AutoethnoGraphics is a storytelling initiative within Merlyna Lim’s #scholartivism program at the ALiGN Media Lab, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University.
#Scholartivism brings together scholarly inquiry, artistic practice, and activist engagement. Within this orientation, knowledge is not separated from form, and form is not separated from the worlds it seeks to engage.
AutoethnoGraphics emerges from this intersection.
At its core, the initiative seeks to gather autoethnographic narratives from scholars, practitioners, and others whose lives move through complex social, institutional, and personal worlds. These stories are not treated as supplementary to knowledge, but as knowledge in lived form—situated, embodied, and relational.
They appear in multiple modes: written narrative, reflective essay, fragment, memory work, and other forms that move between documentation and expression.
The graphic dimension of the project accompanies these narratives as a parallel mode of thinking. Visual elements—sketches, images, traces, diagrams, and other fragments—do not simply illustrate stories. They enter into relation with them, sometimes clarifying, sometimes interrupting, sometimes holding what cannot be fully spoken.
Across these interactions, knowledge is formed through correspondence rather than separation.
While situated within academic and institutional settings, AutoethnoGraphics is not limited to them. It is interested in how storytelling, visual practice, and lived experience might generate forms of understanding that remain critically engaged while moving across scholarly, artistic, and civic worlds.
AutoethnoGraphics is an evolving initiative: part gathering, part practice, part inquiry. It holds stories, memories, images, and traces of lived experience as ways of knowing and relating to the world.