The book’s central argument is that reclaiming our stories is an act of intellectual and political resistance. For those who come from working-class backgrounds, from racialized and Indigenous communities, from queer and trans lives, from experiences of poverty, displacement, and survival, the demand for silence is a form of violence. This collection insists that the stories we carry—of class shame, of racialized bodies, of immigration bureaucracy, of gender transition, of intergenerational trauma—are not obstacles to knowledge but the very foundation of a more honest, more just way of understanding the world.

But this book also offers something simpler and more real: not a single argument, but a way of being with stories. To tell a story is to reach towards another person. To receive is to accept a responsibility not to look away too quickly. In this exchange, something becomes possible. Not healing, exactly, but recognition. A widening. A moment in which the world becomes less private, less sealed, less lonely. It says I see you. You have been seen.

This volume unfolds in three interwoven movements—Self, Scar, and Struggle—which reflect not only recurring themes but recurring truths.

Self speaks to the shaping of identity, to the ways we come into being—and into conflict—with history, gender, family, and interiority. Scar is both memory and aftermath, both pain and persistence. They tell us what happened. They also tell us that we are still here. Struggle dwells in tension. It captures the challenging work of living—with others, with institutions, with ourselves.

At its heart, this is autoethnography—treating personal experience as a legitimate site of knowledge, refusing the divide between the personal and analytical. AutoethnoGraphics adds a second dimension: each chapter includes a hand-drawn illustration by Merlyna Lim.

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Table of Contents

Introduction by Merlyna Lim & Kathy Dobson

Part I: SELF

1. Research in Retrospect: How My “Nappy” Hair is part of my Decolonial Process by Shanice Bernicky

2. Forty Dead Elephants: Of Educated Bodies and Necessary Carnage by Carmen Warner

3. The River Runs in Me by Merlyna Lim

4. Researching My Way Out of the Closet by Rena Bivens

5. Survivalist Storying and the Consequences of Rude Interruption by Q.E. Drummond

6. Surviving paradox by Jo Farrall

7. Figures and Fabulations: Bumping into Donna Haraway in an airport by Sheryl N. Hamilton

8. NarrativeKind by Rory Austin Clark

Part II: SCAR

9. Honey! I FOB’ed our kids; Or, Escaping the trap of citizenship by Jose Lizarzaburu

10. Navigating Intersectionality: An Autoethnography of an Immigrant Muslim Woman of Colour in Canada by Kawther Ramadan

11. Inheriting Otherness: An Autoethnography by Taryn Rerrie

12. From Rags to Robes: Poverty, Invisibility, and Inequality in Academia by Kathy Dobson

13. As Author and Arborist: Seeing the Forest for the Trees by Evan Alexander Nevard

14.  Living your Work and Changing your Mind by Miranda J. Brady

15.  How I was Xed as a Minor Villain by Karim H. Karim

Part III: STRUGGLE

16.  Schooled Separately: Coming to the Study of Religion by Hannah Dick

17.  Beyond the Numbers: My Journey in Critical Data Studies and Data Work by Tracey P. Lauriault

18.  Playing Games, Building Friendships: Where Words, Friends, and Technology Intersect by Maxwell Keleher

19.  A Subjective History of the Internet by A.b. Norris

20. The Work of Artists in the Age of the Polycrisis by Lowell Gasoi

21. Three Musings on Belonging by Jennifer Boland

22. What the Hell is ‘Hegemony’ and How Do I Even Pronounce it? by Scott Mitchell

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