Visual Autoethnography and Poetic Inquiry as Methodological Survival: Navigating Colonial Academic Structures

This article discusses the survival process of one Caribbean scholar working within academic systems shaped by colonial histories, offering insights that may resonate with others navigating similar institutional contexts. This work examines the daily labour of methodological endurance within universities where Euro-American performance metrics continue to shape legitimacy and knowledge production. These academic environments create ongoing colonial contradictions that scholars must navigate. Drawing on visual practice, poetic inquiry, and pedagogical engagement, this article explores how creative autoethnographic methods function as survival tools. It examines how these methods can maintain relational, spiritual, and intellectual integrity while meeting institutional demands. Creative approaches prove valuable when standard academic methods cannot adequately hold embodied knowledge and intergenerational memory. They become essential for scholars whose institutional frameworks require them to compromise or abandon spiritual ways of knowing. The work contributes to methodological literature by demonstrating survival practices in action rather than describing them theoretically. Three original paintings and six haikus serve as analytical methods, making visible the contradictions and quiet negotiations through which the author navigates the academy. The form mirrors the content, modelling how visual and poetic practices serve as methodological scaffolding for scholars seeking to maintain integrity within colonial academic frameworks. This paper honours ongoing contradictions and makes them knowable while preserving their complexity. The primary contribution lies in documenting how particular survival strategies inform broader conversations about methodological innovation in postcolonial academic contexts.