Biodesign is emerging as a radical design approach with great potential for the ecological turn, finally endorsed by some first academic courses providing designers with hybrid skills to embrace scientific disciplines. However, the resulting professional figure, the biodesigner, still needs to be better defined in the academic and grey literature, also considering the different and multiple facets that working between design and science may entail. This study presents four case studies of research through design (RTD), addressed by the author as an autoethnographic form of inquiry to clarify the roles a biodesigner could assume, emphasising the differences in methods, tools and workplaces, which inevitably affect the Biodesign outcomes. The author analyses her role as a biodesigner and designer in lab, working in teams and environments requiring different degrees of interdisciplinarity. Far from adopting a speculative approach, the RTDs focus on sustainable Material Design and Biodesign solutions that might be feasible in the short run, aiming to test the designer’s abilities in enriching scientific research and investigating the role and contribution designers can play in scientific contexts of different intensities. The study demonstrates the possibility of a reciprocal knowledge transfer between design and science, highlighting the potential of the designerly way of knowing in bringing innovation to the scientific field.

My role as a university-based, general classroom music teacher educator in England has become unclear, exacerbated by policies that have undermined the field of classroom music in schools and the role of universities in teacher education. Using self-critical inquiry enacted as critically reflexive autoethnography, I interrogated my professional practice to rethink my pedagogic identity. Theoretical perspectives, drawn from Bernstein and Bourdieu, were used to chart my shifting identity. This paper introduces a theorised model to illustrate a range of pedagogic identities for Key Stage 3 (KS3) general classroom music teacher education.

Although ageing is personally relevant to many if not most gerontologists, a reflexive perspective is largely absent from gerontological scholarship. This paper employs duoethnography, a variant of autoethnography, to explore how experiences related to growing older have informed the authors' teaching and scholarship in the field of ageing. Duoethnography involves putting two autoethnographies into conversation, promoting dynamic self-understandings and generating new insights through dialogue. The co-authors first reflected on their journeys to date in the field, including on how the personification of ageing has shifted our perspective. Then we shared our narratives and made some initial revisions based on each other's feedback. Next, we collaboratively identified and discussed three broad, connective themes: the differing yet central role of gender in our narratives, teaching and generativity, and the pedagogical and personal challenges associated with ageism. Our reflections and dialogue deepened our understanding of these issues central to studying and teaching about ageing. The kind of reflective practice that we model could be a vital resource for bridging the gap between theory and practice, researcher and researched.

Autoethnography—a methodology that foregrounds personal experience both during research and in writing about it—is a useful keyword for scholars working in Africa and the diaspora. Mara and Thompson argue that by exploring new forms of writing and engaging in critical self-reflexivity regarding (shifting) positionalities, autoethnography—particularly collaborative approaches—is vital to ongoing efforts to decolonize African Studies. Mara and Thompson propose changes necessary for the development of Africanist autoethnography as a Keyword, and some hopeful indicators that these changes are already underway, including a small but growing body of Africanist autoethnographic work.

This autoethnography explores a dance scholar's previous choreographic trajectory, positioning the author's career within the sixties and seventies Black Arts Movement for social change. I explore several iterations of my dance lecture-demonstration in particular, which was produced over two decades and three continents, demonstrating how temporal and spatial shifts affect the content and context of a choreographic work. Additionally, I explore my shift into arts producing through my national dance initiative that helped define the work of eighties Black choreographers in the postmodern dance movement. The result is a consideration of how being Black, female, and a dancer provides a particular sociohistorical lens.

This article revisits a paper and from an autoethnographic/critical reflective biographical approach re-examines seven cultural notions or myths, which may encourage ageism. It is framed within my experiential knowledge of caring for my ageing parents, with the tensions and challenges around problematising the value of expertise based on experience, communication, grief, and autonomy and freedom versus safety. The commentary emphasises that by analysing the impact of our personal life experiences, we can start to understand both the intended and unintended consequences of policy and practice affecting those in the fourth age. As a social work educator, I wanted to reflect upon how my tacit experiential knowledge, if made explicit, could impact upon my own and others’ learning. The recent death of my father has allowed for a period of reflection on my own caring and indeed my professional social work experience, knowledge, skills and practice. It is argued that the ageing process is unequal as class and socio-economic factors, i.e. geography, age, gender, religion and ethnicity, all play parts in determining how someone ages, and indeed upon the care an individual older person receives. A fuller understanding of negotiating the role of one stakeholder, that of a family carer in the ageing process, is elicited in this paper.

The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore the political potential of visual autoethnography. I do so through my experience of working as a Swiss Army officer in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Drawing on my own photographs I examine how an appreciation of everyday aesthetic sensibilities can open up new ways of thinking about security dilemmas. I argue that visual autoethnography can be insightful not because it offers better or even authentic views – it cannot – but because it has the potential to reveal how prevailing political discourses are so widely rehearsed and accepted that we no longer see their partial, political, and often problematic nature. I illustrate this potential in two ways: (1) how a self-reflective engagement with my own photographs of the DMZ reveals the deeply entrenched role of militarised masculinities; (2) how my positionality and my photographs of everyday life in North Korea show that prevailing security discourses are highly particular and biased, even though they are used to justify seemingly objective policy decisions.

In this article, I take a creative and autoethnographic approach to reflect upon processes of decolonisation in Indigenous Australian studies classrooms. Positioning myself as a non-Indigenous educator, I take the reader on a journey through my search for pedagogy which makes space for the colonial, difficult and messy politics of race, whiteness and knowledge to be actively challenged, deconstructed and reimagined in this context as PEARL.

Reflecting on my own experiences conducting ethnographic fieldwork within the international backpacking community and the metaphorical (as well as physical) journey this entailed, this article provides an account of the fieldwork process as it is lived and focuses on the interplay between the academic as observer and the academic as observed. In particular, drawing on key excerpts from the author's fieldnotes, the article opens up the fieldwork process to closer scrutiny, examining the emotional, corporeal and social dimensions of research. In so doing, the article explores some of the tensions that can emerge for the tourism studies scholar, who as researcher, traveller and tourist may frequently occupy multiple roles and identities within an individual research project. However, rather than viewing these convergences as an obstacle or limitation, I suggest that when viewed through the methodological approach of autoethnography, they are in fact conducive to developing a more reflexive and critically orientated approach to tourism studies.

What constitutes a quality research student learning experience? Using an interpretive social sciences approach, the tradition of autoethnography and the interpretive processes of reflexivity and constructivist grounded theory, the individual and collective lived research student experiences of three students were constructed/interpreted and (re)constructed/(re)interpreted to provide insights into answers to this question. Each student had completed one research program and, at the time of publication, was currently enrolled in a doctoral program. Based on these three students' autoethnographies, quality research student experiences engender personal, social, supervisor, research profession, learning communities and other life connectivities. These connectivities are generated through conducive conditions for learning, communities of practice and inclusive research cultures wherein research students experience and do research in order to become researchers, and to belong to research communities.