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In Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections of Life and Work (2008), Carolyn Ellis demonstrates a striking ability to tell stories while simultaneously interrogating their meanings. Ellis uses autoethnography and meta-autoethnography to write herself and others into stories which connect to issues that extend beyond the particular characters in the stories. This book demonstrates the value that autoethnography can offer to researcher, reader, academia, as well as to community practice. This review introduces the term experiential layering as a way to describe Ellis' revisioning of the stories that she presented in The Ethnographic I.

I review Millie Thayer's 2010 book, Making Transnational Feminism, from a methodological standpoint to discuss its ability to effectively connect transnational feminist theories with transnational activist practices. Transnational feminism is at once a theoretical and practical model, consisting of an intricate, yet complex, web of small entities that work with and for one another to address related concerns. Thayer illuminates the processes that are involved in creating and sustaining these transnational feminist networks in the attempt to deconstruct the complex social relations and power dynamics that operate within the current structures of globalization. I purport that Making Transnational Feminism is an appropriate and useful text for academics, students, practitioners, feminists, and any individual who is interested in transnational social movements.

This ethnodrama critically examines conceptualizations of women's empowerment in international development initiatives. It represents a collection of experience-based narratives from six Malian women who participated in a photovoice project centered on women's empowerment in the specific context of microfinance. Deviating from normative neoliberal financially-based assumptions underlying the relationship between microfinance and women's empowerment, wherein the prevailing belief is that increases in economic resources necessarily lead to increases in women's empowerment, this article suggests that empowerment is a complex multi-dimensional construct that includes, yet extends beyond, the financial paradigm. This one act ethnodrama is intended as a form of talking back to the academic literature and Western discourses surrounding empowerment. It draws inspiration from Chandra Talpade Mohanty's transnational feminist framework, particularly the concept of history from below, by creating spaces for the women in this project to have their voices heard and to be included in global practices of history-making.