Reflections on a collective biography journey

This Intervention discusses an eight-year collaboration among four feminist geographers using a collective biography methodology to investigate the academy. Beginning from an epistemological-ontological direction rather than a topical one, we used joy as our way "in" to issues around subject formation, intimacy, flows of power, and the care of the self. Using a question and answer format, as though we were being interviewed about our work, we engage with questions about positionality and reflexivity alongside the ways we took up and generated new knowledge using collective biography. We discuss the ways that an affirmative politics informed our research and our ways of working together. We hope that the paper will offer readers new ways to think about auto-ethnographic research practices and autobiography in life writing, feminist selves in the academy, and the intimate nature of close, collaborative work.