Forge and Flex: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Resilience Among Indonesian PhD Mama Scholars

Converging evidence supports the idea that engaging in the arts can benefit mental health. However, the mechanisms underlying such effects are poorly understood. To gain insights that would be useful to the arts-in-health field, the current paper applied collaborative autoethnography to the questions, "How do artists manage their creative process? How might this process be helpful for adolescents with depression?" In an unstructured exchange that took place over 5years, the two authors (a poet/teaching artist and a child and adolescent psychiatrist/researcher) explored the intersection of the artist's strategies for creative practice and mental health. Personal narratives, analytic memos, and detailed conversations exchanged through emails were collected and reviewed through the reflexive lens of collaborative autoethnography, by exploring the artist author's personal experiences from her creative practice, and the child psychiatrist author's reflexive responses, drawing on her patient care experience. Through the conversations, both authors became aware of the connection between the goal of the artist (to create art) and the goal of the physician (to aid in healing). The authors extracted six strategies and developed a concept framework, "artist mindset," which also had significant potential relevance to adolescents who are navigating depression. The artist mindset, a set of strategies that can promote creative practice but also holds promise in application to navigating depression, offers a helpful framework and a unique approach to treatment.

Current life in the US under the COVID-19 pandemic makes visible the fragility of supportive structures for academics with childcare responsibilities. Particularly academic mothers are left grappling with the impact of social and institutional shifts that took place due to the global pandemic. We, two early career multinational and Muslim MotherScholars, ask ourselves how these shifts are affecting our own entanglements of scholarship, job market navigation, motherhood, childcare responsibilities and routines, family traditions, and religious observation through feminist autoethnography. We used the concept of “liminal space” as our theoretical foundation. Data were collected through journal entries and analytic memos, and four vignettes were composed to (re)present the analysis. The vignettes display how Western dominant and nondominant spaces inform the ways in which the authors’ identities are interloped, muted, contested, and thrown into tension with changing social and institutional expectations during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research has implications for higher education administrators who wish to gain a glimpse into the lived experiences and barriers of their international, Muslim, mothering employees, and for MotherScholars who live through similar complex and shifting identities to see validation and representation.

Using collaborative autoethnographic techniques, the authors explored the intersectionality of motherhood and academic career life during 2020, which was logistically and emotionally complex and deeply racialized. To engage in active reflexivity, the authors told their stories with the backdrop of their intersectional identities. Beginning with weekly solo journal entries, they sought to co-construct their experiences as wider commentary on several systemic challenges moms working as professors faced during a global health crisis and a racially inequitable country. Analyzed through a critical feminist theoretical lens, the data revealed stories and analyses of systemic injustices and pandemic pedagogy, unpacked using a combination of personal narratives, journal entries, and scholarly contexts, as each topic was experienced both similarly and differently by the authors. The authors found collaborative autoethnography a cathartic and therapeutic practice. One key takeaway was to elevate a humanizing pedagogy in each of their respective classrooms and spheres of influence.

Our work explores the impact of generative AI (GenAI) on academic life through the lenses of three female scholars. It highlights how the rapid rise of AI technologies has created pressure for faster productivity, leading to feelings of disconnection and overwhelm. In response, we advocate for embracing ‘slowness’ as an act of resistance to the fast-paced, neoliberal demands of academia and allows space for reflection and care. Slowness pushes to the margins, but it also encompasses a careful exploration of such margins as drivers of identity and collective belonging. Therefore, we purport that active slowness supports the construction of a postdigital positionality. To carry out our research work, we engaged in a conversation captured as a collaborative autoethnography. We exchanged 617 messages on Signal and met 5 times online taking individual and shared fieldnotes over the 8 months. Our analysis reveals four key phases in our collective narrative: the initial confrontation with the disruptive ‘tsunami’ of GenAI, the emergence of dilemmas in academic practice, moments of critical epiphany regarding our engagement with technology, and the envisioning of future practices that privilege ethical, inclusive, and context-sensitive approaches. Therefore, our approach to slowness prioritises human understanding, emotional well-being, and collaboration, emphasising the difficulties and the joy of embracing uniqueness and diversity. We discuss to which extent our exercise of slowness captured through a conversation as political choice for a research method can lead to an authentic critical stance toward the instrumental use of AI in academic practices. We conclude that slowness and care as active practice against the dominant AI-driven narrative, should be based on recognising the creative synergies in the margins reinforcing alternative (postdigital) positionalities, rather than just expressing stress, suffering, and misalignment with the ongoing, fast-paced trends.

Unpacking our experiences as trainee researchers navigating a global pandemic; in this research four researchers identify and interpret otherwise individual experiences through a collective lens. These shared responses are collated and understood through the multivocal method of what we term a “feminst collaborative auto-ethnography.” Relational ethics using a praxis of care, in line with feminist epistemology underpin the systematic analysis of our shared experiences to enhance intersubjectivity and the co-construction of knowledge. Individual reflections and collaborative sessions were utilized to immerse ourselves both situationally and critically into the pool of data. Concurrently creating and analyzing our collaborative inquiry. We utilized mind maps, probing, and reflexivity to engage with our individual and shared social, emotional, and structural challenges. Through analysis of the collaborative data we identified that we had all developed safety seeking strategies, and that a focused research method not only provided direction, but provided a support network. The researchers found that collaborative autoethnography is a useful and holistic method of understanding and navigating adversities in the PhD process, allowing for us to interpret multiple levels of adversity and support-strategies during Covid-19 times.

Introduction Consumer-led and collaborative research is consistent with occupational therapy principles of inclusion and client-centredness, and is increasingly valued in mental health. Our research team of three occupational therapists and three consumers was funded to conduct a consumer-led mental health service evaluation. Because of a lack of previous research to guide our practice, we engaged in a collaborative autoethnography to gather information about the process of consumer-led research. We discovered that the systematic reflective processes of collaborative autoethnography played a critical part in shaping the very experiences being investigated. This article describes the impact of using this systematic collaborative reflection on the process of consumer-led research. Method Data from weekly journal entries and quarterly focus groups were analysed using constant comparative analysis. Codes relating to experiences and impacts of the collaborative autoethnography were extracted for presentation in this article. Findings Our collaborative autoethnography activities provided unique opportunities that developed our shared understanding of consumer-led research in mental health, facilitated a respectful and open group culture and, ultimately, resulted in a more consumer-led research project. Conclusion Occupational therapists striving to include and empower service users in research and evaluation could benefit from adopting systematic collaborative, reflective techniques.

In earlier work1 collaborative autoethnography was identified as a viable methodology for researching stories that drew on lived experiences with domestic abuse. Collaborative autoethnography offers a method of working with women outside of academia who have experienced gender-based violence (GBV) and including them as co-researchers whose writings can and should be valued as academic research. In this article, also a collaborative autoethnography, the authors explore methods for storying autobiographical experiences of GBV as a potential way of reclaiming stories whilst navigating the legal, ethical, and moral dilemmas sometimes associated with autobiographical writing that might help to make these stories less difficult to write, and also read, avoiding stereotypes that have led to critique around battle-weary narratives of GBV2 and bad romance tropes.3 The authors argue that evocative texts drawing on lived experiences but layering the real with the imaginary, the remembered with the fictitious, can be more accessible to read and write. Cook and Fonow4 argue that feminist work is often creative and spontaneous, and this article will detail writing methods that were shared by the authors in creative workshops with survivors of GBV as part of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).5 They also share examples of their own stories that have been inspired by this approach as well as the challenges and motivations of working in this way.

This collaborative autoethnography (CAE) aims to explore our lived experiences as four female language teacher educators (LTEs) in tertiary-level education across different contexts (U.S., China, and Indonesia). Drawing upon the concepts of intersectionality, we report on our constructed identities at the intersections of diverse backgrounds (e.g. cultural, linguistic, gendered) and the impact of the intersectional identities on our practices in language teaching and/or teacher education. Our CAE reveals that identities are not shaped by discrete categories but by multiple intersecting factors, such as cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, while also highlighting the contextual dynamics of LTE identity negotiation. Further, our lived experiences indicate that marginalisation and empowerment are not mutually exclusive but coexist within our LTE identity construction. Despite the challenges we experienced as LTEs, we turned those challenges into resources to empower ourselves and students, specifically by agentively utilising asset-based pedagogical approaches, advocating for ourselves and students, and engaging in scholarship on bilingualism, translanguaging, and marginalisation. Lastly, the study provides implications for LTE education and research.

This collaborative autoethnography uses the prompt of “learning to drive” as a pivot point of critically remembering aspects of the authors being and becoming; from the earned autonomy of operating a vehicle to a broader sense of self-determination, social responsibility, and determined directionality as literal and figurative metaphor for life choices. The authors from diverse backgrounds working in the same academic institution engage the processes of reflectivity, reflexivity, and refractivity in autoethnography to theorize through lived experience. In the process, they bridge the gap between past, present, and beyond. The piece ends with prompts for others to tell critical stories of lived experience.

Using Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, and in particular the notion of the undivided life, to guide reflections through the process of collaborative autoethnography, we reflect on our lived experiences with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The central question being: How does Palmer’s idea of the undivided life enable SoTL scholars to explore notions of identity and integrity that are intertwined with our academic practice? Ultimately, we found that Palmer’s insights provoked us to think deeply about our identities, and while perhaps we did not always see ourselves on the paths he illuminates, his work, and our collaborative ethnographic process, helped us to illuminate our own paths. More specifically, we share five themes arising from our collaborative autoethnography related to the importance of context and positionality, defining a SoTL scholar, the power to diminish, the importance of relationships and community, and collaborative autoethnography as method and process. Our stories highlight the need for us to see our community as complex, messy, and deeply human, and we remind readers of the need to think about the ethics of all methods and the power in our everyday practice to include or exclude.

Using Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, and in particular the notion of the undivided life, to guide reflections through the process of collaborative autoethnography, we reflect on our lived experiences with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The central question being: How does Palmer’s idea of the undivided life enable SoTL scholars to explore notions of identity and integrity that are intertwined with our academic practice? Ultimately, we found that Palmer’s insights provoked us to think deeply about our identities, and while perhaps we did not always see ourselves on the paths he illuminates, his work, and our collaborative ethnographic process, helped us to illuminate our own paths. More specifically, we share five themes arising from our collaborative autoethnography related to the importance of context and positionality, defining a SoTL scholar, the power to diminish, the importance of relationships and community, and collaborative autoethnography as method and process. Our stories highlight the need for us to see our community as complex, messy, and deeply human, and we remind readers of the need to think about the ethics of all methods and the power in our everyday practice to include or exclude.

This chapter critically analyses challenges and opportunities of using collaborative autoethnography (CAE) while facing unexpected contexts, namely COVID-19-related social-distancing measures in Europe. We engage with CAE literature to explore the possibilities of sharing lived experiences and relationships in increasingly digitalised, socially distant conditions, our emotional development as individuals and as a team, and meanings of unexpected social changes. We document autoethnographic reflections from us as two female researchers during the COVID-19 European lockdowns, documenting how CAE enabled us to cope as well with the reopening of society. We reflect on the dynamics of distant relationship development, using diverse communication platforms given that, up to the present time, we have never met in person. Besides the COVID-19-related analytical work, we share insights from our day-to-day realities; the burdens and potentially traumatising events related to ‘COVID times’, like the proscription of routine social conduct, increased sanitation of public life, and emerging sociability. Significantly, this chapter contributes to the scant research on the ethics of CAE. We explore complexities associated with sharing lived experiences during unexpected crises events. We argue for a CAE approach that engages with micro-level interactions, reflective spaces and preparing researchers for being sensitive with participants in emergent contexts.

Three Korean female doctoral students studying at U.S. higher education institutions address our lived experiences in this paper. By drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Asian Critical Theory (AsianCrit), we reflected upon the feelings and experiences that we swallowed to survive. We used collaborative autoethnography with artistic methods, such as digital collage and poetry, to share how we have wrestled with feelings of shame when reckoning our embodied knowledge of race and racism. Using CRT and AsianCrit, we disrupted racial stereotypes regarding Asians and their invisibility in racial discourses. We end with suggestions for providing support to Asian international students exploring racialized discourse and positioning themselves as qualified professionals and political agents. In sharing our stories, we hope to illuminate lived experiences that have been neglected, misunderstood, silenced, and forgotten.

We draw from our lived experiences as foreign workers in the U.S. academy to explore how foreign academic worker identity is constituted in the contemporary United States. We practice intersectionality by considering how our experiences of “foreignness” in the academy are intertwined with other markers of difference, including race, gender, sexuality, national origin, and age. We also draw from tenets of collaborative autoethnography, producing insight on three constitutive features of foreign worker identity through four narratives that draw from different genres in the autoethnographic tradition. The article highlights the value of collaborative autoethnography as a method of inquiry and reflection in organizational studies, provides a rare account of the ways in which intersectionality is negotiated in everyday life by foreign-born academics, and identifies features of the performance of foreign worker identity related to spatiality, presence, and absence.

Interest in teacher educator research continues to grow with a focus on the influence of identity development on educator practices in teacher education programs. Scant in the research, however, is an awareness about how life experiences with marginalization contribute toward the development of teacher educators’ identities, particularly those focused on social justice, inclusion and individual dignity. In this study, collaborative autoethnography, an emerging qualitative method involving two or more researchers sharing their personal and professional narratives around particular topics, is utilized to explore the individual and collective experiences with marginalization of five teacher educators, and the influences of these experiences on their professional identities and teaching practices in education preparation programs in the United States. Implications for research and practice are discussed.