Intersections between autobiographical documentaries and animated autoethnographic research

This panel explores intersections between autobiographical documentaries and animated autoethnographic research looking at the common grounds between research methods that use storytelling techniques and audiovisual creative strategies to explore personal experiences. The three contributions delve into the reflection and representation of personal experiences that can be emotionally challenging, touching, and somehow, transformative. While autoethnography may emphasize the analysis of personal experience within a cultural context, autobiographical documentaries may focus on the complexity of human lives. While the three contributions touch the shared theme of identity, each author emphasises different aspects of animation and their artistic, aesthetic, social and cultural contributions.  There is a fertile tension between the autobiographical and autoethnographic components of these works throughout the three papers as well as a diverse approach to animation production. Sally Pearce focuses on women’s authors and how they use metamorphosis to represent themself as non-human characters subverting any stable notion of identity and reality, confronting us with otherness. Elizabeth Hoyle uses her documentary practice to articulate a heuristic inquiry that relates personal life experience of losing a beloved one, other’s experiences of loss, and theoretical developments on grief. Marta Madrid looks at students’ films that talk about depression in men, the fear of getting HIV and the experience of being transgender, which leads to appreciating social and ethical aspects in animated production. These three papers have the potential to open discussions about the in-between spaces of autobiographical animated documentaries and autoethnographic animated films, their commonalities and differences, methodological implications, and the way research may transform researchers and animators when working with these approaches.