R J Pelias
Biographic Data
| ID | 58046 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R J Pelias |
| GIVEN NAMES | R J |
| FAMILY NAME | Pelias |
| SIGNATURE | PELIAS R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Southern Illinois University Carbondale |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5318-4355 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 142 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Possibilities in Three Parts for Collaborative Futures in Autoethnography
This speculative essay, divided into three sections, raises questions about the collaborative future of autoethnography while asserting the author’s continued commitment to the method. It starts by identifying collaborative practices in the author’s past, then moves to a series of possibilities for future practice, and ends by identifying autoethnographic orientations that the author endorses. Each section carries a note of skepticism about autoe…
Autoethnographic Labor for the Future
This essay offers a series of brief claims for future practices for autoethnographers. It identifies the autoethnographer as an individual who writes creatively and ethically to make a difference in the world
Reading Facebook After Norman K. Denzin’s Passing
This essay is a tribute in memory of Norman K. Denzin. It recalls the thoughts that were running through the author’s mind when he learned of Norman Denzin’s passing on Facebook
The Glorious Becoming of Dr. Tami Spry
This brief tribute speaks to the profound and multiple contributions of Dr. Tami Spry to performance studies and qualitative inquiry by calling upon the poetic to make its case. It argues that Dr. Spry will have a lasting and continuing impact on her field of study
“Inter and Enter: An Invitation to Collaboration Thru Autoethnography”
This performative and collaborative autoethnography plays with the homophonic or maybe homiletics of “inter” and “enter” as the invitational aspect of collaborative autoethnography. The contribution of diverse collaborators from differing racial, ethnic, geo-spatial locations, and generational standpoints speak to/between experiences with the dialogic aspects of autoethnography; the speaking of self with and for others that is always a part of au…
“Collaborative Autoethnographic Writing as Communal Curative”
This collaborative autoethnography reflects on how each author experienced COVID-19 and associated precarity. We explore the ways in which this experience relates to our identities (both particular and plural), and our positionalities in terms of privilege and marginality. As a collective of diverse collaborators, we confront dialectical questions of self and society. Our contributions reveal our advantage/disadvantage, mobility/immobility, and t…
Masks as Becoming
This autoethnographic essay explores masks and identity management during the time of COVID-19. It addresses the author’s relationship to masked television and film characters as well as everyday literal and figurative life masks which hide and reveal aspects of ourselves. It ends with a reflection on mask-wearing during the current pandemic and its emergent entanglements
Finding my Way into Resistance
The essay presents satiric accounts of the author’s encounters with Trump signage. It shows how political T-shirts, yard signs, and hats can become emotional triggers, often resulting problematic discourse. As a corrective, it calls upon several scholars who offer more productive ways of conversing with those who hold oppositional views. The essay then raises the question of whether the recommended strategies are effective with those who do not a…
No Rhyme or Reason: A Poetic Lament on Violence
This essay spins off the many versions of 'There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.' This children's song plays with rhyme to tell the story of an old woman who dies after consuming increasingly large animals to rid herself of the previously swallowed one. Revisiting the lyrics, the violence, with its lulling repetition and rhyme, enacted by the old woman was unsettling, another of so many cultural phenomena that deaden our response to violenc…
In These Troubled Times: When Silence Speaks
In this fragmented autoethnographic narrative, I focus on several incidents where silence functions as a political weapon and as a means for coping in these trouble times. Deploying silence is a rhetorical act that unfolds in ethical and unethical ways. It can serve, I argue, as a tactic for resistance and as a strategy to deceive and maintain power
A Collaboration: Connected to, Constituted by, and Comfort in the Other
This essay explores our collaborative work as connective, constitutive, and comforting. Calling upon the poetic and performative, we describe our relational dynamic as a loving presence that comes together for the gifts of our collaborations. The essay ends with a reflection on our presentation at the 14th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry after Tami Spry stood in for Lesa Lockford when Lesa was unable to attend
Contact and the 2020 Pandemic: A Poetic Autoethnography
This poetic autoethnography explores aspects of human contact and communication during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Through a series of poems, the inquiry focuses upon the desire for ordinary interactions and the fear of contamination. The piece stands as a lament, not only for those who have died and have become ill from the virus, but also for the loss of human connection as people practice in varying degrees social distancing
An Autoethnographic Construction
So, you set yourself on a journey, a literary endeavor designed to evoke, to expose cultural logics that work for and against your interests by deploying yourself, by revealing your experiences in public, by telling a truth about this person who goes by the name of Ronald J. Pelias—the “J” for James, after my Uncle Jimmy who was never shy about celebrating life—this Ronald J. Pelias who uses this identity marker whenever he signs an official docu…
A Political Listing: A Rant, a Confession, and a Hope
In this coupling of autoethnography and poetic inquiry, I offer a poem in three parts: the first, a rant; the second, a confession; and the third, a hope. Each part identifies a different way I am experiencing the current political scene, one that I find dangerous to our collective future. I call on the poetic as a method of political intervention
Reading and Writing Research Located in the Literary
In this essay I identify the obligations I feel as a reader and writer who celebrates the literary as a researcher. I structure the piece by asking a series of questions from my writer and reader stances to put on display the relational dynamic between readers and writers and to imply how the literary in research might come into play. I end the essay in the hope that my readers will offer additional questions to my questions, inquiries that will …
Lee Roloff’s presence
Still, after all these years, he is with me, changing me, the twenty-year-old kid who he taught to care more about the line of a poem than the line of a putt, more about the spin of a tale than the
On how ideas have consequences: Alison Fisher Bodkin and Chris Collins’s Fractured
This short response to Alison Bodkin and Chris Collins's performance, Fractured, argues that their work does what good performance work does: It puts on display how ideas have consequences for human lives. The piece identifies several strategies that Collins and Bodkin use in the production to capture attention and to facilitate social change
On Not Being Able to Sleep: After the U.S. 2016 Presidential Election
Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I find myself struggling, wanting to find a narrative that will let me sleep, but I am unable to find any comfort in the current political landscape. I call upon a fragmentary structure in this autoethnographic essay to display the troubling thoughts and incidents that have assailed me since the election, to point toward a frightening right wing agenda, and to demonstrate why I cannot sleep. Each num…
After Orlando
Following in the tradition of poetic inquiry, I offer a series of poems to explore the aftermath of Orlando, Florida shooting on June 12, 2016. The poems call upon the speculative and the imaginative to make its empathic case. The poems, offering distinct perspectives directly connected to the shooting, rely upon news accounts, but do not contain the specific words of any individual
Delusions, Measures, and Presence: Anticipating the Death of a Loved One
In anticipation of my mother's death, I write trying to keep her with me, trying to forestall the inevitable. I write to expose the delusions I maintain, to understand how my mother measures the closeness of her death, and to face the conflictual feelings I have in her presence. Writing becomes a method for dealing what is before me
The End of an Academic Career: The Desperate Attempt to Hang On and Let Go
In keeping with H. L. Goodall's articulation of the "new ethnography," I write into the tension I feel as I approach the end of my academic career. I consider the question of whether or not to retire by offering conflicting narratives organized under the headings of hanging on and letting go. Framed as a familiar life script, I search for a satisfying narrative that will hold still
Performance Ethnography
Performance ethnography takes as its working premise that a theatrical representation of what one discovers through participant observation fieldwork provides a vibrant and textured rendering of cultural others. Performance for the performance ethnographer is typically understood as an interpretive as well a critical artistic act within a theatrical tradition. In western cultures, this artistic endeavor calls upon actors through their use of pres…
"A Story Located in "Shoulds: Toward a Productive Future for Qualitative Inquiry
This piece identifies several directions that I believe scholars engaged in qualitative inquiry ought to pursue. I offer a list of "shoulds" to argue that qualitative scholars would benefit by privileging story over philosophy and theory, by limiting adherence to the postmodern push toward uncertainty, by calling on the literary in our written accounts, by speaking across positionalities, and by strategically considering the audiences for our wor…
An Autoethnographic Writer's Request to Readers
Speaking from the position of an autoethnographic writer, I ask those who might attend to my work to adopt a number of interactional stances that I hope they will bring to our encounter. Likewise, I make several promises concerning the kind of writer I want to be. If we both agree to move forward as outlined, I argue, we will have a more productive and satisfying experience
Hearing Voices
In this brief essay, I attempt to enter into the work of five scholars: Robin M. Boylorn, Lesa Lockford, Chris Poulos, Larry Russell, and Carolyn Ellis. I listen for their voices, for how their words have come to me and live in me. I reach for them, hoping that in my reach I am not too clumsy, too abrupt, or too off the mark. I write, trying to hear
A paradigm for performance studies
This article (1) surveys research exemplars of performance studies by tracing their epistemological claims and methodological assertions through discussions of text, event, performer, and audience and (2) claims a paradigmatic relationship between oral interpretation and performance studies
The Academic Tourist: An Autoethnography
The essay argues that academics, similar to tourists, often only manage to get to the surface of any area of inquiry they pursue, in part because of the nature of what constitutes full understanding and in part because of the habits of academic life. Written in an autoethnographic style, the essay offers a sociology of the academy through descriptive details. It invites emotional identification
Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research
This script comes from an edited transcript of a session titled "Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research," which was part of the 2006 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 4-6, 2006. This special session featured scholars informally responding to questions about their personal history with qualitative methods, epiphanies that attracted them to qualitative work or chang…
Jarheads, Girly Men, and the Pleasures of Violence
This article explores the troublesome ways in which violence and pleasure become conflated for both hypermasculine and effeminate men. Using images from contemporary culture and incidents from the author's life, the article ponders how men might negotiate this unfortunate bind
The End of an Academic Career: The Desperate Attempt to Hang On and Let Go
In keeping with H. L. Goodall's articulation of the "new ethnography," I write into the tension I feel as I approach the end of my academic career. I consider the question of whether or not to retire by offering conflicting narratives organized under the headings of hanging on and letting go. Framed as a familiar life script, I search for a satisfying narrative that will hold still
"A Story Located in "Shoulds: Toward a Productive Future for Qualitative Inquiry
This piece identifies several directions that I believe scholars engaged in qualitative inquiry ought to pursue. I offer a list of "shoulds" to argue that qualitative scholars would benefit by privileging story over philosophy and theory, by limiting adherence to the postmodern push toward uncertainty, by calling on the literary in our written accounts, by speaking across positionalities, and by strategically considering the audiences for our wor…
Confessions of apprehensive performer
This essay explores the subject of apprehension in a personal narrative style. In keeping with what John VanMaanen calls in Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography (1988) an “impressionist tale,” the essay tells its story in an episodic fashion, highlighting the polyvocal, contingent, and ambivalent realities of the apprehensive experience
Issues: A TPQ forum
A Political Listing: A Rant, a Confession, and a Hope
In this coupling of autoethnography and poetic inquiry, I offer a poem in three parts: the first, a rant; the second, a confession; and the third, a hope. Each part identifies a different way I am experiencing the current political scene, one that I find dangerous to our collective future. I call on the poetic as a method of political intervention
Archiving Father and Son
Haunted by the estranged relationship with his son and the loss of his father three years ago, the author writes in the attempt to gather, to archive what needs to be preserved. The author proceeds by recollecting the positive memories he carries of his father and the troubling thoughts he holds about his son. Structured through fragments, the author accumulates an archival history, one that tells the story of the father his dad was and of the fa…
H. L. Goodall's A Need to Know and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
A Personal History of Lust on Bourbon Street
This autoethnographic account traces my lifetime of performative experiences on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. In particular, it focuses upon how Bourbon Street has functioned to situate lust as an act, within limits, of giving permission to consider the forbidden, of offering alternative possibilities for living, of claiming possession of desire, and of giving pleasure. While recognizing the potential dangers of exploitation, the essay ends by c…
Always Dying: Living Between Da and Fort
This is a performative writing essay that reflects on Peggy Phelan's thesis from Mourning Sex that theatre is a rehearsal for death. Using the Freudian frame of da (there) and fort (gone), the essay moves between presence and absence, between aesthetic performances and everyday performances, and between life and death
After Orlando
Following in the tradition of poetic inquiry, I offer a series of poems to explore the aftermath of Orlando, Florida shooting on June 12, 2016. The poems call upon the speculative and the imaginative to make its empathic case. The poems, offering distinct perspectives directly connected to the shooting, rely upon news accounts, but do not contain the specific words of any individual
A paradigm for performance studies
This article (1) surveys research exemplars of performance studies by tracing their epistemological claims and methodological assertions through discussions of text, event, performer, and audience and (2) claims a paradigmatic relationship between oral interpretation and performance studies
Issues: A TPQ forum
Confessions of apprehensive performer
This essay explores the subject of apprehension in a personal narrative style. In keeping with what John VanMaanen calls in Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography (1988) an “impressionist tale,” the essay tells its story in an episodic fashion, highlighting the polyvocal, contingent, and ambivalent realities of the apprehensive experience
Books in review
VAMPIRES, MUMMIES, AND LIBERALS: BRAM STOKER AND THE POLITICS OF POPULAR FICTION. By David Glover. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996; pp. ix‐212; $50.00; paper $16.95. LUDIC FEMINISM AND AFTER: POSTMODERNISM, DESIRE, AND LABOR IN LATE CAPITALISM. By Teresa L. Ebert. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996; pp. ix‐302; $39.50; paper $14.95. A SPACE ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD: CULTURAL POETICS IN AN “OTHER” AMERICA. By Kathleen Stewart. Pr…
Always Dying: Living Between Da and Fort
This is a performative writing essay that reflects on Peggy Phelan's thesis from Mourning Sex that theatre is a rehearsal for death. Using the Freudian frame of da (there) and fort (gone), the essay moves between presence and absence, between aesthetic performances and everyday performances, and between life and death
The Academic Tourist: An Autoethnography
The essay argues that academics, similar to tourists, often only manage to get to the surface of any area of inquiry they pursue, in part because of the nature of what constitutes full understanding and in part because of the habits of academic life. Written in an autoethnographic style, the essay offers a sociology of the academy through descriptive details. It invites emotional identification
A Methodology of the Heart: Evoking Academic and Daily Life
Education without ethics, without sentiments, without heart, is simply soulless, factual academics and nothing more. In his array of authentic essays, Ronald J. Pelias poetically evokes the spiritual aspects of life in a seemingly dispassionate field—the academy. A Methodology of the Heart presents a procession of situational compositions confronting matters such as family relationships, student/teacher communications, and general life at the uni…
A Personal History of Lust on Bourbon Street
This autoethnographic account traces my lifetime of performative experiences on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. In particular, it focuses upon how Bourbon Street has functioned to situate lust as an act, within limits, of giving permission to consider the forbidden, of offering alternative possibilities for living, of claiming possession of desire, and of giving pleasure. While recognizing the potential dangers of exploitation, the essay ends by c…
Two Positions on Menopause and Desire
Additional informationNotes on contributorsRonald J. PeliasRonald J. Pelias is a Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University
Performance Ethnography
Performance ethnography takes as its working premise that a theatrical representation of what one discovers through participant‐observation fieldwork provides a vibrant and textured rendering of cultural others. Performance for the performance ethnographer is typically understood as an aesthetic act within a theatrical tradition. In western cultures this artistic endeavor calls upon actors through their use of presentational skills to evoke other…
Jarheads, Girly Men, and the Pleasures of Violence
This article explores the troublesome ways in which violence and pleasure become conflated for both hypermasculine and effeminate men. Using images from contemporary culture and incidents from the author's life, the article ponders how men might negotiate this unfortunate bind
Making My Masculine Body Behave
Using Constantin Stanislavki's vocabulary for actor training, I offer an autoethnographic essay that explores my performances as a man, a man who does and does not measure up to the cultural ideal. I juxtapose cultural scripts against personal experience in order to demonstrate the tensions that emerge as I try to negotiate the masculine roles I have been asked to play
H. L. Goodall's A Need to Know and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research
This script comes from an edited transcript of a session titled "Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research," which was part of the 2006 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 4-6, 2006. This special session featured scholars informally responding to questions about their personal history with qualitative methods, epiphanies that attracted them to qualitative work or chang…
Pledging Personal Allegiance to Qualitative Inquiry
In this short essay, I consider where the process of navel-gazing takes me, how it leads me to others. In short, I offer a tale of how navel-gazing takes me away from self-absorption and makes others key to any self-reflection. I end by pledging my allegiance to navel-gazing and, more generally, to qualitative inquiry, for the work it accomplishes
We thank the following reviewers who rendered extraordinary services to the International Review of Qualitative Research, Volume 2
Performance is an Opening
How Writing Touches: An Intimate Scholarly Collaboration
Five scholars, with varying histories together, met as writers at a workshop at the 2007 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry and made a commitment to write over the following year to, for and with each other in an experiment in the craft of autoethnography, an experiment that led us to explore questions of intimacy and connection manifested through collaborative writing. Each year since then we have returned to Congress to read a small …
Hearing Voices
In this brief essay, I attempt to enter into the work of five scholars: Robin M. Boylorn, Lesa Lockford, Chris Poulos, Larry Russell, and Carolyn Ellis. I listen for their voices, for how their words have come to me and live in me. I reach for them, hoping that in my reach I am not too clumsy, too abrupt, or too off the mark. I write, trying to hear
Darkness and Silence: The Dis/connection of Writing Intimacy
Having written as a group for four years, we continue with an emblematic methodology of writing into the dark, writing into a space that has become an intensive, maturing, messy, ethically caring, collaborative venture of changing composition. Our collective self writes into a tentative anticipating trust in our presence though we are shaded in uncertainty. We have written with desire and labor, intimacy and work, stuttering and stumbling our way…
Archiving Father and Son
Haunted by the estranged relationship with his son and the loss of his father three years ago, the author writes in the attempt to gather, to archive what needs to be preserved. The author proceeds by recollecting the positive memories he carries of his father and the troubling thoughts he holds about his son. Structured through fragments, the author accumulates an archival history, one that tells the story of the father his dad was and of the fa…
An Autoethnographic Writer's Request to Readers
Speaking from the position of an autoethnographic writer, I ask those who might attend to my work to adopt a number of interactional stances that I hope they will bring to our encounter. Likewise, I make several promises concerning the kind of writer I want to be. If we both agree to move forward as outlined, I argue, we will have a more productive and satisfying experience
Performance Ethnography
Performance ethnography takes as its working premise that a theatrical representation of what one discovers through participant observation fieldwork provides a vibrant and textured rendering of cultural others. Performance for the performance ethnographer is typically understood as an interpretive as well a critical artistic act within a theatrical tradition. In western cultures, this artistic endeavor calls upon actors through their use of pres…
"A Story Located in "Shoulds: Toward a Productive Future for Qualitative Inquiry
This piece identifies several directions that I believe scholars engaged in qualitative inquiry ought to pursue. I offer a list of "shoulds" to argue that qualitative scholars would benefit by privileging story over philosophy and theory, by limiting adherence to the postmodern push toward uncertainty, by calling on the literary in our written accounts, by speaking across positionalities, and by strategically considering the audiences for our wor…
Delusions, Measures, and Presence: Anticipating the Death of a Loved One
In anticipation of my mother's death, I write trying to keep her with me, trying to forestall the inevitable. I write to expose the delusions I maintain, to understand how my mother measures the closeness of her death, and to face the conflictual feelings I have in her presence. Writing becomes a method for dealing what is before me
Sociology (36 works) · Art (32 works) · Aesthetics (26 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Autoethnography (16 works) · Literature (15 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Theatre and Performance Studies (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works)