19. Clever Girls in Conversation

Once completed, contributors shared their autoethnographies so that each writer could compare their own experiences to others’, could reflect on similarities and differences, discover resonances, be surprised, stimulated, shocked, moved, have expectations overturned—in other words, so that we could learn from each other. We shared our responses via a ‘chain’ of emails. This ‘conversation’ is reproduced in this chapter as a kind of ‘modelling’ for readers of the power of autoethnography. For the contributors them(our)selves, this process felt transformative, turning the ‘making’ of the book into a collaborative autoethnography in itself that embodied more than the sum of its parts. The space between the book’s ‘covers’ became a place in which a diverse group of women met to examine the relationalities that shape our world, to address the constitution of alterity in social and political relations, to reflect upon sameness and recognise our different ways of perceiving and conceptualising the world, inflected as they are by the relations of inequality through which we face the world and each other—and to be empowered in the process.