A Review of: “Leah Vande Berg & Nick Trujillo, Cancer and Death: A Love Story in Two Voices.”

A review of the book “Cancer and Death: A Love Story in Two Voices” by Leah Vande Berg and Nick Trujillo

My Father’s Ghost: A Story of Encounter and Transcendence

This autoethnography is about my personal search for my father, who was an early presence in my life, but who gradually became a palpable absence. In many ways, I have been searching for my father all my life, and somehow hoping to rekindle a relationship that I have experienced mostly as something I lost early. As my search progressed across a span of more than fifty years, I found my father in the one place I least expected. In this article, I begin to write my father in a new light, one that offers insights into his legacy for me, and for my sons. In the end, I hope to write our lives in a way that captures just a bit of the spirit of my spirited father

Fire and Ice: Flaming Passion, Reified Structure, and the Organizing Body

In this paper, I engage methods of critical phenomenology and personal narrative in the investigation of a commercial organization. My aim is to come to a richer understanding of embodied organizing, through exploration of some key metaphors that might guide us in our understandings of life at work. With this aim in mind, I will probe the possibilities inherent in two new metaphors related to organizing praxis: fire and ice. Thus, the essay deals with the central role of passion (fire) and of the countervailing energy of reified structures of command-and-control (ice). My interest is in the dialectical interplay of these forces in the ongoing life of an organization

Review of the book, Prejudiced communication: A social psychological perspective

The race problem is solved. Racism is dead. Now we just have the backlash problem: too many groups pushing too hard for special rights and special status. These, at least, are the beliefs of the "modern racist," according to Janet Ruscher

Writing Through the Memories: Autoethnography as a Path to Transcendence

This autoethnography is about writing through the sometimes difficult or traumatic memories that show up in my life from time to time. It is about narrative healing and transformation through the practice of autoethnographic writing

Disruption, Silence, and Creation: The Search for Dialogic Civility in the Age of Anxiety

This article searches the contours of anxiety, asking whether anxiety can serve as a springboard to creative engagement in dialogue. Specifically, the article explores the university classroom as a possible site where anxiety might be transformed into the spark of creation. Three opportune moments are examined—disruption, silence, and creation— for the possibilities they present for creating new spaces of energy and new engagement with the call of alterity that erupts in human encounter. The encounter with an “Other” who calls to us from across a chasm of difference—a call that demands a response—is the opening to the possibility of creative engagement that can lead to new levels of transcendence in the classroom and beyond

Spirited Accidents: An Autoethnography of Possibility

Kierkegaard says, "A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation …" This understanding of spirit-as-self-in-relation, leads, inevitably, to concerns for personal fulfillment, dialogue, community, and social justice in our world. To engage spirit in our ethnographic practice is to engage the self in relation —with the world, with others, with the very frames and possibilities of our being. The accidental ethnographer, open to the driving pulse of spirited searching, may stumble into openings never anticipated. Following these openings may lead to transcendent experiences that bring new relational possibilities into view

Joy Notes

In this essay, I attempt to write the emergence of joy in my life, as I have stumbled into it, in little flashes and glimpses, in minor notes and in waves. I do not think that joy can be more than ephemeral, though I seek here to embrace it, to hold it, to celebrate it when it appears

Performance is a Good Breakfast: Metaphorical Plays on the Meanings of Performance

Performance is a good, hearty breakfast. I'm tempted to say it's a breakfast burrito. I'm sorely tempted to say it's a breakfast burrito with hurricanado sauce, stuffed with eggs instead of pork, wolfed down after a dissolute night of steamy, promiscuous sex — but ... it's already been done. I'm tempted to say it's something I swallowed quickly, like a pill, maybe like that funny little pill the doctor gave me last week, I suspect just to keep me quiet. I'm tempted to say that, in its essence, performance is that first moment of consciousness that opens up my day—a day in which I am free, free, free—free to be, free to do, free to dissolve, to collide, to blow hard wind (or at least hot air), to pretend, to love, and even just to play... I am tempted to call it my lover..

Life, Interrupted

In this autoethnography, the author explores his experiences with the hard disruptions that occur when confronted by others in ways that lead him to question, at times, the very ground of his being, his identity, and his place and purpose in the world. Finding a nexus for understanding these disruptions in interruptions, a story of his life struggles unfolds as a series of passages through gateways to transcendence. In the end, these interruptions, as harsh as some of them may seem, are proposed as necessary “moments of rupture” that allow for the eruption of infinite possibility, joy, and a spirited life