Living an Autoethnographic Activist Life

How does autoethnography, as an interpretive, critical, performative qualitative research method and way of being and doing—inside the academy and out—matter in the lives of those who daily experience social inequities and injustices? How, when and why is autoethnography an activist activity? Does living the autoethnographic life mean living an activist life? The 2017 Autoethnography Special Interest Group (SIG) at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry focused our attention on these questions, answering a call to explore and enact an autoethnography that enables us to live more reflective, more meaningful, and more just lives.

When we gather together in “sanctioned” and “official” public spaces such as a conference SIG gathering, or a university classroom, or in the pages of indexed and ranked journals, as well as when we assemble in “unsanctioned” and “unofficial” spaces such as “unranked” journals and hallways, public squares and street corners, and other spaces in which human equality or relational freedom is not readily manifest if not impossible—our gathering must, to borrow Judith Butler’s (2015) phrase, make a “call for justice” (Butler, 2015, p. 18).

Butler (2015) writes that the statement “we the people” is “first and foremost a speech act” (p. 175). Assembling a “we” in critical qualitative inquiry is a performative—when we say “we,” we seek to create an us, to, “bring about the social plurality” we name (p. 175). In other words, saying “we the people” does not describe our collective, but rather “gathers that group together” through the act of speaking (p. 175). Autoethnography is interested and invested in assembling a we—a collective of scholars who are committed to acting, to action, and to activism. A collective that, before uttering any words—are already enacting (and speaking) a collective and popular “will.” ¹

Our work in autoethnography is not to “find the human dignity” in a person or group of people or a story or group of stories, or to show or speak or enact that dignity for the education or benefit of others. Instead, our work is to “understand the human as a relational and social being, one whose action depends on equality” (Butler, 2015, p. 88). And our goal is to articulate a relation of freedom that speaks the “principle of equality” (p. 88).

In this view, autoethnography is centrally concerned with ethics and advocacy—of critiquing and breaking into oppressive and inequitable social discourse, processes, and institutions that implicates the self in that critique and intervention (Madison, 2010, p. 12). Ethics and advocacy will always raise the question: “To what end” do I make the work (Madison, 2010, pp. 13-14)? Or as my collaborator Anne Harris puts it, “What is the good of it?” Many of the contributors to our “Taking it Public” paper and performance session addressed this question. Norman Denzin looks to Paolo Friere and Augusto Boal for the wisdom they offer to autoethnographers seeking to create community, to connect the personal to history (private to public), and to push back against and resist injustice. David Purnell takes up Denzin’s challenge, asking how we might (re)make public spaces, particularly for homeless communities, by (re)inventing such spaces based upon the interactions that take place within them in an effort to begin having hard and important conversations about the complexities of finding place in the contemporary world. Kitrina Douglas, David Carless, Kate Milnes, Rhys Turner-Moore, Jon Tan, and Erika Laredo explore the space that digital technologies create for “taking” autoethnographic research to the “public,” and making our research accessible to a wider audience through the example of “Reverberations,” a collaborative autoethnography exploring bullying, homophobia, and other types of sexual harassment and the feelings of shame, embarrassment, and fear which often surround these topics. Dominique Hill and Durell Callier (Hill L. Waters) also take a collective auto/ethnographic approach, offering up an account of their educational experience to bear and bare witness to, confront, reimagine, and provide redress, as necessary, to those negative experiences, persons, and teachers who shaped their schooling/educational journey. Each of these pieces each makes a “call for justice” in their effort to make work that matters and speaks (for) freedom in our world.

A set of second questions that guided our work were tied to questions of hope. How do we hold on to hope in a time and a world that has become an increasingly unjust and inhospitable? In addition to asking how we might hold on to hope, we ask ourselves and each other what, under current conditions, we might hope for. In an essay published in The Guardian not long after Donald Trump’s inauguration as President in the United States, writer-activist Rebecca Solnit makes a case for holding on to and imagining with hope:

[Hope] navigates a way forward between the false certainties of optimism and of pessimism, and the complacency or passivity that goes with both . . . Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is unpredictable, and that we don’t actually know what will happen, but we know we may be able to write it ourselves.

Marcelo Diversi and Claudio Moreira sound a siren call for holding fast to community and the importance of remaining hopeful about social and environmental justice in the worlds we find ourselves in. Christopher Poulos returns that call, sharing a passionate response for speaking out for social justice, speaking truth to power, standing up for what you believe in, and answering the call of conscience to respond to intolerable conditions in our contemporary political landscape. Kakali Bhattacharya gives us an example of what holding onto hope entails as she writes into and through gendered sexual repression and silencing as disciplinary apparatuses that cross cultural borders while remaining open to how such disciplining also contains gaps for exploration and resistance. Ron Pelias adds his voice to the conversation, offering a poem in three parts, the first, a rant; the second, a confession; and the third, a hope. Each part identifies a different way he is experiencing the current political scene, one that he finds dangerous to our collective future in the face of that danger, he calls on the poetic as a method of political intervention.

Others among us call on the forward looking power of hope—the “belief that what we do might mater [and] an understanding that the future is not yet written” (Solnit, 2017). Sandra Faulkner takes up this call, making an argument for the power of autoethnographic stories as a means for social activism, using the pathos of shame to move those in power to act and to do the right thing in the face of injustice. A.B. uses what could be a shaming experience to create movement and find hope for the future by making (activist) community through poetry and performance. Karen Werner also explores community space—in particular, community radio as and encounter-based, expressive, poetic, and political space for connecting a vast circle of listeners that reaches ever-outward. My piece with Anne Harris also takes up space—in this case the space of the Westminster Bridge in London, a site of terror and of activism—to ask what affect theory offers activist politics. We explore how such ideas address the urgent need to turn a march (a singular event full of emotion and energy) into a movement—activist activity that exists and persists in and through time. Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt close the collection, looking forward to what autoethnography might do, understanding autoethnographic practices as assembling and dissembling bodies that are active in always territorializing space and in world making. They see autoethnographic practices as always shifting, always about movement, intensity, and potentiality; it never resides; it lives in the creation of the next moment, the next step into the not yet known.

As the essays in this special issue tell and show, the work of autoethnography is “always, first and last, storytelling work . . . . Building, remembering, retelling, celebrating our stories is part of our work” (Solnit, 2017). Sounding a call for justice, exercising will to assemble and work together ethically and in advocacy, engaging “battle” work of story—with these commitments, we can live an activist autoethnographic life, one that makes hope into action and actuality (Solnit, 2017).