ABSTRACT
Critical performance autoethnography forges a link between biography, history and social structure, the lynchpins of Mill's sociological imagination. The heart of the matter turns on issues surrounding the politics and ethics of evidence, and the value of qualitative work in addressing matters of equity and social justice. A soft, a-political pragmatic paradigm emerged in the post-1990 period. Critical scholars are committed to showing how the practices of critical, interpretive qualitative research can help change the world in positive ways. In the eighth moment, the criteria for evaluating critical qualitative work are moral and ethical. Laurel Richardson observes that the narrative genres connected to ethnographic writing have "been blurred, enlarged, altered to include poetry and drama". Mills anticipated and shaped the turn to critical qualitative inquiry and critical pedagogy in the human sciences. Indeed, a direct line can be drawn from Mills to Paulo Friere, and from Freire to contemporary versions of critical pedagogy
