Brown Boxes: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Cultural Identity and Fluid Positionality

Abstract

Through personal vignettes, the author explores how racial, religious, and citizenship aspects of cultural identity shift in meaning both across the lifespan and across borders. The author evokes tension and growth in the vignettes to communicate a felt understanding of the emotional implications of colonial displacement, offering an opportunity for readers to resonate with the diasporic experience. The author further calls for social scientists to reframe positionality as a persistent reflexive process that is as fluid and dynamic as we are (rather than a methods section feature) and similarly reframe diversity to find new ways to relate to one another.