. It is concerned with the ways performance and theatrical methods work with and through a theoretics of affect. The sixteen chapters include work that models theoretical practices in writing, and demonstrates how theorising affect and its methods is itself a performative practice. The contributors offer rich examples from diverse geopolitical as well as disciplinary contexts, innovative methods, and finally, intersectional theoretics. This collection will be of interest to higher education students exploring methodologies, and academic researchers and teachers in the fields of performance studies, communication, critical studies, sociology and the arts.

Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies

Anne M. Harris

Sandra L. Faulkner

Eloise D. Brook

At a time of increasingly diverse and dynamic debates on the intersections of contemporary LGBTQ rights, trans* visibility, same-sex families, and sexualities education, there is surprisingly little writing on what it means to queer notions of family and kinship networks in global context. Building on the recent wave of scholarship on queerness in families and how families intersect with schools, schooling and educational institutions more broadly, this book considers how we are taught to enact family at home, at school and through the media, and how this pedagogy has shifted and changed over time. Conceived as a collection of keywords that take up the vocabulary of queerness, queering practices, and queer families, the authors employ a nuanced intersectional approach to connect the damaging and persistent invisibility of their subject to the complex and dominant and normalizing discourses of marriage and family. Offering post-structural, post-humanist, and new materialist perspectives on kinship and the family, this book moves the conversation forward by critically interrogating and expanding upon current knowledges about gender diversity, queer kinship, and pedagogy.

Keywords

Queering Families, Schooling Publics

Tony E. Adams

Carolyn Ellis

The second edition of the award-winning Handbook of Autoethnography is a thematically organized volume that contextualizes contemporary practices of autoethnography and examines how the field has developed since the publication of the first edition in 2013. Throughout, contributors identify key autoethnographic themes and commitments and offer examples of diverse, thoughtful, effective, applied, and innovative autoethnography. The second edition is organized into five sections: In Section 1, Doing Autoethnography, contributors explore definitions of autoethnography, identify and demonstrate key features of autoethnography, and engage philosophical, relational, cultural, and ethical foundations of autoethnographic practice. In Section 2, Representing Autoethnography, contributors discuss forms and techniques for the process and craft of creating autoethnographic projects, using various media in/as autoethnography, and marking and making visible particular identities, knowledges, and voices. In Section 3, Teaching, Evaluating, and Publishing Autoethnography, contributors focus on supporting and supervising autoethnographic projects. They also offer perspectives on publishing and evaluating autoethnography. In Section 4, Challenges and Futures of Autoethnography, contributors consider contemporary challenges for autoethnography, including understanding autoethnography as a feminist, posthumanist, and decolonialist practice, as well as a method for studying texts, translations, and traumas. The volume concludes with Section 5, Autoethnographic Exemplars, a collection of sixteen classic and contemporary texts that can serve as models of autoethnographic scholarship. With contributions from more than 50 authors representing more than a dozen disciplines and writing from various locations around the world, the handbook develops, refines, and expands autoethnographic inquiry and qualitative research. This text will be a primary resource for novice and advanced researchers alike in a wide range of social science disciplines.

Handbook of Autoethnography

Queering Autoethnography articulates for the first time the possibilities and politics of queering autoethnography, both in theoretical terms and as an intervention into narratives and cultures of apology, shame and fear. Despite the so-called mainstreaming of same-sex relationships and trans* visibility, many within gender’s ‘liminal zone’ remain invisible and unrecognized, existing somewhere outside of heteronormative relationships and institutions. At the same time, the political and scholarly potential of autoethnography is expanding, particularly in its potential to evoke empathic and affective responses at a time of public numbness, a practice crucial to making scholarly research relevant to the work of global citizenship and crafting meaningful lives. This volume considers flash points in contemporary scholarly and popular culture such as queer memorializing and mourning; unintelligibility and monstrosity; physical, digital and cultural transformations of queer lives and bodies; the power and danger wrought in the public assembly of queer people in a culture of massacre; and the promise of queer futurities in the contemporary moment. It also makes original theoretical contributions that include concepts such as massacre culture, queer terror, mundane annihilations, and activist affect. The authors write these ideas in action, joining theory and story as a contact zone for analysis, critique and change.

Queering Autoethnography

Devika Chawla

Notions of home are of increasing concern to persons who are interested in the unfolding narratives of inhabitation, displacement and dislocation, and exile. Home is viewed as a multidimensional theoretical concept that can have contradictory meanings; homes may be understood as spaces as well as places, and be associated with feelings, practices, and active states of being and moving in the world. In this book, we offer a window into the distinct ways that home is theorized and conceptualized across disciplines. The essays in this volume pose and answer the following critical and communicative questions about home: 1) How do people “speak” and “story” home in their everyday lives? And why? 2) Why and how is home—as a material presence, as a sense and feeling, or as an absence—central to our notion of who we are, or who we want to become as individuals, and in relation to others? 3) What is the theoretical purchase in making home as a “unit of analysis” in our fields of study? This collection engages home from diverse contexts and disparate philosophical underpinnings; at the same time the essays converse with each other by centering their foci on the relationship between home, place, identity, and exile. Home—how we experience it and what it that says about the “selves” we come to occupy—is an exigent question of our contemporary moment. Place, Identity, Exile: Storying Home Spaces delivers timely and critical perspectives on these important questions.

Place, Identity, Exile

Stories of Home

Tony E Adams

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.

Stacy Linn Holman Jones

Autoethnography is a method of research that involves describing and analyzing personal experiences in order to understand cultural experiences. The method challenges canonical ways of doing research and recognizes how personal experience influences the research process. Autoethnography acknowledges and accomodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher's influence on research. In this book, the authors provide a historical and conceptual overview of autoethnography. They share their stories of coming to autoethnography and identify key concerns and considerations that led to the development of the method. Next, they outline the purposes and practices--the core ideals--of autoethnography, how autoethnographers can accomplish these ideals, and why researchers might choose to do autoethnography. They describe the processes of doing autoethnography, conducting fieldwork, discussing ethics in research, and interpreting and analyzing personal experience, and they explore the various modes and techniques used and involved in writing autoethnography. They conclude with goals for creating and assessing autoethnography and describe the future of autoethnographic inquiry. Throughout, the authors provide numerous examples of their work and share key resources. This book will serve as both a guide to the practices of doing autoethnography and an exemplar of autoethnographic research processes and representations.

Autoethnography

Fetaui Iosefo

Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography is the first critical autoethnography compilation from the global south, bringing together indigenous, non-indigenous, Pasifika, and other diverse voices which expand established understandings of autoethnography as a critical, creative methodology. The book centres around the traditional practice of ‘wayfinding’ as a Pacific indigenous way of being and knowing, and this volume manifests traditional knowledges, genealogies, and intercultural activist voices through critical autoethnography. The chapters in the collection reflect critical autoethnographic journeys that explore key issues such as space/place belonging, decolonizing the academy, institutional racism, neoliberalism, gender inequity, activism, and education reform. This book will be a valuable teaching and research resource for researchers and students in a wide range of disciplines and contexts. For those interested in expanding their cultural, personal, and scholarly knowledge of the global south, this volume foregrounds the vast array of traditional knowledges and the ways in which they are changing academic spaces and knowledge creation through braiding old and new. This volume is unique and timely in its ability to highlight the ways in which indigenous and allied voices from the diverse global south demonstrate the ways in which the onto-epistemologies of diverse cultures, and the work of critical autoethnography, function as parallel, and mutually informing, projects.

Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography

With an ethnographer's eye, Stacy Holman Jones provides a cultural critique of torch singing—describing the genre as a rich drama of passiveness, deception, desire, and resistance.

Performing Resistance and Desire from Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf

Torch Singing

The Queer Life of Things takes up new materialism and posthumanism as a queer intervention into the devaluing and degradation of some human, animal, and plant lives and ways of living. Through a sustained and vibrant encounter with things that matter, this book offers readers an affective and more-than-human mode of activism for the 21st century.

Stacy Holman Jones

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