In the life of Søren A. Kierkegaard “the instant” had two distinct meanings. The first use of the phrase “the instant” is the point of intersection of time and eternity. It is the split second of decision, and the flash of a personal revolutionizing vision: a decisive “glint of an eye” to live in the existential moment. However, The Instant was also the title of a broadsheet Kierkegaard published at the end of his life that directly attacked “Christendom” and the idea of a Christian Nation. Through a layered account using narrative vignettes, I examine how “instants” and Kierkegaard's The Instant impacted my ideas of identity, community, and Christianity, leading me to a place of exile.

Large-scale transformational change, such as the integration and acceptance of gays in the U.S. military, necessitates a long-term effort by management to mitigate unanticipated consequences. Suboptimal implementation may not account for damaging consequences among individuals expected to live the change. The purpose of this autoethnographic study was to examine the individual experiences of a closeted gay personnel member living through a transformational change in identity, which paralleled an organizational change in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The conceptual framework included elements of general systems theory, Kotter's theory of change management, Ostroff's change management for government, and Maslow's self-actualization theory. Data collection included logs, notes, journals, field notes, and recollections of experiences, conversations, and events connecting the autobiographical story to organizational change. Data were coded and analyzed to identify themes. Data analysis entailed triangularization using the largest DoD survey of that time, and public records of military personnel who participated in lawsuits against the DoD or opined about the policy. While the organization was transforming to allow openly gay individuals to remain in the military, findings showed that nearly half of those who offered opinions predicted that openly gay servicemembers would get beat up or abused. Findings showed the process of transformational change allowed those impacted to make their own sense of the change, and knowing whether someone was gay mattered. Findings may be used by sexual minorities and other subgroups to engage in sensemaking activities to promote transformational change initiatives.

If cosmetic surgery has become the cultural lens through which Americans look at issues of beauty and ugliness (Haiken 1997), then minor bodily stigma is the personal lens through which we scrutinize our bodies and self-diagnose our own flaws in the first place (Ellis 1998). In this dissertation, I interrogated the stories of eight women who struggled with two specific minor bodily stigmas--strabismus (crossed eyes) and micromastia (small breasts). Cosmetic surgery presents a potential "cure" for both of these conditions, however, as some of my interviewees could testify, the results are unpredictable. While some women reported being grateful that they could try to resculpt their bodies with surgery, others were too afraid to try, or annoyed that the option existed in the first place. Using a Grounded Theory approach, I combined autoethographic techniques with interactive interviewing to collect and interpret my data about how individuals cope with, and talk about, minor bodily stigma in an age of cosmetic surgery. The two flaws I chose to examine carry a great deal of cultural significance because in the West, eyes are revered as "windows to the soul," while breasts are regarded as powerful symbols of sexuality. Consequently, I looked at each woman's exposure to culture at three levels--the mass media, the local culture, and the circle of family and friends. First, I wanted to find out how these women identified themselves as flawed in the first place, and what impact their perceived stigma had upon their lives. I wanted to know if, and how, they communicated to others about their minor bodily stigmas. Next, I delineated the eight coping strategies outlined by my interviewees and examined the efficacy of each. Finally, I looked at how each woman made and communicated her decision regarding whether or not to pursue cosmetic surgery as a solution to her minor bodily stigma. I asked those who had surgery to elaborate on their decision and its outcome.

In this dissertation, I seek to examine the effects of purposeful journaling and guided storytelling on past traumas, perception of current lives, and the development of new coping skills among men at The Salvation Army’s residential adult rehabilitation center (ARC). All residents of the ARC must attend Christian-based devotional services, go to Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) meetings, follow the A.A. 12-step program, and sign up for several weekly counseling and educational groups, one of which is the “Guided Journaling and Storytelling” group I lead. The men who attended this group are (1) addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, (2) face homelessness, (3) cope with some form of mental or physical health issue, (4) may have criminal records, and (5) have alienated most of their social support. Through a twelve-week curriculum I developed, I introduced coping skills—building resilience, expressive writing, and deep breathing—while incorporating art, music, and poetry in the groups. I elicited participants’ stories through prompts, using my own experiences to model vulnerability and demonstrate concepts, such as: narrative reframing; how memories can be uncertain, partial, and elusive; how storytelling can prompt forgotten stories; and the efficacy of including emotion and rich details in the stories we tell. Knowing the value of writing and storytelling, I set out to see if the communicative practices I had learned in the past that had improved my life situation might assist others to write themselves out of destructive patterns, desperation, and trauma, and into sober and more fulfilling lives.

Within the context of culture, disability has long existed as a stigmatizing quality (Goffman, 1963). As a result, people with disabilities are often overlooked or completely omitted from various, cultural artifacts. This exclusion of people with disabilities is largely recognized as unproblematic because their disabilities imply an inevitable failing. Through my own experiences as a disabled gamer, I have recognized that video games have also framed gamers with disabilities as problematic. Video games are largely constructed in a one-size-fits-all mentality (Grammenos, 2014), where very specific people, with very specific kinds of bodies, are granted access to play them. Since disabled gamers are not necessarily capable of playing video games in similar ways that able-bodied gamers can, it is assumed that we can't play video games and that we shouldn't want to. By using autoethnography as theory, I venture through a few stories from my life in which my own disability has rendered gaming either difficult or impossible. I seek to use these autoethnographic pieces as living examples of the problems involved with a traditional discussion of accessibility for people with disabilities. This thesis is a call for a renegotiation of "accessibility," and how generalized formulations of this concept are still capable of excluding people who are disabled in very particular ways. In accordance with Shakespeare's (2006) interactive model, I use my stories to show how my disability is a culmination of both the material and social qualities of my body. It is from this model that I seek transcendence from thinking of disabled bodies in either a medical or social model (Oliver, 1990) approach. Accessibility should be regarded as an interactive and cyclical process, which takes place between the individual, her body, the environment, and back again. An assessment of video game accessibility should be referred to in a similar way, where developers may attempt to be inclusive to people of varying kinds and levels of disability, rather than focusing solely on able-bodied modes of gaming.

This autoethnographic dissertation recounts numerous untold stories about my journeys into the Islamic Republic of Iran as a sports consultant and women’s softball coach for Global Sports Partners (GSP). Autoethnography as defined by Ellis & Bochner (2000), is “an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural…Autoethnographers vary in their emphasis on the research process (graphy), on culture (ethnos), and on self (auto)” (pp. 739-740). Autoethnographers, writing within a branch of narrative inquiry (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), believe in the power of story and that humans learn through stories lived and told (Ellis, 2004). To date, the majority of the literature devoted to Iranian women in sports has been written from a critical feminist perspective, detailing the “oppressive” societal structures associated with sport in an Islamic Republic (Hargreaves, 2000; Pfister, 2003; Pfister, 2006). While understanding the structure in which Iranian women compete is important, it does not closely reflect my experiences with the way Iranian women define their own sport participation. The purpose of this autoethnography is (1) to confront my previously held stereotypes and reveal my personal transformation, (2) to provide a counternarrative that “extends sociological understanding” (Sparkes, 2002), (3) to demonstrate the use of sport in fostering cross-cultural respect, appreciation, and dialogue, and (4) to offer new ways of knowing and telling (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Richardson, 2000b).

This dissertation examines the experience of former collegiate football hostesses and presents an autoethnographic narrative from my viewpoint as a female researcher enmeshed in the culture of athletics. The exploration reveals the experience of gender, race, and power as told through my own stories as well as those of former hostesses. My exploratory study reveals the contradiction and conflict between and amongst women’s experiences as well as brings to light the aspects of hostess experience that the media rarely highlights. I wrote this for readers to witness and understand the complexity of the hostess experience, its privileges and challenges.

Through six months of ethnographic and autoethnographic fieldwork, which included participant observation and ten individual semi-structured interviews, I sought to determine how dominant discourses in dance, especially those pertaining to professionalism, ability, validity, and legitimacy, are circulated in and through training, and how we as dancers responded to these discourses. Following the stand alone thesis format, this thesis is comprised of two publishable papers. The first is an ethnography of one integrated dance company’s members’ experience with negotiating space for alternative forms of dance in contemporary dance. The second is an autoethnographic piece of writing where I show the challenges of resisting dominant discourses of validity and legitimacy in both qualitative research as well as contemporary dance. Together, these papers form a thesis that strengthens our scholarly understanding of the discourses and associated tensions at work in participating in and writing about integrated dance.

As I write this piece, I wonder how I got here. I began with an interest in adolescent mental health services in schools. Then I was captured by autoethnographic writing and Carolyn Ellis became my hero. I read everything I could find regarding autoethnography and mostly I read autoethnographic stories. This led me to wanting to tell my own stories, but I realized they were very difficult stories to tell and very difficult stories to hear. I became interested in why certain stories are difficult to tell. I wanted to know what made them difficult stories. I wanted to understand why we tell certain things more easily than others or why we dont tell at all. I then became interested in secrets. I realized that my personal secrets were mostly about mothering. I wondered what it was about mothering that made these stories so difficult to tell. I wondered what was unique and specific to the secrets of mothering. I read extensively about mothering and motherhood. I was exhilarated when I found the work of Andrea OReilly and the Association for Research on Mothering at a book fair at a local conference. I had found another hero. Then I read Susan Maushart (1999) and Adrienne Rich (1986) and I became immersed in the search for meaning about motherhood, mothering, the masks of motherhood and the normative discourse of mothering. I realized there was a disconnect between the discourse of mothering and the actual practice of mothering. I also began to realize that perhaps the masks of motherhood and the normative discourse contributed to and perpetuated the secrets of mothering. I tell my own secrets of mothering to examine this phenomenon. And I tell stories that I never thought I would tell in a public forum. My stories look behind my cool and competent mask of motherhood (Maushart, 1999), and expose the raw emotions of my secrets of mothering. I am often vulnerable and naked and I ask readers to appreciate this in context of their own nakedness and vulnerability. An exploration of the discourse and practice of mothering, and the secrets related to that, offers a means to disturb the normative discourse of mothering and a means to unravel my secrets of mothering. I offer no solutions only hope and possibility that the disturbing and unraveling will guide mothers and parents to decide which mask to wear (or not) and which secrets to keep (or not) and perhaps to awaken readers to the social and political issues related to these stories (both mine and the readers). I introduce and provide the background for the dissertation through my positionality in Tomasulos chair. I will give no other explanation of the chair except to say that I move in and out of the chair as I explore the purpose of my dissertation and position myself within that exploration.

Utilizing autoethnographic reflections in the forms of lyric, collage, and personal narrative, this inquiry shows how one teacher developed resiliency. That teacher is me. My early teaching experiences in an Ontario high school provide a qualitative focus of an inner, emotional journey to regaining strength and rediscovering passion after a period of burn-out. Tracing the passage from idealism to defeatism to resilience through metaphors, this arts-informed inquiry represents the inner life of a young woman and teacher.