This article introduces transdisciplinary autoethnography as a relational mode of inquiry grounded in lived experience, ontological plurality, and epistemic humility. Drawing from the author’s intersecting roles as an adoptive parent, career practitioner, and doctoral researcher, the article explores how transdisciplinary research and autoethnography converge to support reflective, ethically attuned scholarship. Building on Nicolescu’s concept of the Hidden Third, it positions knowledge as emergent and co-produced in the spaces between disciplinary boundaries, personal narratives, and institutional systems. Through vignettes situated within the adoption process, the work attends to complexity, vulnerability, and the ethics of representation, emphasizing how inquiry can be shaped by care and accountability. Theoretical and methodological discussions are interwoven with reflexive storytelling, illustrating how autoethnographic practice can embody transdisciplinary commitments to integration, transformation, and situated knowing. Tensions around legitimacy, voice, and institutional norms are not treated as obstacles but as generative conditions for reimagining rigor and relational ethics. Ultimately, the article argues that transdisciplinary autoethnography enables researchers to remain attentive to the affective, embodied, and political dimensions of knowledge, offering a viable approach for those working within layered domains such as adoption, trauma, and kinship. It is both a methodological proposal and a situated reflection.
Andrew Bassingthwaighte (Thu,) studied this question.