International Conference of Autoethnography, Zoom (!) 20th-21st July 2020

Tim Buescher writes:

This year has been rather different for all of us in many ways. Lockdown, travel restrictions, increased workloads and caring duties have made meeting up difficult for all of us and an academic conference sounds like an impossibility. Or so it seemed in February when the steering committee for the International Conference of Autoethnography (formerly the British International Conference of Autoethnography) had to admit that we wouldn’t be gathering in Bristol for the 7th annual conference this year. 

However, we agreed to look at moving the thing online and relaunching/announcing this through the twitter account @_ICAE_. It has been an eye-opening experience to see people from as far afield as Kazakhstan, Aruba, Brazil, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Norway, Chile, Turkey and various US states come together online for two days and share autoethnographic work in a wide variety of styles on a wide range of topics from an array of disciplines.

The theme for this year was Reclamation:

The process or act of claiming something back; of reasserting a right Restoration, regeneration, recapture, recovery, repossession or retrieval Reclamation as an act of telling a continuing narrative with what is salvaged from the wreckage of crisis. Something new.

Paraphrased from Barker and Buchannan-Barker, 2003

Panels included surviving lockdown, stories of survival/loss/reclaiming self, Reclaiming voices through poetic and lyrical understandings, Black motherhood /girlhood/womanhood, Methodological challenges and insights, Disrupted and problematic bodies, and many others.

The full programme is available here:

A YouTube channel has been established to curate some of the presentations including keynotes from Sophie Tamas and David Carless and the lifetime contribution award, which went to Alec Grant. You can access the channel here.

Many attendees spoke of how the online format allowed them to contribute in a way which would be financially impossible in a traditional setting, a serious consideration in thinking about decolonising academic institutions. The whole thing has been exhausting, but so very rewarding.