Ethnoautobiography chapter 2
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Telling our personal story is one of the most powerful tools for self-understanding, the integration of information, and critical insight. This unique approach to ethnic studies and the psychology of identity is designed to utilize autobiographical storytelling to facilitate a process of transformative identity politics.
Ethnoautobiography sees Ethnic Studies and the Psychology of Identity as the critical and transdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, border-crossings, migration, and indigeneity. When we study and understand the historical and contemporary entanglements among the different sets of binaries (victim/victimizer; white/person of color; indigenous/settler, for example), what results is a decolonization process that helps students develop a more complex view of their social, cultural, and political lives. Through the use of a storytelling framework that is indigenously grounded, Ethnoautobiography opens up to other sources of power outside of the established categories that are often centered on whiteness, modernity, and colonial thinking. The experiences and perspectives of people of color within and beyond the United States and the experiences of Indigenous people provide the critical context for the deconstruction of “white consciousness” and the rem
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Ethnoautobiography —
The Struggle for the Human Right of Visionary Sovereignty: An Introduction
Jürgen W. Kremer
Ethnoautobiograpy (EA) is both a practice of personal transformative inquiry as well as a research methodology that aims to establish decolonial islands in the midst of the horrors of our present challenges and crises. Today Indigenous peoples the world over are continuing to fight on behalf of their sovereignty, their traditions and rituals that embody their profound understanding of ecological entanglements. At the same time, “the West”, through the relentless forces of the capitalocene, has surrendered to separations and dissociations from intimate relationships with nature, from our other-than-human and more-than-human relations.
The critical issue here is not merely a difference in worldviews or ideologies, but practices which create radically different worlds. World making.
What is at stake is the freedom, the fundamental human right, to embody and practice visionary sovereignty, i.e., the right for all humans to live in a decolonial world that is structured by their intimate and intricate dialogues within the web of life and the stories and practices emerging from it. The right to envision their own cultural world in their ecological world.