Examining whiteness (in) education is a journey of identity and materiality. In this article, the authors adopt an approach to research that highlights the role of performance in constituting identity. They believe that theorizing identity in this way is facilitated through autoethnographic storytelling, which allows one to theorize material performances of identity, along with the culture in which those performances are situated. In the following, the authors dialogically theorize whiteness education through their stories. They draw upon themselves as individuals and one another as partners in humanity in order to make sense of education within a context of whiteness. They develop community autoethnography as a method with which to engage in such dialogical theorization.

In this article, I reflect on the critical potential of complete-member ethnography (CME) through a retrospective and methodological exploration of a 2004 ethnographic project. I offer my provisionary theorization of critical CME (CCME) by reworking data and experimenting with CCME writing. CCME is an innovative intracultural praxis which engages in and facilitates social justice and cultural reform through its dialectical and highly personalized communication theorization. I draw from three ethnographic traditions: ethnography of communication, critical ethnography, and autoethnography to theorize both consensual and conflictual aspects of CCME as dialectics. Implications for identity investments are discussed.

Doing autoethnography simultaneously empowers and colonizes me, my lived experiences, my sense-making, my writing, and my sense of being. I find my heart feeling energized and displaced. In this essay, I engage this feeling critically with hope to further theorize autoethnography as a de/postcolonial research practice for me. With this goal in mind, I discuss the academic second persona and its potential colonial implications on the “auto,” the “ethno,” and the “graphy” of autoethnography while these three components are inseparable in an act of doing autoethnography. This essay addresses the critical relationships between autoethnographers and the academic second persona while envisioning and laboring toward de/postcolonial autoethnography. Autoethnographers work with/within/against those relationships. Becoming a de/postcolonial autoethnographer does not signify the complete departure from the relationality. It marks a pledge or commitment for our continuous self-reflexive labor to interrogate, become more aware of, and possibly challenge the relationality through which we became and continue to become autoethnographers in our academic culture and everyday living.

Identity politics in culturally diverse U.S.-American higher education is so complex that it is difficult to completely account for all of its elements. As a communication sensei, I enter this arena taking an approach informed by critical pedagogy and employing performative and/or autoethnographic writing as a mode of critical interrogation. Via storytelling, I investigate my becoming and the role of a critical pedagogue as a sociotemporal actor in today's culturally diverse U.S.-American education. Critical pedagogues should enter education as an intersubjective identity project where educational participants' stories meet, and their “hoped-for future” emerges from their storytelling.

The authors trace the development of ethnographic practices according to the methodological assumptions of ethnographers within different historical periods. As communication scholars, the authors find Calvin O. Schrag's conceptualization of the self to be informative and advantageous for navigating an ethnographic sense of 'self' in the current status of the methodological contestation. Borrowing from Schrag's work, which focuses on communicative praxis in understanding the self, this article explores an innovative methodological framework called automethodology. By examining the deployment and emplotment of the self within the automethods of autobiography, autoethnography, narrative co-construction, community autoethnography, critical complete-member ethnography, reflexive ethnography, autoperformance, and layered account, the authors develop epistemological foundations for praxis-oriented ethnographers. Throughout this journey, the authors end up situating themselves in a place they consider home-in the practices of automethodology.