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"The brief, practical texts in the Essentials of Qualitative Methods series introduce social science and psychology researchers to key approaches to capturing phenomena not easily measured quantitatively, offering exciting, nimble opportunities to gather in-depth qualitative data. In this book, Christopher Poulos provides a step-by-step guide to writing autoethnography, illustrating its essential features and practices with excerpts from his own and others' work. Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze one's personal experience in various contexts, and thereby understand its cultural, social, and emotional meaning. About the Essentials of Qualitative Methods book series: Even for experienced researchers, selecting and correctly applying the right method can be challenging. In this groundbreaking series, leading experts in qualitative methods provide clear, crisp, and comprehensive descriptions of their approach, including its methodological integrity, and its benefits and limitations. Each book includes numerous examples to enable readers to quickly and thoroughly grasp how to leverage these valuable methods"--

Preface to the Classic Edition -- Foreword -- Preface -- Overview of the book -- Family secrets -- Accidental ethnography -- Dreaming autoethnography -- Out of the shadows -- Evoking archetypal themes in an ethnographic life -- The storied life and the courage to connect -- Epilogue

Following the logic and structure of the children's nursery rhyme "I don't know why she swallowed a fly," this autoethnographic performance essay explores the contours of woundedness, anxiety, self-respect, and recovery. I write my way through the wounds I have suffered from lies casually thrown my way by family, institutions, and culture—and land, somewhat surprised and surprisingly, in love.

In this brief autoethnographic essay, I explore the contours of communication during and after (?) the COVID-19 pandemic.

This essay is part of the ICQI 2019 Autoethnography SIG, the Materials of Resistance.

When I was a kid, cowboys ruled. Every week, my heroes—Lucas McCain, the Cartwrights, Matt Dillon, Paladin, Big John Cannon—were taming the "wild west." These were good guys, in charge and on a mission. But in the world around us, everything was changing. 1969 was a turning point. Everything was suddenly in Technicolor, and as we gave up on the West and turned to outer space for our hero-adventures, our heroes morphed from Cowboys to Space-Pirate-Cowboys. These space-pirate-cowboys (or big damn heroes) manage to do the right thing as they improvise their (opportunistic) ethics of friendship.

The time for silence has long since passed. It is time to raise our voices in outrage at the racism, the brutality, the ignorance, the hatred, the oppression, and the cowardice of the political right in this country and around the world. As autoethnographers, we are uniquely positioned to raise our voices and to reach broader audiences inside and outside the academy. We can raise up a "discourse committed to a politics of resistance, a politics of possibility, a politics that dares to dream of social justice, to dream of equity, peace and a world without violence".

In this autoethnography, I write my way through the contours of scrutiny, measurement, and control across the span of my life, and (eventually) write my way into a solution, of sorts, to the conundrum of a knowledgeable agent living in a neoliberal world. In my story, life-space in the academy has just been one of the many locales subjected to the corporate colonization of the lifeworld. Autoethnography emerges as a channel of resistance against neoliberal forces.

Asked to write a manifesto for autoethnography, I find myself writing, instead, a manife story for auteothnography—a cry for scholars to engage the vibrating force of story-craft in service of our life-enhancing, knowledge-constructing, world-building praxis of the autoethnographic craft. I write to expose. I write to shine light. I write to open up the world to a new way of seeing, feeling, thinking, reflecting, smelling. I write it into a story of a life, a story of a human working like hell to navigate this choppy, murky, oddly human water we've all been shoved into. I write to build bridges, to probe and make meaning, to start a dialogue, to bring memory to light, to write relationships into being.