This evocative autoethnography reflects the author’s grief after she learns that a past teacher candidate was killed on Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) flight 752. Grief washes over her as “writing down our worst experiences can also offer a way to cope with some of life’s horrors.” 1 The autoethnography becomes “interventionist, seeking to give notice to those who may otherwise not be allowed to tell their story or are denied a voice to speak.” 2 Memorable stories from the trauma become a composed collection of touchstones. In the end, the author discovers how “weaving personal experiences with academic research can reveal an understanding of complex, painful issues, such as death, grief, and traumatic loss,” 3 in hopes to inspire others to share their autoethnographic experiences.

In this autoethnography, I layer a childhood memory of playing chess onto the experience of watching a video about chess. In doing so, I hope to bridge past and present to build future.

One of the strengths of autoethnography is the connections that can be made through the telling of story. This article is an compilation of the connections made during presentations at the International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry. Despite age differences, situations, and ways of being in and of the world, there were overlaps in the experiences of the authors. Three individual conference papers are merged to begin a conversation of queering queer narratives through an exploration of embodiment, relationality, and self-presentation without resorting to an established, and perhaps reified, queer iconography. From our queer identities, we offer narratives that are neither settled nor normative from our individual queer standpoints. We write to champion a different view of possibilities for queer non-normativity.

This autoethnography explores the communication and helpful/hindering systems available for faculty being harassed and stalked by current or former students. Highlighting general statistics and the numbers in my own student-stalker experience, I use this work to elucidate socio-psychological reports and qualitative accounts of stalking experiences, while integrating my own background and identity ambivalence as a combined woman, educator, and stalking victim. Last, I offer implications and practical insights regarding support for faculty within the university and criminal justice systems.

Using a blend of auto-archaeological, critical, and queer approaches, I descriptively and performatively articulate the position of my sexual identity when entrenched in the familial and organizational structures of scouting. Throughout this piece, I expose the intersections of father-son turmoil and organizational oppression along with offering defiant modes of queer resistance(s) and becoming(s).

According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders 1 approximately 37.5 million American adults aged eighteen and over report some trouble hearing. Despite the number of people affected by hearing impairment, the hard of hearing and deaf population are underrepresented. The hearing-impaired community faces a myriad of challenges in their daily lives communicating and relating to others. Unfortunately, there is a lack of resources for the hard of hearing and deaf population in schools, and a lack of affordability for hearing aids in the healthcare field. In this critical autoethnography, the author focuses on her experiences of coping with and navigating her world as a hearing-impaired individual. The autoethnographic account explores the author’s face-to-face encounters with her peers, audiologist, medical practitioners, and personal relationships centering her research on the communication barriers that often come with hearing loss including adjustments to sound, relating to others, and overcoming obstacles due to the lack of resources. The stories shared aim to illustrate how those with hearing impairments are disempowered in a world that is geared toward the hearing abled.

In Narrating the Closet , Adams described “coming out” as a seemingly never-ending ongoing process. I reflected on the number of times I had to explain how a blind guy could see, and I had a better understanding of coming out. Although I do not have the same negative social stigma, I often get weary repeating myself, trying to explain how a blind guy can see. Autoethnography can provide the reader with an opportunity to embrace the cultural standpoint of the writer, 1 especially if they find a way to associate the experience with their own journey. I am attempting to “seek dimensions of experience that will engender connection and recognition in the midst of complexity.” 2 I offer this article to provide a perspective of the phenomenon created when an adventitiously blind person (a person who had sight long enough to have visual references, usually after the age of five) tries to re-enter the sight-biased world.

In one year, I moved from a diverse school where I felt pretty and smart to a predominantly White school where I felt ugly and dumb. This autoethnography examines how a little African American girl’s transfer from an urban to a suburban school resulted in a paradigm shift that had and continues to have profound consequences on her identity development and subsequent choices and practices as a marginalized student struggling to succeed academically, a teacher grappling with professional identity, and a doctoral student hoping to help preservice teachers prepare to meet the needs of diverse students. The research question that prompted this exploration is How does teacher-student (dis)connection impact the identity development of students of color in U.S. schools, and these same students’ professional identity development should they later become teachers themselves? In a larger social context, this work examines the impact of a culture of care, or lack thereof, in the milieu of teaching and learning, especially as it relates to the academic and personal growth and development of Black and Brown students in U.S. public schools. The inquiry aids in unpacking, storying, and restorying the school-related lived experiences of the researcher. The narrative exemplars that are illuminated reinforce the personal, relational, and professional significance of creating a school and classroom culture of care; and the “truths” revealed may offer new knowledge that encourages today’s teachers to develop behaviors and practices that lead to safe, productive, culturally solicitous learning environments.

This article is an exploration of Salomé’s construction of the U.S. American Dream. Salomé is a sixty-seven-year-old immigrant from Guatemala. During eight hours of in-depth interview, Salomé talks about the embodied experience of migration, motherhood, and her view of the American Dream. In this article, I explore issues of representation, voice, and positionality when conducting qualitative research. Salomé’s story is not generalizable to all Latinx immigrants but is nonetheless illustrative of the ways in which the American Dream is contextualized by individuals. At a time when Latinx migration and experience in the United States and the nature and content of the American Dream have taken center stage in national dialogue, Salomé’s experiences serve to illustrate the profoundly personal and individual lived experiences of the American Dream.

Through my own narrative about my relationship with my fictive father in Zanzibar and the impact of this relationship on my research, in this autoethnographic essay I explore three themes: fictiveness, fatherhood, and the field. These themes tie together different aspects of the term “patriography,” linking them to ethnography and its subgenre autoethnography. Drawing on the term “patriography” as the science or study of fathers, I use the concept of “the field” to examine the impact of narratives about fathers on not only the field as a site of ethnographic research but also on the field of African cultural studies.

Research on survivors of homicide has focused on various circumstances and the impact of homicide on family members and strangers. However, research regarding the survivors of individuals killed by police remains difficult to find. This particular kind of public, traumatic death of a loved one imposes unique and traumatic grief for the survivors. Per the 2014 FBI Uniform Crime Report, my family and I were one of an estimated 461 families affected by the death of a loved one due to police homicide in 2013. This estimate is low, however, because only thirty-three states voluntarily report such information, and law enforcement agencies are not required to report civilian deaths by police homicide. This narrative explores the impact of homicide by police on me as a survivor and mother as I coped with the death and trauma of my adult son’s death by police. Using short episodes of interactions, I analyze my experience and ongoing grief.

This article traces my struggles with psychosis, arrest, psychiatric institutionalization, and recovery. Mobilizing a cathartic approach to autoethnography, I reveal my resistances, resiliencies, oppressions, nightmares, and recovery processes in the mental health system as I became entangled in another, darker reality and tried desperately to escape it. This work is a contribution to the emerging field of Mad Studies that seeks to privilege lived experiences with madness and the mental health system as a way of knowing. I found that doing an autoethnography of the mind helps recover the pieces of a fragmented identity and heals some of the visceral horrors that haunts us through and beyond experiences with mental illness.

This autoethnographic essay explores experiences of two White female media-scholars at the Newseum in Washington, DC, on August 10, 2013. It considers the Newseum’s role in how we remember and why we forget certain aspects of U.S. American journalism and the relationship between this institutional site of memory and our individual and collective identities. The self-reflexive, autobiographical methodological form allows the historians of media and culture to consider the calls of Barbie Zelizer, Carolyn Kitch, Janice Hume, and Alexander Dhoest for more conceptual clarity in our understandings of public, social, cultural, and collective memory and for new understandings of the negotiation and reception of media memory-texts and sites of memory.

This is an autoethnographic poem. It shows one of the limits of autoethnography.

Autoethnography has become legitimized through its ability to connect culture to personal experiences. This legitimization has occurred alongside a titanic shift in communication made possible by digital technology, which has rapidly transformed, multiplied, and mediated the ways through which we engage one another. This essay explores and exemplifies the necessity of autoethnography to evolve in concert with the ways our lives have become inextricably tethered to digital technology. Due to this shift, we propose that contemporary autoethnography is digital autoethnography, a method we propose that relies on personal experience(s) to foreground how meaning is made among people occupying and connected to digital spaces. Digital autoethnography is distinguishable from traditional autoethnography because the cultures analyzed are not primarily physical; they are digital. In short, the work of digital autoethnography is situated within and concerned about digital spaces and the lived experiences, interactions, and meaning-making within and beside these contexts. Embracing digital autoethnography pushes us to consider and reflect upon the ways we have changed over time with the influx of digital technology. Additionally, the method provides a framework to keep autoethnography relevant in spite of the inevitable changes to human experience that will occur as digital connectivity becomes increasingly enmeshed in our everyday lives.