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This chapter makes the assertion that social class is a verb, which is to say, an individual's class identifications are not fixed and ascribed at birth but must be understood as something that is practised and lived. In an era in which hyper mobility is the norm among a growing segment of the global population, social class identifications are increasingly fluid, context-dependent and could only be understood in relation to ‘other’ social class categories. By taking a discourse analytic approach to closely look at the episodes of my interactions with a range of interlocutors in my biographical trajectory across multiple contexts, this chapter provides accounts of the complexities of my class identifications as an academic in the UK higher education (HE) sector. Following Marxist scholarship in general, this linguistic autoethnography shows how class is not depicted as an attribute of people that is stationary in contemporary stratified societies. It argues that class must be understood as a social relation, as evolving in the social interactions with human subjects and the cumulative relationships that people engaged with, all arising out of the economic order in societies. Second, the interactional episodes highlighted in this chapter also shows how social class is interconnected with other identity inscriptions, such as gender, ethnicity, race and nationality. As such, this chapter shows how the nature of social class identifications in contemporary times are impacted by an individual's alignments with a range of social categories.

This chapter explored how authenticity and objectivity in autoethnography research are viewed from a new materialist perspective. The study is framed within Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism, which reconceptualizes how objects are examined, and knowledge created in scientific activities. The findings showed that in terms of authenticity, new materialism suggests a non-representationalist voice, which argues against the need to exactly mirror pre-existing phenomena in some metaphysical world through language in traditional research paradigms. This means the researchers must give up the authority of their narrative voice as a privileged source of knowledge with a valued property of authenticity. The study suggests performative voice as an alternative. The performative narrator is concerned not with identifying who researchers are, and how they are similar or different from the Other, but how their experiences constrain what they know and how they represent participants or themselves in their worlds. Writing autoethnographies now is less a way of telling than a way of knowing in being. An agential-realist account of objectivity posits that “distance is not a prerequisite for objectivity, and even the notion of proximity takes separation too literally” (Barad, 2007, p. 359). So objectivity does not mean to be removed or distanced from what we, as individual subjects of cognition, are observing. Objectivity, instead, is embodied through specific material practices enacted between the subject and the object. This entails that “objectivity is about accountability and responsibility to what is real” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). This understanding of objectivity engenders a reconfiguring of data as diffractive phenomena and reliability as axiological intra-actions in what I now call an auto-ethico-ethnography.

The purpose of this paper is to share my personal memories and emotions of my experience as an African American, a Woman of Color, teacher-peer, teacher-researcher, student and a colonized standard American English speaker, situated in English classrooms as white teachers teach African American literature from a white gaze. I concur with previous researchers on this topic, but from a fresh perspective that traditional educational spaces support racial-socio and linguistic hierarchies by avoiding authentic racial, social and cultural ways of knowing, thus allowing reproduction and perpetuating academic and social inequities targeted toward multilingual learners. Furthermore, I suggest that teachers must acquaint themselves with communities of color to become affective and effective to specifically facilitate multilingual classrooms.

This is an autoethnographic inquiry. It examines instances of culturally inexperienced white teachers teaching African American literature to middle school and high school multilingual learners. In adjacent, I share my personal memories and emotions of my experience as an African American, a woman of color, teacher-peer, teacher-researcher, student and a colonized standard American English speaker, situated in English classrooms as white teachers teach African American literature from a white gaze.

Undoubtedly, the white gaze influences marginalized persons. It does not merely attack who we be. It counter forms (e.g. influences) the views and ideas of the world around us. Gonzales (2015), shares in her autoethnography how educational practices are unjustly resistant to diversity. The racial-socio hierarchy uses every means necessary to deprive ethnicity (language, practices and beliefs). I did not verbally resist discrimination. Subsequently, some people of color may be guilty of having a slave gaze. I am very cautious and reluctant to use the term slave gaze. Nevertheless, I describe this as the opposite of having a white gaze. Slave gaze is someone who is colonized, dominated, submissive and feels unequal to whites and describes persons of color who have been conditioned to believe that whites are privileged and there is not much that we can do about it. I think this one way that Gonzales’ (2015); definition of double colonization can be extended, the racial-socio hierarchy in education forces marginalized persons to “redefine their identities within the dictates of yet another racial ideology” (p. 50). Undoubtedly, in re-identifying self-inflicts a counter-response to developing a substandard identity. Yet, I am certainly not the only person of color that is wary of challenging whiteness. Dismantling the master’s house will take more time. As white supremacist’s perceptions are embedded deep in the heart of education. Banishing false linguistic, cultural and racial ideologies equate to a mere few bricks of the master’s house. However, with non-traditional methods (e.g. getting to know the community in which the students live), renewed hearts and minds educators (together as a human race) can deconstruct and rebuild an education system fit for all learners.

This piece is an autoethnography of my experiences as a teacher teaching in multilingual classrooms. These are my original experiences and opinions.

This chapter examines in-service teachers’ transformed perspectives and practices for educating emergent bilinguals resulting from graduate study in a bilingual education graduate program in Chicago. This examination is contextualized in consideration of emergent bilinguals relative to the changing face of P-12 classrooms and gaps in teacher education. Findings from autoethnographic and discourse analytic inquiry suggest that teacher preparation in bilingual education (1) prepared and empowered in-service teachers to meet the academic, social, and cultural-linguistic needs of emergent bilinguals in their classrooms and (2) fostered a conscious inner transformation in in-service teachers that resulted in new ways and purposes of interacting with emergent bilingual students, their families, and colleagues. Findings also suggest that although there is institutional progress in meeting emergent bilinguals’ needs, it is incremental and insufficient. There are three major deficiencies: (1) new and increased teacher education standards lack the required specialized coursework in the education of emergent bilinguals; (2) teacher preparation of emergent bilinguals is inadequate; and (3) teacher preparation programs resist requiring specialized coursework in teaching emergent bilinguals.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to problematize dominant discourses of diversity in academia that are constructed with Eurocentric ideals that demand assimilation with Western expectations and norms that, in one way or another, maintain the status quo. In doing so, the authors theorize transnational diversity in academia by looking back at their own experiences as postcolonial students and teachers.

Autoethnography is used as a writing method. The authors use autoethnography to intellectualize their experiences and connect everyday life to the immediate and larger cultural, political and social contexts to reflect on how they navigate their postcolonial identities and negotiate(d) the diversity they bring into academia.

The authors’ narratives present acceptance, acculturation, assimilation and rejection encompassing trauma and resistance that suggest that the dominant approach to diversity is not necessarily pluralistic, and require a re-organization.

The authors’ narratives present acceptance, acculturation, assimilation and rejection encompassing trauma and resistance that suggest that the dominant approach to diversity is not necessarily pluralistic, and requires a re-organization.

The authors theorize transnational diversity as an alternative to the dominant approach to diversity. Transnational diversity attempts to expand the discourse of diversity in academia, and create a space for other cultural, intellectual and institutional legacies to be included and recognized.

While higher education has been encouraging interdisciplinary research, few studies have been conducted to understand how interdisciplinarity shapes the identity construction of scholars, especially doctoral students who may already strive to socialize into academia.

Therefore, this study adopts the approach of autoethnography to analyze my lived experience of developing disciplinary literacy and constructing interdisciplinary identity as a Chinese international doctoral student at a North American university. Communication theory of identity (CTI) is the theoretical framework through which I understand the negotiation among my personal, enacted, relational and communal identities while communicating my research through diverse literacy practices.

This autoethnography reveals that interdisciplinary doctoral students can flexibly use discursive resources from different disciplines and literacy practices in both English and their first language to dynamically create interdisciplinary identities communicable to different discourse communities. Their identities in different disciplines can develop simultaneously, rather than suppressing one for the development of the other as they do interdisciplinary research.

This study first extends current scholarly discussion of disciplinary literacy to a less-investigated setting, i.e. doctoral education in higher education. Second, it adds an additive and current layer of interdisciplinarity to the existing understanding of international doctoral students’ identity construction. Third, it helps to understand how the development of disciplinary literacy can facilitate disciplinary identity construction and how disciplinary identity construction can facilitate the development of disciplinary literacy.

As emerging scholars of color with transnational backgrounds, we collectively recount our socialization experiences in US higher education institutes. We explore moments of betweenness as catalysts for envisioning a more inclusive academia that operates beyond the tokenism of diversity.

Employing betweener autoethnography (Diversi and Moreira, 2018), we inquire into the sense of impasse encountered by South Korean female emerging scholars in the field of education in becoming an outsider within the academic system.

Chronicling our shifts in perspectives of our positionality, we interweave inquiries motivating us to challenge normative pressures and map our betweener experiences onto the Wiedman and DeAngelo’s (2020) socialization model. Through this process, we wedge open in-between spaces in the socialization process that accommodate the nuanced positionality of transnational scholars.

Integrating postcolonial critiques on the Western-centric meritocratic academia, this piece sheds light on the complexity and fluidity of emerging transnational scholars’ socialization processes. The thick, nuanced description deepens the understanding of the complexity of their identity negotiation within the dominant logics of academia. Our inquiries interwoven through betweener autoethnography serve as guidance for mentoring international graduate students and transnational scholars.

This is a two-voice autoethnographic dialogue about Rousseau's Confessions and their relevance for the contemporary autoethnograpy. The paper examines the possibility that Rousseau was not only the creator of modern autobiography but also a forerunner of autoethnography. Many features of the Rousseau's masterpiece are analyzed and systematically compared to our contemporary autoethnographic sensibility: the purposes which brought him to write an outstandingly detailed description of his life; the fact that he acknowledges autobiography as the only source of true knowledge; his obsession for sincerity and his strong will to disclose all the truth about his own life to his readers (included the dreadful things that he did); the authority that he assigned to the readers in deciding about the truthfulness of his tale; his concern for the ethical issues and the care of the others; and the therapeutic value that he recognized to the practice of writing about themselves. In the end, Jean-Jacques was not only extraordinarily able to use his emotions to analyze human nature, but also he was a radical autobiographer at the limits of intransigence. His considerations on the value of autobiography can help us greatly to legitimize contemporary autoethnographic practice.