Change in Everyday Life and in the Communication World: A Co-Constructed Performance Autoethnography

In this paper, we use a co-constructed performance autoethnography to explore change in everyday life and in the communication world. Keywords: Autoethnography, Performance Autoethnography, Communication, Change, Everyday Life Performance autoethnography is well positioned to examine the central role of change in the human experience. As communication scholar Tami Spry (2001) has written: "Performing autoethnography has encouraged me to dialogically look back upon myself as other, generating critical agency in the stories of my life, as the polyglot facets of self and other engage, interrogate, and embrace" (p. 708). By examining these patterns of change in personal stories, one is able to access the more intimate and personal self of change. As Spry notes: "Performing autoethnography has allowed me to position myself as active agent with narrative authority over many hegemonizing dominant cultural myths that restricted my social freedom and personal development" (p. 711). Following Spry, we assert in this paper that examining the landscape of the past makes possible the journey to our present selves. Specifically, we present two autoethnographic sketches (Rambo, 2007) focused on changing self-perceptions as lived through early experiences with music. The first sketch was composed by an assistant professor of communication while the second sketch was composed by a recent college graduate. We choose to elevate these everyday experiences because they feel to us to be indicative of broader self-transformation. We assert that our decision(s) to be selective in this way reflect and reinforce the emancipatory power of performance autoethnography as a tool for analyzing lived experience. In each of these autoethnographic sketches, we were--and are--performing our younger selves. 1. In her poem, "Why I Wake Early," Mary Oliver (2004, p. 3) opens: "Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields" Oliver's words invite a memory of how the floor shook, more like vibrated, when I played music on the stereo in my room. I was a teenager and welcomed the beautiful chasm; how it felt like an earthquake yet barely moved the world. Which songs didn't much matter: how each voice was a kind of affirmation of liberation, in the way youth carries across its time an opportunity for embracing all. In eighth-grade honors choir, I sang a solo in "Seasons of Love" from the musical RENT. I remember being worried that I might forget the words in the midst of my big moment, but thankfully, I did just fine. Music has been all around me ever since. I can still remember the lyrics: "in truths that she learned, or in times that he cried, in bridges he burned, or the way that she died." I might have the gender pronouns wrong, but that's the gist of it. I hope. Funny how certain words stick to my tongue years later. I feel a need to apologize, in the event I might have the lyric wrong, but I am fighting that urge as I write these words. I am learning the value of feeling my way through experiences, weaving emotions into and out of memories. Patching up a certain kind of quilt. "Focus on what you know." This is the best advice I've ever received. And also: "show up and be nice." Remember two things. I grew up as a Dave Matthews Band fan, and I know they have a song (and/or perhaps an album) called "Remember Two Things," but the details escape me on a Saturday morning. The best thing I can say about the band is that they made the floor shake (not just vibrate), when I played their albums with enough bass on the stereo in my room. In this autoethnographic sketch (Rambo, 2007) about growing up in Southeastern Minnesota, USA, I explore the relationship between memory and media on an autoethnographic journey (Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013). Forging a link between media and memory and autoethnography is personally meaningful to me, because I am both a media and memory researcher and also an autoethnographer. …