It is Too Much. Too Many Stories to Handle

Abstract

This is an autoethnographic poem. It shows one of the limits of autoethnography.

The Future of Autoethnographic Criteria

“…Then people started approaching me out of the blue thanking me for my research because I captured something-the story-the feelings-they experienced too. Szwabowski's (2020) poem evoked those feelings within me. I am not a poet, but I recognize the "auto," the "ethno," and the "graphy" in those lines.…”

“…We need people who can. These new expressions of autoethnography may solve two parallel issues: the “helplessness of autoethnography” (Szwabowski, 2020, p. 188) and possibilities for public scholarship. Let me tackle each.…”

“…Autoethnography is one of the few places in scholarship where the researcher's voice is explicitly allowed. Autoethnographic writing brings us the slangs of blackgirlness (Boylorn, 2017), the idioms of dive bar customers (Denker, 2017), the "white trash" lexicons (Dunn, 2018), the masculinities of the military (Hunniecutt, 2017), the cusses of punks (Herrmann, 2011), the syntaxes of nonnative-English speakers (Moreira & Diversi, 2010), the jargon of being queer (Adams, 2020), the beauties of poetry (Blinne, 2010;Szwabowski, 2020Szwabowski, , 2021Tillmann, 2019), music (Bartleet, 2009), and more. There are works and worlds full of sarcasms, and dialects, and blasphemes, and dirt, and shame, and sex, and anger, and mourning, and joy.…”

Diary of an assistant professor: Invasion of neoliberal-zombie reform in Polish universities

“…Sometimes we may ascribe too much power to words, stories. I myself felt overwhelmed at times in my auto-ethnographic research of the university; instead of joy, change, hope, I experienced a gloomy, dark depression in the face of suffering (Szwabowski, 2020). Auto-ethnography is not exactly a method.…”