Academia can be a hostile environment for Black women. Our research team leveraged Black feminist research praxis to produce new knowledge countering conceptions of Black women students and faculty as people who are unintelligent, produce superfluous work, and worthy of being ignored. In order to locate spaces for healing, mentorship, and validation, we engaged in a collaborative autoethnography to co-narrate our experiences while conducting a study for, by, and about Black women. Re-purposing tools from Black feminist thought, critical autoethnography, and collaborative autoethnography enabled us to write ourselves into existence, countering damaging narratives and subverting the harm inflicted by the institution.

In this article, I utilize phenomenologically-based creative nonfiction to present a case study of what micro-protest looks like for an African American faculty member working in a predominantly white university. Drawing from observations and informal information-gathering techniques over a 20+ year period, I present a layered account to share snippets from a larger narrative that vividly capture the nuanced ways co-cultural group members navigate predominantly white organizational spaces in the margins. Ultimately, I introduce the various ways micro-protest—as a new conceptualization of co-cultural practice—is enacted to achieve the preferred outcome of separation. I conclude with a brief discussion of how this scholarly endeavor contributes to co-cultural research and theorizing.

The medical model attributes religious and spiritual experiences in epilepsy to delusional or hallucinatory events, sometimes diagnosed as a form of ictal psychosis with its causation lying in epileptic symptomatology. Individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy rarely discuss experiences with medical professionals, fearing judgment and pathologization. I problematize understanding these experiences in a strictly biomedical manner. A medical case study is replaced by autoethnographic narrative to describe and analyze spiritual experiences from a nonmedical perspective. This approach emphasizes the phenomenology of the experience and its meaning for the life of the experient. Themes of illness, disclosure, and stigma become transformative.

This essay explores what I describe as “bad feelings” in the field and the research process. Combining autoethnography with feminist and queer methods, I counter the stigma around trauma and feelings of shame and fear in research. I ask what happens when the researcher experiences bad feelings that recall past lived trauma, and that challenge their sense of safety and security. In addition, I consider what it means for researchers to feel bad about their research. I argue that feeling one’s research, and thinking through and with bad feelings, opens up the possibility to “accidentally fall” into productive, and perhaps, alternative issues of study.

In this duoethnographic essay, united in our desire as white settler scholars to trouble the settler colonial legacies still steeped in what counts as our “home,” we have written personal accounts of our connections to certain places. Building on these musings, we explore the ontological perspectives of Donna J. Haraway and Karen Barad to navigate the more-than-human dimensions of our home places as well as their troubling colonial histories. Using composting as theory making, we make tentative conclusions about the practice of white settler response-ability and the possibilities of a more response-able relationship with Indigenous people and with our home places.

The essays in this Critical Intervention forum continue work on posthumanism in performance studies where the elemental performance tools of body, word, and thing activate studies in materialism, vital materialities, and engagement with non/human others. Through methods of performative writing, these works assist in deepening our potential to understand the intersections of art, materiality, and political intervention.

Using the artwork of Southern-born but Los Angeles-based artist Jerry Weems, this performative autoethnography engages artistic renderings of Black Southern cultural life as lived and historicized; as nostalgia and hauntology; as remembrance and recovery; between the there-and-then and the here-and-now. All of this invokes my own lived experience as a Black man from the South now living in Los Angeles.

Reflecting on new materialisms and performance, the author uses autoethnography to link his bodily experience with the materiality of wool (including a childhood friend’s flock of sheep, yarn as a man who crochets, and his dead father’s coat) to a spontaneous, prereflective decision to “lean in” to one of Joseph Beuys’s felt suits on display in a museum.

In her lifetime, US American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) wrote thousands of letters to those closest to her. However, she relied on painting as her primary public voice. This essay takes the form of five letters, composed through posthumanist performative writing, 1 addressed to O’Keeffe. I work through the process of experiencing the death of my father in a material landscape as it was painted by O’Keeffe. The southwestern landscapes O’Keeffe painted were the same landscapes in which my father and I negotiated material relations to live a life of what Donna Haraway calls “significant otherness.” 2

Focusing on our interactions with visual art as posthuman performance, this piece explores how Jane Bennett’s “vibrant materiality” moves us into a radical relationality with art and processes of grief. Performance studies’ enduring plumb into the deep ecology of body-page-body-stage makes us particularly equipped to see what else we might know of being in semantic-somatic multimatter knowing.