Call it Swing: A Jazz Blues Autoethnography

This performative autoethnography utilizes jazz swing as a method to further activate the critical processes in qualitative research. In reflecting on my father’s 25 years as a jazz musician, I find his everyday lived methodology of swing provides an opportunity to explore the ways in which family inheritance collides with sociocultural practices of racial inequity and cultural appropriation. Autoethnographically re/inhabiting this space and sound with my father revealed a performative ethos, an empathetic epistemology of critical reflection activated by the transgressive discipline of jazz. Specifically, this performative ethos is applied to issues of racial accountability, embodied theorizing, and the ethical implications of an aesthetic/epistemic praxis in autoethnography. More broadly, I offer performative ethos as critical pedagogy assisting in living a critical life where issues of power and privilege are personally political and are written and rewritten daily with others in hope of utopia.