Borderland Journeys: A Layered Autoethnography

Abstract

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)The collection of pages spread before you now, this story-thesis, is a collection of stories about my journey from cult member to the place in life I am now, stories about those stories, and stories about the people who lived or read them, talked about them, and were changed by the tellings. Most importantly, the goal of this story-thesis is to illustrate how the process of story-making and -telling changes how we interpret our identities and our lifeworlds. I argue that the stories that we share change our identities, and I also argue that how we perceive our identity and the identities of others affects the stories that we share