The Twelfth International Conference of Autoethnography will take place online (via Zoom) and in-person at The Engineer’s House, Clifton Village, Bristol, UK.
Workshops Sunday 13th July
Monday 14th and Tuesday 15th July 2025
Conference theme
“Breathing Spaces”
We all breathe. We have this in common with each other – and with the flora and fauna of planet Earth. We may take our breath for granted – for a time. Yet breath, the act of breathing, is far from assured. We exist in atmosphere that is precarious, environments that have been violated, cities that are congested, societies driven toward inequality and division, and workplaces that threaten health and morale.
ICAE2025 offers breathing space; an invitation to story, perform, challenge, theorise, resist or reimagine spaces, relationships, and new ways of being in/for the human and more-than-human world.
Keynotes
In person
Tony Adams, Bradley University, USA
Many of our community will recognise Tony Adams as founding co-editor of the Journal of Autoethnography (University of California Press) and from his co-editorship of the Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives book series (Routledge), along with the Handbook of Autoethnography.
Away from his editorial work much of Tony’s research focuses on sexual diversity and queer concerns such as stigma, social support, and self-disclosure. In his first book, Narrating the Closet (Routledge), he identified struggles with disclosing same-gender attraction – often referred to as “coming out (of the closet).” He described experiences of sexuality before, during, and after coming out, as well as demonstrated how the coming out process never ends as every new audience makes for a new time to disclose one’s desires. In subsequent projects, he has focused on forgiveness and sexuality by investigating how queer folks live with others who have committed and continue to commit homophobic and transphobic slights. Over the past decade Tony has prioritized building the interdisciplinary and international infrastructure for autoethnography. Underlying all of his work is a commitment to identifying injustices, challenging harmful norms, and improving relationships.
Keynote title : Missing Each Other: Queer Lapses, Loves, and Longings
Tony E. Adams, Bradley University
Abstract: There are many popular sayings about the consequentiality of everyday relational affairs. There’s the quote attributed to Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” And the aphorism credited to Aesop: “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” There are those inspirational memes: “Some stranger somewhere remembers you because you were kind to them,” “Someone heard a song that reminded them of you,” and “You knew the other for only a short time but they changed your life for the better.” And there’s the “butterfly effect,” the concept that suggests even the slightest act, maybe a breath, can motivate infinite iterative and compounding acts. In this keynote Tony Adams will use autoethnography to describe the consequentiality of our everyday relational affairs. He will focus specifically on mundane queer encounters—moments of meeting that reference same-gender attraction and LGBQ+ identities and/or challenge heteronormative expectations about when, where, how, and with whom intimacy can occur. Throughout, he will show how we can, knowingly and unknowingly, change someone with our words and deeds. He pays homage to social interactions that, at the time they occurred, may have felt trivial and unremarkable yet now, upon reflection, feel formative and momentous. In so doing, he illustrates the potential iterative and compounding impact of what we say and don’t say, do and don’t do.
Tony Adams will also be giving a workshop during the Sunday workshops please select the link to learn more
Djenane Ramalho-de-Oliveira, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
I am a clinical pharmacist and a qualitative researcher. I am grateful for what qualitative research has done to advance my practice as an educator in a college of pharmacy. I am a professor in the Department of Social Pharmacy at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and the founder of the Centro de Estudos em Atenção Farmacêutica.
Creating breathing spaces in a Brazilian Pharmacy School
Abstract: Teaching in a college of pharmacy for almost 30 years, I had to learn how to live in a liminal state. My body knows well how to feel to be isolated, to constantly row against the current, and the frantic need to find partnership. I always liked dancing, and that pleasant sentiment that I have a partner you can rely on. As I move, my partner move accordingly, and the magic happens. We must build perfect harmony and synchronization so our bodies sway to the rhythm of the music effortlessly. We not only move together; we connect physically, mentally, and emotionally to create a seamless flow of movement. My partner and I engage in a silent conversation that involves awareness, trust, and flexibility so that we can move as a unit. Dance is about transforming individual movements into a shared and harmonious experience. Dance also includes leading and following, even though each person adds their own expression and interpretation of movements. Perhaps dance is my experiential metaphor as I navigate the world as a clinical pharmacist and a professor of pharmacy. I have been creating new performances for myself and for pharmacists but persistently adapting and responding to others. This journey has required tremendous energy, flexibility, and courage. I have pushed to exercise possible futures for my students and colleagues. I want my “dancing partners” and I to “esperançar” in the arid environment of a pharmacy school. As proposed by Paulo Freire, this means to go beyond simply having hope in a passive way. We are resisting, acting and transforming the reality of the profession of pharmacy towards our new mission to become patient-centered providers. This is a call for change that transpired to be more dramatic that we expected. Thus, we are creating spaces and experiences that provoke the preparation of not only competent patient care providers, but also more critical and compassionate human beings. This presentation is about my encounters and experiences throughout a career working to transform myself and the “raison d’être” of a profession. It is about finding the right partners and inspiring them with great ideals to change healthcare. What does it mean to revolutionize pharmaceutical/pharmacological pedagogies”? How have I been engaging qualitative approaches and autoethnography to serve as an interdisciplinary bridge worker around the globe? How did I translate technical knowledge into creative and relational ways of teaching and learning? What has been my experience going through the transformation myself and creating more hopeful and caring spaces in the college of pharmacy? It has been a lot of hard work and sometimes an emotional roller coaster. Finding “dancing partners” and producing meaningful transformation has involved learning to speak multiple languages, connecting hard and soft science, and performing to be accepted in different worlds. What a journey! I am thrilled to share this story with you.
Abstract submission is now open,