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The author uses performance autoethnography to explore the impact of Professor Tami Spry's work in his life.

In this performance autoethnography I am talking about the "new writing" that is everywhere, but still, it is also nowhere. This is also about Conde, a poor Black Brazilian soccer fan. Mixing together stories I wrote for my master thesis, memories, notes, and 'leftovers' of my field work, my lived experiences, plus six years of my life as grad student at the University of Illinois, I am looking for ways to decolonize inquiry; to decolonize academia. This performance discusses and interrogates forms of representation, knowledge production and experience, method and theory, about the other. All of these issues are pertinent to any field of knowledge which deals with issues of social justice in the lives of human beings.

Who gives ethnographers the authority to do research? Whose bodies are in and/or out of researchers' practices or roles? In this performance autoethnography, I explore the (im)possibilities of these questions, pressing concerns that remain interconnected with discussions of ethnographic reflexivity. I convey how, despite the rise of conscientization resulting from the Crisis of Representation in the 1980s, knowledge production about the Other still tends to reify the very oppression it intends to challenge. Can a janitor become an ethnographer without having to bury experiences under layers of theory and other technologies of justification? Or are marginalized humans still relegated to a subordinate position of "research subject" in this process? I attempt to further promote narrative space about the struggles to move from researched to researcher, from honorable subject to street knowledge producer. Inspired by Dwight Conquergood's suggestion that we do not write about them—the Others—but with and for them, I perform to better understand and explore issues of reflexivity in terms of privilege and authority, as they still dwell in current ethnographic research.

In this article, as suggest by the subtitle, I try to expose a kind of hidden homelessness. One that is not worse than others but important to bring to light. One where narratives are missing. One that goes against the essentializing of home as a middle-class heterosexual construction while not negating the desire for a home by the ones that have none.This is a textual performance about the idea of linking traditional notions of home with how academic knowledge is constructed about the homeless—by disrupting grand narratives of home as physical or institutional space. It is a decolonizing performance autoethnography exposing homelessness that returns its gaze into the process of knowledge production in the hope that by reflecting on how knowledge is produced, troubling the Western concept of home, we academics may create narratives that help more people feel housed.

What does happen, when "history" and "heritage" is nowhere to be found or claimed and granted? Drawing in his own mestiço heritage, the author tells the story of Geraldo in relation to his own one. Who was Geraldo? The intention is to challenge categories of knowledge that also relay in "knowledges" and social constructions, created by mechanisms of colonization even when they are created for the empowerment of the oppressed in many circumstances. The author offers visceral knowledge of growing up as and working with the poor in Brazil, to advance decolonizing discourse that may lead to more inclusive notions of social justice questioning the uncontrolled desire to categorize and control the Other. Through a layered text with a blurred aesthetic format, which mixes life stories and academic scholarship, the author asks: Can these borders, legacies, and injustices be transgressed? Can my body be transgressive as a form of scholarship?

Performing social justice -- Expanding the circle of us -- Locating betweener autoethnographies in qualitative inquiry -- Betweener autoethnographies -- Betweenness in writing and performativity -- Betweenness in systemic exclusion -- Betweenness in decolonizing inquiry -- Contemporary issues on us versus them -- Betweener autoethnographies -- Traveling identities -- Activism through decolonizing inquiry.

We write about betweener autoethnographies in this manifesto. We see autoethnography as a way of knowing that has the potential to examine social justice, systems of oppression, and neocolonialism from our encounters with experiences lived in-between identities and worlds. We see life lived in between fixed identities and social categories as a common human experience, and as such, as places where we can expand the circle of Us while also decreasing notions of Them and Other.

In this performance-theoretical text, we attempt to advance collaborative writing as decolonizing inquiry. Western inquiry has been dominated by the solitary writing of lone rangers of expertise, who are granted disproportionate narrative space to discourse about the Other. We think this exclusionary way of knowing keeps historically marginalized peoples from occupying Western academia as knowledge makers. Building on our collaborative writing experiences, Paulo Freire's dialogical philosophy, and Della Pollock's performative writing, we discuss how our collaborations with students and ethnographic partners have allowed us to break away from the expert isolationist writing standpoint and expand our own imaginations of and possibilities for inquiry—one that is more concerned with advancing collaborative ways of knowing and representation than with individual expertise and recognition, with advancing a more serious invitation for those with visceral experience of oppression to collaborate with the learned and cultured in the creation of knowledge that heals.

As the neoliberal nozzle continues to tighten its grip on education that is public, accessible, critical, inclusive, and liberatory, we hold an even fiercer belief that dogma-free intellectuals, here used according to Edward Said's definition, can serve as one of its most effective oppositional figures. While our decolonizing critique of neoliberalism is as wide as its imperial project, we focus our attention here on how we attempt to examine, challenge, and resist neoliberal dehumanizing narratives of the Other in our classrooms. Humans are natural born learners who, for the most part, tend to be protective of those perceived to be part of Us. We have an opportunity to use the classroom to deconstruct the neoliberal narratives of the Other, such as the post-9/11 "dangerous and deranged Muslim," used to justify military violence against entire nations and regions defined as the Evil Axis, as Them. We are guided in this journey by Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of Hope.

While writing together, we have found a dialogical voice that has made our individual work more meaningful, grounded, and fulfilling. Together, we have found a voice that we did not have in our work alone as individuals, a voice that seems, to both of us, more vibrant, truer to our experiences as betweeners and decolonizing scholars. This writing joint-venture exemplifies the very connectedness and co-construction of meaning we advocate in any type of social science preoccupied with empowering praxis. It is also an act of resistance to the academic ranking system and the idea that better work comes from isolated individuals. We have been friends since our late teens, long before each knew what career to pursue, and we have been closely connected from that time. Writing together seems, to us at least, like another important completion of the many intersecting experiences in our lives: friendship, global migration, profession, scholarship, knowledge production, and a keen attraction to a vision of inclusiveness.

In this performance autoethnography we re-present our experiences of disembodied knowledge construction in mainstream American academia. We claim that knowledge production about the Other still tends to reify the very oppression it intends to challenge. Can a janitor become a scholar without having to bury experiences under layers of theory and other technologies of justification? Or are marginalized humans relegated to a subordinate position of research subject in the process of knowledge production? Neither? Both? Troubling the recurring experience of "my bad English," we try to show that folks lacking an educated upbringing can contribute to the decolonizing dialogue through something no technology of methods can provide: visceral lived experience of systemic oppression. We are insisting on narrative space for visceral knowledge to advance decolonizing discourses that may lead to more inclusive notions of social justice.

This coperformed autoethnographic inquiry explores "the West" as both a seductive and a subjugating narrative terrain on which betweener identities must navigate the colonizing structures of Western epistemologies. On this terrain, we collaboratively engage the metaphors and tropes of "Cowboys" and "Indians" within a broader critique of knowledge production in the Western academy. As a decolonizing performance, our journey invites a collective turning of the academic gaze away from objectifying the Other and toward making Western systems of knowledge themselves the objects of inquiry.