Performing autoethnographic praxis in kinesiology and community health scholarship

Performance pedagogy is largely absent from community-based participatory methods within kinesiology and community health research. A focus on health equity requires community driven qualitative methods within research. Giving voice to diverse narratives and stories through performance are key to learning about underserved populations. Focusing inquiry on those who are generally excluded from research can serve as community-engaged scholarship. This dissertation is based in performance pedagogy to help reclaim transformative research experiences by providing a platform for legitimacy and authenticity in community-engaged scholarship. The unique contribution this dissertation makes to cultural studies/social science is a re-envisioning of the autoethnographic methodology and MyStory together and their dissemination through performance pedagogies. Specifically, the aim of this dissertation is to incorporate autoethnographic performance into a popular narrative with cultural viewpoints of the lived experience as praxis for community health as a new way of approaching community-engaged research. I argue that legitimizing human and personal features of the lived experience is a way to understand culture and the politics of dealing with certain adversities i.e. illness, alcoholism, violence, and injury, as found in the residual effects of trauma in the body – a site of “doing and an undoing” (Harris, 2017, p. 26). I build from a notion that autoethnography has significant involvement in relationship to MyStory (Ulmer, 1989, 1994 [as foundational]; Denzin, 2014). The MyStory serves as a technique/prompt developing the autoethnographic performances-ethnodramas within the dissertation text— as expansive to the field of KCH. The work of this dissertation stems from personal experience, as well as through developed insight from my work as community-engaged scholar in the Little Village community; and methods demonstrated in the Seminar on Advanced Interpretive Methods, SOC 580, 2014-2016, at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in [2014-2016]. Literature in this dissertation is founded in the discipline of interpretive qualitative methodology and greatly influenced by the works of Norman Denzin (1992, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2006a, 2006b, 2008, 2009, 2014), Raymond Carver (1976, 1981, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1997) and Dwight Conquergood (1984, 1985, 1986, 1991, 1992, 1998, 2013)