Introduction: Decolonizing Autoethnography

Abstract

Can there be a decolonial autoethnography? If so, what could such an autoethnography look, sound, and feel like? If the possibility of decolonizing this mode of knowing does not exist, then what are the impediments—discursive, material, political, social—that disallow a move to decolonized autoethnographic work? Where would decolonization take us? What does it mean to write the self in and out of colonial historical frameworks? In this special issue, we bring to life such conversations through nine essays and a postscript that perform, ruminate, narrate—with a thoughtful tenderness—some versions of decolonized and postcolonial autoethnography. The essays illustrate the form that emerges when the colonial and postcolonial (both past and present) are taken as central concerns in autoethnographic writing.

Unsettling reflexivity and critical race pedagogy in social work education: narratives from social work students

“…This term, rather than positioning reflexivity as a self-indulgent telling of honesty or humility that replicates white colonial emancipatory constructions, reflexivities of discomfort engages in 'practices of confounding disruptions' and pushes toward unfamiliar and uncomfortable arenas of continued struggle by visibilizing and challenging white colonial liberal discourses (Calderon, 2016;Pillow, 2003). Instead of recognizing the humanity of the oppressed groups in the existing social order or using individuals in the margins to justify extractive and hierarchical relationships of power and privilege, scholars have proposed alternative approaches to disrupt the existing social order drawing from queer and indigenous futurities and movements to shift away from individual confessions and center a liberatory praxis of critical reflection and critical action that dismantles systems and ideologies focusing on replicating settler colonialism and White supremacy (Chawla & Atay, 2018;Dutta, 2018;Smith, 2013;Winddance Twine & Gardener, 2013). Moreover, uncomfortable reflexivity is intrinsically in alignment with Critical Race pedagogy, it recognizes White power as a structure of racial dominance exerted through the subordination of indigenous, Black, brown, African Americans, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islanders, and in the possessive investment in Whiteness (Dyer, 2011;Lipsitz, 2018).…”

My career development journey to an authentic work identity

“…The rationale for the analytic autoethnography was supported by the key strengths of the visibility of the author as a researcher in the enquiry process, together with strong reflexivity, deep personal engagement, personal vulnerability and open-endedness of the social contexts (Anderson and Glass-Coffin, 2013). However, autoethnographic enquiries are often criticised for lacking scientific rigour, analysis and theory (Anderson, 2006;Denzin, 2014), posing ethical challenges (Bochner and Ellis, 2016), being limited to white-privileged groups (Chawla and Atay, 2017), being self-indulgent and lacking the criteria for good quality research (Denzin, 2014). To mitigate some of these methodological challenges, the criteria for reviewing creative analytical practices (CAPs), mentioned by Richardson and St. Pierre (2000), were used throughout this paper and are summarised in its conclusion.…”

Multimodal Expressions of Self: Telling Ghost Stories as Intersectional African American and Latinx American Scholars

“…We want to use our storied experiences as method, as a weapon against the colonizers by using multimodal storytelling methods (e.g., poetry, images, and videos) from our cultural backgrounds as African American and Latinx women. In this way, we hope to help decolonize qualitative research through the telling of these stories and through the claim that these stories are valid knowledge (Chawla & Atay, 2017; Lincoln & González y González, 2008; Patel, 2016).…”