Writing Lives: Ethnographic and Autoethnographic Narratives
Writing Lives: Ethnographic and Autoethnographic Narratives publishes autoethnographic and narrative research projects across the disciplines of the human sciences—anthropology, communication, education, psychology, sociology, etc. The series editors seek manuscripts that blur the boundaries between humanities and social sciences. We encourage novel and evocative forms of expressing concrete lived experience, including literary, poetic, artistic, critical, visual, performative, multi-voiced, and co-constructed representations. We are interested in ethnographic and autoethnographic narratives that depict local stories; employ literary modes of scene setting, dialogue, character development, and unfolding action; and include the author’s critical reflections on the research and writing process, such as research ethics, alternative modes of inquiry and representation, reflexivity, and evocative storytelling.
Prospective authors should submit a Routledge Book Proposal, current CV, and a completed (or nearly-completed) manuscript to abochner@usf.edu, cellis@usf.edu, and tadams@bradley.edu.
Unraveling: An Autoethnography of Suicide and Renewal
Mike Alvarez
Unraveling is an autoethnographic story that explores the intricate relationship among trauma, marginality, and mental health.
It follows Mike Alvarez, a precocious gay teenager from an immigrant Filipino family who loses his grip on reality as he succumbs to so-called mental illness. Divided into two parts, the first half of the book uses evocative storytelling and in-the-moment narration to capture the slow descent into anxiety, paranoia, depression, and suicidality, as experienced by the author during young adulthood. The second half of the book critically reflects upon the story through a series of analytic chapters. In these chapters, the author considers the role of narrative in cultivating empathy for the mentally ill, the psychiatric-industrial complex’s obstruction of that empathy, and the moral dilemmas autoethnographers face when writing about self, other, and the social world.
A Story of a Marriage Through Dementia and Beyond
Love in a Whirlwind
Laurel Richardson
A Story of a Marriage Through Dementia and Beyond is the extraordinary, unflinching account from sociologist Laurel Richardson of her love and caregiving through the last period of her husband Ernest Lockridge’s life – from his transient amnesia to his death from Lewy Body Dementia.
Focusing on the lived experience of the caregiver through the loved one’s journey from mild cognitive impairment to death, the book gives the reader the experience of what the medical diagnoses mean and what has led up to the loss. It shows the complex, nuanced lives of a couple both living with the worst effects of a disease like Lewy Body Dementia, while maintaining, sometimes with hope and laughter, their loving connection nourished through a 40-year marriage.
Tony E. Adams 