Upsetting the (Schooling) set up: autoethnography as critical race methodology

Abstract

This manuscript utilizes autoethnography as a critical race methodology. Specifically, the authors use generative autoethnography – a collective spin-story – to illustrate how their past personal experiences are present in their current educational lives. This generative autoethnography fulfills CRT’s tenets of: intercentricity of race and racism; challenging dominant Ideology; the commitment to social justice; the centrality of experiential knowledge; and interdisciplinary perspectives. We illustrate the dialectical relationship of our lived experiences in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Oakland, and how these experiences propel the educational work that we do, the voices we choose to lift up, and how we choose to lift them. Shared publicly, these stories further invite readers to critically reflect on their own personal experiences and social realities, continuing the generative praxis of autoethnography. In this way, autoethnography, like critical race method, is an analytic tool that fosters internal reflection, intra/intercultural compassion, and community activism.

Keywords:

• Generative autoethnography
• critical race methodology
• insurgent scholarship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On July 26, 2020, educator and scholar Connie Wun posted a meme on Instagram taken from a 1982 Audre Lorde speech titled, “Learning from the 60s,” at a celebration of the Malcolm X weekend at Harvard University.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick Roz Camangian

Patrick Roz Camangian, Ph.D. is professor of Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. His interdisciplinary scholarship on education and humanization intersects critical pedagogy, critical literacy, and health science research. Camangian pursues these areas of interest to improve the holistic learning outcomes for historically and multiply-marginalized students and transform teacher quality, capacity, and retention.

David A. Philoxene

David A. Philoxene is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and current Gerardo Marin Dissertation Fellow at the University of San Francisco. His current research focuses on geographies of race and safety, including Black youth’s sense-making and spatial practices across school and community. He is committed to (re)telling stories of resistance, survival, and possibility, and studying educational and community spaces that exemplify this.

David Omotoso Stovall

David Omotoso Stovall, Ph.D. is professor of Black Studies and Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His current research interests include Critical Race Theory (CRT), the relationship between housing and education and the abolition of the school/prison nexus. He is a member of the People's Education Movement and a board member of the Abolitionist Teaching Network.