This collection explores how autoethnography is made. Contributors from sociology, education, counselling, the visual arts, textiles, drama, music, and museum curation uncover and reflect on the processes and practices they engage in as they craft their autoethnographic artefacts. Each chapter explores a different material or media, together creating a rich and stimulating set of demonstrations, with the focus firmly on the practical accomplishment of texts/artefacts. Theoretically, this book seeks to rectify the hierarchical separation of art and craft and of intellectual and practical cultural production, by collapsing distinctions between knowing and making. In relation to connections between personal experience and wider social and cultural phenomena, contributors address a variety of topics such as social class, family relationships and intergenerational transmission, loss, longing and grief, the neoliberal university, gender, sexuality, colonialism, race/ism, national identity, digital identities, indigenous ways of knowing/making and how these are ‘storied’, curated and presented to the public, and our relationship with the natural world. Contributors also offer insights into how the ‘crafting space’ is itself one of intellectual inquiry, debate, and reflection. This is a core text for readers from both traditional and practice-based disciplines undertaking qualitative research methods/autoethnographic inquiry courses, as well as community-based practitioners and students. Readers interested in creative practice, practitioner-research and arts-based research in the social sciences and humanities will also benefit from this book.

This collection explores how autoethnography is made. Contributors from sociology, education, counselling, the visual arts, textiles, drama, music, and museum curation uncover and reflect on the processes and practices they engage in as they craft their autoethnographic artefacts. Each chapter explores a different material or media, together creating a rich and stimulating set of demonstrations, with the focus firmly on the practical accomplishment of texts/artefacts. Theoretically, this book seeks to rectify the hierarchical separation of art and craft and of intellectual and practical cultural production, by collapsing distinctions between knowing and making. In relation to connections between personal experience and wider social and cultural phenomena, contributors address a variety of topics such as social class, family relationships and intergenerational transmission, loss, longing and grief, the neoliberal university, gender, sexuality, colonialism, race/ism, national identity, digital identities, indigenous ways of knowing/making and how these are ‘storied’, curated and presented to the public, and our relationship with the natural world. Contributors also offer insights into how the ‘crafting space’ is itself one of intellectual inquiry, debate, and reflection. This is a core text for readers from both traditional and practice-based disciplines undertaking qualitative research methods/autoethnographic inquiry courses, as well as community-based practitioners and students. Readers interested in creative practice, practitioner-research and arts-based research in the social sciences and humanities will also benefit from this book.

Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association's "Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award for a Book about the Working-Class Academic Experience" This collection by three generations of women from predominantly working-class backgrounds explores the production of the classed, gendered and racialized subject with powerful, engaging, funny and moving stories of transitions through family relationships, education, friendships and work. The developments that take place across a life in processes of 'becoming' are examined through the fifteen autoethnographies that form the core of the book, set within an elaboration of the social, educational and geo-political developments that constitute the backdrop to contributors' lives. Clever Girls discusses the status of personal experience as 'research data' and the memory work that goes into the making of autoethnography-as-poiesis. The collection illustrates the huge potential of autoethnography as research method, mode of inquiry and creative practice to illuminate the specificities and commonalities of experiences of growing up as 'clever girls' and to sound a 'call to action' against inequality and discrimination.

Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association's "Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award for a Book about the Working-Class Academic Experience" This collection by three generations of women from predominantly working-class backgrounds explores the production of the classed, gendered and racialized subject with powerful, engaging, funny and moving stories of transitions through family relationships, education, friendships and work. The developments that take place across a life in processes of 'becoming' are examined through the fifteen autoethnographies that form the core of the book, set within an elaboration of the social, educational and geo-political developments that constitute the backdrop to contributors' lives. Clever Girls discusses the status of personal experience as 'research data' and the memory work that goes into the making of autoethnography-as-poiesis. The collection illustrates the huge potential of autoethnography as research method, mode of inquiry and creative practice to illuminate the specificities and commonalities of experiences of growing up as 'clever girls' and to sound a 'call to action' against inequality and discrimination.