Autoethnography 2025 Special Interest Group
Risky Business, Uncertain Futures… and, The Work Continues
Wednesday May 14, 2025
1pm – 2:30pm (Los Angeles)| 4pm – 5:30pm (New York) |9pm – 10:30pm (Bristol)}
Thursday May 15, 2025
6am – 7:30am (Melbourne)|8am – 9:30am (Aukland)
The theme of this year’s ICQI conference, “Qualitative Inquiry under a Big Tent” calls us to link our research and our attendant interventions to those institutional sites where “private troubles are turned into public issues and public issues transformed into social policy.”
This year’s conference theme asks us as critical autoethnographers to take stock of the field of qualitative inquiry and to think about the stakes of our political moment, how it shapes our collectively shared futures, and what it calls of us to do to actualize a world that we all can live fully and free.
“Risky Business, Uncertain Futures… and, The Work Continues” is about acknowledging the times we are living in while saying YES to our work and each other. This call is an invitation to name the work we see as necessary, to devise autoethnographies that practice risk taking, and to water our community in this new season.
In this SIG Day, we aim to:
● Sustain and further build our autoethnographic community
● Explore the following themes:
○ Speaking through a broken heart: How does autoethnography and performance support us in our efforts to feel the weight of the world and move forward anyway? How can we both acknowledge “broken heartedness” and express an impulse towards what comes next?
○ Advocacy and Action : The autoethnographic project is/as an action; what is the nature of that action now, in these times of closing, and constriction, and an
impulse to self-protection, what is the fuel that autoethnography provides to call in, call out, and call up?
○ Worldmaking/World(re)making: What worlds become possible with seeing
ourselves as reflections of the world, now? What stories have we told about this
world and/or ourselves that need rewriting? This theme welcomes stories that
imagine us into other futures and draws from our rolodex of experience seeds of worldmaking practices.
● Discover, through conversation, where and how the work continues. How are imagination and inspiration helping us to work in new ways and new contexts to meet the needs of our communities and the times through which we are living?
SESSION OVERVIEW
Given the format of the conference, our SIG Day will be structured slightly differently than in past years. The core of our effort this year is to center our autoethnographic community across multiple time (zones) and geographies. To that end, our day will consist of one 90-minute synchronous session. We will have small performances from our SIG community and leave space for dialogue and connection.
ADDITIONAL DETAILS
● Everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend
● If you would like to receive regular updates from the SIG, or have recently transitioned to another job, please write to [email protected] so we can update your information.