Carol Rambo

Impressions of Grandmother An Autoethnographic Portrait

Through the use of a layered account format, the author sketches, through a juxtapositioning of vignettes and impressions, an autoethnographic portrait of her grandmother. Derrida’s concepts such as the “mystic writing pad,” “differance,” and “sous rature” serve as frames through which to gaze at the emergent nature of identity formation across time. Various aspects of the author’s grandmother’s character, positive, negative, and shades of gray, are illustrated through descriptions of drawing. Through reflexivity, she will show how some of the impressions her grandmother left with her manifest in her. Derrida’s concepts, the layered account format, and drawing, serve individually as viewfinders that offer snapshots of her grandmother and her but, taken together, build up traces and impressions that merge and blend into an illustration of identity as a process and thus an autoethnographic portrait.

Handing IRB an Unloaded Gun

The authors autoethnographic article was accepted for publication and then blocked by her Institutional Review Board (IRB). The overt reasons for the “denial of approval” differ from accounts given behind closed doors. By weaving experience, excerpts from her article, and the responses of others into a narrative, the author creates an ongoing performance ethnography that resists the “tacit norm of silence” regarding discussions of incest and student/teacher attraction. Framing autoethnography as a “breach” of the academic norms regarding scientific inquiry helps her make sense of how IRB as a committee used the resources at hand—the existing religious/political context, their identities, their formal roles, and the written rules they had before them—to coconstruct a narrative that rendered her manuscript unpublishable. It is the authors hope that this performance of resistance will help facilitate the creation of a safe, defined space (similar to that of oral history) for autoethnography to occur.

Sound Acts: Elocution, Somatic Work, and the Performance of Sonic Alignment

Drawing on reflection, nonparticipant and participant observation, and introspection this article examines the performative dimensions of sound, arguing that sounds of both the nonsemioticized and semioticized variety function as acts, not unlike speech acts. Through a layered text, the article offers analytical reflections and evocative writing focused on the exploration of acoustic environments such as movie theatres, airplanes, street music performances, residential neighborhoods, and more. An important material property of sound acts, elocution, is identified, conceptualized, and examined. Elocutionary sound acts are also examined as social dramas, insofar as they constitute a crisis-ensuing breach of what the authors refer to as the somatic order. The maintenance of, or alignment on, the rules prevalent within a defined somatic order is also examined and discussed. As a whole, the sensuous performative dynamics that sound acts and somatic alignment entail can be referred to as instances of somatic work.

Coming Unhinged: A Twice-Told Multivoiced Autoethnography:

This story tells about an accident that occurred at the 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. The first author presents her autoethnography of her partner’s fall and her subsequent reaction. Then to complicate and deepen her telling, she crafts a second multivoiced account from the responses of eight people who were part of the event. The participants’ stories are juxtaposed to tell a multivoiced tale and to theorize what happened in an experience-near mode. Twice-told multivoiced autoethnography brings other voices, subjectivities, and interpretations into our autoethnographic accounts, providing a collective consciousness and offering the possibility of initiating conversations about the values of care and empathy connected with the project of autoethnography.

Strange Accounts Applying for the Department Chair Position and Writing Threats and Secrets “in Play”

This autoethnographic layered account makes use of Georg Simmel and Jacques Derrida’s theoretical frameworks to simultaneously examine my experience of applying for the chair position in my department and to make the case for the use of strange accounts. Strange accounting is proposed as a method of writing about situations where there are secrets, risks, or threats. Strange accounts work with secrets through distance by leaving key information about the situations and identities of those represented in the story, unsettled, ambiguous, under erasure and “in play.” While applying for the chair position, I found the process to be destabilizing for both myself and my department. It was fraught with issues regarding strangeness and secrecy. The strange account (re)presents the role of the secret, while leaving the secret itself “in play.”

Claiming, Resisting, and Exempting Pathology in the Identities of Self-Injurers

Abstract For this project, we analyzed in-depth life history materials from interviews with twelve former self-injurers. Eschewing a medical/psychological approach to self-injury, our primary goal was to discover how study participants used the discourse of self-injury as a narrative resource to construct their identity. Our study participants drew on pathology exemplars and alternative frames to make sense of their lives and selves. In this article, the lines between so-called self-injury and other socially sanctioned behaviors became blurred. We call for an approach to the topic that is more consciously aware of the socially constructed nature of the phenomenon.

“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity, Stigma, and the Racial Formation Project

Using interview data from individuals who were frequently asked some version of the question “What are you?” in regards to their race, we apply a deviance perspective to frame these encounters as micro level racial formation projects. Racial formation projects are problematized when one’s race is not readily classifiable. These data suggest that when race is perceptibly ambiguous, stigma is assigned and normativity is enforced through discursive constraint and other means. Racially ambiguous individuals use many forms of resistance to navigate these encounters and make identity claims that either affirm or endanger the normative racial formation order.

The Dialectics of Stigma, Silence, and Misunderstanding in Suicidality Survival Narratives

ABSTRACT Modern suicidologists have noted a dearth of qualitative research on suicide. The first author conducted 20 in-depth interviews with formerly suicidal adults to understand how they accounted for their experiences contemplating or attempting suicide. According to participants, stigma necessitated impression management, which contributed to the production of silence and misunderstanding. Silence and misunderstanding reinforced stigma. This complex, dialectical, belief system about stigma yields insight into the interpretive culture of surviving suicidal ideation or a suicide attempt. These beliefs about suicide may serve as a barrier to individuals seeking help, recovering from suicidality, and larger social change regarding attitudes toward suicide.

“God Smites You!”: Atheists’ Experiences of Stigma, Identity Politics, and Queerness*

ABSTRACT Existing research on Atheists is sparse. The lived experiences of Atheists have been ignored almost entirely. Triangulating from autoethnographic materials and life-history interviews, this project documents the ways that Atheist individuals understand the stigmas attributed to them and their responses to it. Some of the behaviors are framed as “techniques of information control” such as “compartmentalizing” and “passing.” Others are framed as “Identity Politics.” Techniques of information control and identity politics may serve to impede efforts toward effective activism on behalf of Atheists. Taken from an alternative perspective, Atheism is deconstructed as a form of “queerness” in relation to religion.

The future of symbolic interaction, peaking, and collapsing the matrix

Symbolic interaction may not have much of a future. Rome is burning; the Titanic is sinking; and still the band plays on. With some notable exceptions, we symbolic interactionists, as a group, appear to be sitting around, paralyzed, watching events unfold from the dizzying heights of our ivory tower, grumbling under our collective breath about how bad things are, but not yet doing enough, much like the rest of the world.You take the blue pill; the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. (Morpheus from The Matrix)