"I have personally been that teenager, marking down “white” on a school application, hesitating to answer when an Anglo-American asked me “what are you?”, and leaving those experiences with a deeper sense of displacement."
Autoethnographic Writing
Whether short-form or long-form, personal memoir or speculative fiction, The AutoEthnographer seeks to publish your evocative expressions of the cultural made personal.
“A Quest for Social Justice: Notes on an Encounter” continues my accounting of having been falsely accused of sexual assault online.
"Give Me a Strawberry Cockroach" is the first article in our 2023 special issue on laughter and tells a story of Japanese language learning and performance.
This piece of original short fiction contains plot elements based on my recent adventures hiking remote trails in Ecuador and Colorado.
Patricia Leavy·
All ContentAutoethnographic EssaysCelebrating Dr. Patricia Leavy's Social Fiction 2024Reflections on Method
··11 min readWriting fiction allows me to document reality and to reimagine it, just as we can always reimagine ourselves. And that is why we need stories.
"I had no idea what the repercussions would be should I disclose my identity to my students. Would I be fired? Would I be questioned? Would I be told not to talk of such things? This reticence is a sad reflection on my internalized homophobia, my being still uncomfortable enough with my identity such that I had to worry about keeping it secret."
I. Hate. Black. History. Month. And I’m hopeful, that in time, you will come to hate it too!
Jesus and Fentanyl: A Mortician's Perspective is actually thoughts from a funeral director and also an ode to an overdose victim.
As two authors/playwrights exploring this small island on the East Coast of Canada, we write to share our own experiences and perspectives.
Ulla-Maija Matikainen·
All ContentAutoethnographic Literary FictionAutoethnographic PoetryAutoethnographic WritingVolume 2, Issue 1 (2022)
··12 min read"A woman alone doesn’t belong to any male power or protection sphere. She can be kidnapped into fears and dreams."
Through these reflections on heritage, I delve into being a child of parents who immigrated from the Bronx to a suburban lifestyle.
"When I return to Sam’s place with the cheesecloth, I smell our “soup” pot. Shit. I envision the blotter headline: ECU Professor busted for marijuana. What a way to make my graduate mentors proud and to show success at this professor business."