Presentation on family meals, mothers and daughters and cancer, expectations of women.

Political decisions about higher education and organizational decision-making within higher educational institutions reflect the acceptance of academic capitalist discourse, placing financial burdens on students, stress upon faculty, and the obliteration of trust between faculty and administration. In this critical layered narrative account, a tenure-track faculty member examines the impacts and influences of academic capitalism, including how this neoliberal discourse disregards the idea of higher education as a public good, creates an atmosphere of fear among faculty, and affects faculty-student relationships. This account illustrates how academic capitalism, with its emphasis on money and power, influenced decisions regarding a partnership with a software company, and of course, a rebooted football program.

This narrative articulates the advantages of long-term autoethnographic logotherapy. I explore how the practice of long-term autoethnographic logotherapy led me to the point where I was prepared for my father’s death, and how that allowed me to let him go before he actually died. I propose that long-term personal narrative and autoethnographic writing are not merely a form of therapy and healing. Rather, it is a practice aligned with existential psychologist Victor Frankl’s conception of logotherapy, literally “healing through meaning.” Using vignettes, I interrogate canonical narratives about father–son relationships, especially focusing on troubled relationships, and examine standard notions of bereavement.

Excerpt: Besides the lead character herself, the leather-clad vampire Spike -- introduced as the "Big Bad" in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) Season 2 -- the most analyzed character in the Buffyverse.

In this exploration, I consider the dilemmas I experienced as a young qualitative researcher, particularly the ethical questions about how I write, who I implicate as I write, and how community fits into my ideas of qualitative inquiry. This account is drawn from conversations with peers and mentors, ethnographic experience, and interviews. It is an explication of how the academic capitalist discourse that surrounds higher education conflicts with the premises of qualitative inquiry. It is a call to arms for second-generation qualitative researchers to push the boundaries, expand the development, and increase the readership of our work. It calls on our academic parents to continue to protect us within the academy, but also from the academy's criteria as we attempt to enlarge our readership and influence.

New media technologies (NMT) demand we ask new questions connecting communication theory and media ecology. Despite McLuhan’s famous statement “The medium is the message,” most communication scholarship in new media continues to examine the messages, rather than how the medium and their outlets Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, etc. transform communicative activity and meanings. This panel will address current conceptions of communication theory and media ecology, while proposing future directions for both research and theory.

Excerpt: MOTHERING A SON WITH SPECIAL NEEDS, or special-mothering, as I call it, is often solitary, crazy-making work. Several years ago, in part inspired by DeAnna Chester’s personal storied account of infertility, I started actively examining my own maternal story. Eventually, a desire surfaced in me to more openly witness (Frank), voicing my maternal experiences so that other special-parents know they are not alone. From the start, though, I wondered if I could witness in an ethical way. Granted, storytelling may be agency-generating, revealing previously unheard truths (Pitre, Kushner, and Hegadoren; Pitre, Kushner, Raine, and Hegadoren; Stevens). Still, as Kristin Langellier...

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Book Summary: Who are we with-and without-families? How do we relate as children to our parents, as parents to our children? How are parent-child relationships-and familial relationships in general-made and (not) maintained? Informed by narrative, performance studies, poststructuralism, critical theory, and queer theory, contributors to this collection use autoethnography-a method that uses the personal to examine the cultural-to interrogate these questions. The essays write about/around issues of interpersonal distance and closeness, gratitude and disdain, courage and fear, doubt and certainty, openness and secrecy, remembering and forgetting, accountability and forgiveness, life and death. Throughout, family relationships are framed as relationships that inspire and inform, bind and scar-relationships replete with presence and absence, love and loss. An essential text for anyone interested in autoethnography, personal narrative, identity, relationships, and family communication.