Evocative Autoethnography Research Articles

‘Carefree enjoyment - can you tick that box?’ A story of thriving following experiences of abusive coaching in gymnastics

ABSTRACT Within this paper, we aim to utilise a creative analytical practice to embody the experience of thriving and show the ways in which the coach-athlete relationship may influence an athlete’s ability to thrive. By using an evocative autoethnographic approach, we hope to connect the reader to the thoughts, emotions, and feelings of a gymnast. To achieve this, I, the first author, used three main strategies to build the story presented in this study: use of memory, memory writing, and emotional recall. I adopted the role of ‘storyteller’, and the story was constructed through an evocative autoethnography with the aim to show emotional experiences that encourage empathy, social awareness, and reflection within the reader. Four memory fragments depict my own gymnastics experience presented in relation to key moments of my performance and well-being. The story chronicles how the coach-athlete relationship affected my personal experiences of thriving, including initial interactions, navigating feelings of anxiety and panic at competitions, and finishing my university sporting experience. We’d like to invite you, the reader, to live the first author’s story and immerse yourself in her experience of how the coach-athlete relationship impacted her experiences of thriving as a gymnast.

Sexuality, Secrecy—and Sewing with Mum

This article explores the author’s experience of navigating relational ethics. It details the aftermath of a reflexive discussion with the author’s parents, which focused on autoethnographic episodes about family experience, within a wider autoethnographic exploration of the author’s experience as a trainee counselor. The work, which had originally examined what it feels like for counselors to disclose erotic countertransference within clinical supervision, grew to encompass the author’s parallel experiences of (dis)honesty around sexuality, specifically regarding disclosures to the author’s parents and church: his original “moral supervisors.” As he and his mother spend time together sewing, recovering from the previous reflexive conversation and looking ahead to the next, the author considers the emotional impact of sharing an autoethnography with intimate others who are alive. Through evocative autoethnography, the article aims to use narrative analysis (as opposed to analysis of narrative) to capture an embodied and emotional response to the sharing of an autoethnography. It asks: what is it like to be honest?

Multilinearity in ‘reading’: Bridging cultural psychology and autoethnography

Reading is not a linear process. In this commentary on Struppe-Schanda’s autoethnographic work, I explore the multilinear nature of reading from the experience of being able or unable to ‘read’ her work. This commentary attempts an autoethnography that emphasises the subjective feelings of the researcher and resists the traditional modalities of ‘science’. In determining the starting point for this commentary, whether as an autoethnographer or cultural psychologist, I discovered numerous potential directions for further development. Presented as a fictional conversation with my other self, this commentary delves into the implications of deliberative autoethnography, which seeks to explore subjectivity differently from mainstream evocative autoethnography.

An Early Childhood Educator’s Learning Story in the Time of COVID

While it began with a variety of narrative representations of writing personal experiences, since Ellis (2004; Bochner & Ellis, 2016), evocative, performative, and creative nonfiction forms of storying have coalesced to form contemporary autoethnography. For over a decade, Canadian arts education researchers have blazed trails to employ those forms of autoethnography as “learning stories” (Carr, 2001; Carr & Lee, 2012) to study teaching and learning practices in a variety of school and community educational contexts. Learning stories enable educators to reveal teaching and learning experiences that cannot be represented by, or communicated through, other research forms. The present inquiry, which begins with the story of an early childhood educator, is rooted in the fusion of evocative autoethnography and learning stories with arts-based research, particularly a/r/tography.

«Kalevala—Unwritten Fragments» by Teatr Węgajty / Field Project: Trevor Hill’s Autoethnographic Narration

The text discusses the performance Kalevala The Unwritten Fragments of the Węgajty Theatre / Field Project, which in 2000/2001 opened a new phase in the theatre’s activity. The performance continued the thematic, aesthetic, and method choices of the Węgajty Village Theatre, while also opening new paths of exploration. The group’s work was particularly transformed, and a new quality was brought into its accompanying reflection, by the presence of the actor and anthropologist Trevor Hill. The analysis of Hill’s autoethnographic description of their work on Kalevala allows us to distinguish three dimensions of autoethnography: as an innovative technique of obtaining information, as a research method (analytical autoethnography), and as an indicator of a new paradigm of producing knowledge about social life and its participants (evocative autoethnography).The use of the autoethnographic method in research on the Węgajty Theatre made it possible to access information that is otherwise difficult to obtain, including the actor’s experiences and internal processes.

The Critical Art and Hope of Unraveling: A Review of M. F. Alvarez’s Autoethnography of Suicide and Renewal

This review engages with the powerful critical and evocative autoethnography, Unraveling: An Autoethnography of Suicide and Renewal (2024). Written by M. F. Alvarez, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of New Hampshire, this book narrates the embodied experiences of a young Filipino gay man named Mike whose suffering from childhood trauma slowly escalates into relentless delusions and self-harm that eventually propel him to seek professional help. Alvarez’s beautifully sculpted book captures Mike’s multidimensional psychological life as he lives, observes, and narrates it within structures that medicalize people’s mental health experiences. Dividing his text into story and analysis, Alvarez brings a critical gaze to normative medical and psychiatric accounts of mental health and highlights the agency of people navigating their embodied landscapes, trauma, suicidality, and recovery.

A Tender Witness’s Story of War: A Tale on the Road in Three Voices

On February 24, 2022, we embarked on a war journey into the unknown, witnessing the war in Ukraine. Our contact with the war is mediated (mainly by the media), yet painful and saturated with extreme emotions. This article is an autoethnographic description of the experiences of this journey of three academics from Poland, a frontline country. The metaphor of the road is carried out by evocative autoethnography in terms of its symbolism of personal journey of each of us; nevertheless, it also unifies our experiences of war into one tender narrative. Embedded in the essence of our autoethnographic narrative of the war is a constant openness to new circumstances, the natural dynamics of action at the front and in the frontier country, and the constant search for and discovery of one’s own narrative identity. Each part of this path traveled is inscribed in the baggage of personal experience, a narrative of life in a frontier country, unification by the situation of witnessing the war, and the desire to express our resistance to it. It became a form of mental resistance, analysis, empathy, and concern which were our methods of struggle and a way of taking responsibility for the reality we witness. In the description, we used the “tender narrative” proposed in the texts of Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk.

An Academic and a Small Shelf

The following brief paper is an evocative autoethnography of the lockdown life of an academic and the impact on his home and family, presented as a poem. It is followed by a reflection on relevant literature and some practical ethnographic research questions arising.

As if I was a spacecraft returning to Earth's atmosphere. Expanding insights into illness narratives and childhood cancer through evocative autoethnography.

Today, a majority of children diagnosed with cancer are expected to grow up and live-hopefully until old age. Still, knowledge of the lived experience of childhood cancer survivors is sparse. In pursuit of knowledge expansion, by combining my intersecting roles as an academic, educational counselor, and childhood cancer survivor, I approach my personal illness narrative. By means of evocative autoethnography, I write intentionally vulnerably about my experiences and make them available for consideration. I explore my narrative through archives, artifacts, memories of the past, and conversations evoked in the present. I re-visit the cultural landscape of a southern Norwegian girl growing up in the 00s with cancer. Through this, my illness narrative presents as positioned, tangled, and interwoven with a developmental trajectory. Specific educational experiences seem to linger, and many are related to being absent from or re-entering school after the onset of illness. To grasp the intersecting and conflicting experiences of being very ill while also young, I suggest Erik Erikson's moratorium as a key concept. To complement Arthur Frank's illness narratives of restitution, chaos, and quest, I establish the moratorium narrative. As a fresh resource, the moratorium narrative underlines the need to make sensitive our academic community's gaze on illness trajectories unfolding in formative phases and illness narratives defined by growing up. By providing a point of recognition that prompts elaboration, this could also provide the young and very ill with a much-needed narrative space of opportunity, of which more narratives are invited and insisted upon.

The impact of expressive storytelling on grieving: how narrative writing can help us actively and effectively process and reconcile the loss of a loved one

ABSTRACT After my father's death, writing became a tool to alleviate my suffering. Using evocative autoethnography, I examined if written, first-person storytelling that leaned on expressive writing techniques could help me actively process and effectively move through my complicated mourning. My data consisted of 41 stories (published as The Revelations of Eapen) that disclosed the cultural interactions of bereavement while narrating the wildness of prolonged grief. Removing myself as the protagonist, I looked at the writing through a scientific lens. I discovered the writing was constructed using two central themes, targeting bereavement: the art of storytelling and the four cornerstones of grief stories. This article explores my analysis, providing a framework for therapeutic storytelling that can be used to reconcile grief.

Mystory as an international graduate student: a socialization autoethnography

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to seek answers to how receiving his PhD at the University of Alabama influenced the author’s ongoing academic discourse socialization as an international graduate student coming from Turkey. To that end, the author incorporates second language and academic discourse socialization theories with the concept of “desire” in TESOL.Design/methodology/approachIn this autoethnographic paper, the author discusses his academic discourse socialization as an international graduate student in the form of an evocative autoethnography of socialization. The author uses data gathered through his personal memory in the form of self-reflections. Using Chang’s “chronicling the past strategy” (2008, p. 72), the author prepared a data chart, which included information regarding the data source, its mode, time, venue and stories gleaned. The author used this data chart as a self-generated document to guide him through the selection process of his personal memories in an organized way while writing mystory.FindingsThe findings show that his academic discourse socialization was mainly influenced by the attitudes of local US citizens’ and existing members of international communities in both on- and off-campus settings. Over time, his academic discourse socialization turned out to be a complex process where the author oftentimes found himself struggling to find an entry point in extracurricular conversations and interactions.Research limitations/implicationsThe author recommends further research to focus on the inner worlds of both old(er) timers and newcomers to understand the challenges, emotions and nuances that are at play in both L2 socialization and academic discourse socialization of international students.Originality/valueIn this autoethnographic study, the author offers a unique example of an international PhD student’s transnational socialization experiences. Future international students, higher education administrators, faculty members and local graduate students may learn from his autoethnography and approach their future academic relationships in a more informed way.

Situating the silencing and de-silencing of traumatic memories in 2016 students’ protests in Hyderabad, India: an auto-ethnographic analysis

Psychologists, anthropologists, and historians have researched, revered, and replenished the past. Although the substance of their research is the same, their respective interpretations of the retrieved objects paint a plethora of images. This paper is a peek into the process of silencing and articulating memories. Both silencing and expression of memories are facilitated by temporal and spatial conditionalities, as would be argued here. With the help of an activist petition written by the author during the anti-Caste Discrimination Students’ Movement, known as “Justice for Rohith Vemula”, at the University of Hyderabad (India) in 2016, this study not only delves into the realms of individual memory but also critically evaluates the carrier of the memory undergoing the act of silencing and de-silencing (expression). As the Indian state brutally crushed the protest, the embodied memories carry the mark of the state’s brutality. This paper seeks to ask why and how memories and experiences are silenced, and how those memories find conduits for expression through narratives. How does trauma facilitate the silencing and anticipate the de-silencing of memory? Although the reading of trauma and memory as constitutive of each other helps us to place the narrative within a theoretical debate, the analysis of the author’s petition as an ‘evocative autoethnography’ helps to construct and follow the making and un-making of silence and expression and goes beyond the individual carrier of the traumatic memories. The petition serves as an ‘emotional recall’ and allows the author to enact the felt-emotions that engender the traumatic memory.

Publish or perish

The purpose of this paper is to share a poem I wrote as I seek to publish findings from my PhD. The poem, which can be considered as a form of evocative autoethnography, expresses trauma incurred during childhood triggered by feedback accompanying a desk reject. The poem echoes internalised judgement but also seeks to provide hope that achievement is possible even in the face of what feels insurmountable. The backdrop of the poem is the neo-liberal university, the emotive and perilous demand to publish or perish, as well as patriarchal mansplaining.

On How I Got Through COVID-19 Lockdown: An Autoethnographic Approach to Resilience in Disability

I explore how I—a person born with a physical disability living alone in a foreign country—was able to cope with COVID-19 lockdown. I used the autoethnographic method (Chang, 2016) to scrutinize sources of my resilience. Through evocative autoethnography, I reviewed risks/coping strategies recalling the lessons drawn from my childhood in the care of two supportive women. Then, performing analytical autoethnography, I self-assessed my lived experiences through a social science lens. A theoretical validation of my personal story helped me to acknowledge how resilience in my life had been built and was mobilized in the face of the pandemic.

Narrative Cities - Literary Edinburgh. A Model to Follow

While Edinburgh is a beautiful and interesting city to visit per se, its literature is an added value which plays a crucial role in marketing the capital city. The importance of literature in generating tourism has been highlighted by a number of studies. The opposite is true as well: tourism can also lead to literature. Edinburgh is probably one of the best examples in this respect. Many people go there to just visit the city but encounter literature in unexpected places. This paper is an autoethnographic account of a literary tour in Edinburgh. It looks at how this city makes use of its literary heritage and why it is a great model to follow. The author contends that while literary tourism is open to any book lover, still, some strategies are needed to promote literature and bring it to the attention of people in new and interesting ways. The success of Edinburgh as a literary city owes a lot to the interactive ways used by its authorities to showcase literature and keep people interested through direct and active engagement. The paper has been structured as a combination of experiential and analytic writing, with the former reflected through an evocative autoethnography and the latter as an analysis of that experience.

An Autoethnography about being an International Student

The number of immigrant and international students in Canada and other Western countries has increased in recent decades. This group of people faces many challenges, especially at the beginning of their entrance to the host country, such as different expectations regarding two different cultures, being away from their family and loneliness, financial problems, language limitations, and racism. As the experiences of these students can affect their satisfaction and success during their academic years, it is essential to explore the experiences of this growing population during their higher education. In this paper, I explore my own experience as a female international student. My first several years in Canada illustrate the everyday struggles I have faced to attain social, cultural, and linguistic development and build a new life in a new country. Using evocative autoethnography as a research methodology has revealed layers of my consciousness by connecting my personal experience to culture. This autoethnographic study presents the reflections of an Iranian female scholar’s experiences in Canadian higher education; it explores how my personal status as an Iranian female scholar, along with social factors, have shaped my academic experiences in Canada.

Giving Voice to Young People: Evocative Autoethnography as a Method of Researching Personal Experiences Connected o Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis. A discursive article

Giving Voice to Young People: Evocative Autoethnography as a Method of Researching Personal Experiences Connected o Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis. A discursive article

Why Autoethnography?

Autoethnography addresses the need and desire to make the human sciences more human by writing in ways that are more poignant, touching, vulnerable, and heartfelt. Since social work is a field not only of facts but also of meanings and values, researchers should not be obliged to cling to a narrow range of methodologies and writing genres that may be scientifically acceptable but poorly suited to the broad objectives of the field. Concerned more with evocation than information, autoethnography enables researchers and practitioners to address what it feels like, and what it can mean, to be alive and living in a chaotic and uncertain world, and to show others how they might endure it and move forward. As we developed evocative autoethnography, we not only questioned the boundaries between social sciences and humanities, we tried to stretch and cross them in ways that would create new practitioners and new genres for representing lived experience appealing to the hearts and senses of readers as well as their intellects.

“Khi mô về?” (When will you go home?) Evocative Autoethnography on Death, Impermanence, and Time-Space Extension

This article is motivated by my personal wish to pay tribute to my beloved grandfather, who passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic while I was stranded in Australia. Relying on an evocative autoethnography of a grandson, a father, a PhD candidate and graduate, and a researcher, and in reference to the concepts of place-making theories such as time-space expansion, I tried to embrace my experience of grief and loss as well as to make sense of my feelings of distance, impermanence, and death during this chaotic period. The story I will tell below chronicles my emotional and spiritual journey from the moment I first learned of my grandfather’s illness (early 2020) until the time after his passing (October 2021). I have found out that during this process of attempting to converse with, heal, and take care of myself, I have transcended the physical-social aspects of place and touched on spiritual space.

Teaching through Pain: Finding Peace, of Sorts, after Unimaginable Loss

This evocative autoethnography is an exploration of learning and perseverance during a particularly dark time in my personal and professional life. In a period of just over 3 years, my spouse and I dealt with the need for several surgeries, the Covid-19-Delta pandemic and subsequent isolation, social unrest, an insurrection in the U.S., and the tragic death of our son. Then, the D.Ed. program in which I teach was closed. Through this writing, I attempt to make meaning from these events and to share what I have learned.