The research study that would become the book Mothering at the Margins: Black Mothers Raising Autistic Children in the UK began on WhatsApp. As my academic colleague Claire and I shared yet another voice note conversation that had me nodding in recognition and the typed response of ‘same’ pinging through each of our phones, we began to realise something profound. This was knowledge. In our book, I noted that it felt as if ‘this woman is living my life’. Those exchanges that began with ‘You won't believe what happened today’, evolved into deeper reflections on identity, motherhood and marginalisation; this was data. It was a co-constructed reality. We were engaged in a research method called collective autoethnography, though we were only just beginning to name it as such.

What Is Collective Autoethnography?

Autoethnography (AE) is an approach to qualitative inquiry in which a researcher recounts a story of their own personal experience, coupled with an ethnographic analysis of the cultural context and implications of that experience (Lapadat, 2017). Rather than positioning themselves as neutral observers, autoethnographers acknowledge that their personal experiences are valuable sources of knowledge.

Collective autoethnography (CoAE) takes this further. It is ‘a participatory and democratic research methodology distinct from other autoethnographic methodologies in its emphasis on co-constructing narratives’ (Karalis Noel, Minematsu and Bosca, 2023, p. 1). Owing to its focus on shared meaning-making and mutual respect, CoAE is particularly well-suited to examining shared experiences within a community or group setting in a qualitative research context. It allows communities to tell their own stories.

In simpler terms, collective autoethnography recognises that our stories, particularly when told alongside others who share aspects of our identity or experience, can illuminate truths that traditional research methods might miss. It is research that validates lived experience and shows how our experiences, woven together, revealing patterns and insights that surveys and detached observation cannot capture.

Why CoAE matters for Black mothers (and other marginalised groups)

Black Feminist Thought has long argued that knowledge production is not neutral. Those who have historically held power in academia who have shaped what counts as ‘legitimate’ knowledge and whose experiences are deemed worthy of scholarly attention are predominantly white, Western male voices. For Black women, for disabled people, for those existing at the intersections of multiple marginalised identities, this has meant our voices have been studied about rather than listened to, with our experiences filtered through others’ interpretations rather than articulated in our own words.

Traditional ethnography, where researchers study communities and cultures from the outside, has long faced criticism, particularly when it comes to research about racialised groups (Adhikari, 2023). When someone who doesn’t share your identity studies your life, there’s always a risk. They might misunderstand your experiences, take your stories out of context, or worse, use them in ways that cause harm. Even more uncomfortably, traditional research often puts all the vulnerability on one side. Participants are asked to open up, to share painful or difficult experiences, while researchers get to keep their professional detachment, taking notes but never really exposing themselves to the same scrutiny, maintaining a ‘safe distance’ from that process.

Autoethnography reverses this dynamic as it sees the researcher turn the ‘lens’ on themselves, recounting their own stories and embracing the vulnerability and honesty that this requires (Malcom and Green, 2025). This matters because our personal stories are critiques of societal structures. As Hernández-Saca and Cannon (2019) explain, our autoethnographic experiences connect to much larger patterns of power, privilege, and difference. When Claire and I wrote about our encounters with healthcare professionals, teachers and social workers, we were going beyond sharing anecdotes as friends. We were also documenting how these systems have been built around certain assumptions about what’s ‘normal’: white, middle-class, non-disabled norms that shape whose voices get heard and whose get dismissed (Tyack, 1974). This is precisely why some scholars describe autoethnography as ‘a radical democratic politics’ that creates space for conversations that can actually change things (Holman Jones, 2005, p. 763). Storytelling becomes a form of resistance.

Patricia Hill Collins speaks of the ‘outsider-within’ status of Black women in institutions, a position that grants unique insight into how systems function (and fail) for those they were not designed to serve (Collins, 1986). As Black mothers raising autistic children, Claire and I knew this position intimately. We were both qualified researchers working in universities, yet we were also the mothers attending the same appointments, navigating the same services, filling out the same endless forms, experiencing the same microaggressions and systemic barriers as our participants. To pretend otherwise, to adopt a stance of false objectivity, would have been to deny the very insights that our positionality offered.

Collective autoethnography, approached from a subordinate or ‘othered’ group perspective, becomes a ‘community of resistance’ (Malcolm and Green, 2025, p. 15). It centres voices that have been marginalised. It validates experiences that have been dismissed and transforms what has been called ‘bias’ or being ‘too close to the subject’ into methodological strength.

How we did it (by realising we already were)

Our WhatsApp voicenotes became a space of mutual support and shared analysis. We swapped stories that revealed uncomfortable patterns. One shared experience came from how we had both, at different times, asked our white husbands to attend meetings on our behalf, arming them with scripts and lists of questions. We both recognised that in this action, we were making a strategic choice. We knew that our voices, as Black mothers, risked being filtered through harmful stereotypes: the ‘angry Black woman’, the ‘difficult parent’, the mother who ‘exaggerates’. Deputising our husbands worked because their maleness and whiteness granted them access to credibility we were denied.

These snippets of conversation, sent in snatched moments between school runs, meltdowns and marking, were rich with our reflexivity and ad hoc analysis. We were theorising our experiences, connecting personal encounters to broader structural issues, engaging in the kind of critical consciousness-raising that bell hooks describes as essential to liberation (hooks, 1994). We were, as I’ve written elsewhere about Black women’s storytelling, ‘narrating self’ and ‘narrating us’ simultaneously, using our individual experiences to illuminate collective truths (Green, 2025). 

Once the project received ethics approval, we formalised what we were already doing. We transcribed relevant voice notes and developed intentional reflections, guided by the same prompts we used with our participants. We also conducted what we called a bilateral focus group, interviewing each other using the same questions posed to the mothers in our study. These reflections became vignettes, narrative snapshots capturing emotional and analytical relevance to depth. In Mothering at the Margins, these vignettes introduce the themes revealed in our participants’ accounts, demonstrating how our stories resonated with, complicated, and deepened theirs. As Jones (2021, p. 217) writes:
‘We are living in a time and space in which the personal – our sense of selves, safety, health, and well-being, and our relationships with others and the planet and our work – is urgently and globally political.’

Addressing the critics

Critics of autoethnography often raise concerns about rigour and subjectivity. They ask: how can research grounded in personal experience be objective? How can it be generalisable? These questions reflect traditional ideas about what counts as ‘good research’. Rigour has historically been defined by treating emotion as contamination rather than evidence. Yet collective autoethnography offered us a different kind of rigour: one based on reflexivity, relational accountability and transparency.
Tolich (2010, p. 1605) reminds researchers to ‘treat all the persons mentioned in the text as vulnerable, including the researcher’. This ethical awareness is central to CoAE. It acknowledges that telling one’s story can be both empowering and exposing. The risk of emotional labour is real, and safeguarding researchers’ wellbeing becomes an ethical imperative.

Critics also warn that autoethnography can become self-indulgent becoming closer to memoir than method. Yet, as Lapadat (2017) and others note, this criticism often reveals discomfort with emotional honesty rather than methodological weakness. Collective autoethnography, when done well, resists this charge through systematic reflection, collaborative validation, and attention to context. In our case, the bilateral focus group added transparency and accountability. We subjected ourselves to the same scrutiny as our participants and made sure our vignettes did not overshadow their stories.

What we gained (that we couldn’t have achieved another way)

We believe that we couldn’t have written Mothering at the Margins any other way, not with the depth, nuance or authenticity it carries. CoAE allowed us to co-construct knowledge that was both academically rigorous and emotionally truthful. Through constant dialogue, we built an audit trail of reflection, challenging each other’s assumptions and interpretations. Our disciplinary differences, mine in Education and Claire’s in Politics, strengthened our analysis, showing how identity, care and power intersected across contexts.

Perhaps most importantly, CoAE embodied the principle we were advocating; Black mothers’ experiences are a legitimate source of knowledge about the systems we navigate. In Mothering at the Margins, we modelled the kind of research that treats lived experience as expertise. Rather than treating our perspectives as subjective or unreliable, we placed them at the centre of the research, where they belong.