1st Edition
Crafting Autoethnography Processes and Practices of Making Self and Culture
This collection explores how autoethnography is made. Contributors from sociology, education, counselling, the visual arts, textiles, drama, music, and museum curation uncover and reflect on the processes and practices they engage in as they craft their autoethnographic artefacts. Each chapter explores a different material or media, together creating a rich and stimulating set of demonstrations, with the focus firmly on the practical accomplishment of texts/artefacts.
Theoretically, this book seeks to rectify the hierarchical separation of art and craft and of intellectual and practical cultural production, by collapsing distinctions between knowing and making. In relation to connections between personal experience and wider social and cultural phenomena, contributors address a variety of topics such as social class, family relationships and intergenerational transmission, loss, longing and grief, the neoliberal university, gender, sexuality, colonialism, race/ism, national identity, digital identities, indigenous ways of knowing/making and how these are ‘storied’, curated and presented to the public, and our relationship with the natural world. Contributors also offer insights into how the ‘crafting space’ is itself one of intellectual inquiry, debate, and reflection.
This is a core text for readers from both traditional and practice-based disciplines undertaking qualitative research methods/autoethnographic inquiry courses, as well as community-based practitioners and students. Readers interested in creative practice, practitioner-research and arts-based research in the social sciences and humanities will also benefit from this book.
Introduction
Jackie Goode, Karen Lumsden and Jan Bradford
Section I: This Writing Life
1. Shoring Up the Fragments
Jackie Goode
2. When the Slave Ships Came
Panya Banjoko
Section II: Making a Drama Out of It
Chapter 3. Reflections and Confessions on the Making of a Performative Autoethnography: University Professional Development Reviews and the Academic Self
Karen Lumsden
4. Mi amigo Giovanni: A Digital Engagement of Friendship, Community and Queer Love Through a Zoom Performance
Edgar Rodríguez-Dorans and David Méndez Díaz
Section III: Crafting Selves
5. Thinking with our Hands while Becoming Autoethnographers
Rommy Anabalón Schaff and Javiera Sandoval Limarí
6. Putting Ourselves in the Picture: An Autoethnographic Approach to Photography Criticism
Simon Denison
7. Digital Autoethnography: An Approach to Facilitate Reflective Practice in the Making and Performing of Visual Art
Joanna Neil
8. Stitching as Reflection and Resistance: The Use of a Stitch Journal During Doctoral Study
Clare Daněk
9. Making The Dreamer: Cut-ups, Découpage and Narrative Assemblages of Interbeing and Becoming
Mark Price
Section IV: Creating Class
10. Hidden Time: An Autoethnographical Narrative on the Creation of Seven Working-Class Time Pieces
Aidan Teplitzky
11: Coming Back to Class: The Remaking of an Academic Self
Chrissie Tiller
Section V: Place and Belonging
Chapter 12. Walking as Knowing, Healing, and the (Re)making of Self
Lauriel-Arwen Amoroso
13. Where the River Flows Out to the Sea: A Story of Place-Making
Patrick Limb
14. Making Mistakes: Learning Through Embarrassment when Curating Indigenous Collections in UK Museums
Jack Davy
Conclusion
Jackie Goode, Karen Lumsden and Jan Bradford
Biography
Jackie Goode is a Visiting Fellow in Qualitative Research in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University, UK.
Karen Lumsden is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, UK.
Jan Bradford completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and is an independent researcher.
"Practices and academic disciplines that are founded on skilled material engagement have lacked methods to bring to light what this engagement involves. From this perspective, the focus on the making of autoethnographies in Crafting Autoethnography provides an essential and welcome addition to the resources available for contemporary research and practice."
Tom Fisher, Professor of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University, UK
"This is a wonderful book! The go-to text on theorising, making/doing and reflecting on autoethnography in current times. A richly textured collection that is rooted in the history of the method and the importance of paying attention to the multifaceted ways we can work with personal and professional experience."
Maggie O’Neill, Professor in Sociology, University College Cork, Ireland
"This fascinating collection of intertwined and evocative autoethnographic creations is a welcome addition to a developing auto-methodological literature. In contrast to existing works, it offers readers grounded and rich insights into the art and crafting of autoethnographic making. It succeeds in drawing us in to the lifeworlds of autoethnographic creators."
Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson, Professor Emerita in Sociology & Physical Cultures, University of Lincoln, UK
