In this exploration, I examine how autoethnographers create connections and community through the metaphor of the undead in their various forms. Autoethnography allows us to write and speak about our anxieties, our impolite private issues, and what frightens us at home and at work, including aging, guilt, mortality, shame, and lost love. Through autoethnography, we connect the seen and the invisible, the known and the unknown, the understood and the unexplained, mystery and science. It provides us the opportunity to reenchant the world. Most importantly, autoethnographic writing provides us the opportunity to recognize that our fears are not ours alone but are a basis upon which we can all connect.

In communication and family studies, narrative inheritance Òprovides us with a framework for understanding our identity throughÓ the stories of those who preceded us in our families (Goodall, 2005, p. 497). Ballard and Ballard (2011) supplement the concept of narrative inheritance with the idea of Ònarrative momentum,Ó suggesting that family identity moves forward into the future through the narratives the family tells (p. 80). In this account, I question the hegemony of both concepts, particularly narrative momentum which discounts the variety of family types, while supporting the dominant cultural discourses of what defines Òfamily.Ó

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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.

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.

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.

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