Collaborative Autoethnography Research Articles

Intersections of queer, gender, and religious socialization: a critical collaborative autoethnography

As four queer counseling and counselor education scholars, we used critical collaborative autoethnography to examine socialization influences on our queer, gender, and religious identities. Analysis revealed four themes describing social-cultural socialization’s influence on identity negotiation processes: social-cultural/environmental influences; navigating inequalities, power relations, and structures; personal/internal development; and action-oriented change. Findings inform counseling, psychology, PK-12 and higher education, and an interdisciplinary understanding of intersectional identity development for queer persons in theologically conservative and gendered contexts and warrant further investigation of intersectional identity development for queer persons navigating dominant gendered, racist, and religious contexts.

Inclusive Change in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines: A Collaborative Autoethnography

In many countries, including those in the Caribbean, there has recently been an increasing demand for professional development on inclusive educational practices This need for high-quality professional development is in line with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (2016) call for inclusion of all children by 2030. Recently, our team was asked to provide professional development to educators in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines that focused on evidence-based practices for students with special education needs. Over the course of 3 years, this service work evolved into a multi-faceted pilot of inclusive education, whereby students with special education needs transitioned from a segregated school into mainstream schools. In this article, we present a collaborative autoethnography that highlights our collective experiences. Our self‑reflections chronicle our experiences and accompanying perceptions gained through providing support and education to educators, students, schools, community, and families in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines over a 3-year period, as they prepared for this transition to inclusion. In collectively reviewing our self-reflections, we discovered three major themes at the heart of our service work: (a) “barriers to inclusion,” (b) “the importance of relationships,” and (c) “transformation.” In discussing these three themes, we explore the successes and challenges we experienced throughout these service projects. What follows is a discussion of our reflective musings related to these experiences as shared critical knowledge for sustainable inclusion work within the Caribbean and beyond.

“Together, We Empower. Together, We Are Enough”: Radical Healing Among Pinay Scholar-Activists

Filipinas face barriers to psychological wellbeing that stem from interlocking oppressive systems, like racism, sexism, capitalism, and colonialism. This article explores how Pinay scholar-activists cultivate radical healing through an intergenerational mentorship program for Filipina/x/o youth in Southern California. We apply a critical collaborative autoethnography drawing from the Psychological Framework for Radical Healing (French et al., 2020) and Pinayism, the theoretical framework to conceptualize the social, political, and economic oppression and struggle for growth faced by Pinays (Tintiangco-Cubales & Sacramento, 2022). We explore how Pinay scholar-activists heal from oppression by fostering loving relationships with the self and community and critically reflecting on and acting against oppression and toward social change. We conclude with considerations for radical healing through feminist community development and ethnic studies education.

Making Waves in Academia: Asian/Asian American Feminist Mentoring as Activism

Multicultural Feminist Mentoring (MFM) models have provided an important foundation to address the further need for conceptualizing a mentoring model that is specific to Asian/Asian American (A/AA) experiences. In this collaborative autoethnography, six researchers in three mentor-mentee dyads explored what it means to pursue Asian/Asian American feminist mentoring (A/AAFM), through dyadic and group interactive dialogues and collaborative analysis. A/AAFM can be conceptualized as anti-racist praxis, where each mentor attempted to consider mentoring as activism within academia, being grounded in values stemming from A/AA experiences and feminism. Results yielded a model of A/AAFM which emphasizes a convergence of multifaceted racial and cultural identities, feminist values, and activism. Three specific processes emerged: being holistic, relational, and mutual; a focus on community and intergenerational generosity; and intentional flattening of the power hierarchy. Implications for training and activism are discussed.

Confronting Mean Girls Niceness: Conceptualizing Whisper Care to Disrupt the Politics of Niceness in Academia

While the current literature on Niceness in higher education has examined the discourses and practices of Niceness in academic spaces, making it more identifiable, less is known about how minoritized faculty navigate and disrupt the culture of Niceness. The purpose of this article is to offer a resistance-based framework to combat academia’s Niceness culture through the lens of the authors. Using theory in the flesh as theory and methodology, we use collaborative autoethnography to conceptualize Whisper Care to give language and articulate an orientation and philosophy rooted in Kindness. Our findings present a process to confront Niceness while guiding, supporting, and protecting each other in higher education institutions. We conclude with implications for future research and practice for faculty and higher education leaders.

How Do Transnational Distance Education Graduate Students Perceive Quality?

Driven by competition amongst higher education institutions, increasing recognition of the benefits of international academic mobility, and the global pandemic, transnational distance education has accelerated in recent years. Despite its many advantages, quality assurance issues can pose significant obstacles to success. Using a collaborative autoethnography approach, this study aimed to conceptualize quality dimensions from the perspectives of three Greek graduate students shaped by their collective experience at an open university in Canada. The findings suggest that quality encompasses accessibility, learner-centred instructional design, social-emotional support, and applying acquired knowledge and skills in local contexts.

Challenges of Art Therapists Implementing Art Therapy for Achievement Gaps in Korean School

This collaborative autoethnography explores the experiences of two art therapists who designed and implemented art therapy programs for achievement gaps in schools in Korea. We gathered autoethnographic data and contextualized information within the socio-cultural and institutional framework of Korean society. Four discussion points emerged: (1) The inherent societal and cultural values of school art therapists and their impact in the therapy room, (2) The reconceptualization of the role of art therapy within the school, (3) The necessity for art therapists to demonstrate flexibility and creativity, (4) The recognition of establishing a support system for school-based art therapists. This experiential research provides a multifaceted understanding of art therapy within the Korean school context and offers practical insights based on our experiences.

Anti-stigmatizing: a collaborative autoethnography on recovery from depression.

Despite extensive research on clinical treatments for depression, there remains a significant gap in understanding of the lived experiences and recovery journeys of those with depression. This study sought to explore the recovery process through an "anti-stigmatizing" lens, emphasizing the cultural-psychological mechanisms at play and the importance of personal narratives in shaping the recovery trajectory. Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, this report focuses on the first author's journey of depression recovery. This research methodology allows for an in-depth exploration of subjective experiences, with a specific emphasis on the interaction between societal stigma, personal identity, and mental-health challenges. It is found that the depression-recovery experience can be divided into four stages from an anti-stigma perspective: (1) encountering the public stigma of emotions; (2) internalizing the stigma to a self-stigma; (3) "decriminalizing" the expected stigma of a "depressed" identity through diagnosis; and (4) being able to cope with and understanding the public stigma relating to depression when facing it again. Key factors that were found to contribute to recovery were self-awareness, community empowerment, and recognition and acceptance by close friends and family. We propose a reconceptualization of depression that incorporates a societal perspective on internalized stigma. Recovery from depression is not merely a medical process; it also pertains to how the patient frees themselves from public stigma. The results strongly indicate the need for a paradigm shift toward a more inclusive and empathetic approach to mental-health care, and we emphasize the importance of personal narratives in depression recovery.

Using Open Educational Practices: Implications for Nursing Education.

This paper reports on our use of open educational practices (OEPs) with online students in nursing. Our aim was to provide nurse educators with knowledge about (and examples of) OEPs they could use to enhance student learning and their career satisfaction. Using collaborative autoethnography, we probed our open teaching strategies. With Swanson's middle-range theory of caring as a theoretical framework and thematic analysis of our data set (which included literature annotations, dialogic conversation transcripts, individual reflections, and course evaluations), we uncovered 5 themes relevant to nursing education. The themes are student achievement of affective domain learning outcomes, our values as a blueprint for action, alignment of our OEPs and relational pedagogy, mutuality of the experience, and the ongoing process of learning to be an open educational practitioner. Using OEPs can help develop skilled and caring nurses.

Teaching English in an engineering international branch campus: a collaborative autoethnography of our emotion labor

Abstract While a number of studies have documented the significant role of emotions and the emotion labor produced in English language teaching, research exploring English instructors’ emotion labor in transnational higher education contexts such as international branch campuses (IBCs) and within Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) programs is lacking. Arguably, these neoliberally-driven and educational neocolonialist endeavors can produce intense emotion labor for English instructors. This study employs a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) methodology to investigate what provoked emotion labor for expatriate instructors, who teach English courses to Qatari national students at an IBC in Qatar. Taking a poststructural approach to emotion labor as our theoretical framing, we collaboratively examined our emotion labor in audio-recorded weekly meetings and then engaged in further dialogues and writings about our emotion labor. We reflect on two themes that produced emotion labor as well as emotional capital for us: 1) navigating our purpose teaching English to engineering majors and 2) confronting our roles as English instructors within a context of educational neocolonialism. Our study adds to the knowledge base of English teachers’ emotion labor in transnational and STEM spaces, while also showcasing CAE as a transformative methodology to explore language teachers’ emotion labor.

Juggling Academic Practice and Care: Collaborative Autoethnography within a Basque University Research Group

Many university scholars, including the authors of this article, acknowledge that they feel like they are riding an emotional roller coaster with academic success, as well as many project failures. Except for our PhD thesis, many of us complete our research tasks in relatively established research groups. However, little research has examined the potential these groups might have to mitigate feelings of academic isolation. To fill in this gap, we designed two methodological steps. First, we adopted the Woolfian metaphor of a room of our own, where we composed individual vignettes regarding our feelings of isolation. We read each other's texts and then, in a second step, moved to a “living room” to negotiate our emerging ideas, echoing a Collaborative Autoethnography. Two full professors and two early-career researchers reflected on and talked about their feelings of academic isolation, from their personal and professional standpoints. Despite the differences in job stability, the four participants acknowledged having felt isolated and abandoned. We argue that viewing research groups not as a community of practice, but a community of care is a more humane and desirable framework to model university research groups in these current times of exacerbating neoliberalism.

Professional development through collaborative action research for early career academics - a collaborative auto-ethnography during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Early career academics (ECAs) constitute a significant part of the teaching responsibilities in higher education. However, ECAs, especially those employed on sessional or fixed-term contracts are particularly impacted by a lack of sustainable professional development. This article presents findings from collaborative reflection by a small group of ECAs. They explored their experiences in learning to use pedagogical action research in their own teaching facilitated by an academic developer. This collaborative autoethnographic study collected data from verbal and written reflections by all four authors, including field notes, journals, email exchanges, and group meeting recordings. A grounded approach was used to facilitate the data collection and analysis processes. The data analysis process was also guided by inductive thematic analysis. Authors’ reflections included the action research experience, and their respective teaching and teacher’s identities. These findings show that pedagogical action research was effective in helping the authors understand ourselves better as teachers which fostered our teaching practice. The collaborative reflection environment also created a stronger and supportive environment for teaching, increasing teachers’ professional confidence and a sense of belonging, which was extremely beneficial during the prolonged lockdowns.

Emotionally (in)hospitable spaces: reflecting on language teacher–teacher educator collaboration as a source of emotion labor and emotional capital

Abstract While various aspects of language teachers’ emotional experiences have been gaining attention, including emotion labor and emotional capital, less attention has been placed on the emotional experiences of teacher educators supporting language teachers in emotionally challenging situations. Following calls to examine language teachers’ emotional experiences ecologically and as socially and institutionally shaped, we engaged in collaborative autoethnography to explore how language teacher and teacher educator emotion labor reflects answerability to multiple commitments in the face of external feeling rules. Our findings highlight how language teacher–teacher educator collaboration can mitigate as well as reproduce emotion labor. This study contributes to research on language teacher emotion labor by focusing on the role of the teacher educator in supporting language teacher emotional capital and highlighting the complexity underlying emotion labor and emotional capital as multi-directional. Furthermore, the study illustrates how collaborative autoethnography can generate reflexivity and emotional capital for language teacher educators.

Coming to Terms with Our Racecar Brains: Academic Mothers Experiencing Adult Diagnosis of ADHD

ABSTRACT This collaborative autoethnography explores the experiences of women academics and mothers who received late diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Due to the historical underdiagnosis of women, little research has focused on this specific demographic. We shed light on how ADHD presents in women, interweaving our stories with extant literature and emphasizing the need to understand this demographic’s experiences better. This piece discusses our process of seeking diagnosis and treatment, the communicative disenfranchisement we faced, and the stigma associated with ADHD. Our narratives highlight the generational impact of ADHD, with family members often sharing our diagnosis. Through divulging our experiences, we hope to contribute to the destigmatization of ADHD, particularly for women and academics.

Doxa in international research collaboration: a critical collaborative autoethnographic account

ABSTRACT Funders are increasingly requiring international collaboration for research projects and such projects add to the reputation, rankings and research gravitas of institutions and individual researchers alike. The power asymmetries in global knowledge production means that international research collaboration comes with a range of taken-for-granted and unquestioned rules and rituals. These have become naturalized in international research collaboration and shape researcher identity, development and career progression. In this paper, we operationalize the term ‘doxa’ as a methodological tool through a critical collaborative autoethnography to examine how researchers negotiate the opportunities, tensions, and power struggles emerging from their varying possession of symbolic capital and (dis)positions in a globalized research landscape. In doing so, the paper considers how global power structures play out in individuals’ lives and identities, and suggest that international research collaboration contributes to the reproduction of inequalities in the highly competitive and unequal field of academic research.

Read, write, retreat: a collaborative reflection on shared writing retreat experiences among PhD candidates

ABSTRACT As PhD candidates of geography and planning, we engage in a collaborative autoethnography to reflect on our experiences during a writing retreat. We explore the significance of material and immaterial spaces of the retreat and how these spaces impacted our academic writing. We emphasise the value of a collaborative and supportive learning environment that challenges the productivity-driven, neoliberal narrative imbued in academic writing. Drawing on our personal reflections of the retreat, we illustrate how writing retreats foster a “space” of support, facilitate academic writing competence, and expose participants to new avenues of learning. Using a grounded theory approach, we draw on Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges as well as and Dooren Massey’s theorisation on space, to examine our individual reflections and collectively discuss the intricate relationship between solitude and productivity in academic writing. Our findings delve into diverse experiences of material space (physical) and immaterial space (psychological and imaginative), as well as the negotiation of solitude-togetherness and speed-slowness interface within the retreat context. We argue for rethinking the notion of a retreat, envisioning it as a space that challenges the norms of academic productivity and fosters a more caring and interconnected approach to scholarly writing.

Shared wisdom: a collaborative autoethnography on mentorship and women supporting women in academia

ABSTRACT In this collaborative autoethnography, three female professors sought to reflect on personal discoveries from their recent research examining the benefits of women supporting women in academia. The findings of their study indicated that women who are mentored and supported by other women in academia feel empowered to continue with this work despite the challenges they encounter. As educators, reflective thinking and writing are common practices we use to examine and enhance our teaching. Through this autoethnographic exploration, we self-reflected on the topic of this research and explored how we, as women in academia, benefit by being supported by other women and how we could take what we learned to support and mentor other women we encounter in this field.

Gendered Dimensions of Migration and Conviviality: A Virtual Space for Autoethnographic Explorations of ‘Finding Home’

ABSTRACT Gendered dimensions of migration although mainstream current research, there is less attention given to migrant women’s social interaction and convivial experiences. As three transnational women living and working in Melbourne, we have our social lives outside work and family. During COVID-19 lockdowns, we found ourselves isolated with restrictions on social interaction and convivial gatherings. In this paper, we discuss how we experienced ‘conviviality’ while sharing our stories of ‘finding home’ in a virtual space. We engaged on Zoom to tour an exhibition about migrant stories – The Unending Absence (2017) at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne. We listened to migrants’ audio stories of ‘finding home’, then paused to write our individual experiences of migratory moves. Collaborative autoethnography facilitated our writing and reflexive dialoguing providing a safe and convivial space to share our experiences infused with emotions. Discussing our gendered migration journeys we found similarities and differences in cultural heritage, ethnicity, and belonging along with personal and professional identities structuring our choices, decisions, norms, and opportunities of ‘finding home’. Through reciprocal triadic lenses, we highlight how social interactions and being convivial are important to our ongoing well-being, whether we interact with others in person or using a virtual space.

“Can’t you just tell us when to teach them how to use an apostrophe?” The worthwhile struggle to cultivate agential preservice teachers in a compliance culture

ABSTRACT Teachers are simultaneously regarded as the most important influence on student learning and, paradoxically, as untrustworthy agents who can’t be relied upon to deliver quality learning outcomes. Globally, this contested view of teaching is reflected in policies that limit teacher agency by prescribing how teaching will be conducted; for example, insisting on so-called evidence-based instructional models. Such policies also affect initial teacher education, which is increasingly policed for compliance with national teaching standards. However, teaching standards that reduce the teacher’s role to ensuring fidelity to acceptable pedagogies has been widely criticised, with calls for teacher agency and professional judgement to be more highly valued. We endorse this critique and draw on Bakhtin’s dialogic theory to illuminate data generated using collaborative autoethnography that reveals the worthwhile struggle for “good” initial teacher education.

Exploring the marking of a reflective assessment task: a collaborative autoethnography by educators navigating Indigenous allyship in higher education

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to closely examine the experiences of non-Indigenous academics in marking a single assessment task designed to promote cultural safety practice in a health professional programme. In recognition of institutional racism and significant health and wellbeing disparity in Indigenous wellbeing, cultural safety is recognised as essential knowledge across professions in tertiary education. An assessment task was designed to support students’ written critical reflection to promote their cultural safety practice. A collaborative autoethnography by four academics critically reflected on the tensions in marking this reflective assignment as non-Indigenous educators. Thematic analysis was conducted on transcriptions of the authors’ discussions and a framework was developed in response to repeating sites of tension. The Indigenous allyship assessment framework: sharing the load was framed around the central theme of Navigating the Unsettling. It specifically draws attention to navigating the Personal (Heightened Responsibility and Partial Knowledge), Pedagogical ( Judge the Meaningful and Feedback Conversations) and Persons and Processes (systems) (Efficiency Culture and Cost of Marking) tensions. Our conclusion was that non-Indigenous educators need to consciously navigate unsettling challenges to do justice to assessment tasks to promote cultural safety.