“A Eulogy for My Father” is a long citational poem that integrates various writing techniques, such as writing and rewriting, autoethnography, prose, vignette, and citation. Following Mexican poet Sara Uribe, this poem acts as a “sounding board” that allows for the exploration of pain, disenfranchised grief, and trauma. Ultimately, the poem seeks to engage in a critical dialogue that questions the meaning of a “good death.”

Since 2003, journalists in Venezuela have been censored by the government, either directly or indirectly, through legal and paralegal means. As such, they have learned to tread carefully between self-censorship and retaliation, greatly impacting the way journalism is practiced there. This evocative autoethnography explores the experience of a recent émigré of Venezuela to the United States interviewing journalists in his former home country. The emergence of elements that rearticulate the sense of belonging in the interviewer are used as touch points to a reality presumably left behind, but ultimately lying dormant, ready to resurface at a moment’s notice.

Conducting research in a familiar site of crisis brings about feelings of resonance between a researcher and participants. After 11 months of shadowing a pediatric palliative care team and 20 interviews with parents and grandparents of seriously ill children, the author, also the parent of a medically complex child, searched for creative ways to explore her findings. In this exploration of life as the parent of a seriously ill hospitalized child, the researcher reflects on her participants’ and her own collective experiences and frustrations in the form of poetry.

This essay is an autoethnographic account of the ways Black cultural performance, specifically Black social dance, works to produce and maintain Black cultural space in predominantly white spaces. I consider the significance of the “City Boy Wit It” song and dance as an expression of Black identity that marks Blackness in Tampa, FL. By framing my personal experiences through a discussion of Black identity and Black space, I critically examine larger issues of Black performativity and Black cultural spaces.

Growing up in Florida as a queer subject, I bounced from disaster to disaster. The annual hurricane season reminds me of this vulnerability, despite my racial and class privilege to background my precarity. Through reflection, the hurricane brings me home. In this autoethnography of queer survival, I approach identity disclosure as a process of negotiation and regulation. With ecological and queer temporalities, I explore the elemental interconnections of identity, space, and time. Further, the concept of queer ecological temporality expands the present moment to encompass disasters both past and future in an era of political and climate uncertainty.

Through centering the Florida Panhandle and using MTV’s Floribama Shore as an entry point, this essay articulates a Floridian-Southern identity. We organize this project around three themes that are heavily present in both Floribama Shore and our personal experiences as Floridian-Southerners: intra-regional tensions around religion, gender performances, and reproductive politics. Through layering our experiences among vignettes from Floribama Shore , we make visible the relationship between the consumption of popular media, the representations of Floridian-Southerners in popular media, the social and cultural regulation of hegemonic Southern deportment, and our own Floridian-Southern identity.

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.

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.

Drawing on autoethnography as a genre, this letter of disapplication to the discipline of organizational communication is organized around short poems. Speaking from my positionality as a brown foreign woman of Ivorian and French heritage, I walk the reader through my experience of the walkout at the 2019 National Communication Association Organizational Communication Division's Top Paper Panel. Weaving in recent and distant pasts, I claim that this particular encounter is interconnected to other daily embodied experiences of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism that constitute the normal for many people of color in communication studies.

In this essay, I autoethnographically map my experience of pursuing and then denouncing the “religion” of merit into which I was indoctrinated in my white, second-generation immigrant household. I argue that my disabled body is marked as visible through medical discourse that originated within, and is in turn perpetuated by, white patriarchal discourse. This visibility interrupts the power of white invisibility, allowing a means of understanding how white normalness perpetuates a system of merit that rejects all visible, abnormal bodies while offering an unsuccessful pursuit of meritorious invisibility. The normal and invisible system of merit, when exposed, visible, and rejected, can be dismantled.

Inspired by Dwight Conquergood, who calls on scholars to engage in intimate conversations, I offer an autoethnographic approach to explore the interconnectivity between place attachment, shame culture, and what I refer to as identity suicide through my journey to finding an attachment to place, to having interaction. Through these findings, I discovered the self-acceptance that had always been a struggle to reach due to the choices I was making within the shame culture in which I was living. This work is a reflective processing of my choices along this journey—choices that are denied to so many other queer individuals.

Provincializing whiteness—this deconstructing move lays bare the absolute power of racial supremacy that faculty of color housed in communication studies and other departments have faced in US academia. Yet, acts of racial supremacy reveal how provincial that way of thinking is. There is a plethora of her-his-stories that are better suited to coexistence and tolerance without privileging Western modernity.

Hegemons arise by smashing and terrorizing human diversity. They do so structurally, institutionally, and discursively—that is, through logics, rationales, and schemes. In this special issue, we grapple with the racism problem that pervades communication studies. In fact, the discipline has long had a racism problem, silenced by overarching structures that deploy the language of civility to erase conversations that call out this problem. This special issue, “Merit, Whiteness, and Privilege,” focuses on the racial, ideological, and epistemological logics, rationales, and schemes, such as falsely separating scholarly merit from diversity, that the status quo in communication studies employs to keep minority peoples marginalized. We contend that looking at the racism problem that pervades communication studies from a perspective of whiteness deepens our understanding of this problem in profound ways.

Racial violence in the academy is enacted upon faculty of color, particularly women, in multiple disciplines. This essay attempts to both expose and suggest that everyday systemic racism has become a pervasive and normalizing feature within disciplines that continue to privilege white and Eurocentric forms of knowledge making while devaluing others. Furthermore, attempts to challenge such supremacies are immediately countered by calls and charges of incivility. This is an essay about the costs of unmasking norms of civility as it bears upon constructions of both whiteness and meritocracy.

This essay is an autoethnographic account of my transition from the working class to the middle class. It argues that performativity is central to upward social mobility, and that in my case this process has resulted in a loss of working-class identity. I perform this argument by having my working-class self comment upon the middle-class form to which I have committed my childhood. By making this split visible, I aim to evoke the complexities that are bound up in this class migration, and to question the middle-class academy's role in shutting out the working class.

This piece offers a handful of poems written over the past few years, during a time of profound departures, pivots, and journeys that have mostly happened within the innocuous orbits of everyday life in familiar spaces. They might provide a micro-scale situated examination of self/other care-giving dynamics or add to the feminist conversation around academic subjectivity and slow scholarship or sketch a terrain that pieces together into an impressionistic map of the emotional and affective geography of professionally and relationally moving on.

This production reflection describes the aesthetic and conceptual logics that informed a staging of Heavier than Air at Southern Illinois University. I take up the metaphor of “open hands” with which artists share and shape each others' stage work in order to reflect upon and rationalize the scripting and staging choices we made.

This artist statement and poetic response to Ed Mabrey's poem map my ongoing journey to understanding my role in the cultural pursuit of racial justice. I begin with my initial reactions to the request to respond to Mabrey's poem as part of the Opening Session of the 2017 National Communication Association annual convention and explain my reasons for choosing to respond with an autoethnographic poem. I then trace my understandings of racism as 1) a working-class white child in a northern factory town, 2) a first-generation college student and academic, and 3) a parent of sons growing up in a racially divided southern US city. Location, relationships, power, and privilege emerge intertwined in my ongoing lived experience, art, and advocacy.

Can a theatre play provide actors and audiences with a feeling of being at home? This article is an autoethnographic work that addresses how the author finds, in his work directing the research-based theatre play Heavier than Air devised by Anne Harris and Stacy Holman Jones, a self-identification with its queer characters. Describing it as a play that explicitly and implicitly welcomes people to be queer and to tell their stories, the author analyzes how the play also symbolizes the free movement of people and the quest for home.

This performative autoethnography sways between past and present, setting two towers and a flying trapeze into a “responsive dialogue” in the liminal space between waiting and weightlessness, the mirrored mediations engage in an intra-active word play that reflects the forward–back arcing rhythms of lived experience. The pas de deux of the intertwined stanzas seeks to embody on the page an iterative conversation between memory and materiality, time and form, sorrow and joy, connections missed… and connections made.