Crafting Autoethnography

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.

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.

Introduction; Section I: This Writing Life 1. Shoring Up the Fragments 2. When the Slave Ships Came; 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 4. Mi amigo Giovanni: A Digital Engagement of Friendship, Community and Queer Love Through a Zoom Performance; Section III: Crafting Selves 5. Thinking with our Hands while Becoming Autoethnographers 6. Putting Ourselves in the Picture: An Autoethnographic Approach to Photography Criticism 7. Digital Autoethnography: An Approach to Facilitate Reflective Practice in the Making and Performing of Visual Art 8. Stitching as Reflection and Resistance: The Use of a Stitch Journal During Doctoral Study 9. Making The Dreamer: Cut-ups, Découpage and Narrative Assemblages of Interbeing and Becoming; Section IV: Creating Class 10. Hidden Time: An Autoethnographical Narrative on the Creation of Seven Working-Class Time Pieces 11: Coming Back to Class: The Remaking of an Academic Self; Section V: Place and Belonging 12. Walking as Knowing, Healing, and the (Re)making of Self 13. Where the River Flows Out to the Sea: A Story of Place-Making 14. Making Mistakes: Learning Through Embarrassment when Curating Indigenous Collections in UK Museums; Conclusion