Exo-autoethnography is the autoethnographic exploration of a history whose events the researcher does not experience directly, but a history that impacts the researcher through familial, or other personal connections, by proxy. It is an approach to research and autoethnographic writing that seeks to analyze individual and private experience, as directed by the other's experience or history, to better understand: a history that affects the researcher indirectly; and personal and community experience as it relates to that history.

The method of exo-autoethnographic research and writing has been developed for the qualitative study into transgenerational transmission of trauma, moving beyond the personal experience of the researcher. In this first and preliminary conception, the method aims to connect the present with a history of the other through transgenerational transmission of trauma and/or experiences of an upbringing influenced by parental trauma.

Since the late 1970s, autoethnographic research and writing has demonstrated that non-fiction creative writing practice can utilise this alternate-ethnographic method as part of its research and narrative, producing rigorous creative work which is palatable both by the academy and the general audience: bringing social science closer to literature. This paper proposes a new autoethnographic method of research and writing I am calling exo-autoethnography: a distinct ethnographic method of qualitative research within non-fiction creative, and autoethnographic writing, that deals with transgenerational transmission of familial trauma. Exo- autoethnography is an approach to research that seeks to analyse individual and private experience as directed by the other’s experience or history to better understand: 1. A history that impacted the researcher by proxy; and 2. Personal and community experience as related to that history. Exo-autoethnography is the autoethnographic exploration of a history whose events the researcher (author) did not experience directly, but a history that impacted the researcher through familial, or other personal connections. Placing focus on a history that impacted the self (author) by proxy, the method aims to connect the present with a history of the other through transgenerational transmission of trauma and/or experiences of an upbringing influenced by parental trauma.

Autoethnography has undergone numerous critical appraisals based on its specific ways of truth reproduction. This paper looks at autoethnography as method and text from an ethical journalistic perspective, utilising it as a method for the production of written artefacts, and its interpretation and reinterpretation of past events. The research identifies the ethical issues and dilemmas of allowing composite events and reproduction of conversations to enter autoethnography in its work, both as method and as text. Particularly, the paper questions when the message or main tenet of the text overshadows the balance and truth experienced by the author in a corporeal, rather than a metaphysical sense. The paper reviews three autoethnographic texts, comparing current methodologies to journalistic output. It also discusses issues of implementing autoethnography in producing factual reconstructions of events. This research challenges autoethnography’s use of composite events and reproductions of dialogue without recorded evidence in order to produce a text more reliant on ideology and meaning. Using a journalistic lens, ethical issues arising from this method are discussed in conjunction with a discussion of balance and truth, paying attention to fictitious accounts of factual events, and adjudicating autoethnography under the principles of journalistic ethics.

Since the late 1970s, autoethnographic research and writing has progressively demonstrated that non-fiction creative writing practice can aptly utilise this alternate-ethnographic method as part of its research and narrative, producing rigorous creative work which is palatable both by the academy and the general audience: bringing a social science closer to literature. This paper proposes the use of the methodological model I am calling exo-autoethnography as a form of qualitative research within non-fiction creative writing, and autoethnographic writing, that deals with the inter-familial trauma narrative.

Exo-autoethnography is the autoethnographic exploration of a history whose events the researcher or author did not experience directly, but a history that impacted the researcher or author through familial, or other personal connections.

This paper will interrogate the notion of exo-autoethnography as a distinct method informing qualitative research, for the purpose of deeply and rigorously exploring inter-familial trauma through generations. This practice is utilised in order to produce a creative non-fiction and autoethnographic narrative that is accessible as both memoir, and research text (autoethnography) to better understand sole, and cultural experience.

Yarramundi is 70 kilometres from Sydney’s city center; it feels like a whole new world as the skyscrapers shrink and disappear in the rear-view mirror, and suburbia’s manicured lawns and rows of homes morph into wide, open paddocks, green fields, and farm houses.

It’s eight am on a cold Saturday morning; in big, red letters, a sign reads Cover Your Load, as I drive past a waste management plant.

Turning right onto Springwood Road, the Blue Mountains of New South Wales stand at the horizon, splitting the sky and the green fields below them. And as you cross the little bridge hovering over the Nepean River, the flat fields soon begin to melt into the trees and bush interrupted only by the sparse darting of country homes and their long, dusty driveways.

As an off-road trail begins mirroring Springwood Road, riding parallel to its rough asphalt, an idle convention centre starts creeping in on the left, hugging a bend in the road, the same right bend that peripheries the site of Australia’s first taphonomic research facility, colloquially known as a Body Farm.

Since the ’70s, transhumanist artist Stelarc has used himself as an experimental canvas for exploring his ideas about the body’s obsolescence and its potential for technological alteration. The Perth, Australia-based artist has investigated, amplified, and internally examined his body to view how far it can be pushed with the use of technology, and how much further we can take its operation and its capabilities.

1998, Julian Dibbell publishes the now classic essay, ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’, dealing with text-based rape in the mid-nineties. But unlike this world of LambdaMOO (a genus of Multi-User-Dimensions), and unlike the text-based assault of Mr. Bungle (a character swathed in “cum-stained harlequin garb” (Dibbell, 1998)) and his voodoo doll, forcing a slew of acts debauched, decadent and depraved on other residents of the digital-code world of LambdaMoo, contemporary developments in technology, specifically those of haptic, or kinesthetic technology, and smart adult toys enjoying wireless, WiFi functionality, raise the prospect of virtual rape now morphing into one of a physical sensation, and of physical damage.

Exhibition of photographic (black and white film) portfolio.

Expressive form: photography.

Artyom Borovik wrote that ‘Afghanistan became part of each person who fought there. And each of the half million soldiers who went through this war became part of Afghanistan.’1 This mixed-methods study focuses on familial relationships pertaining to returned Soviet veterans of the Soviet–Afghan War, 1979 to 1989, examining the impact of the conflict on the first post-Soviet generation through the intergenerational transmission of war-related trauma from parents to children. Research was conducted from 2015 to 2018, with fieldwork conducted in Russia in 2017, and survey data collected between 2016 and 2017. The qualitative analysis was based on interviews with veterans, now-adult children of veterans, and veterans’ other family members. The quantitative analysis was based on questionnaire responses from now-adult children of veterans. The study was conducted using an exo-autoethnographic framework, a methodology developed during this PhD. Exo-autoethnography is the autoethnographic exploration of a history whose events the researcher did not experience directly, but a history that impacts the researcher by proxy through the familial environment. In this first conception, the methodology is a merger of the fields of psychotraumatology and autoethnography, connecting the present with a history of the other through trauma transmission and experiences of an upbringing influenced by parental trauma. Research results show an ongoing impact of the Soviet–Afghan war on the first post-Soviet generation. This study provides four key findings: intergenerational trauma transmission, domestic violence, collective trauma and mental health in the former Soviet Union, and makeshift group therapy and substance abuse. The outcome of this research demonstrates a strong likelihood that the correlation of mental health issues between children and their veteran parents is a result of intergenerational effects of military service in the Soviet–Afghan war. The implications of these find...