Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Academic Aunting: Reimaging Feminist (Wo)Mentoring, Teaching, And Relationships., Laura L. Ellingson, Patricia Sotirin

Women's and Gender Studies

In this essay, we explore the potential of aunting relationships for rethinking feminist selves and relationships, especially in academic settings. Relationships between generations of academic feminists have often been described using mother-daughter metaphors. We suggest some limitations to framing teaching and learning across academic generations (e.g., teacher-student) and among colleagues (e.g., peer review of scholarship) using maternal imagery. We then argue that the figure of the aunt offers a powerful trope for negotiating relationships between the "waves" of academic feminism. Aunts provide a generative alternative to mothering and sisterhood as frameworks for feminist womentoring, teaching, and scholarly reviewing.

Embodied Knowledge, Laura L. Ellingson

Women's and Gender Studies

Embodied knowledge situates intellectual and theoretical insights within the realm of the material world. Embodied knowledge is sensory; it highlights smell, touch, and taste as well as more commonly noted sights and sounds. Knowledge grounded in bodily experience encompasses uncertainty, ambiguity, and messiness in everyday life, eschewing sanitized detached measurement of discrete variables. Such an epistemology, or way of knowing, resists the Cartesian mind–body split that underlies Enlightenment philosophy and its persistent remnants, including the scientific method and the glorification of objectivity. Embodied knowledge is inherently and unapologetically subjective, celebrating—rather than glossing over —the complexities of knowledge production. Fieldwork, interviewing, …

Autoethnography As Constructionist Project, Laura L. Ellingson, Carolyn Ellis

Women's and Gender Studies

In this chapter, we explore autoethnography as a social constructionist project. We want to resist the tendency to dichotomize and instead explore how autoethnography makes connections between seemingly polar opposites. Though we see it as a sign of progress that authors desire to tease out differences in autoethnographic projects, we argue that concentrating on dichotomies is counterproductive, given that autoethnography by definition operates as a bridge, connecting autobiography and ethnography in order to study the intersection of self and others, self and culture.

After further detailing in this chapter the limits of dichotomous thinking, we sketch the meanings and goals …