Autoethnographic Vignettes Research Articles

Surviving academia: Narratives on identity work and intersectionality

AbstractThis paper examines the lived experiences of four early career researchers (ECRs), from various intersecting backgrounds, who pursued their degrees at a prestigious UK university. Bonded through solidarity and care, the authors came together in an online writing group (OWG), which serves as a means of liberation from structural, colonial, and patriarchal oppression. Built upon autoethnographic vignettes, this paper reveals fragile narratives to capture subjective experiences of neglect through the lens of intersectionality and Goffmanian “passing” and “revealing”. Motivated to explore the coping mechanisms of marginalized ECRs, this paper's co‐constructed data collection and co‐generative analysis unpack how a meso‐organization (here, the OWG) allows foreign identities to transcend the constraints of the expected academic professional identity; thus freeing authors from stigma. This paper calls for help and advocates for the urgency of support groups for ECRs as they face issues around finances, political conflicts, and family from pre‐ to post‐COVID‐19 pandemic. Additionally, the research challenges internalized norms of academic productivity and responsibilization and calls for a re‐examination of systemic inequalities. By advocating for collaborative autoethnography and embodied personal storytelling, this study contributes to a richer, more inclusive exploration of intersectionality in academia and emphasizes the need for structural reforms to create more equitable academic environments.

Empowering the already powerful? A feminist intersectional analysis of critical management education in a business school

This article investigates the possibility of critical management education to transform management education, that is, expose the ethicopolitical nature of managerial knowledge and practice, and empower students to act for social justice, in the context of a business school. Drawing on a conceptual framework on power rooted in Black feminism, we analyze three autoethnographic vignettes narrating our experience of teaching about discrimination and sexism, using participative methods inspired by pragmatic and radical critical management education, in a French business school. Our study shows that participative methodologies can empower the powerful and disempower the powerless and entrench rather than destabilize the neoliberal status quo in our classrooms. We empirically describe how participative methodologies can reinforce rather than challenge existing power relations connected to gender, race and class, as well as the neoliberalization of management education. We contribute to the literature on CME by empirically demonstrating that participative methodologies can be co-opted within business schools, thus highlighting a dark side of pragmatic critical management education and providing a feminist intersectional reading that goes beyond critical management education’s dominant focus on teacher/students power dynamics. Our work also advances scholarship on intellectual activism as we reflect on the conditions to sustain critical engagement as feminist teachers and writers.

“Who am I?”: an autoethnographic self-study on teacher identity and emotional labour of a volunteer teacher during COVID-19

ABSTRACT Teachers may undergo emotional and identity dissonance during professional practice due to various personal and contextual factors. These types of dissonance may provide opportunities for teachers to address challenges, thus enabling personal transformation and professional development. Despite a surge in research interest in teacher identity and emotional labour, few studies have used an autoethnographic lens. In this autoethnographic paper, I share my lived experiences as a volunteer teacher during campus closure from March to May 2022 in Changchun, China, a COVID-19 pandemic hotspot in the aforementioned period. I conducted an exploration of my emotion management processes in negotiating conflicts between my teacher and volunteer identities and the challenges associated with online teaching and volunteering activities. Thematic analyses of my reflective journals revealed three strands of emotional/identity dissonance involved in online teaching, volunteer work and final exams. The autoethnographic vignettes include epiphanic moments highlighting the identity dissonance and adverse challenges that led to negative emotions and, in turn, emotional labour. The findings reveal how my emotional labour prompted the construction and negotiation of volunteer teacher identity. This study confirms the importance of engaging in self-reflective narration to cope with challenges and the implications of this process for teachers in emotional quandaries.

The potential of collaborative online international learning as a border thinking third space for global citizenship education

In this article, we examine the potential of collaborative online international learning as a borderland third space for global citizenship education. Border thinking is used as a mode of critical questioning and reflection of ways of relating to the world, of feeling, acting, living and inhabiting the world that emanates from plural knowledges disrupting modernity and repositioning alternative knowledge traditions. After discussing the central concepts of collaborative online international learning and global citizenship education, and unpacking border thinking and third space as a lens, we provide four illustrative autoethnographic vignettes from which we then discuss collaborative online international learning and global citizenship education critically. We conclude that by bringing together students to engage in a collaborative learning task that they would be unable to complete on their own, participants have a personal and collective opportunity to appreciate each other’s microsocial realities better. We argue that the potential for becoming in the collective borderlands of collaborative online international learning can deepen students’ learning and understanding of global citizenship education as inclusive, decolonising, Indigenising, critical and transformative. However, collaborative online international learning for global citizenship education should not be deployed uncritically as an online pedagogy, assuming inclusivity. Rather, it can be a core component of holistic learning practice, if it is deliberately used as a borderland third space where valuable learning through reflection and openness to discomfort advances a global mindset.

Teaching to transgress through residential education: Nurturing pedagogical innovation to tackle the climate and nature emergencies in higher education

ABSTRACT Universities occupy a contested space regarding their responses to the climate and nature emergencies. They are criticised for their neoliberalism, marketisation and corporatism yet they provide education to the leaders of tomorrow who are essential for the transition to a sustainable world. In this paper, residential education is explored through a three-phase Rites of Passage framework based on teaching to transgress. Dependable and trustworthy literature sources were identified to develop strands of a pedagogical framework. Autoethnographic vignettes added further novel strands based on insights into residential education from the authors’ lived experiences. Thus a residential education pedagogical web emerges to reimagine learning, teaching and research in higher education that deals directly with the climate and nature emergencies. We argue that more residential education centres should be developed to operate as semi-autonomous satellites of their parent universities because they can be more participatory, flexible and dynamic.

International graduate students’ perspectives on sense of belonging in leisure

Sense of belonging (SB) has been linked to increased academic engagement, enjoyment, and motivation. This paper explored international graduate students(IGS)’ SB in leisure spaces and its lessons for leisure educators. The paper addressed the following questions: (a) How do IGS’ leisure experiences change after migrating to the US? Furthermore, (b) How does the orientation of IGS towards leisure spaces post-immigration impact their sense of belonging? In the context of leisure, three themes emerged from the intersectional autoethnographic vignettes of five doctoral students. Utilizing Bronfenbrenner's (1979) Ecological Model, we highlight how these themes relate to IGS’ different life systems and we propose a new model for studying IGSs' sense of belonging.

Modeling the Livable City: Urban Ableism Across Borders

The concept of livability is treated as a universal public good, and many cities seek to model those ranked high on livability indexes. In the global livability imaginary, however, certain design features (notably active transportation infrastructures) are prioritized, with livable cities being those designed for bicycling and walking rather than automobiles. This article extends feminist infrastructure theorist Susan Leigh Star’s query, “cui bono?” to the question of “livability for whom?” Drawing on site visits and autoethnographic vignettes of disabled life in supposedly livable spaces, the article argues that infrastructural preferences for able-bodiedness in social and built environments create hidden geographies of urban ableism. In an era of mass-disabling phenomena such as climate change, COVID-19, and housing instability, attending to unequal forms of livability is necessary to design cities for a broad, inclusive range of inhabitants.

Conducting collage elicitation research online: what happens when we remove the scissors and glue?

PurposeThis autoethnographic article presents the adaptation of collage—an arts-based method traditionally used in face-to-face settings—into an online research tool. It emphasizes the increased relevance of such a transition in the wake of the digital shift and the Covid-19 pandemic. The work aims to reveal how digital collages can facilitate in-depth participant responses in a time when conventional research settings are inaccessible.Design/methodology/approachThe article incorporates autoethnographic vignettes, which are identified in italics, that offer insights into my personal reflections on the transition and adaptation to an online mode. Firstly, I review how collage can be a valuable tool to include in focus groups and for elicitation during semi-structured interviews. Secondly, I review the challenges I experienced when conducting focus groups online to create the collages. Thirdly, I explore, in more detail, three examples of collages that reflect the diverse ranges that were produced and the insightful discussions that emerged from the participants describing the visual elements of their collages. Finally, the reflective nature of my autoethnographic vignettes provides an insight into the world of the researcher during this turbulent time.FindingsFindings show that collage, whether physical or digital, remains an effective tool for eliciting nuanced understandings from participants. The research contributes to the arts-based research narrative by showcasing how the digital adaptation of collage methods can yield profound insights into participants' perspectives, therefore enriching the data beyond what traditional interviews could unveil.Originality/valueThese observations can provide support for other researchers who are contemplating the adoption of online arts-based research methods. Understanding how traditionally face-to-face arts-based research methods can be adapted for the digitally evolving landscape is important for shaping the future of online research.

When Descriptor is Diagnosis: An Autoethnographic Response to the Medical Treatment of Women with Vulvodynia

ABSTRACT Women with chronic vulvar pain experience symptoms that can affect their everyday functioning. These women are often diagnosed with vulvodynia, defined as vulvar pain without a medical explanation lasting at least three months. Yet while vulvodynia is presented by medical authorities as a diagnosis it is, more accurately, a descriptor of the physical condition. As such it does not have the ability to explain what causes this vulvar pain and, consequently, cannot determine an appropriate treatment pathway for all patients. As women with vulvodynia (‘V women’), we use this article to highlight the issues posed by a descriptor camouflaging as a diagnosis, including the harm it can cause. Using literature in the field and autoethnographic vignettes, our article unravels the effects of receiving this diagnosis from disappointment at what it offers women like us in explanatory terms to how it pressures us to live up to ideas of the ideal heteronormative patient (and woman). While we use our experiences to speak to how medical descriptors can be used, through diagnosis, to undermine and damage women’s bodies and voices, we also reveal possible paths for resistance through personal research, autoethnography and encouragement of the voices and agency of other ‘V women’.

Living in a Material World

This article explores the nuances of applying Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to autoethnography. The authors argue that ANT-informed autoethnography may broaden the understanding of how social and material networks are interrelated and can influence research. Two divergent autoethnographic vignettes are analyzed to illustrate how ANT-informed autoethnography may differ from other forms of autoethnography. ANT-informed autoethnography may be helpful when researchers wish to understand better the diverse political, social, and economic interactions and knowledge among actors and then offer insight into how these engagements affect our lifeworlds. The paper concludes with implications and recommendations for autoethnographers who utilize ANT in their research.

Writing and falling through the cracks

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the many ways in which those who have experienced early life adversity and trauma can continue to be failed within health-care settings and other organisations. The author explores the impact that repeated exposure to indifference and a lack of help and support has on the ability to recover and rebuild a meaningful life. The author takes the reader through a journey of various autoethnographic vignettes to explore the living experience of continuing to be unseen. The author hopes to contribute to improving the lives of service users. Design/methodology/approach The author has written about the many ways in which distressing experiences and mental health difficulties were left unsupported by various professionals and organisations. The writing is rich and evocative and gives voice to the distress experienced from a lack of caring attention. Findings The author concludes that whilst it has been painful to remember the varied ways people with lived experience of early life trauma continue to be failed it has also been cathartic and helpful. It is noted that the writing of these events brings some perspective and enables the author to limit the potential for self-blame which is a regular feature of the psychology of those living with early-life relational trauma. The writing of these events serves to highlight the ways institutions might improve responses to those seeking support. The author concludes that this is a meaningful way to use such harmful experiences. Research limitations/implications The author concludes that recovery and the ability to rebuild a meaningful life after early-life trauma is often hindered and denied by the responses received when seeking support from various institutions and people who may be able to intervene to prevent further harm occurring. These testimonies may contribute to the wider learnings about the impacts and lived experience of early life trauma and how institutions might support and encourage recovery. The author notes the helpfulness of writing about these experiences to bring perspective and remind those who seek help that it is a great act of courage despite unhelpful responses. Practical implications The author has found that writing about these experiences helps to soothe any feelings of self-blame in terms of being unable to recover sooner from early life trauma and that recovery and moving forward must be positioned as a social phenomenon and not a solely individual pursuit. It is noted that writing about difficult experiences can be cathartic and bring fresh perspective and hope. Contributing to ongoing research in terms of how helping professionals can respond wisely is satisfying and meaningful for the author. Originality/value This is the author’s firsthand and unique testimony of how easy it can be for survivors of trauma to continue to be unseen and failed. The author also shows that there are many opportunities to support and help which are inadvertently missed which contributes to ongoing distress. The author hopes that the courage taken to write of these experiences will contribute to learnings within many professions and organisations of how to notice, support and help those in distress and living with the effects of early life trauma. The author has found the writing of this paper to be meaningful. The process has helped the author to make sense of previously distressing events. It is hoped it will be of value to the reader.

Ethical Relational Space: Autoethnographic Reflections on Learning From Indigenous Mothering

In this paper, I aim to centre and attend to the transformative possibilities and power of the intimate, everyday spaces of parent-child relationships in the journey of mental and spiritual decolonisation. Drawing on the concept of “Ethical Space” from Cree legal scholar Willie Ermine, I share what I have learned from insights and wisdom of Indigenous women mentors and writers centring mothering, parenting and family in the work of healing, decolonisation and resurgence. I share two autoethnographic vignettes of my own mental and spiritual decolonising journey, as this is interwoven with my experiences as a mother. My journey grew from, and continues to reciprocate within, the relationships and strength of Stó:lō Téméxw (Stó:lō lands and world) on the Pacific Northwest coast in lands now known as Canada. I particularly share from within my mentorship and friendship with Ts’elxwéyeqw matriarch Lumlamelut (Wee Wee Láy Láq), and in learning from the writing and teaching of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Both emphasise children’s honoured place in family and community and an understanding that governance, leadership, and respect for others’ self-determination begin in the cradle of family relationships. I begin to see how the ways of being my mothering passes on are part of what upholds the contemporary colonial reality – and to experience the cracks that make space for other ways of being to emerge. Through sharing pieces of my journey, I aim for readers to witness the power of opening oneself to look into the mirrors held up in relational spaces across differences, and call for a deep reflection on the cultural beliefs and socialisation that shape parenting and family life. From here, we can question whether the beliefs and ways we see in the mirror are who we want ourselves and our children to be/become and what we hope and dream for the collective future they are already part of creating.

(De)humanization in the business school: Critical reflection on doctoral experiences

Recently in academia, and particularly in management and organization studies, there is more attention being paid to unpacking our own oppressive systems and practices. In this article, we join the conversation examining the pressures of academia by exploring how reflexivity can be elicited through engaging with theory. We draw on the theories and concepts of Paulo Freire to (re-)interpret how PhD students experience the material practices and symbolic systems of the business school. We use autoethnographic vignettes to engage with our personal experiences and stories as field-based researchers and PhD scholars in UK business schools. Through critical reflection and cooperation-based dialogue, we analyzed these experiences using Freire’s concepts of banking education and (de)humanization. This can be considered conscientização (conscientization), raising critical consciousness of our own experiences. We find that doctoral students suffer from processes of dehumanization in the business school, but they also reinforce these processes through social reproduction. We reflect on the need for solidarity and how an awareness of the role we play within the system can shift our thinking toward constructive social change.

Uncanny Organization and the Immanence of Crisis: The public sector, neoliberalism and Covid-19

This paper uses the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny to develop a new perspective on crisis, one that challenges its associations with turning points and opportunities. The study highlights the immanence of crisis in organizational life. Crises under consideration include the historic Covid-19 global pandemic, and examples of crisis in public sector organizations shaped by neoliberalism. Engaging with the work of Julia Kristeva, the uncanny is explored as an integral part of our subjectivities, one which disrupts our social stabilities and patterns of organizing. A montage of autoethnographic vignettes is assembled to illustrate the eruption of the uncanny unconscious, a dynamic that unsettles our routine impositions of order and control. Examining crisis through the lens of the uncanny brings to the fore the elusive and affective aspects of socio-political and organizational life. This perspective draws us away from an understanding of crisis as a passing phenomenon or as an opening that can be instrumentalized for cunning managerial purposes. Instead, it suggests the more radical insight that crisis is a condition of organizing.

Becoming processual: Time to de-place managerial education

Managerial education and managerial research are still deeply emplaced and emplacing phenomena. They are expected to be emplaced somewhere, in bounded space-times and in the powerful subjectivities of students and colleagues, awaiting their expression and expansion. This constitutes a strange extensive continuum which remains the heart of academic work. In this provocative essay, we invite organization scholars to de-place managerial phenomena and to become processual. We use one-block auto-ethnographic vignettes to show that existentiality matters and can lead to different life paths, in particular processual ones. In a final discussion, we offer a manifesto for those interested in cultivating processuality in their work as teachers and academics.

Identities of a post-graduate research student

This paper explores the multiple identities held and embodied by a post-graduate research (PGR) student and helps to produce new knowledge about the identity of PGR students. This could have wider implications for the sector by helping to facilitate an understanding of those studying within it. The results are contextualised with literature from the field of art (Daichendt, 2010; Thornton, 2013), and the identities of the researcher are visualised on networks of enterprises. Networks of enterprises are visual tools for tracking and charting the different enterprises of creative people at work overtime (Wallace & Gruber, 1989). The paper is a reflective piece, with the results written autoethnographically by an artist-teacher-researcher-student. Autoethnographic research can be shared as stories, poems, or performances (Bochner & Ellis, 2016; Pace, 2012). This paper includes autoethnographic vignettes written in a first-person voice. The data were collected through the lived experience of the multifaceted identity. In writing about these experiences, the researcher can explore and gain an understanding of the phenomena of identity as a post-graduate research student. The vignettes are analysed with the published literature and data collected from 17 artist-teachers in Adult Community Learning, to see how their experiences compared to my own. This allows for commonalities and divergences to be identified, and to see if the autoethnographic vignettes are generalisable.

Security knowledges: circulation, control, and responsible research and innovation in EU border management

ABSTRACT The knowledge emerging from research funded by the European Union (EU) through its Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation and other funding streams is significantly shaped by different forms of epistemic control exerted by the EU itself. Through the promotion of industry-research-policy cooperation in EU-funded research, and in light of the growing importance attached to ‘impact,’ this knowledge will often contribute to bureaucratic decisions taken by the European Commission, Frontex, the EU Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems (eu-LISA), and other agencies tasked with border security and control. The circular dynamics surrounding knowledge production, from the calls for proposals to the results of the research, are intrinsically political and contribute to exposing the limits of the EU-promoted principle of Responsible Research and Innovation. Additionally, and due to the centrality of EU funding in the research outlook in contemporary Europe, these processes raise wider questions about the sociology of the academic fields that this article relates to: critical border studies, critical security studies, and science and technology studies. How can we interpret the interplays between the EU’s policies fostering development and integration of border security technologies, on the one hand, and the Union’s broader principles for free and open research and innovation? Through the use of autoethnographic vignettes, and mediated by an expanded Foucauldian understanding of circulation as a technology of control with performative effects, the article sheds light on the dynamics surrounding knowledge production in the field of border technologies in an EU context.

“And when will you install the new water pump?”: disconcerted reflections on how to be a ‘good’ Global Health scholar

BackgroundWhile critique on Global Health is not new, recent years show a surge of criticism on the field’s colonial legacy and practices specifically. Such accounts argue that despite Global Health’s strive for universality and equity in health, its activities regularly produce the opposite. The epistemic privileging of Northern academics and scientific method, further augmented by how Global Health funding is arranged, paints a picture of a fragmented field in which ‘doing good’ has become a normatively laden and controversial term. It is specifically this controversy that we seek to unpack in this paper: what does it take to be a ‘good’ Global Health scholar?ResultsWe used Helen Verran’s notion of ‘disconcertment’ to analyse three auto-ethnographic vignettes of Robert’s Global Health ‘fieldwork’. We illustrate that disconcertment, a bodily and personalised experience of unease and conflicting feelings, may serve as an important diagnostic of conflicting imperatives in Global Health. Robert’s fieldwork was entangled with incongruous imperatives which he constantly had to navigate through and that repeatedly produced disconcertment. The contribution that we seek to make here is that such disconcertment is not something to defuse or ignore, but to take seriously and stay with instead.ConclusionStaying with the disconcertment serves as a starting point for conversations about ‘doing good’ in Global Health fieldwork and creates opportunity for making Global Health teaching and projects more reflexive. The paper thereby positions itself in discussions about fair collaborations between the Global North and South and our analysis offers a set of considerations that can be used by Northern scholars to critically reflect on their own role within Global Health.

Letting failure be: COVID‐19, PhD fieldwork and to not (want to) learn from failures

The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted researchers to rethink their fieldwork. My doctoral fieldwork plans, which involved conducting ethnographic research amongst Afghan refugees and migrants in New Delhi and Kolkata, were upended because of the recurring waves of the pandemic and the lockdowns/curfews that were imposed in their wake (2020−2022). Locked out of my field, my inability to conduct my research as planned amounted to a failure that could not be redeemed, especially because of time constraints. Using autoethnographic vignettes of my encounters in the lead up to the eventual suspension of in‐situ fieldwork, I critically reflect on how I approached and felt towards failures in/of field and how these encounters speak back to the discourse on failure in academia. In doing so, this article advocates for the need to revisit failures simply for what they are, without necessarily demanding and/or (self) expecting that we recast them as stepping stones towards success. By challenging the neo‐liberal desire to re‐present failures in a productive light, I argue we can make greater room for more supportive discussions around failures without committing ourselves to the task of having to find triumph in (every) adversity.

Autoethnographic narrative as a lens on life-long musician-teacher identity

Musician-teacher identity is a “work-in-progress” spanning a career lifetime, yet little research appears to explore how this culminative development occurs, particularly from an individualized musician-teacher viewpoint. Using a qualitative epistemology, the author examines autoethnographic vignettes of life experience to highlight how changes of aging, work environments, and personal circumstances guide such a musician-teacher’s journey. A “rivers of experience” approach, combined with several frames of reference, uncovers epiphanic moments showing how local and international contexts shape musician-teacher identity. Given the enormous changes in education over the past 40 years, and the changing, challenging world of Covid-19, this article is a timely and needed catalyst for others to reflect on their own experiences as they look to their futures.