Coming Unhinged: A Twice-Told Multivoiced Autoethnography

Abstract

This story tells about an accident that occurred at the 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. The first author presents her autoethnography of her partner’s fall and her subsequent reaction. Then to complicate and deepen her telling, she crafts a second multivoiced account from the responses of eight people who were part of the event. The participants’ stories are juxtaposed to tell a multivoiced tale and to theorize what happened in an experience-near mode. Twice-told multivoiced autoethnography brings other voices, subjectivities, and interpretations into our autoethnographic accounts, providing a collective consciousness and offering the possibility of initiating conversations about the values of care and empathy connected with the project of autoethnography.