Self, Relationship, Positionality, and Politics: A Community Autoethnographic Inquiry Into Collaborative Writing

In 2009, Toyosaki, Pensoneau-Conway, Wendt, and Leathers developed a collaborative writing method called community autoethnography (CAE). Participants dialogically collaborate through writing in order to “resituate identified social/cultural and sensitive issues” with the explicit goals of community-building and “cultural and social intervention.” In this article, we use CAE to explore and interrogate the politics, ethics, and boundaries of our collaborations and relationships. As individuals entering this collaborative engagement, we occupy various positions in relation to each other—stranger, best friend, student-turned-colleague/friend, student-friend, sibling, and so on. Each of these positions is subsequently complicated by social positions and relational politics that necessarily inform the process of collaborative writing. We write vulnerabilities across boundaries and between relationships, and in the process, with careful purpose, we write the becoming of new relationships, the becoming of community.