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.

A devastating loss of digitized possessions, due to an unexpected and sudden malfunction of a back-up storage device ( Time Machine ) evokes a complex set of emotional reactions and inquiries into the nature of digital loss. This autoethnographic narrative reveals, through a reverse chronological order (to emulate Time Machine 's archival data storage process), how the events followed by the loss impacted my beliefs and attitudes toward the realms of digital technology in our lives, as it relates to a habit and need for archiving and preserving digitalized possessions, both personal and professional.

In this essay, we write about our collaborative experiences with faculty mentoring/allying relationships using autoethnography. From two different locations of academic faculty standing, we articulate that faculty mentoring/allying relationships can be sites of critical intercultural communication praxis in which differences informed by historical and existing power relations are productively discussed and acknowledged. However, these are easier to talk about than to practice. Thus, we share our continuing struggle to complicate the notion of faculty mentoring/allying and offer our experiences as complex, fluid, multiple, and contextual productions and constitutions of differences.

This critical reflective practice article juxtaposes the temporal relationship between lived experiences in my past, with my present actions as a schoolteacher. Presented in the style of a dwam—the state of semiconsciousness that precedes sleep—I uncover dominant colonial narratives that continue to inscribe racialized power relations in school curriculum and pedagogy, and that have done so throughout my experiences as a child–student and an adult–teacher. Drawing from Albert Memmi's “colonizer who refuses,” my dwam demonstrates critical awakening as a white teacher through six scenes that span four decades.

Although tourism is considered leisure, tours can serve other means for the tour-participant. Tours can prompt memories of the past, and offer a framework for understanding our pasts. This essay uses touring as a metaphor and a mechanism of exploring our pasts to better understand our presence/present. Through autoethnographic methods, this essay examines tourism as ritual and explores rituals as a resource for making sense of painful pasts. Painful memories can pervade individuals’ minds, altering their perspective and understanding of events, interactions, and relationships. This essay demonstrates how tourism can help people overcoming the memories of sexual assault to find healing.

This project posits the practice of scrapbooking as an arts-based, performative autoethnographic method of inquiry that allows me to interrogate my experiences teaching a tourism course grounded in critical performative pedagogy. Teaching American Expedition was sublime and, in its sublimity, it resists linear, dispassionate analysis. Choosing an arts-based method of inquiry, such as scrapbooking, opens up possibilities of thinking and understanding beyond the limitations of language, of honoring bodied experiences that are not easily or necessarily speakable, and of exploring how care is enacted in and through the practice of my pedagogy.

In this essay, I explore the significance of involving personal experiences with loss in my research on parental bereavement. By intersecting autoethnography and findings from a qualitative interview study with bereaved parents following infant loss, I argue that while popular and professional accounts depict normal grief as a transitory state, parental accounts present grief as a continuing and open-ended relationship with the dead child. In acknowledgment of this, I present fragmentary, non-reifying narratives of the continuing realities of becoming a bereaved parent.

In this fusion of autoethnography and phenomenological description, I explicate my experiences as a door-to-door social welfare advocate for the Maine People's Alliance. Examining my lived experiences of being a stranger in the midst of facing other strangers in their homes, I reflect on the collaborative constitution of strangerdom. I also recount the possibilities of transcendence through dialogic negotiations and attempts at dismantling this threshold of unfamiliarity. I argue that autoethnographic inquiries that include portrayals of unknown others are productively informed by the descriptive richness of phenomenological variations.

Journal entries documenting hidden emotions about my dual role as law teacher and practicing lawyer provide powerful insight into an aspect of academic practice not yet considered by autoethnography. But my stories are a consequence of my interactions with students. How do I negotiate the desire to give voice to a hidden world, yet protect the bonds of trust? This essay critically explores relational ethics in autoethnography from the unique perspective of a law clinic supervisor. Drawing on lessons from memoirists, personal reflections, and an unexpected dialogue with Carolyn Ellis, I raise important questions about my own ethical dilemma.

Charting my personal experiences with Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), I argue that centering the lived experiences of Black girls and including their creative forms of expression and knowledge production allow for a rearticulation of forms of agency, social power, and meaning making. Thinking specifically about the ways Black girls are stereotyped and pathologized, I discuss how Black girls create, talk back, and resist through their creative processes of dance, play, and art.