In her eloquent riff on the âeffortless effort of creativity,â poet Jane Hirschfield writes, âWorld and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be doneâ (qtd. in Popova). The cohering and the enlarging of self and world in the âeffortlessnessâ of creativity is, itself, an effort of concentration and concerted movementâtoward and into inquiry or âwhat may be known,â of emotion and affect or âwhat may be felt,â and of action or âwhat may be done.â This book takes as its starting point the effortless effort of creativity; one undertaken by selves and worlds in performance, in language, and in and as education. This book began as a conversation among scholars and researchers in education, performance studies, communication, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology, and artists in visual arts, music, theater, and dance. As a community of artistsâscholars we were interested in the energizing charge and possibility of working at the intersections of creativity, education, and critical autoethnography. We wanted to make work and ask questions about how selves and cultures are created, understood, questioned, and transformed. As arts-based and practice-led scholars, we aimed to explore what critical autoethnography and performance in particular have to teach us about creativity and pedagogy (which includes formal educational contexts alongside the broader concerns of public pedagogy and creativity education). We approached our work with the aim of joining the explanatory power of critical theory and inquiry with creative, specific, aesthetically engaging, and personal examples of the ideas at workâin cultural context, in practice, in peopleâs lives. The result is a collection of essays that we believe fills a much-needed gap in creativity and education by providing you, our readers, with work that demonstrates how critical autoethnography offers researchers and scholars in multiple disciplines not only a method for creatively putting critical theory into action, but also a means for forging more creative selves and creative cultures in a time when neoliberal discourses and the forces of globalization are working against (while trying to capitalize on) the cohering and enlarging of both self and world.
This chapter begins with a brief overview of the purpose and goals of critical autoethnography, the connection between critical autoethnography and performance/performative writing, and the pedagogical functions that critical autoethnography might serve in the academy and beyond. The primary argument and ethos that informs this overview is the idea that critical autoethnography is a particularly agile approach for understanding and transforming the lived experience of selves and cultures as they are encountered and lived within systems and discourses of power, oppression, and privilege. In addition to this overview and argument, this chapter includes brief introductions to each of the major sections of the volume and the chapters included in each section of the book. And, so, to begin: What is critical autoethnography and why is it an innovative and educative approach for building, understanding, and transforming creative selves and cultures?
Critical Autoethnography
Critical autoethnography is, most simply, the study and critique of culture through the lens of the self. Critical autoethnography merges the practices of autobiographyâwriting about the selfâand ethnographyâthe study of and writing about culture. Critical autoethnography is a thoroughly qualitative and intimate method in that it provides us with nuanced, complex, and specific insights into particular human lives, experiences, and relationships. Where quantitative approaches to research give us general insights into the cultures and experiences of large groups of people, telling us about the who, what, when, and where of life, critical autoethnography teaches us about the why and how and so what of those lives. Further, where some autoethnographies might provide rich and detailed descriptions of cultures through the lens of personal experience, critical autoethnographies work to bring attention to the ways cultures are created and compromised through institutional, political, social, and interpersonal relations of power. That is, they focus on how our experiences within cultures are enlarged and/or constrained by relations of power. Critical autoethnographers view their work as a means of pointing out the politics of their positioning, explicitly acknowledging the inevitable privileges and marginalizations they experience and the âresponsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain,â including the practices of research itself (Madison, 2012, p. 5). They do so by creating accounts of intersectionality, a term coined by legal, feminist, and critical race theory scholar KimberlĂ© Crenshaw (1991). Intersectionality calls to attention to how oppressive institutions, attitudes, and actions in cultures including racism, xenophobia, sexism, heternormativity, classism, religious and spiritual fundamentalism, ageism, and ableism do not function independently but instead are connected and mutually influencing. Such accounts strive to âcapture the complexities of intersecting power relations that produce multiple identities and distinctive perspectives on social phenomenaâ (Hill Collins, 2016, p. 135). Autoethnographers do so by being as critical of their own intersectional positionings within cultures as they are of their relationships with others and by ethically, honestly, and unapologetically foregrounding and interrogating these positionings in their work. As Tami Spry (2016) puts it, âOne of the things we do best in autoethnography is critical reflection upon the effects of hegemonic power structures even, and especially when, we may be the arbiters of such structuresâ (Spry, 2016, p. 37).
For critical autoethnographers, the mode of personal telling accomplishes three intersecting goals. Firstly, critical autoethnography asks authors and readers to examine systems, institutions, and discourses that privilege some people and marginalize others. This goal, to borrow another term from Black feminist thought, serves a âdiagnosticâ role; critical autoethnographers analyze âanalyzing socially unjust practicesâ as well as the âlimitations of existing scholarship in understanding these processesâ (Hill Collins, 2016, p. 135). Here, existing knowledge about culture and cultural experience is problematized and questioned.
Secondly, critical autoethnography aims to mobilize and develop the explanatory frameworks that critical theory provides usâframeworks such as Black feminist thought, queer theory, materialist and new materialist critiquesâby putting that theory into action through storytelling (Madison, pp. 14, 20â21). In other words, theory and story work together in a dynamic relationship that performance studies scholar Della Pollock describes as âdoing theory and thinkingâ story (Pollock, 2005, p. 1). As a critical theory project, this knowing and being and is not about creating stable, coherent, finished, and identifiable knowledges but instead focuses on engaging with the world as shifting, partial, unfinished, and animated by feeling and imagination (Holman Jones, 2016, p. 4; Pollock, 2005, p. 3). The kinds of knowing produced in critical autoethnographic works are as dynamic, diverse, and intersecting as the people who create and are featured in those works. This diversity, dynamism, and complexity affords a perspective on theory that likewise avoids the totalizing and prescriptive claims of Theory with a capital T. Instead, critical autoethnography engages in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) and JosĂ© Esteban Muñoz (2006) describe as âweakâ theory and theorizingâclaims to knowledge and understanding that âdo not position themselves in [a] masterful, totalizing fashionâ but instead stitch together theory, experience, and critique in a âprovisional and heuristic approachâ (Muñoz, 2006, p. 682). Taking this approach to theory and theorizing, critical autoethnography works to join the specific and the concrete with the larger and more expansive insights and tools for transformation that theory offers us, linking ideas with the people, places, and positions they originate for and from. In other words, critical autoethnography builds bridges between the analytical, observational view from above featured in the language of theory (and valorized in academic scholarship) with what Donna Haraway describes as the specific, complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured âview from a bodyâ that stories offer us (Haraway, 1988, p. 589).
Finally, critical autoethnography seeks to âbuild new knowledge about the social world in order to stimulate new practicesâ (Hill Collins, p. 135). Critical autoethnographers work toward realizing this âconstructiveâ goal by imagining and writing new âinterpretations and trajectories for actionâ that address the issues important to cultural actors and that imagine new ways of doing scholarship (Hill Collins, p. 135). Here, critical autoethnographers focus on linking analysis and action by presenting the insights of theory in context, in practice and performance, and in peopleâs lives. Striving to meet this goal asks critical autoethnographers to write and embody these trajectories for action and new ways of doing scholarship, even when the way forward is not simple or clear (Holman Jones, 2016, p. 5). Instead, critical autoethnographers reach toward what JosĂ© Esteban Muñoz (2009) calls âutopian performativesââthey write into a future not as a static and unachievable ideal but instead as stage for taking up and taking on identities and positions that remind us âthat there is something missing ⊠that the present is not enoughâ (p. 100; see also Spry, 2016). Utopian performatives imagine a future that is not yet here, desiring another âway of being in both the world and time,â though, importantly, this desire for a future not yet here âresists mandates to accept that which is not enoughâ (Muñoz, 2009, p. 96).
In linking story and theory, the personal and the political, critical autoethnography is a particularly agile approach for understanding and transforming the lived experience of culture as it is encountered and lived within systems of power, oppression, and privilege (Boylorn & Orbe, 2013, p. 19). Critical autoethnography helps us create âliving bodies of thoughtââwork that uses story to bring theory alive and shows us how stories are embodiments of knowledges that can and do create movement and change in the world (Holman Jones, 2016). As âan embodied method,â critical autoethnography âarticulates and makes material what is and should ...