Confabulating Research: Performing Memory-Work as Inquiry

Abstract

This collaborative autoethnographic essay centers on memory-work describing the ebbs and flows of boarding school policies’ effects on ethnic minorities in China and language policy decisions on multilingual citizens in Sri Lanka. The text is the product of the authors’ attunement to the role that confabulation plays in shaping collaborative autoethnographic research through the sharing and analysis of life-writing activities—for example, memoirs, journal entries, photographic narratives, and so on. Confabulation guided the authors through questions related to the meanings of self, other, and culture often taken for granted in (auto)ethnographic research. This is a topic expanded upon in the postface, where confabulation as the method, process, and outcome of research is discussed.