Diasporic Storying – Autoethnography as Method
In this episode, I am joined by Archana Pathak for a reflective dialogue on writing, theory, and meaning-making from diasporic locations.
The episode explores autoethnography as a rigorous, relational practice shaped by movement, rupture, and multiplicity. Archana reflects on story and metaphor as analytic tools that allow researchers to stay with complexity, tension, and unansweredness, rather than forcing false resolution. Diasporic life, she argues, does not lend itself to neat answers, and honest scholarship must be willing to reflect that reality.
Together, the conversation considers theory as liberatory and relational practice: a way of giving meaning to experience, recognising oneself among others, and grounding analysis in cultural frameworks that shape how we live and know. Writing emerges here as an ethical commitment to community rather than performance for institutions, and as a practice of truth-telling without guarantee of outcome.
This episode invites listeners to think differently about rigour, method, and authority, and to consider how diasporic autoethnography makes space for lived experience as archive, theory, and method.
What This Episode Offers
A grounded exploration of diasporic autoethnography as metaphor and method
Insight into story and metaphor as analytic tools for holding complexity, tension, and unansweredness in diasporic life
A reframing of theory as relational and liberatory practice, offering recognition rather than distance from lived experience
Reflections on writing as an ethical commitment to community
An invitation to rethink rigour, authority, and method beyond Western academic norms
Language for understanding unansweredness and tension as truthful, disciplined ways of knowing rather than methodological failure
📚 Further Reading / Resources
Bhatt, A. J. (2003). Asian Indians and the model minority narrative: A neocolonial system. In J. Prashad & M. Prashad (Eds.), The emerging monoculture: Assimilation and the "model minority" (pp. 203–220). SAGE Publications.
Bhatt, A. P. (2008). The Sita syndrome: Examining the communicative aspects of domestic violence from a South Asian perspective. Journal of International Women's Studies, 9(3), 155–173.
Johnson, J. R., & Bhatt, A. J. (2003). Gendered and racialized identities and alliances in the classroom: Formations in/of resistive space. Communication Education, 52(3–4), 230–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/0363452032000156213
Johnson, J. R., Bhatt, A. P., & Patton, T. O. (2007). Dismantling essentialisms in academic organizations: Intersectional articulation and possibilities for alliance formation. In International and Intercultural Communication Annual (Vol. 30, pp. 21–50). National Communication Association.
Pathak, A. (2008). Being Indian in the US: Exploring the hyphen as an ethnographic frame. In J. N. Martin & T. K. Nakayama (Eds.), Intercultural communication in a transnational world (pp. 175–196). SAGE Publications.
Pathak, A. (2013). Musings on postcolonial autoethnography. In S. H. Jones, T. E. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (pp. 595–608). Routledge.
Pathak, A. A. (1994). How can I tell you how smart I am: East Indian and Pakistani students in the U.S. high school classroom (Master's thesis). University of Northern Iowa.
Pathak, A. A. (1998). To be Indian (hyphen) American: Communicating diaspora, identity, and home (Doctoral dissertation, The University of Oklahoma). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
Pathak, A. A. (2010). Opening my voice, claiming my space: Theorizing the possibilities of postcolonial approaches to autoethnography. Journal of Research Practice, 6(1), Article M10. http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/184/182
