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This article aims to represent three ethnographers researching an organizational event within academia: the Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. It explores the divergent viewpoints of their ethnographic experiences as well as reflecting upon their relationships with each other as they attempted to understand each others’ viewpoints.

This ethnographic project involved participant observation, full participation, and narrative interviews. However, as the project continued, it evolved to reflexively examining the authors’ own viewpoints and relationships challenges.

This paper contributes to understanding ethnographic research of organizational events in several ways. First, it is an exemplar of how three ethnographers examining the same organizational event view it through differing lenses. Secondly, it shows how the authors worked together through the research, struggling to understand each others’ varied political and personal lenses through dialogue.

The research examined only one organizational event, therefore the findings are specific to this site and the same results may not necessarily be found in other organizations.

This paper is unique in that three ethnographers from different generations and different political worldviews can come together for the purposes of research, examine an organizational event and learn to cooperate with and appreciate each others’ viewpoints.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how mindless/mindful classroom practices affect the quality of learning and overall experiences of children in an early childhood educational setting.

The method used in the study is auto‐ethnography. This qualitative research is based on self‐reflexivity in ethnographic research and intrinsic case study. The study draws substantially from the theory of mindfulness/mindlessness.

Quality can be marred through mindlessness. The same can be improved through mindfulness, child centric and friendly practices, recognising the needs of each individual child, and enhancing their learning experiences, as against merely fulfilling curriculum obligations. It is suggested that when mindful approaches are applied to classroom practices, the needs of young learners can be better met, thereby improving the experiences of learners, and eventually the curriculum quality.

The scope of the study is limited to early childhood education in one location; more studies in other cultural settings are suggested.

The paper concludes that mindful classroom practices are effective strategies for improving the quality and overall performance of students and teachers, whereas mindless approaches will achieve the exact opposite.

Through auto‐ethnography, the paper adds value to existing approaches to understanding quality and how mindfulness/mindlessness can affect education quality.

In this paper I seek to contribute to a growing understanding of the role of the self in qualitative forms of research and narrative. In calling upon the work of symbolic interactionists, postmodernists, and feminists, I explore how self-narrative might inform our scholarly work, both in terms of creating more advanced self-understandings and in promoting open and honest discussions about how our personal and professional lives intersect. After reviewing the philosophical rationale as well as various uses of self-narrative in social science and educational research, I examine my own deployment of self-reflexive writing as part of an effort to bridge the chasm between my personal life and my life in the academy.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the lived experiences from the voice of the authors (a science professor, an instructional designer, a distance learning doctoral intern, and a distance learning director) in the process of transitioning a face-to-face science course to online modality at a large, research university.

The method of this qualitative inquiry involves a personal narrative approach in which the authors reflect on their experiences of this process and analyze it through writing.

The findings examine the challenges of moving a traditional course online and reiterate the value of a team approach to ensure its quality. The narrative offers clarity to the different phases of such a project and can enhance decision making among those involved in course design and delivery, as well as administrators incentivizing the conversion of traditional courses to the online modality.

Online education has emerged as a viable solution. The challenges and rewards of transitioning face-to-face courses to distance learning modalities are well documented, even for a senior science educator.

Universities face several modern day challenges, including reductions in state appropriations, lack of available space for classes, challenges of engaging a technologically savvy generation, and preparing students for a global marketplace.

To support faculty members’ transition to online education, universities offer instructional design support, where ideas are exchanged with faculty members to ensure pedagogically sound and engaging distance learning. The authors conclude with recommendations for both practice and future research in the area of practice and process improvement for diffusion of online courses at traditional universities, one course at a time. This is important to those beginning to transition course offerings online.

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of organizational conflict management from a multicultural perspective in the context of higher education institutions (HEIs).

Besides a theoretical discussion about multiculturalism and leadership, a case study based extensively, but not exclusively, on oral history has been undertaken within a unit of a HEI in Brazil. The case study, which illustrates the cost when multicultural leadership is absent, is based on a combination of first‐hand information and facts reconstruction.

The research discussed in this paper showed that the system of constructing “otherness” and isolating it can actually be characterized as workplace bullying condoned by extremely mono‐cultural leaders. An alternative scenario with more multiculturally competent leaders is discussed, providing possible tools and avenues for organizational conflict management.

HEIs should be viewed as multicultural organizations, not only for the purpose of developing multicultural curricula but also for reviewing the impact of institutional practices and leadership on the organizational climate. Leaders should be ethically and multiculturally accountable for ensuring an institutional identity that is open to cultural plurality and to the challenge of the institutionalization of differences.

This paper goes beyond multicultural issues restricted to individual and group identities and incorporates institutional cultural climate and the role of multicultural leaders in organizational conflict management in the context of HEIs, hitherto not much discussed, which may open up new debates in the area.

This conceptual paper seeks to critically evaluate and illuminate the diverse autoethnographic methodologies that are pivotal for understanding the dynamics of contemporary workspaces. The objective is to contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate on the value of autoethnography in workplace research and explore how it can shed light on complex organizational phenomena.

The paper adopts a narrative literature review approach, focusing on four main forms of autoethnography: realist, impressionistic, expressionistic and conceptualistic autoethnographies. Each form is discussed and dissected, emphasizing their specific sub-forms and illustrating their application through representative examples. The paper engages in a critical debate on utilizing autoethnography in workplace research.

The findings illuminate how autoethnographic methods can be used to gain nuanced and complex understandings of personal experiences situated in workplace culture, as well as how broader social and cultural contexts shape these experiences. The study also highlights the potential of these methods to explore marginalized and silenced stories within workplaces and contribute to the knowledge on power dynamics, inequalities and injustices embedded in the organizational culture.

The following contribution discusses approaches for conducting autoethnographic explorations of selected work environments, offering researchers valuable insights into these methods' application. Through better comprehension and application of these methodologies, researchers can enhance their contribution toward cultivating more inclusive and equitable workplace environments.

The paper stands out in its extensive review and critical discussion of the autoethnographic methods as applied in workplace research. It expands upon individual autoethnographic studies by providing a comprehensive, multifaceted perspective, delving into the merits and limitations of these approaches in particular context of researching contemporary places of work.

The purpose of this chapter is to make visible the similarities and differences among narrative, self-study of teacher education practices, and autoethnographic methodologies to generate clarity about when each methodology might be most appropriate. Using Margery Wolf’s (1992) A Thrice Told Tale as a heuristic to support our exploration, we look at a selected slice of data as if standing within each methodology. As we do that we consider ways that we might engage each methodology to push forward our thinking about powerful research. Our goal is to critically examine the processes that researchers use for the study and to explore the ways using particular methodologies in appropriate ways that can strengthen our thinking about professional knowledge.

Purpose – To introduce autoethnography as an innovative research approach within sport and physical culture, and consider its key tenets, strengths and weaknesses. For illustrative purposes, the chapter draws upon two specific autoethnographic research projects on distance running – one collaborative and one solo.

Design/methodology/approach – The design of the two projects is delineated, including methods of data collection and analysis: tape-recorded field and ‘head’ notes, personal and analytic logs, phenomenological, thematic and narrative data analysis. Issues of representation are addressed and the chapter explores salient, but often-overlooked, ethical considerations in undertaking autoethnographic research.

Findings – Key findings of two research projects are presented, cohering around issues of identity construction and identity work, together with lived body and sensory experiences of distance running.

Research limitations/implications – The limitations of using an autoethnographic approach are discussed, including in relation to fulfilling traditional, positivistic judgment criteria such as validity, reliability and generalisability; more appropriate criteria are proposed, particularly in relation to evocative autoethnographies. Novel forms of the genre: collaborative autoethnography and autophenomenography, are suggested as future directions for autoethnographic research in SPC.

Originality/value – The chapter provides a succinct introduction to the use of autoethnography in sport and physical culture, for those unfamiliar with the genre. The author also suggests an innovative variation – autophenomenography.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce to sociologists the concept of dissociative hypnosis and to demonstrate the potential that this discipline has for obtaining or deriving biographical narratives in ethnographic and autoethnographic studies.

The paper presents brief comparative histories of the development of hypnosis and of performance autoethnography to highlight the degree of consonance between these apparently, disparate modalities, in their struggle for acceptance and respectability. The intensely introspective, emotional and experiential nature of hypnosis and self-hypnosis narratives is then compared with the personal descriptions and applications of the autoethnographic process as depicted in the sociological literature, to illustrate the parallels between the two modalities. The paper concludes with a review of the potential problems and limitations inherent in using hypnosis as a memory recall modality in sociological research studies.

This paper argues that the exploratory and revelatory nature of information accrual during dissociative altered-state hypnosis closely resembles that during performance autoethnography, and that hypnosis could therefore be usefully employed as an additional and novel (ethno-) autobiographical tool in sociological and ethnographic research.

Performative autoethnography has now become a firmly established route to obtaining a valid and intensely personal autobiographical history of individuals or groups of individuals. However this is the first publication to propose hypnosis as an alternative approach to deriving ethnographic and autoethnographic biographical narratives.