Betweener Autoethnographies ― A Path Towards Social Justice

How do we persuade people that we all have common experiences and hopes? That we are ever more dependent on each other in times of globalization via technology, commerce, climate change, and overpopulation? How do we move from an ‘Us and Them’ mentality to simply ‘Us’?

In this book, a follow-up to their first book Betweener Talk, the authors share autoethnographies about being and doing scholarship as betweeners searching for inclusivity. The authors have witnessed an escalation of division in their native Brazil and in the USA, as well as in South America more broadly and Europe — places that had been making steady, albeit slow, progress toward greater inclusion. The book explores identity, interactions, existence, and possibilities in the spaces between ‘Us and Them’ to help current and future generations imagine a more inclusive way of living – as Us. It is about how two Third World scholars think the Postcolonial/Decolonizing discourse—with a performance studies lens—can further notions of inclusive social justice through scholarship borne out of lived oppression and the struggle for humanization.

It is a union of two authors who, in their own words ‘have been close friends since our youth, both captivated by Paulo Freire’s notion of education and social transformation through a praxis of conscientização (conscientization), but who experienced life growing up at opposite ends of the social class spectrum. Early through love and later through theory, we have come to viscerally inhabit and embrace our betweener identities in scholarship and daily lives, breaking the distance between us and the paradigms that attempt to separate political, personal, and professional life.’

The authors’ hope is that their own and other betweener autoethnographies can contribute to the larger qualitative inquiry global movement and its central goal: marching together toward ever-greater social justice.

Marcelo Diversi is professor of human development at Washington State University Vancouver. His first book, Betweener Talk, also co-authored with Claudio Moreira, won the 2010 Best Book Award from the Ethnography Division of the National Communications Association. He has authored dozens of articles in leading qualitative inquiry journals, and won several teaching awards along his career.

Claudio Moreira is an associate professor of performance studies-Department of Communications at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His first book, Betweener Talk, also co-authored with Marcelo Diversi, won the 2010 Best Book Award from the Ethnography Division of the National Communications Association. A specialist in performance autoethnography, he has more than two dozen articles published. In 2016, he won the Distinguished Teaching Award, the most prestigious and only student-oriented teaching award at UMass.