Abstract

This critical autoethnography opens in a lower-level undergraduate class that will create an ensemble performance autoethnographic show in pursuit of social justice. The class lecture explains autoethnography as a theoretical concept and methodological practice related to performance ethnography, oral storytelling, and personal narrative research, before tackling the risks, possibilities, constraints and hopes it offers as applied-learning pedagogy. The professor asserts that performance autoethnography offers a vehicle to pursue hyper-embodiment: the embracing of human beings’ inescapable vulnerabilities and inevitable mortality. Hyper-embodiment resists the fears that compel us to marginalize and stigmatize cultural members and advocates for the collective valuing of and adapting to the needs of our diverse, forever-changing bodies.