ANSO 18
Writing Your Self in Research: An Introduction to Performance Autoethnography Winter 2025

How do you bring your self into your research? You come to the academy with lived experiences and embodied knowledges, but academic research often requires you to leave yourself out of your writing. Sometimes it feels like you have to write with a disembodied academic voice in order to produce research, even when it’s research about people like you, about your own communities, or about yourself. So, are you even allowed to bring your self to research? And if so, how? The good news is that qualitative research methodologies offer avenues for embodied ways of knowing to be valued in academic research. In this class we explore performance autoethnography: A cluster of approaches at the intersection of performance studies, ethnography, performative writing, and decolonizing methodologies. We will learn how to entwine our lived experiences with reflexive analyses of the societal structures and power dynamics within/against which we live, love, and labor. We will learn modes of storytelling that weave personal voice with creative ways of quoting/citing academic scholarship, as well as performative writing techniques that transform the printed page into a stage. We will read examples of published scholarship, and we will practice writing exercises drawing from our own research interests. Through sharing among a supportive community of fellow writing selves in class, we will develop ways of listening and learning from each other’s stories in/as research. We will also engage in performing our texts together, drawing from theatre-based practices to rehearse and discover and revise our material. At the end of the course, we will collect our final performance texts into an anthology of the course. This Winter Study course is designed to complement performance-based pathways and methodologies in a range of disciplines, including but not limited to: Africana Studies, Anthropology & Sociology, American Studies, English, Music, and Theatre & Dance.