A Profound Passing

• In Event: 16.027 - Educators Queering Academia: Critical Memoirs

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
“Gliding into Rapid City regional airport snow drapes the surrounding hills and cloaks the prairie” begins this auto ethnographic narrative (Bochner, 2000; Clough, 2000) of my life as a young-man in the Mid-western part of the United States, my mother’s battle with Parkinson’s Disease, and my time in higher education during a four-mile run on my Father’s ranch. I interweave descriptions of the mid-western plains with my time as a graduate student and as a professor.

Perspectives
I build on the aesthetic turn in qualitative inquiry (Denzin, 2000). As Denzin asserts in his article, “Aesthetics, art, performance, history, culture, and politics thus are intertwined, for in the artful, interpretive production, cultural heroes, heroines, mythic pasts, and senses of moral community are created” (p. 260). I weave together figurative language, cultural landscape, and family history to describe how rural nature reminded me of my early same-sex desire as reminisced here by “The sweet and rustic scent of the weeds, hay, and wheat…remind me of crushes, fantasies, and heartbreak.” I describe being silenced in a Multicultural education class in a teacher education program where my classmates refused to discuss LGBTQ issues, and how as a secondary English teacher was encouraged by my principal not to come out to my students, and last, how a senior administrator took me off of a grant because of my research on LGBTQ issues.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Autoethnography positions the self within a context (Ellis & Brochner, 2000; Reed-Danahay, 1997) where “the researcher is viewed as a viable data source” (Leavy, 2015, p. 43). This paper describes how my experiences as a queer scholar in higher education and my personal memories can be profound data sources.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
This paper uses the memories, reflections, nature, and family history to narrate my experiences as a queer scholar in higher education.
Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view The results of this paper illustrate that doing research is a personal endeavor, that one’s personal reflections can be valuable research, and that reflections of past experiences can be fruitful data to expand upon one’s academic life.
Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
This work illustrates how research, personal experiences, methodology, and autoethnography merge to explicate experiences as a queer academic. Furthermore, it shows how metaphor can be used as “a tool of and for discovery” (Brady, 2004, p. 629). As Brady explains, “Metaphorizing experience is an activity embedded in interpersonal relations and thereby rendered more or less consciously in the realms of sociability and the social construction of reality—person to person, author to reader, and so on, every waking day” (p. 629). Reflections on one’s experiences as a critical queer scholar in academia occur “every waking day” and in medias res, on a ranch during a four-mile run.

Author

• David L. Carlson, Arizona State University