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The purpose of this paper is to show how autoethnography applied to digital fiction can give us deep insights into collaborative writing through a case study of a Japanese mobile novel platform.

The paper is based on the author’s autoethnographic fieldwork as an ethnographer and a writer, arguing that the autoethnographic method is an effective tool for the understanding of digital fiction.

Through this approach the researcher, could not only reflect on the possibility of autoethnography as a methodology, but he could also enter into the dynamics of how the community of people surrounding a digital novel and his/her author is organized.

Despite the fact that Japan has been a pioneer in the development of mobile novels, almost nothing has been written on the topic in languages other than Japanese. This paper is an invitation for further investigation that could foster comparative studies between the Japanese case and those in other countries.

This chapter discusses the methodological underpinnings of a doctoral study that examined boys’ performances of gender in physical education (PE) at a single-sex secondary school in Auckland, New Zealand. Initial findings are also presented; however, they only serve to demonstrate the potential of such an approach and not as an exhaustive report of findings. Using a participatory visual research approach involving video recordings of boys participating in PE, the boys’ representations and interpretations of the visual data were explored during both focus groups and individual interviews. The boys’ visual representations and interpretations highlight how their performances of gender are embedded in the design and structure of the physical spaces and places associated with PE. Through a Foucauldian (poststructural) lens the boys’ responses also illuminate how the gendered self is performed in multiple, contradictory and fluid ways involving particular technologies of the self. Visual research methods that focus on young people’s visual representations and interpretations might help identify (gendered) identity issues that are seen as important to the students themselves. It creates a space for young people to critically think about, reflect, articulate, and reason their lived experiences, their relationships with their peers and more importantly themselves. The use of such research approaches has the potential of realizing one of the key aims of symbolic interactionism by opening up new analytical possibilities for understanding young people’s lived experiences in both formal and informal pedagogical contexts.