ABSTRACT
109From different moments throughout our professional careers, we have come together to write our biographies into history (Mills, 1959), creating stories that at the same time resist and demand to be told, moving from personal troubles to public issues, refusing hegemonic pictures of reality through reductionist methodologies and pedagogies, where oppressed bodies and lived experiences are missing, or (mis)represented as exotic, deviant, decontextualized, glorified. Like many others, before and with us, we write autoethnography together to bring personal troubles to living history with the intent of disrupting essentializing representations and interpretations of lived experience. The words of Bryant Keith Alexander, then, become very important to us,
Issues of personal survival motivate scholarship production… I am exploring and sometimes exposing my own vulnerability to racial, gender, and cultural critique as a method of both understanding self and other, self as other, while engaging in performances (written and embodied) that seek to transform the social and cultural conditions under which I live and labor.
(2005, p. 433) Like him, we write with the hope that we will invite historically marginalized outcasts into conversations about decolonizing knowledge production in academia. We write against repeated exclusionary treatment of the Other from our own biographies and political bodies.