37.3273, Reviews: Untold Autoethnographic Stories of (In)Justice, Teaching and Scholarship: Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton (ed.) (2025)

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Subject: 37.3273, Reviews: Untold Autoethnographic Stories of (In)Justice, Teaching and Scholarship: Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton (ed.) (2025)

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Date: 12-Oct-2026
From: Melissa Hauber-Özer [mhauber at missouri.edu]
Subject: Sociolinguistics: Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton (ed.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-2756

Title: Untold Autoethnographic Stories of (In)Justice, Teaching and
Scholarship
Series Title: Encounters
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Multilingual Matters
           http://www.multilingual-matters.com/
Book URL:
https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?K=9781800417335

Editor(s): Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton

Reviewer: Melissa Hauber-Özer

SUMMARY
Edited by Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton, “Untold Autoethnographic
Stories of (In)Justice,  Teaching and Scholarship”  joined the
Multilingual Matters Encounters series in 2025. Sparked by a
colloquium that Sherris organized for AAAL 2022, the volume contains
14 autoethnographic contributions, a foreword by Suhanthie Motha, an
introductory chapter from the editors, and an afterword (of sorts) by
Tommaso M. Milani. The collection features critical reflections from a
diverse group of contributors – including scholars, artists,
practitioners, and activists – examining ethnicity, national origin,
cultural heritage, religious identity, and varied areas of expertise
within applied linguistics.
In her foreword, “Inhabiting (In)Justice Through Our Lives,” Suhanthie
Motha crafts a multi-voiced “found” poem constructed directly from the
contributors’ words, eloquently interweaving her own lived experiences
with theirs to demonstrate how autoethnography allows researchers to
both inhabit and resist systemic (in)justice.
Ari Sherris & Joy Kreeft Peyton introduce the volume in Chapter 1,
“Embodying Untold Truths: Autoethnographic Textu(r)alities of
(In)Justice In and Beyond Applied Linguistics.” The editors open with
an epigraph from Blackledge and Creese’s (2019) ethnography that
alludes to Nobel laureate, author, and political activist Svetlana
Aleksievich. They then coin the term textu(r)alities to mesh textual
structure with sensory and aesthetic qualities of autoethnography and
draw on concepts from Karen Barad’s (2007) new materialism,
specifically intra-action, agential cuts, entanglement, and agential
realism. Through this framing, the editors offer an overview of the
book, which explores autoethnographic influences on three sections
focusing on research, scholarship, and teaching, and highlight “topics
of racism, sexism, minoritization, language loss and reclamation,
marginalization and speaking back” (p. 10) that resonate across the
chapters.
In Chapter 2, “Embodied Reflexivity: Ethnographic Trouble and the
Hypervisibility of the Muslim Body,” Rima Elabdali examines her
subjectivity as a hypervisible Libyan Muslim researcher conducting
fieldwork in a secular Lebanese community school in the United States.
Drawing from diary entries, fieldnotes, and recordings, she utilizes
Pillow’s (2003) uncomfortable reflexivity to reflect on how her
headscarf marked boundaries, producing deep discomfort and surfacing
tensions. Elabdali contrasts transnational unity discourses (such as
pan-Arabism or the Maghreb Union) with the racialized prestige of
Levantine Arabic – which is often positioned as “white” and untainted
by European or African languages – against post-9/11 US racializing
surveillance discourses that construct Arabic as a security threat.
Through these reflections on her experience navigating the school's
strict “no religion” policy, she advocates for conceptualizing
research reflexivity as an embodied endeavor.
Chapter 3, “Brown – Blanche? Black: Weaving Multilingual,
Multicultural and Multiracial Minoritised Identities Across
International Educational Contexts,” by Gail Prasad presents an
intersectional, evocative narrative exploring identity dissonance as a
monolingual child of multilingual immigrant parents in Canada turned
international applied linguistics scholar. Drawing on anomalous
embodiment (Canagarajah, 2022; Siebers, 2013), Prasad uses textile
weaving as a metaphor for research. She critiques academic advice
urging her to abandon creative practices to pursue tenure, exposing
the academy’s systemic bifurcation of mind/body, theory/practice and
individuals from their communities functions to exclude diverse
knowledge holders. Through “uneasy vulnerability,” Prasad frames her
trajectory as a “tension between resistance and belonging” and,
ultimately, a “journey of healing and resistance in the Academy.”
In Chapter 4, “Easy-Linguistics,” Elaine W. Chun interrogates her
experience of being labeled an “accessible” linguist as a
Korean-American raised in a bilingual household. She analyzes
accessibility across several dimensions: her research focus on
everyday language use; teaching supplementary courses in areas like
sociolinguistics and second language acquisition that are viewed as
“outside the core” (p. 57) of linguistics (e.g., syntax and phonology)
historically dominated by white men; and convenient research methods
that utilize publicly available language data from sources including
social media that are also accessible to students. Through these
reflections, Chun highlights how racialized and gendered embodiments
shape scholarly perceptions of accessibility and professional rigor.
Chapter 5, “Racialized Entanglements of Englishes, Literacies and
Peoples across Transnational Contexts: An Autoethnographic Account,”
by Patriann Smith explores her professional journey as an
Afro-Caribbean teacher from Saint Lucia migrating to the US. Based on
a conversational intergenerational interview with Dr. Allan Luke, she
deploys transraciolinguistics (Smith, 2019) and translingual
entanglements of Englishes (Pennycook, 2020) alongside “heuristics of
the heart” (Sherris, 2022) to detail her concurrent experiences of
“becoming Black” and “becoming immigrant” in a system governed by a
rigid Black/White binary. Moving from outsider to insider, she asserts
her “Black innocence” – operating oblivious to the White gaze – to
leverage her full repertoire of Black literacies. Smith emphasizes
that while scholars can disentangle linguistic constructs, they cannot
unentangle lived histories, calling for institutional investments in
real-world transraciolinguistic pedagogical solutions.
In Chapter 6, “Wraiths, Rasa and Rememory: Re-searching in the Shadows
of Peripheral Knowledge and Wisdom in the Quotidian,” Darshini
Nadarajan formulates a de/colonial autoethnography constructed from
conversations with her mother around preparing a traditional sambar
recipe. “Theorizing from the flesh” (p. 93), she draws on the Malay
cosmological concept of rasa – an intuitive sense of taste, feeling,
and corporeal (un)knowing – alongside Derrida’s (1994) hauntology,
Toni Morrison's (2014) rememory, and Jungian shadow work. Through
“practiced vulnerability” and strategic surrender, Nadarajan
demonstrates how cooking and teaching function as sensory, corporeal
inquiries that reclaim ancestral wisdom and honor the “absent
presences” in qualitative research.
Chapter 7, “‘No stars: Nothing to guide me’: Paving our Destiny by
Learning from the Land and Creating Alternative Practices,” by Ahmar
Mahboob (also writing as Prof Nomad and Sunny Boy Brumby) critiques
Western linguistic hegemony. Mahboob explicitly eschews traditional
academic references to resist Western systems of authority, relying
instead on poetry, observational data, and experiential evidence. The
chapter identifies seven colonial myths: Myth 1–3 categorize human
practices into static entities: framing language as strictly
spoken/written, religion as mere belief rather than action, and human
progress as a linear shift from nomadic to settled life). Myths 4–5
project infinite phenomena as finite: namely ranking knowledge and
treating money as a scarce resource controlled by elites. Myth 6–7
divide unified realities: Cartesian dualism of mind/matter and
colonial definitions of development as a human goal. Mahboob closes by
offering subaltern alternatives, specifically Positive Discourse
Analysis and the CREDIBLE approach, to solve real-world problems using
localized knowledge and resources.
Adam Haupt’s Chapter 8, “Sample a Look Back: Autoethnographic
Reflections on Hiphopography, Language and Identity,” recounts a
series of transdisciplinary, community-engaged projects in South
Africa. In the process, Haupt reflects on how English-medium education
functioned as a tool for upward mobility that simultaneously distanced
him from his native language and family. Grounded in culturally
sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017), he details collaborative
research involving hip-hop activists that produced a multilingual
hip-hop volume and a trilingual dictionary of Kaaps (a marginalized
dialect of Afrikaans). Haupt then illustrates how hip-hop activism
disrupts academic power asymmetries, validates Cape Flats youth
culture, and establishes Kaaps as a legitimate domain of scholarly
study.
Also situated in South Africa, Chapter 9, “The 4 Rs of Hip Hop
Cultural Education,” by Emile Jansen (aka Emile YX?) outlines his
framework for decolonizing education: Reassess/Remember, wRite/Read,
Renumeration/Reparations, and Rehumanization, later expanded to
include Revolution. Recounting his history as an Apartheid-era teacher
ousted for introducing hip-hop into the classroom, Jansen details his
efforts in grassroots activism. To counter rising global white
supremacy and Eurocentric curricula in South Africa, he created
culturally and linguistically relevant storybooks in the Kaaps
language and illustrated booklets based on First Nation Bushmen
creation narratives, composed songs and lullabies for his children,
established practical hip-hop schools, and built 40 community
“True-braries” to foster cultural pride and restore collective
humanity.
In Chapter 10, “‘Whatever you do, don’t give up!’ A Scottish Gael’s
Language Reclamation Journey, Paul J. Meighan details how he reclaimed
his heritage language, Scottish Gaelic, working through
self-decolonization and generational trauma in the process. Meighan
draws on the Gaelic concept of dùthchas – an ontology stressing the
interconnectedness of land, language, culture, and non-human entities
– which he extended to language revitalization efforts in his
Anishinaabe Ojibwe husband’s community in Canada. His pilot of this
approach, the TEK-nology project, employed a kincentric and
place-based qualitative methodology and incorporated technology for
endangered language acquisition. Based on this work, Meighan proposes
five core principles for language reclamation: interconnectedness,
responsibility, respect, ecological balance, and kinship.
Chapter 11, “Privileging Indigenous Māori Knowledge—Reclaiming My
Birthright of Language and Culture: An Autoethnographic Story,” by
Tania M. Ka’ai details Māori language loss and recovery in Aotearoa
New Zealand following colonization. She examines how colonial
assimilation policies, intergenerational trauma, and Western academic
structures generated severe achievement gaps and marginalized
Indigenous epistemologies. Highlighting the legislative shift marked
by the Māori Language Act, Ka’ai introduces the Mahitahi Model. Rooted
in Kaupapa Māori principles, this model offers a culturally relevant,
collaborative postgraduate supervision framework and pedagogy centered
on wrap-around support, reciprocal relationships, and unconditional
mutual care for Māori and Pacific scholars.
In Chapter 12, “Kūlia I Ka Nu’u: Strive to Reach Your Highest,” Kū
Kahakalau reflects on her development as a Hawaiian activist,
educator, and the first person globally to earn a PhD in Indigenous
Education. Opening with traditional Hawaiian protocol, genealogy, and
place connections, she details growing up as the child of a Hawaiian
jazz musician and a German mother. Kahakalau describes resisting the
historical criminalization of the Hawaiian language (outlawed in 1896)
by establishing Hawaiian-focused charter schools, teacher preparation
programs, and community camps. She introduces Ma’awe Pono – a
culture-based, observational phenomenological methodology – and
outlines her Pedagogy of Aloha, which grounds educational practice in
compassion, cultural relevance, and community responsibility.
Chapter 13, “Unlearning Shame and Silence as a Multiracial Woman of
Color: My Pursuit of Research for Collective Healing and Liberation,”
by Aurora Tsai explores her identity as a multiracial woman of
Taiwanese and mixed-European descent raised in the US who teaches
Japanese. Applying MultiCrit (Harris, 2016), raciolinguistic
perspectives (Rosa & Flores, 2017), and intersectionality (Crenshaw,
1991), Tsai analyzes her graduate coursework, journal entries, and
recordings to trace instances of identity denial, “racial authenticity
testing,” and raciolinguistic microaggressions. She documents her
transition from internalized shame to liberation, emphasizing the role
of online multiracial affinity groups in fostering community healing
and collective liberation.
Ayanna Cooper and Shelley Jallow contribute Chapter 14, “Fieldnotes
from Buffalo Soldiers: Black Educators in TESOL Leadership,” exploring
their intersectional experiences as Black TESOL professionals and
advocates for marginalized students. To do so, they employ bell hooks’
(2010) concept of love as action, Crawley’s (2012) self-ethnography
method, and the Social Action, Leadership and Transformation (SALT)
framework, defined by seven indicators: capacity for empathy, critical
consciousness, commitment to justice, equity in purpose, value of
collective action, controversy with courage, and coalesce. Cooper and
Jallow highlight the lack of professional knowledge among school
leaders regarding English Learners (ELs) and illustrate how social
justice-oriented leadership can drive district-level change.
Editor Ari Sherris presents Chapter 15, “‘Isn’t Ari an Israeli name?’
Untethered Discourses, Entangling Troubles.” Sherris reflects on his
positionality as a Jewish-American-Israeli TESOL instructor at a Saudi
Arabian university where he initially passed as a White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant. Utilizing Gal and Irvine’s (2019) theory of unbounded
semiosis, Bakhtinian chronotopes, and Michael Agar’s “rich points,”
Sherris analyzes ethnographic notes and conversation transcripts. He
examines critical incidents – ranging from encounters with taxi
drivers and hosting an “Arab Spring Freedom Seder” to navigating the
loss of his father and teaching female Saudi graduate students – to
trace how identity positioning shifts dynamically across restrictive
sociopolitical environments.
In the final chapter, titled “Instead of an Afterword,” Tommaso M.
Milani declines to offer closure to the volume, arguing that doing so
would contradict the collection’s spirit. In place of an afterword,
Milani traces academic positivism back to Cartesian dualism, which
historically privileged mind over body and reason over emotion, laying
the groundwork for colonial and gendered oppressions. Following a
genealogy of scholars who have challenged the supposed neutrality of
knowledge production, Milani points to the volume’s personal accounts
of pain, unlearning, and embodied resistance as vital evidence that
applied linguistics is “in the process of freeing itself from the
straitjacket of positivist, universal rationality” (p. 278).
Recognizing ongoing epistemological tensions in academia, Milani
offers up the volume’s contributions as signs of progress through
visceral, embodied, politically located knowledge production.
In the concluding chapter, “Instead of an Afterword,” Tommaso M.
Milani refuses to provide a neat summary, arguing that bringing formal
closure would contradict the volume's spirit. Milani traces academic
positivism back to Cartesian dualism, which historically privileged
mind over body and reason over emotion, laying the groundwork for
colonial and gendered oppressions. Tracing a genealogy of scholars who
have challenged the supposed neutrality of knowledge production,
Milani points to the volume’s personal accounts of pain, unlearning,
and embodied resistance as vital evidence that applied linguistics is
breaking free from "the straitjacket of positivist, universal
rationality".
EVALUATION
Sherris and Peyton’s introductory chapter sets the tone for richly
textured, evocative accounts of personal encounters with (in)justice
and “critique of social, political, and institutional dynamics” (p.
4). The impressive variety of author backgrounds and areas of focus
represents a rare feat for an edited volume. The collection
successfully bridges contemporary Western frameworks (e.g., Barad’s
new materialism) with rich Indigenous onto-epistemologies from (e.g.,
Gaelic Dùthchas, Malay Rasa, Kaupapa Māori).
The book also displays considerable variation in chapter length, prose
style, and formatting. Some authors adhere to standard chapter
structures and writing conventions practices – for instance, Smith
provides extensive citations of her own work as a foundation for her
autoethnographic exploration – yet others eschew such expectations,
like Mahboob’s explicit rejection of Western citation practices.
Despite the significant variation in professional identities,
theoretical framing, writing styles, and topics between contributions,
the volume still manages to feel cohesive and intentionally
structured.
Overall, the text offers significant value for applied linguistics
scholar-practitioners. Empirically, it offers localized insights into
linguistic justice across global contexts, including Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa
New Zealand, South Africa, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia.
Methodologically, its diverse autoethnographic approaches serve as
rich sources of inspiration to aspiring autoethnographers and
instructional material for qualitative research courses.
Pedagogically, actionable constructs like Ka’ai’s Mahitahi Model,
Kahakalau’s Pedagogy of Aloha, Jansen’s 4 Rs, and Cooper and Jallow’s
application of the SALT framework offer clear blueprints for
educational leaders committed to culturally and linguistically
relevant approaches to educational equity in K-12 and tertiary
education.
In conclusion, Untold Autoethnographic Stories of (In)Justice,
Teaching and Scholarship is a skillfully curated, innovative volume.
It serves as a unique resource for applied linguists, qualitative
researchers, educational leaders, and social justice scholars seeking
to disrupt entrenched academic hierarchies and embrace decolonial,
embodied modes of scholarship.
REFERENCES
Agar (1994). Language shock: Understanding the culture of
conversation. Willams Morrow.
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (M. Holquist, trans.).
University of Texas Press.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and
the entanglement of
matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
Blackledge, A., & Creese, A. (2019). Voices of a city market: An
ethnography. Multilingual
Matters.
Canagarajah, S. (2022). Language incompetence: Learning to communicate
through cancer,
disability, and anomalous embodiment. Routledge.
Crawley, S. (2012). Autoethnography as feminist self-interview. In J.
F. Gubrium, J. A. Holstein,
A. B. Marvasti, K. D. McKinney (Eds.) The SAGE handbook of interview
research: The complexity of the craft. (2nd ed., pp. 143-160). SAGE
Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452218403.n10
Crenshaw, K. (1990). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity
politics, and violence
against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1300.
Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work
of mourning, and the new
international. Routledge.
Gal, S., & Irvine, J. (2019). Signs of difference: Language and
ideology in social life. Cambridge
University Press.
Harris, J. C. (2016). Toward a critical multiracial theory in
education. International Journal of
Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(6), 795–813.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2016.1162870
hooks, b. (2010). Teaching critical thinking: Practical wisdom.
Routledge.
Paris, D. & Alim, H. S. (2017). What is culturally sustaining pedagogy
and why does it matter?
In D. Paris & H. S. Alim (Eds.) Culturally sustaining pedagogies:
Teaching and learning for educational justice (pp. 157-174). Teachers
College Press.
Pennycook A. (2020). Translingual entanglements of English. World
Englishes, 39(2). 222–235.
https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12456
Pillow, W. (2003) Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses
of reflexivity as
methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal of
Qualitative Studies in Education 16(2), 175–196.
Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a
raciolinguistic
perspective. Language in Society, 46(5), 621–647.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404517000562
Sherris, A. (2022). Ethnography and a heuristics of the heart: Allied
solidarity with Indigenous
language and literacy Activism. In K. Dikilitaş, & K. Reynolds (Eds.),
Research methods in language teaching and learning (pp. 104-117).
Wiley Blackwell.
Smith, P. (2019). (Re)Positioning in the Englishes and (English)
literacies of a Black immigrant
youth: Towards a transraciolinguistic approach. Theory Into Practice,
58(3), 292–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2019.1599227
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Melissa Hauber-Özer, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor and Co-Director
of Qualitative Inquiry in the University of Missouri’s College of
Education and Human Development. She employs critical and
community-based participatory, ethnographic, and narrative
methodologies to examine issues of equity and access for
linguistically and culturally diverse learners in migration contexts.
She previously taught adult literacy and English as a second language
for over 15 years in both non-formal and university settings.
Melissa’s recent work has been published in the Journal of Language,
Identity & Education, TESOL Journal, Gateways: International Journal
of Community Research and Engagement, and RELC Journal.



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