Autoethnographic Stories Research Articles

Curating cognition in higher degree art education

This article shares research, an empirical psychological case study, about cognition in higher degree art education. It proposes cognitive curation as a concept and practice that can develop knowledge and learning autonomy in and beyond the academy. Informed by the autoethnographic stories, interviews, and artworks of three academic art educators, this article’s research demonstrates how cognition and its curation can manifest and develop in the teaching, research, and practice of higher degree art education. Open coding and framework alignment (cognitive, nexus orientated and visual) helped understand, locate, and exemplify cognition and curation in the research. Informed by the data, this article acknowledges how movement, identities, and frameworks, as learning strategies, can help facilitate cognition and cognitive curation. Cognitive curation provides means to responsibly form and follow learning, it is consequently relevant to the arts, education, and life. Art education’s cognitive value is often questioned, this article dialogically contributes to the defense of its cognitive integrity whilst foregrounding cognitive curation.

A Woman’s Journey of Decolonization and Indigenous Amazigh Identity

This article is a reflection on my journey as an Indigenous Amazigh woman. I employ autoethnographic stories to make meaning of my narrative. The stories I tell of my ethnic identity will hopefully contribute to a discussion about decolonization and Indigeneity, whereby I mean to regain my Indigenous self and make meaning of my own experiences and history as an Amazigh person, which requires that I engage in memory work to claim my Indigenous voice as an Amazigh. In adopting this framework, I center my Indigenous self. Indigenous Amazigh autoethnography can allow diverse Amazigh communities to engage in making meaning of their own experiences. The stories we tell are a source of agency and community, and engaging in this type of inquiry will set a stage for Amazigh people to gain their own agency and accountability for the stories they tell about themselves and in relation to their Amazigh communities.

Turning to Greet the Unheard, Unseen, and Unknown in Western Thought: Autoethnographic Stories of Learning with the Blackfoot

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has calls to action for the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges and teaching practices in classrooms. Western educators have different degrees of willingness, understanding, and skill in teaching Indigenous concepts and their teaching practices can be superficial. Highlighting autoethnographic accounts of learning from Blackfoot Elders through Indigenous land-based pedagogy with current literature review data, I argue that Western educators must understand that the more-than-human entities are animate and have agency in teaching and healing people. Findings suggest that all students benefit from the wise teaching practices of inviting the more-than-human as co-teachers. Key words: Indigenous education, Indigenous land-based pedagogy, Blackfoot, more-than-human, autoethnography La Commission de vérité et de réconciliation du Canada a lancé des appels à l'action pour l'intégration des connaissances et des pratiques d'enseignement autochtones dans les salles de classe. Les éducateurs occidentaux n'ont pas tous la même volonté, la même compréhension et les mêmes compétences pour enseigner les concepts autochtones, et leurs pratiques d'enseignement peuvent être superficielles. En mettant en évidence les récits autoethnographiques de l'apprentissage auprès des aînés pieds-noirs par le biais d'une pédagogie autochtone basée sur la terre, ainsi que les données d’une analyse documentaire actuelle, je soutiens que les éducateurs occidentaux doivent comprendre que les entités plus qu'humaines sont animées et ont un pouvoir d'action dans l'enseignement et dans la guérison des personnes. Les résultats suggèrent que tous les élèves bénéficient des pratiques d'enseignement sages qui consistent à inviter les entités plus qu'humaines en tant que co-enseignants. Mots clés : éducation autochtone, pédagogie autochtone basée sur la terre, Pieds-Noirs, plus-que-humain, autoethnographie

An Introduction to Responding Autoethnography

In this article, I introduce the concept of responding autoethnography. The immediate inspiration for this concept was Ellis’s text on the amassing of many autoethnographic stories to generate collective consciousness. In my text, I present a different approach to collective consciousness and the relationship between stories: that is, collective consciousness is not a fusion of horizons; it is not a unified story, but a dirty, chaotic, pulsating, cluster of diverse elements. It is not a collective consciousness in the Marxist sense, but a form close to the Deleuzian complex. The second source was the issue of taking into account other autoethnographic texts so as not to reduce them. Responding autoethnography would be another way of taking into account the voices of other researchers, a form of answering beyond the dominant way of appropriating someone else’s thought. I will present responding autoethnography on the example of experiencing the pandemic.

Healing the spirit:

Liberation is the act of setting free from internal and social oppression (Afuape, 2011), in 2019 it was the Liberation Trail fire that raged through our place, turning the living essence of our livelihood, and belongings to dust. The dust had barely settled when the torrential rains drenched the remains, weeping over the ashes. These ashes were not just of things, houses, and furniture, but also of trees, ferns, and animals of all sizes. Next, it was isolation and fear that arose from the ashes in the form of Coronavirus (COVID-19 virus). Isolating people from the natural environment and from each other. Through these transmutations, we relied upon the resilient nature of the human spirit to survive. This autoethnographic story explores human resilience in the face of personal and global loss. The power of storytelling is an ancient tradition, stemming from a human need to make meaning of the lived experience. Each person who tells a story speaks from their ‘biographical position’ and is unique as the storyteller (Denzin, 2014). Stories, or narratives, assisted in the survival of cultures by retelling warnings of potential threats. They are intrinsic to all cultures, whether they are written or verbal. The act of storytelling can impart a metaphysical presence that can provide a sense of spirituality in the communication process (Snyder & Lindquist, 2006; Uys, 2014). Storytelling has been described as an expression of human consciousness and as such, can guide the person towards healing the spirit, and liberating from trauma (Carter,2019).

Border Rioting and Crossings Between Disciplines and Professions, Countries and Cultures, Science and Society: An Assemblage of Autoethnographic Stories From the High North

We are seven experienced academics and researchers from the high north. All within the field of education. We represent different disciplines, countries, and cultures. What we have in common is a wish to cross borders, collaborate, and learn: make space for storied experiences. Our stories are open ended—we start and end in complexities, and embedded in some sort of post- or trans- perspective be it modernisms, -structuralisms, -humanisms, -colonialisms, -feminisms . . . No conclusions or commonalities are necessary. Rather, we want to draw attention to the metatextualities and freedoms of our storying and the inseparability of opposites. We are learning academics beginning where we are. We are learning academics wanting lives of becoming rather than copying or reinforcing what is already there.

Rethinking professional identity formation amidst protests and social upheaval: a journey in Africa

The under-representation of minoritized or previously oppressed groups in research challenges the current universal understanding of professional identity formation (PIF). To date, there has been no recognition of an African influence on PIF, which is crucial for understanding this phenomenon in places like South Africa, a society in which the inequity of the apartheid era still prevails. In addition, there is little data examining how social upheaval could impact PIF. This study uses interviews with medical students to explore PIF within the context of social upheaval during the 2015–2016 protests that rocked South Africa when students challenged asymmetries of power and privilege that persisted long after the country’s democratic transition. The combination of the primary author’s autoethnographic story, weaved into the South African sociohistorical context and ubuntu philosophy, contributes to this study of PIF in the South African context. The use of an African metaphor allowed the reorientation of PIF to reflect the influence of an ubuntu-based value system. Using the calabash as a metaphor, participants’ experiences were framed and organized in two ways: a calabash worldview and the campus calabash. The calabash worldview is a multidimensional mixture of values that include ubuntu, reflections of traditional childhoods, and the image of women as igneous rocks, which recognizes the power and influence on PIF of the women who raised the participants. Introducing an African ubuntu-based perspective into the PIF discourse may redirect the acknowledgement of context and local reality in developing professional identity.

Crossing Over: An International Student’s Experiences and Musings in Recent Times

Crossing Over: An International Student’s Experiences and Musings in Recent Times

Review: Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories, by Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis

Review: <i>Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories</i>, by Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis

Storytelling content, contexts, and controversies

The performance of autoethnographic storytelling can amplify the voices of those who are often unheard, silenced, or marginalized. Moreover, personal storytelling in appropriate contexts can provide a forum for sharing the previously unspoken or unspeakable that, when shared, can begin to heal the teller and promote social justice and societal change. Yet, not all contexts are are appropriate and not all stories are safe to share. Thus, telling autoethnographic stories can present ethical concerns for which there are no pat answers or one-size-fits-all solutions. This article discusses a few of these concerns.

Shades of Invisibility

Shades of Invisibility is an ongoing experimental artist’s documentation of my practice in making Chernobyl Journey, an activist film that I have been working on for twelve years. In Chernobyl Journey live action tells the story of my four trips to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone between 2009 and 2015 in search of rare Przewalski Horses, while animation is used to subversively unravel this apparently straightforward and chronological story backwards, tracing my fascination for the Exclusion Zone back to memories of an acute and life-changing illness in my own timeline from May to August 1986. In the film, animation is used not only to portray my inner private world of sensations, emotions and memories, but also to trace the slow process of arriving at self-knowledge through unravelling invisibilities of a very external and political nature. However, it is not the animation itself that makes the film experimental and subversive, but the way in which the animation is intimately woven into the live action footage. Through methods of compositing and blending, a counter historical narrative is inscribed into the fabric and the forbidden spaces of the two landscapes my auto-ethnographic story inhabits. As well as providing an outlet for my counter historical auto-ethnographic story, Chernobyl Journey also debunks the myth that nature will spring back like a lightly trodden on blade of grass, even after the worst excesses of human exploitation, extraction and environmental disaster. Shades of Invisibility is informed and inspired by my reading of New Materialist texts, in particular Jane Bennett’s ‘Vibrant Matter’. In the text I attempt to explore the efficacy of agencies other than my own will upon my art, using invisibility as a linking theme to create a network of interlocking pathways into subject matter that is dense, multi-layered, interdisciplinary, complex and sometimes politically taboo. My approach to documentation is activist in itself, as it questions the hylomorphic and anthropocentric world view that underpins auteur theory. I argue that this model of creativity based on the unrestrained and unaccountable power of the human individual’s will mirrors the neo-liberal model of unrestrained extractive capitalism that is contributing so much to our present reality of climate crisis, loss of species diversity and global injustice.

CO-llaborative VI-rtual D-esign: A Collaborative Autoethnography on Conducting Exclusively Online, Data-Led Collaborations in the Creative Industries

This collaborative autoethnographic story of #DataCreativities articulates data traces found within the rapid move online in education and creative sectors in Melbourne, Australia. As a result of the lockdowns imposed to combat the initial spread of COVID-19, this collaboratory began within the anxieties of 2020. #DataCreativities takes a data-related approach to understanding the fast-paced shift to making, learning, teaching, and living in a crisis through research and art. Twelve months on, we figure (out) our own data and practice. We ask: What does CO-llaborative VI-rtual D-esign look like, how can it be established, and how can it be sustained?

Autoethnographic stories for self and environment: a reflective pedagogy to advance ‘environmental awareness’ in student outdoor practitioners

ABSTRACT There is increasing pressure on academic staff to enhance the graduate capabilities of students, rendering them employable as morally informed global citizens, in addition to enhancing their disciplinary knowledge, reflective practice and understanding. The BA Outdoor Adventure Education degree programme at Plymouth Marjon University, includes the module, Environmental Awareness through Adventure Sport, as one focus to engage students in the environmental ethics discourse of outdoor adventure and explore how adventure activities are managed with specific consideration to ethical environmental practices (Module Descriptor, 2016). We aim to achieve this through learning, teaching and assessment that includes journaling and autoethnography as pedagogy and research method. This approach enables students to experience nature through an adventure activity, in this instance, rock climbing. This is a human experience in a social and cultural context, in, of and for nature. Students are asked to engage with nature ‘making-meaning in, about, and for the various environments’ as outdoor practitioners and leaders. These lived experiences in nature have prompted us to develop a framework where future students and other outdoor leaders can develop understanding and interrogate, the multiple, complex and nuanced ways outdoor activities can engage people with nature.

Straddling Differences: Celebrating Contradictions and Confusion at the Frontera

A yearlong collective auto-ethnographic stories of three colleagues at a Hispanic Serving Institution at the U.S.–Mexican frontera culminated in the realization that our disparate experiences, the multiple voices used in articulating these, and the diverse ways these manifested in classroom practices and interactions had crafted the only academic space where we-three felt to belong.

Storycircling the Virtual: Creating Space in a Pandemic with Storyscope

Stories offer time and space for connection. This has been particularly true during social distancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In this collective autoethnographic story, we explore how generative energies of storytelling and storylistening emerge within communities via virtual storytelling. With COVID-19 being a catalyst for change, we share our adaptation of the Storyscope Project story circles to facilitate connection through a virtual space. Our stories within this work reflect our experience of virtual Storyscope in the roles of host, facilitator, participant, and educator. Additionally, the collaborative process of our writing mirrors the unfolding of virtual Storyscope story circles. In other words, the practices of virtual storytelling and storylistening guided our inquiry and evolving discussion of a similarly evolving practice.

Revealing colonial power relations in early childhood policy making: An autoethnographic story on selective evidence

The COVID-19 pandemic exposes uncertainty, instability and glaring inequality that requires urgent global policy decisions. Historically, bureaucrats regard uncertainty as the enemy and look for tested solutions (Stevens, 2011). In contrast, Fielding &amp; Moss (2010) acknowledge an uncertain future and encourage shifting policy making towards the search for possibilities instead of replicating singular solutions. Escobar (2020) advocates for pluriversal politics, with many possibilities created through collective decision-making by autonomous interlinked networks. In this paper, I combine autoethnography with policy analysis drawing on my own experience in South African early childhood policy making. I argue for a fresh decolonial debate about early childhood policy to replace dominant imported evidence-based narratives. I pay attention to power relations and examine, not only the content of evidence, but who has authority to speak (Mignolo, 2007). I introduce the bottom-up appreciative participatory dialogical policy making in the Gauteng Impilo project (1996 - 2000), as one attempt to resist the dominant policy trajectory. Local networks, that can inform policy making and resource allocation though conversation and action, emerged from this experience. This article invites urgent inclusive policy debate that expands choices and can produce cumulative worthwhile change and new learnings to birth a better society.

Instantáneas de una pandemia. Mirar en un régimen de confinamiento.

En este texto de ensayo y de manera reflexiva planteamos cómo es una nueva tecnología social que denominamos Régimen de confinamiento, y que se ha usado durante la actual pandemia. A través de un relato autoetnográfico y autoreferencial, planteado en forma de instantáneas en la vida de una mujer encerrada en una ciudad de la argentina actual. Así desgranamos la vida en lo doméstico, las ideas de género, de trabajo, de edad en lo cotidiano. Se revela la relación con los medios, en las redes sociales y con las nuevas formas de biopolítica. Este trabajo da cuenta de un momento en que todo queda en suspenso y da tiempo, consiguientemente, a ver en qué mundo vivimos, cómo es nuestra vida interior y su relación económico-política con el afuera. Un momento privilegiado para pensar y preguntarnos.

Making meaning of being bereaved by suicide: an everyday experience

ABSTRACT This autoethnography explores the experience of societal meanings of suicide from the perspective of people bereaved by suicide. The research focuses on three autoethnographic stories of everyday experiences in which personal meaning making and societal meanings of suicide intersect in contemporary Australian settings. Personal perspectives are positioned alongside broader discussions of suicide taboo to consider the implications for agency and meaning making. Key differences between conventional notions of stigma and structural stigma, and ways in which suicide taboo influences meaning making for people bereaved by suicide are explored. The paper proposes a recasting of action previously framed as internalised stigma as proactive self-preservation by people bereaved by suicide. It concludes by arguing that building capacity to see the societal taboos of suicide creates opportunities for strengthening agency in personal narratives of bereavement by suicide.

Conectando miradas. Una autoetnografía del encuentro intercultural artístico

El siguiente trabajo ofrece un acercamiento etnográfico sobre el valor de la interculturalidad y las posibilidades de transformación de la mirada en la tarea psicopedagógica, a partir de la experiencia artística y la pedagogía del encuentro. Se describen, a través del relato autoetnográfico, experiencias educativas interculturales realizadas en Alcalà de Xivert (España) y en Gandiol (Senegal) que ponen en relación el arte con el encuentro entre culturas, destacando su capacidad de mostrar la polivalencia de los materiales a partir del arte del reciclaje y la reutilización. Este estudio, permite reflexionar sobre la transformación en la mirada psicopedagógica y visibilizar, explicar y comprender los aprendizajes producidos, a través de la descripción de los choques culturales vividos. Como conclusión se muestra la relevancia de las prácticas creativas que propician el encuentro intercultural puesto que favorecen una educación inclusiva, ecológica y sostenible tanto en la persona como en su entorno.

Endings and Beginnings: An Autoethnography of a Father’s Journey through His Son’s Madness, Loss, and a Quest for Meaning

In our society, individuals with mental illness often are stigmatized due to misunderstanding and fear. Families with a member diagnosed as a person with mental illness may find themselves forced to restructure themselves around the idea that they are now coping with a family member who may be subject to social stigma and who may draw them into that same negative framework. In this autoethnographic story, I recall and describe the moment my relationship with my son changed forever—the moment he revealed his mental illness to me. This moment altered my own life course—from businessman, to academic, to wounded storyteller. Personally, transformative experiences like mine tend to create writers because we feel compelled to share our experiences in the form of stories. This is my story, but it could be the story of any parent and child in any family.