2024 International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative
March 1-3, 2024 (Online)
The 2024 International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative (ISAN) featured more than 100 prerecorded presentations of autoethnographic and narrative research. Several presentations are linked throughout the program (below). The Symposium also featured one keynote address, five workshops, and 15 spotlight sessions. More than 330 people registered for the symposium, and we had participants affiliated with more than 25 countries.
Below are recordings of several of the live sessions from the 2024 symposium. Given that the presentation sessions have links to prerecorded presentations, we did not record those sessions. With the exception of the keynote address, the recordings are listed in the order they appeared in the program.
Keynote Address
White Elephant: Regifting Gifts of the Trade
Ragan Fox, California State University Long Beach (USA)
Honorary Memorial Spotlight Panel
Remembering Norman K. Denzin
Moderator: Aisha Durham, University of South Florida (USA)
Panelists
Aisha Durham, University of South Florida (USA)
Celiany Rivera Velázquez, Hunter College (USA)
Desiree Yomtoob, University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign (USA)
Claudio Moreira, University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA)
Himika Bhattacharya, Syracuse University (USA)
Grant Kien, California State University, East Bay (USA
Norman K. Denzin, research professor emeritus of communications at the Institute of Communications Research, professor emeritus of media and cinema studies, and professor emeritus of sociology and humanities at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, passed away on August 6, 2023 at the age of 82.
Norman was one of the world’s foremost authorities on qualitative research and cultural criticism, and a renowned figure in symbolic interactionist theory. In 2005, he founded the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry conference. Norman created and edited several journals, and he authored more than 50 books and 200 professional articles and chapters. For several decades, Norman guided our interpretive autoethnographic and narrative academic family, spurring us on, making each of us feel special, and creating a world in which we could succeed and be with and support each other.
A writer, scholar, teacher, and visionary, Denzin was a mentor to many generations of faculty and students. Panelists will share reflections about Norman K. Denzin. Drawing from epiphanic moments of their mentor-advisor, they will recall how his methodological approaches, representational forms, and politically-informed perspectives resonate.
Workshop
Publishing Fiction
Patricia Leavy, Independent Scholar, Paper Stars Press (USA)
Patricia Leavy, PhD, is a novelist and sociologist. She has published more than forty books, earning critical and commercial success in both fiction and nonfiction, and her work has been translated into many languages. Recently, The Location Shoot won a Literary Titan Gold Award for Fiction and Midwest Book Review called her novel Hollyland “laudably original.” She has received career awards from the New England Sociological Association, the American Creativity Association, the American Educational Research Association, the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, and the National Art Education Association. Her website is www.patricialeavy.com.
Honorary Interview
Kenneth Gergen
Swarthmore University (USA) and The Taos Institute
Interviewed by
Arthur P. Bochner, University of South Florida (USA)
Sheila McNamee, University of New Hampshire (USA) and The Taos Institute
Workshop
Yoga
Himanee Gupta, Empire State University (USA)
Scholar Spotlight
Kitrina Douglas and Ken Gale in Conversation
Kitrina Douglas, University of West London (England)
Ken Gale, University of Plymouth (England)
Kitrina Douglas is a video/ethnographer, storyteller, songwriter, performer, and narrative scholar whose research spans the arts, humanities, and social sciences. With David Carless, she has carried out 20 research projects, written 2 monographs and produced the online qualitative programme “Qualitative Conversations” available on YouTube. She is currently working in the department of Psychology, within the School of Human and Social Sciences at the University of West London, UK.
Ken Gale works in the Institute of Education in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business at the University of Plymouth in the UK and has published widely and presented at several international conferences on the philosophy of education, research methodologies and collaborative approaches to education practices. His current research involves the use of speculative and more than simply human approaches to theorising and inquiry, in encounters with creative and relational space making and the in-formational play between discursively constructed and materially constituted aspects of pedagogy and research in contemporary education. His most recent book, Writing and Immanence: Concept making and the reorientation of thought in pedagogy and inquiry was published by Routledge in January 2023.
Author Spotlight
Writing for Wellbeing: Theory, Research, and Practice
Katrin Den Elzen, Curtin University (Australia) and Reinekke Lengelle, Athabasca University (Canada) and The Hague University (The Netherlands)
Interviewed by
Elissa Foster, DePaul University (USA)
Writing can support our wellbeing even under the most difficult life circumstances, helping us to adapt to significant change, make sense of loss, improve our physical and emotional resilience, and foster personal growth. Numerous studies of Expressive Writing have confirmed this, and there are other established methodologies for practice. However, few accounts have offered detailed descriptions showing how and why putting pen to paper can be so beneficial. This book delves deeply into the landscape of Writing-for-wellbeing and demonstrates the transformative power of writing in a wide range of contexts.
Author Spotlight
The Everyday Lives of Gay Men: Autoethnographies of the Ordinary
Edgar Rodriguez-Dorans, The University of Edinburgh (Scotland)
Interviewed by
Tony Adams, Bradley University (USA)
The Everyday Lives of Gay Men draws on the expertise of 12 contributors from different countries and fields, writing from an autoethnographic first-person approach. Putting the power of personal stories at the centre of the construction of sophisticated narratives of gay men’s lives, the accounts draw attention to the limits of traditional perspectives to gay men’s studies that look at gayness through a sexualised lens and explore how gay men make sense of their identity in their everyday lives. Together they present a complex, nuanced understanding of gayness and challenge the conception of ‘being gay’ as a sexual orientation because it describes in sexual terms an identity that is not only, not always, and not predominantly sexual.
Author Spotlight
An Autoethnography of Letter Writing and Relationships Through Time: Finding Our Perfect Moon
Jennifer Adams, DePauw University (USA)
Interviewed by
Arthur P. Bochner, University of South Florida (USA)
An Autoethnography of Letter Writing and Relationships Through Time: Finding Our Perfect Moon is about love letters, stories, and the ability of words to bring people together across time and physical space. Weaving together edited and annotated letters between a young couple in the 1930s with interludes of autoethnographic reflection, the book relates the author’s experiences as she has negotiated this project over 20 years. The author uses reflective autoethnographic interludes to tell the story of finding the letters and to explore the significance of letters as a communicative genre. Adams considers the ethical implications of being a researcher eavesdropping on private moments in others’ lives, and she explores the function of dialogue in the development of the romantic relationship that unfolds in the letters and between the letters and her.
Spotlight Session
Writers in a Round: Songwriting as Teacher
Moderator: Martin Høybye, Aarhus University (Denmark)
Song as Teacher, Daniel Bakan, The University of British Columbia (Canada)
Join Our Hearts in Song: Reflecting On Songwriting As Teacher, Martin Høybye, Aarhus University (Denmark)
I Was Saved by a Song Too: Trauma, Recovery and Learning Through Songwriting, David Carless, University of the West of Scotland (Scotland)
Songwriter as Teacher Panel: Fisherwoman, Kitrina Douglas, University of West London (England)
Singer, songwriter and troubadour Mary Gauthier writes that “a song waiting to be born has something to teach the songwriter. Something we didn’t know before we wrote it” (Gauthier 2021, 3). In this panel we will discuss how we as songwriters and autoethnographers experience songwriting processes. How songwriting may be enlightening in the way that Gauthier suggests, what kinds of lessons we may personally have learned from songwriting processes, and, as autoethnographers, in what ways songwriting may help to connect the personal to the social. The four panelists have pre-recorded short paper presentations, and the panel discussion will be framed by these. Drawing on the Nashville tradition of “Songwriters in a round” the panelists will then take turns presenting a song, speaking to what they learned from writing it, before we open a broader discussion on the subject, and end by summarizing what we have learned from putting our minds together during the panel.
Author Spotlight
Jotería Communication Studies: Narrating Theories of Resistance
Robert Gutierrez-Perez, California State University, San Marcos (USA)
Interviewed by
Rona Tamiko Halualani, San Jose State University (USA)
This book articulates Jotería Communication Studies as a subdiscipline and as a praxis for resisting multiple forms of oppression by focusing on how everyday performances of identity and culture challenge master narratives of power and control. This book speaks to and with those nonheteronormative mestizas/os who perform their sexuality and gender in queer practices and communicative forms—Jotería. Specifically, this book locates “theories in the flesh” in the borderlands narratives of Jotería, such as cuentos, pláticas, chismé, testimonio, mitos, and consejos. These theories of power and resistance create knowledge about how Jotería make sense of their own difference, how people interpret their assumed or perceived difference, and ultimately, how difference is managed as an emancipatory tool toward the goal of queer of color world making.
Scholar Spotlight
César A. Cisneros-Puebla
Universidad de Tarapacá (Chile)
Moderator
Robert E. Rinehart, Lincoln University (New Zealand)
César A. Cisneros-Puebla, currently is researching and teaching at University of Tarapaca, Chile and former professor of Sociology at Autonomous Metropolitan University-Iztapalapa, Mexico more than 30 years. He has been a visiting professor at the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology, University of Alberta, Canada; in the CAQDAS Networking Project at University of Surrey, UK and also at the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences in the University of Augsburg, Germany, among other Universities around the world. He received in 2016 the Special Career Award in Qualitative Inquiry given by the International Association for Qualitative Inquiry in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA.
Workshop
Propagating Black Joy: How to Grow the Next Generation of Black Joy Scholars
Chris Omni, Ashley Powell, Michelle Gunn, Nailah Lee, and Christina Dugazon
Florida State University and The Omni Institute of Black Joy Research @ FSU (USA)
The Propagating Black Joy panel discussion was created to educate the community about Black Joy and more specifically nature’s influence on the health and healing of Black people. Just like the TEDxFSU experience, everyone is welcome to engage in this space; however, an extra dose of love will be showered upon Black women. I stand in this declaration because oftentimes, Black women, myself included, prioritize our productivity over our personal peace of mind. Sadly, the efforts we pour into achieving our various levels of personal and professional success do not directly equate to any greater protective factors when it comes to our overall health outcomes (McGee, 2015). For these reasons, I create and hold spaces for our healing and our collective self-restoration.
In this panel discussion, you will hear directly from the next generation of Black Joy scholars who engaged in a praxis of Pause in order to center their own Black Joy in green spaces. Ultimately, this panel discussion will leave you wanting to create these experiences in your various home states. Together, let’s Propagate Black Joy. Are YOU ready?
Author Spotlight
A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men
Stefan Battle, Rhode Island College (USA)
Moderator
Marquese McFerguson, Florida Atlantic University (USA)
In A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men, Battle weaves together autoethnographic narrative and ethnographic performance material from his own life and those of four other Black men, to show the untold impact of racial trauma on these everyday lives. By engaging readers with these experiences, stories, and pain, the book aims to help to stop racial trauma and heal the race-based grief of the many Black men who need to speak out against racial injustice United States. Battle uses individual activities including an interview with a White woman regarding her relationship to race and racism, a staged reading in which five Black men share their stories, an audience discussion about race and racism, and Battle’s performative talk, sharing the author’s desire for people of all races, to self-reflect and then talk among themselves about race and racism. Battle’s powerful book reveals that each Black man’s unique story is important and that understanding something of a person’s hidden context for processing the traumas of racism can lead to new understanding and healing. To this end, Battle examines issues such as Black men’s mental health and the wider societal systemic racism in the US that provokes tension and harm to the racial victimization of Black men.
Scholar Spotlight
Brydie-Leigh Bartleet
Griffith University (Australia)
Moderator
Stacy Holman Jones, Monash University (Australia)
Brydie-Leigh Bartleet is a Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Creative Arts Research Institute and Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University (Australia). She is a dynamic research leader, award-winning educator, respected community collaborator, and arts sector advocate. Over the past 20 years, her work has advanced our understanding of the cultural, social, economic, and educational benefits of the arts in First Nations’ Communities, prisons, war affected cities, educational and industry contexts. Her research is known for its innovation, interdisciplinarity, and cross-sector partnerships, connecting the arts with areas as diverse as social inequity, regional development, criminology and corrections, health equity, and human rights.
Author Spotlight
Unraveling an Autoethnography of Suicide and Renewal
M. F. Alvarez, University of New Hampshire (USA)
Interviewed by
Alec Grant, University of Bolton (England)
Unraveling examines the relationship among trauma, marginality, and mental health and critiques pathological notions of social and relational being. Through evocative storytelling and in-the-moment narration, the author provides a candid account of descending into so-called mental illness, the myriad traumas leading to breakage, and possibilities for reconstitution and renewal. The narrative is followed by a series of analytic chapters that explore the power of autoethnography in challenging hegemonic (i.e., biomedical) discourses on madness, suicidality, and recovery, and the ethical challenges that may arise. Ultimately, the author advocates for ‘unraveling’ as an orientation to the study of madness – an invitation to decipher the structures and conditions in which people come apart at the seams, and come together anew.
Panel Discussion
Getting Started with Critical Autoethnography: Learning How to Explore Culture, Identity, and Visibility as Graduate Researchers
Moderator: Marlen Harrison
Presenters: Marlen Harrison, Michele Ainsworth, Emily LaVergne, Kendra Hurst, Nicole Shim, Mavvy Vasquez, and Mary Schwope
This panel, moderated by The AutoEthnographer Magazine’s Marlen Harrison, is ideal for those just getting started with autoethnography or looking to mentor others utilizing the method. Our session will include discussion of our introductions to, resources utilized in support of, and responses to challenges faced while writing and mentoring critical autoethnography. Our intent is to provide our audience with a diverse snapshot of how autoethnography can be introduced and adopted in graduate humanities research settings, generally, and English Language Arts more specifically.
The first part of our session will be presented as a group narrative of the seven panelists’ diverse experiences, illustrating how autoethnography can stimulate innovative work around culture, identity, and visibility while supporting significant transdisciplinary and self- and cultural-awareness. We will also discuss our socioemotional experiences as researchers and the ways in which autoethnography allowed us to connect to and be visible in our work while pushing against the pervasive influence of imposter syndrome.
Scholar Spotlight
Christopher N. Poulos
University of North Carolina Greensboro (USA)
Moderator:
Robin M. Boylorn, University of Alabama (USA)
Christopher N. Poulos, Ph.D. is Professor and Head of Communication Studies at the UNC Greensboro. His scholarship focuses on autoethnographic and narrative inquiry/methodology; communication and stories, lies, secrets, trauma, violence, and loss; and ethics. He teaches courses in friendship and family communication, ethics, autoethnography, dialogue, and film. He is the author of two books: Essentials of Autoethnography (2021) and Accidental Ethnography: An Inquiry into Family Secrecy (2009). His work has appeared in Qualitative Inquiry, Journal of Autoethnography, Communication Theory, Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, Southern Communication Journal, International Review of Qualitative Research, Qualitative Communication Research, and in many edited books.
Panel Discussion
Muslim Voices: Experiences of Women in Academia
Panelists:
Noor Ali, Northeastern University (USA)
Fatima Seyma Kizil, Syracuse University (USA)
Fatima Koura, Northeastern University (USA)
Carolyn Lane, California State University Bakersfield (USA)
This panel brings to your four Muslim scholar-practitioners who have all separately embarked on the journey of collecting narratives of the Muslim American educational experience. While defying monolithic understandings of the Muslim demographic, this live discussion panel seeks to explore the lived experiences of female Muslim scholars through the utilization of autoethnography. This work addresses the need for Muslim voices in academia, and focuses on how the panelists each navigate their own intersectional identities as individuals, women, researchers, and community members, while also engaging with the vulnerable narratives of their research participants. This panel provides critical insight at a time when the climate is rife with misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the Muslim demographic. The panelists will share insights they have gained from their experiences, offering an opportunity to increase understanding and connection.
Honorary Scholar Spotlight
Ronald J. Pelias
Southern Illinois University Carbondale (USA)
Interviewed by
Keith Berry, University of South Florida (USA)
Ronald J. Pelias is a Professor Emeritus from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he taught performance studies from 1981-2013 in the Department of Communication Studies. He works on the stage primarily as a director and on the page as a writer committed to non-traditional forms of scholarly representation. His most recent books exploring qualitative methods are If the Truth Be Told (2016), Writing Performance, Identity, and Everyday Life (2018), The Creative Qualitative Researcher (2019), Lessons on Aging and Dying: A Poetic Autoethnography (2021).
2024 IAANI Awards
Moderator: Tony Adams, Bradley University (USA)
Each year, the International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry (IAANI) solicits nominations for various awards. For 2024, we solicited nominations for five awards: Outstanding Book, Outstanding Edited Book, Outstanding Audio and/or Visual Project, Outstanding Thesis (Masters), and Outstanding Dissertation (Doctorate). We also awarded a Journal of Autoethnography Article of the Year.