This paper, in the form of walking meditation, sitting, drinking, eating, and traveling among spaces and times, witnesses how the author as a Vietnamese immigrant child living in the United States (U.S.) traces untold stories of their family through family photos. Further, this paper attempts to find, understand and connect the relation between personal and political, between individual and collective, for a Vietnamese re-education camp detainee and his family, situated in political, historical, and cultural context. The use of photo elicitation comes from the desire that the reader can engage with the voices of the family members as they describe events in their past history. In addition, this paper refuses the forms of "category" and "fixed results" in writing up academic research. Rather, it will appear in the form of daily conversation, collected from multiple settings. Simply speaking, this paper is a form of storytelling that invites the readers to oscillate, communicate and think with the author's family members on this historical journey.

This piece will be walking, writing, meditating in in-between spaces with me. I call this act queer walking meditation, which blended autohistoria, the Coatlicue State, and meditation to examine my own queer self. This queer walking meditation helps me move between stories, initiates dialogues with a self, recognizes my self’s confusion, and leads to a series of actions to fight against the struggles and complicatedness in my identities. As a result, I learned how to mediate and take actions for myself and with my students from the standpoint of a Vietnamese queer, accented, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teacher and Chicana-feminist writer. This walk witnesses the cathartic process through which I came to understand intersectional identities and how I used them into teaching, researching, and writing in a white gay world. I came up with another question, Is that the feeling of intersectionality?, at the end of this walk in order to open another walk in the future.

For Nepantleras, “to bridge is an act of will, an act of love, an attempt toward compassion and reconciliation, and a promise to be present with the pain of others without losing themselves to it” (Anzaldúa & Keating 4). This piece witnesses my entering to confusion as an outsider/writer to write about the stories of four women who work with/for Latinx communities in the U.S. Therefore, bridging tHEiR stories together becomes an act of drawing a picture of a new home; a new tribalism. Their stories become a representation of border-crossing of liminal spaces, and of going beyond the limits of monocultural perspectives. More importantly, their realities represent the intertwined and mutual way can help the Other understand one another.

This paper conveys the reflections of an instructor and a graduate student after participating in a graduate course on autoethnography, offered in a college of education at a large public research institution in the United States. In addition to the course focus on autoethnography as a qualitative research approach, the course used authentic practices, which are commonly used by academics, to socialize doctoral students from the social sciences to the demands of their future careers in the academy. Although the number of published autoethnography articles in academic journals has increased, few autoethnography courses are being offered, and even fewer are described in the research literature. The authors share their experiences and address their own assumptions, challenges and breakthroughs across practices, including: informal peer-reviews, drafts revisions, and the ongoing composition of a full-length autoethnographic manuscript to be (potentially) submitted for publication, and, thus, shared with a larger audience of readers. The authors call for more explicit and authentic preparation and socialization of social science doctoral students throughout graduate coursework—especially in light of the growing competition for tenure-stream faculty positions across the social sciences and the humanities.

This is a collection of beautiful, critical, supporting, and loving articles written by graduate students. The authors in this first issue grapple with the realities of our current moment in ways that both acknowledge the significance of past scholarship while also mapping new pathways that put Foundations to work in (more) public ways.

This autohistoria, or “a personal essay that theorizes” (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2002, p. 578), is a special piece to me. It is spiritual, poetic, political, and dialogic. This essay thus delves deeper into the mourning, the fear, the tears, the pain, the loneliness, the strength of a Vietnamese queer immigrant in a state of Nepantla in order to relate with other queers of color in the dark, i.e.: in suicidal process. “Living in Nepantla, the overlapping space between different perceptions and belief systems, you are aware of the changeability of racial, gender, sexual, and other categories rendering the conventional labelling obsolete” (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2002, p. 541). In this space, I attempt to use the concept of Nepantla to describe and understand stages of pre- and post- suicide attempt that I experienced. Then, I will conclude with a call for policy change to ask for attention to those who live in the life-death margins and in between and among worlds as mine.

This article features personal narratives that condemn ideologies that work to render invisible the identities of translingual individuals. The author engages members of the language and literacy field, particularly teachers and researchers, in conversations that will not only denounce anti minoritized groups rhetoric but also counter prejudiced standpoints about the validity and appropriateness of their literacies. The author describes and critically analyzes principal contemporary language theories, practices, and pedagogies in the preparation of English as a second language and bilingual education teachers she encountered in her academic journey, as an English teacher and learner. Through autoethnographic and multimodal sensory layered-account methods, she highlights issues of power and linguistic hierarchies entrenched in the language philosophies and pedagogies she experienced, while illustrating how translingual individuals do literacy. The author supports her analysis with vignettes, a poem, proverbs, pictures of artifacts, and photographs and defies traditional academic expectations about literacy processes, while exemplifying translinguistic writing. Findings are framed around narratives about bridging ideological beliefs into practical realities in the classroom, personal value systems and disposition regarding language and literacy, turning critical experiences into meaningful research and practice, and the significance of a like-minded and supportive community of practice.

Academic Autoethnographies: Inside Teaching in Higher Education invites readers to experience autoethnography as a challenging, complex, and creative research methodology that can produce personally, professionally, and socially useful understandings of teaching and researching in higher education. The peer-reviewed chapters offer innovative and perspicacious explorations of interrelationships between personal autobiographies, lived educational experiences, and wider social and cultural concerns, across diverse disciplines and university contexts. This edited book is distinctive within the existing body of autoethnographic scholarship in that the original research presented has been done in relation to predominantly South African university settings. This research is complemented by contributions from Canadian and Swedish scholars. The sociocultural, educational, and methodological insights communicated in this book will be valuable for specialists in the field of higher education and to those in other academic domains who are interested in self-reflexive, transformative, and creative research methodologies and methods. " This book illuminates how autoethnography can engage authors and researchers from varied epistemological backgrounds in a reflexive multilogue about who they are and what they do. The creative representations of the lived experience of doing autoethnography sets the book apart both methodologically and theoretically, revealing how rigor and critical distance can serve to position autoethnography not only as a personal self-development tool but a tradition and method in its own right. " – Hyleen Mariaye, Associate Professor, Mauritius Institute of Education, Mauritius " This compelling book foregrounds autoethnography as an innovative and creative research methodology to generate reflexive sociological understandings of teaching and researching across disciplines in higher education. Rich, evocative and authentic accounts reveal unique possibilities for the transformation of teaching, learning and research at personal, professional and socio-cultural levels. " – Nithi Muthukrishna, Professor Emerita,