Degrees of Separation

Abstract

This autoethnographic text invites readers into identity work at the interstices of growing up working class and becoming an academic. Influenced by mystory scholarship, the author has crafted a performance-oriented “ourstory” that blends academic, personal, biographical, and popular culture discourses. Following an introduction, the author presents four scenes chronicling her own and one research participant's moments from precollege through present day. The text uses a wideangle lens to view the social dimensions of being a first-generation college student and academic. In proximate existential moments, readers also move inward, being exposed to two vulnerable, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory “selves-in-process.” A critical text reflecting the belief that the ethnographic, aesthetic, and political can never be neatly separated, it seeks to provoke us to deconstruct the degrees of separation between private troubles and public issues.