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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Bullying: A Narrative Opening to a Relational Problem -- 2 Cutting Through: The Journey and Horror of Finding Self-Love -- Reflexive Interlude 1: The Little Professor -- 3 Pure Evil Entertainment -- Reflexive Interlude 2: Rope Burn -- 4 Flying Tomatoes: Cruella's Clash with the Dalmatians -- Reflexive Interlude 3: Stretch -- 5 Highlight Girl: Finding Strength in Her Weak Soul -- Reflexive Interlude 4: Of Frogs and Friends -- 6 A Narrative on Bullying and Rape

In this essay, I explore the areas of accord and discord between two efficacious modes of research: practice approaches and the Ethnography of Communication (EOC). As an interpersonal and intercultural scholar, I carefully analyze these approaches in order to find innovative ways to describe the diversity that I see in modern social interaction. Working against paradigms that suggest using either one approach or another, I engage this project hoping (expecting?) to find and/both alternatives for communication study. I argue that, in spite of their differences, practice and EOC traditions co-exist in a mutually beneficial relationship for the study of communication in 2002.

There is an unmistakable power in narrative to comment on and shape cultural lives. This special issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies is comprised of often unheard stories that seek to queer the relational phenomena of family, home, love, and loss. Authors draw on a range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies to disrupt and dismantle the normative conceptualizations that pervade research and everyday understanding concerning these thematic areas. These essays work in creative and experimental ways to evocatively demonstrate Queer Theory and queer as unique, needed, and generative paradigmatic orientations and conceptual tools for use in Cultural Studies research. They help to advance a more open and tentative understanding of relational stories and fluid and dynamic relational identities.

How do we reconcile the complex and subjective dimensions of ethnographic research as they pertain to ethnographers themselves? What is to be made of the compelling draw the ethnographic process tends to have on its researchers? This article uses hermeneutic phenomenology to examine how ethnographers' lifeworlds make possible the doing of ethnographic research. I draw on moments from past research to argue for an inexorable link between lifeworlds and ethnography, which results in ethnographers being definitively, yet uniquely and contingently, "chosen" to live as ethnographers. This multilayered snapshot of ethnographic subjectivity seeks to embolden the reflective space necessary for promoting a fuller sense of accountability by ethnographers, a fuller understanding and awareness of the complexities inherent to ours and others' ethnographic stories.

Key themes that motivated this special issue on ethnographic reflexivity are discussed in the following section. Specifically, contributors responded to all or some of the shared questions posed by issue editors. Contributors offered an array of open thoughts and feelings concerning experiences and issues germane to reflexivity. As a dynamic and complex collage of discoveries and possibilities, contributors sought to perpetuate open and frank discussions, as well as future research, concerning the contested nature of ethnographic reflexivity.

Academic discourse on ideas and techniques of reflexivity in ethnographic research are common and essential. Less common are collections devoted entirely to this topic, and those conducted by diverse researchers who draw on distinctive intellectual values and commitments for cultural inquiry. Also strange to the literature are discussions about ethnographic reflexivity that are grounded in everyday personal and professional experiences of ethnographers, those lived but less-examined (and often contested) realities that constitute what it means to be ethnographers and do ethnography. This introduction briefly discusses this void in the literature and previews the current issue of Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies.

This essay examines Joan W. Scott's (1991) essay "The Evidence of Experience" in light of cultural studies scholarship that uses personal, experiential evidence, and/or innovative/critical methodologies. The authors argue that the situated, (inter)subjective, and complex nature of this inquiry conscientiously has brought to life Scott's call for historicizing experience, rather than blindly using it as foundational, and enthusiastically continues doing so to date. In this way, these critical methods already seek to problematize and complicate experience, even as it is used to talk toward and/ or against cultural norms.

"There has never been a more crucial time for an intimate and thorough examination of the ways in which sexuality informs people's lives. In Living Sexuality: Stories of LGBTQ Relationships, Identities, and Desires, the authors use autoethnography and personal narrative to provide first-hand accounts of the connections between sexuality, particularly LGBTQ identities, and the everyday experiences of relationships. Each story also invites readers to understand how sexuality informs communication as it occurs within diverse cultural contexts. In addition, the stories often focus on taboo issues overlooked or ignored in mainstream research about sexuality. Discussion questions appear at the end of each story that should stimulate engagement by students, instructors, and researchers"--

Acknowledgments; Foreword; Introduction; I: Identity, Pedagogy, and Praxis; Chapter One: Performative Pedagogy as a Pedagogy of Interruption; Chapter Two: Doing Intersectionality; Chapter Three: Understanding Identity Through Dialogue; Chapter Four: (Academic) Families of Choice; II: Identity and Home/Spaces; Chapter Five: Cultural Reentry; Chapter Six: Performing Home/Storying Selves; III: Identity and the Global-Local Dialectic; Chapter Seven: Landscaping the Rootless; Chapter Eight: Cultural Matter as Political Matter.