Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

I am fascinated by the potential for moments to reveal broader themes within media and everyday life. In this short article, I use autoethnography to explore the aural ritual of listening to a memorial tribute to media celebrities on nightly television news. I hope this article encourages others to use sensory investigation as a methodological tool within the autoethnographic tradition in communication research.

The Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozie Adiche in her insightful TED talk, expounds on “the danger of the single story.” I have always had a tacit knowing about this, that one story is just that: one story. If a story is told long and often enough, it becomes the truth, going possibly unquestioned through generations. I continue to explore my father’s nuclear family and the narratives of his siblings regarding their lives with their Sicilian father. Disrupting the “Master Narrative” using poetic inquiry and respondents’ own words help to redress the lack of their voice(s) in their own experience(s).

This poem addresses the limitations of language for representing experience and shaping political action at this historical moment of inquiry. Words have the power to name or to silence. Who owns a particular narrative, and who has a right speak for whom? As worldwide political, social, and environmental issues become ever more pressing, we need pragmatic tools to bridge the gap between naming and doing, and strategies to move from fear and passivity to collective agency.

I chose poetic performance narratives to create a provocative piece offering a glimpse of the reality, tragedies, dreams, and hopes lived daily by more than 12 million people in the United States. These individuals are reported as unauthorized, undocumented immigrants by the U.S. Census Bureau. These specific stories were shared and collected ethnographically on the agricultural fields of the South East of the United States. My goal is to have “captured” readers to be seduced into the “uncomfortable” world of undocumented people and have the poems/performance narratives become not only representation of the events but, as Renato Rosaldo said, “the event itself.”

Jewish people are a unique minority group identified through a religious belief system, a culture, and supposed biological traits. I describe myself here as a partial Jew, indicating my unique status parallels the identities of mixed race individuals who feel some other minority group members see them as like themselves but marginally or partially so, at times creating a double marginalization. Through my marginal identity, I encounter prejudice and discrimination from non-Jews and Jews alike. Taking cues from Claudia Rankine, I write examples of everyday identification, prejudice, and discrimination in the second person, in a style unique to sociology. I note my silences, responses, and thoughts about those encounters. I consider whether these everyday encounters constitute microaggressions, and what, then, I am, and you are, left with.

Children from multilingual families often attend preschool programming that engages in school readiness including school-based language and literacy through play. This article problematizes the privileged position of school-based language and literacy. Proposing all literacies and languages are equally important, what is the relationality of multilingualism and multiple literacies in an assemblage with families engaged in minority education? Two 7-year-old girls, their mothers, and the researcher discuss literacies, multilingualism, and learning. The conceptual and analytical lenses of Multiple Literacies Theory and rhizoanalysis deterritorialize arborescent learning and reterritorialize learning rhizomatically. Through problematization, multilingualism, multiple literacies, and minority education conceptualize differently.

This poem forms a diffraction of Patti Lather’s article listing ten learnings from the ontological turn. This work is intended to be read alongside Lather’s original article, so the reader can appreciate how poetry and prose form and entangle reciprocally. Ostensibly coalescing as notes from a face-to-face, simultaneously video-conferenced meeting to discuss Lather’s list, this poem pulls together fragments from multiple intra-actions and pushes meaning apart, as do the human and other speakers it calls into being. It avoids dramatic claims to making a difference, but suggests an infinitesimal, insect antennae shift via the ways it may brush against the reader’s skin and increase awareness of the more-than-human. This may even activate a tiny wriggle-release from a stuck place. Lather’s list emerges through the narrows of poetic inquiry as changed, alternatively accessible, more intensely affective, yet still resonant with her advice and spiky with further, many-legged, tangential questions.

If telling the truth is considered vital to research methodology, what happens in methodological spaces where “telling the truth” is futile? In this article, we examine the limitations, possibility, and even desirability of normative forms of empirically verifiable truth-telling and the potentialities for storied or fabulated truths with regard to knowledges that have historically been dismissed by their audiences as unreliable and even deceptive. To do so, we draw from critical theory, and Deleuzian theory in particular, to offer a detailed theoretical framework for understanding the notion of fabulated truth. We then turn to our own research to describe a project that embraced the potential of fabulation as a deeply generative methodological practice in regard to better understanding experiences of trauma. This project, which involved working alongside people with intellectual disabilities who have survived institutional incarceration, used fluid arts-based methods to help engage the affective force of trauma to story multiple truths about an otherwise unspeakable history.

This autoethnographic essay examines the complexity of reproductive storytelling. Framed around a pair of interwoven reproductive stories, and located within a reproductive justice framework, it asserts that women’s stories of fertility, pregnancy, contraception, and abortion have, both historically and in the contemporary period, been marked by silences. Such silences, the result of political, legal, social, and moral forces beyond women’s control, have limited women’s abilities to share and reflect on the intricate negotiations that have shaped their reproductive lives, and as a consequence, have also limited their capacities for telling their reproductive stories. As this article argues, all reproductive stories are complex stories. Too often, however, those complex nuances that shape women’s reproductive lives and stories remain hidden, unspoken, and secret. Making room for the intricacies of reproductive stories and storytelling can also, this article argues, offer greater nuance to continuing debates around reproductive rights and reproductive justice.