Autoethnography in the 21st Century, Volume II: Genealogy, Memory, Media, Witness(Life Writing)

Autoethnography in the 21st Century offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of autoethnography from around the globe. Volume II, Genealogy, Memory, Media, Witness examines hybrid ethnographic life-writing genres, including genealogical memoir, cultural autotheory, and family narrative. Contributors actively blur the distinction between emic and etic classifications of ethnographic experience to position themselves as both the active bearers of and critical witnesses of culture to produce and analyze expressive rather than data-driven depictions of selfhood and culture that emerge in the spaces between traditionally self-effacing scientific methods and literary narrative. It features autobiographical and anthropological poetics, autotheory, and fieldwork grounded in Trinidad, Jordan, Mexico, Italy, Australia, Canada, Scotland, Egypt, Turkey, and the United States. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of critical autoethnography, communication, cultural and gender studies, and other related disciplines. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - Autoethnography and Beyond: Genealogy, Memory, Media, Witness 1. Where the Centres Line Up: Finding Myself in the Fabric of the Highlands 2. Writing Ourselves into Time: Stories of Indo-Trinidadian Women 3. Strangers in a Strange Land: Jewish Memories of Istanbul in the Memoirs of Roni Margulies 4. The Language of Food: Semiotics in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Gastrographies 5. Hip Hop, La Crónica and Epiphany in Mexico City: Performative Research, Methodological Identities and Affective Analysis 6. Arriving on YouTube: Vlogs, Automedia and Autoethnography 7. Embodied Dread in Covid-19 Images and Narratives 8. Embracing the ‘Good-enough’—Teaching, Learning, Living During the COVID-19 Lockdown

About the Author :
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle is Professor of English at The College of New Jersey. Her work appears in Life Writing, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, The European Journal of Life Writing, Persona Studies, and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. She was the 2021-22 Fulbright Research Chair of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton Canada. Her books, Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator (2020) and Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood: In the Spaces Provided (2023) are published with Routledge Press in its Auto/biography Studies Series. Her current project, tentatively titled Life’s Work: Career Narrative as Autobiography in the North American Academy, is a study of functional forms of life writing in academic careers. She serves as Editor in Chief of a/b: Auto/biography Studies.