An Autoethnography of Letter Writing and Relationships Through Time: Finding Our Perfect Moon is about love letters, stories, and the ability of words to bring people together across time and physical space. Weaving together edited and annotated letters between a young couple in the 1930s with interludes of autoethnographic reflection, the book relates the author’s experiences as she has negotiated this project over 20 years. Reading the letters is a sepia-toned window into the very private world of two young, well-educated Jewish-American people who lived their lives against the backdrop of the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and Prohibition. The author uses reflective autoethnographic interludes to tell the story of finding the letters and to explore the significance of letters as a communicative genre. Adams considers the ethical implications of being a researcher eavesdropping on private moments in others' lives, and she explores the function of dialogue in the development of the romantic relationship that unfolds in the letters and between the letters and her. The author also advocates for the everyday relational communication practices that collectively comprise life's most important experiences. Students and researchers interested in letter-writing, autoethnography, and relationship development will find relevance in this book. It will also be of value to those interested in letter collections, the ethical implications of intimate research on people from the past who cannot offer consent, the role of nostalgia in interpersonal communication, and anyone who thrills at a love story told from primary documents from the past.

An Autoethnography of Letter Writing and Relationships Through Time: Finding Our Perfect Moon is about love letters, stories, and the ability of words to bring people together across time and physical space. Weaving together edited and annotated letters between a young couple in the 1930s with interludes of autoethnographic reflection, the book relates the author's experiences as she has negotiated this project over 20 years. Reading the letters is a sepia-toned window into the very private world of two young, well-educated Jewish-American people who lived their lives against the backdrop of the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and Prohibition. The author uses reflective autoethnographic interludes to tell the story of finding the letters and to explore the significance of letters as a communicative genre. Adams considers the ethical implications of being a researcher eavesdropping on private moments in others' lives, and she explores the function of dialogue in the development of the romantic relationship that unfolds in the letters and between the letters and her. The author also advocates for the everyday relational communication practices that collectively comprise life's most important experiences. Students and researchers interested in letter-writing, autoethnography, and relationship development will find relevance in this book. It will also be of value to those interested in letter collections, the ethical implications of intimate research on people from the past who cannot offer consent, the role of nostalgia in interpersonal communication, and anyone who thrills at a love story told from primary documents from the past.

Writing Philosophical Autoethnography is the result of Alec Grant’s vision of bringing the disciplines of philosophy and autoethnography together. This is the first volume of narrative autoethnographic work in which invited contributing authors were charged with exploring their issues, concerns, and topics about human society, culture, and the material world through an explicitly philosophical lens. Each chapter, while written autoethnographically, showcases sustained engagement with philosophical arguments, ideas, concepts, theories, and corresponding ethical positions. Unlike much other autoethnographic work, within which philosophical ideas often appear to be "grafted on" or supplementary, the philosophical basis of the work in this volume is fundamental to its shifting content, focus, and context. The narratives in this book, from scholars working in a range of disciplines in the humanities and human sciences, function as narrative, conceptual, and analytical exemplars to act as a guide for autoethnographers in their own writing, and suggest future directions for making autoethnography more philosophically rigorous. This book is suitable for students and scholars of autoethnography and qualitative methods in a range of disciplines, including the humanities, social and human sciences, communication studies, and education.

In this book, Stefan Battle weaves together autoethnographic narrative and ethnographic performance material from his own life and those of four other Black men, to show the untold impact of racial trauma on these everyday lives. By engaging readers with these experiences, stories, and pain, the book aims to help to stop racial trauma and heal the race-based grief of the many Black men who need to speak out against racial injustice United States. Battle organizes the book as a performative account of a one-day workshop that he might teach to college students or other adults. He uses individual activities including an interview with a White woman regarding her relationship to race and racism, a staged reading in which five Black men share their stories, an audience discussion about race and racism, and Battle’s performative talk, sharing the author’s desire for people of all races, to self-reflect and then talk among themselves about race and racism. Battle’s powerful book reveals that each Black man’s unique story is important and that understanding something of a person’s hidden context for processing the traumas of racism can lead to new understanding and healing. To this end, Battle examines issues such as Black men's mental health and the wider societal systemic racism in the US that provokes tension and harm to the racial victimization of Black men. Suitable for students and scholars of qualitative research and autoethnography in the social sciences, communication studies, education, social work, and Africana or Black studies, this book will also be of interest to anyone seeking to better understand and engage with the Black male experience in the US.

A narrative inquiry into the lives of three men, Robert, Raheem, and Warren, this book shares their stories about over-discipline in school, adverse teacher-student relationships, and violent community policing that proceeded and intersected with their involvement in the criminal justice system. After being incarcerated, the men restored their dreams through the same structure that helped remove them from society—the education system. This book critically analyzes the school policies and individual practices that inflict educational harm upon the lives of students who experience criminalization, disengagement, and lack connectedness and a sense of belonging at school. The narratives center the voices of three men who describe how home environments and educational policies and practices structure schools into locations where Black and other minoritized students are forced to survive. Their stories help examine how criminalized experiences—school removal and incarceration—intersect with historical and social factors that create anti-Black practices in schools and communities. These narrative accounts are critical pedagogical tools for those who work with Black, Latinx, low-income, and other minoritized youth. Readers will have a more in-depth understanding about how Black males experience schools, neighborhoods, and the world. This volume will appeal to teachers and teacher educators in K-12 schools, colleges, and universities. More specifically, faculty in programs that lead to elementary, middle, and secondary education certifications can incorporate the stories into courses around cultural diversity, equity and inclusion, social justice, and humanizing pedagogies. Community organizations can use the narrative accounts to create spaces for transformative conversations that aim to improve school and community policing practices.

Reading Autoethnography situates autoethnographic insights within the context of two fundamental concerns of critical qualitative inquiry: justice and love. Through philosophical engagement, it gives close readings of written passages taken from leading autoethnographers and frames the philosophical project of autoethnography as one that is both political and interpersonal. It does this to highlight how autoethnographic lessons can allow us to think through how we may achieve a flourishing for all — something that is both related to justice as it pertains to the political, and when situations are in excess of justice, related to love as it pertains to feeling at home in the world with others. As such, this book will be of interest to those who have a burgeoning interest in autoethnography and seasoned autoethnographers alike; anyone interested in critical qualitative inquiry as a discourse promoting justice and love; and any scholar who has encountered the ethical question of: "What ought we do?"

Writing Feminist Autoethnography explores the personal-is-political relationship between autoethnography and feminist theory and practice. Each chapter introduces the lives and works of a range of feminist thinkers and writers and considers the ways in which their thinking and writing might come to be in relation with our own personal-is-political thinking and writing work as feminist autoethnographers. The book begins with an acknowledgement of the author’s positionality as a white-settler-colonial-woman in relation with Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Mara and Kudanji Aboriginal women. This positionality has continued to resonate deeply with the responses and sensibilities the author holds as a feminist autoethnographer to move beyond coloniality. She explores the writing of Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Kathleen Stewart, bell hooks and Ruth Behar, with critical affect to embrace, embody and engage with feminist thinking, wondering and feeling. The book creatively and performatively explores what it means to live a feminist life as an autoethnographer. This book will define and conceptualize feminist autoethnography for all qualitative researchers, especially those interested in critical autoethnography, and scholars in gender studies and communication.