Theory as a Technology of Survival: Vulnerability and Scholarly Becoming Through Autoethnography in Sociolinguistics

This review essay explores Untold Autoethnographic Stories of (In)Justice, Teaching and Scholarship and Autoethnographic Explorations of Lived Raciolinguistic Experiences Among Multilingual Scholars as significant interventions into the growing place of autoethnography in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. Situating the volumes within broader reflexive, embodied, affective, feminist, and decolonial turns in the field, I argue that they expand autoethnographic inquiry beyond pedagogical experience toward lived experiences of racism, linguicism, coloniality, gendered vulnerability, exclusion, and scholarly marginalization. Reading the 31 autoethnographic inquiries across both volumes through Butler's vulnerability, I show how theory constitutes a technology of survival: It does not simply explain pain after an experience but reorganizes the affective and epistemic conditions through which pain becomes intelligible and transformed. Thereby, I conceptualize autoethnography as a mode of scholarly becoming through which marginalized scholars reinterpret experience, reclaim agency, and produce embodied sociolinguistic knowledge .