Affective Moments

This book offers a bold reimagining of academic research by challenging conventional understandings of identity, culture, and everyday encounters, opening new methodological possibilities for qualitative inquiry. Crafting his own life as an immigrant teacher into a source of meaning, the author reimagines academic writing not simply as an examination of cultural difference, but as an ongoing, often painful process of becoming otherwise. Refusing the detached voice of traditional scholarship, he engages in meta-reflexivity, showing how memory, emotion, and embodiment generate a living theory that unfolds across time and place. Through a creative blend of memoir, poetry, lyrics, drama, theory, and performance autoethnography, the book develops an original experimental form that captures the contradictions and uncertainties of migrant life. The fragmented form mirrors the discontinuities of immigrant becoming, while theoretical insights emerge organically from lived realities of being rather than overshadowing them. In doing so, it challenges the tendency of conventional qualitative scholarship to position immigrant teachers as objects of research. Instead, it foregrounds self-knowledge as a critical act of reclaiming narrative authorship and transformative potential. This experimental work invites scholars and students of intercultural communication, autoethnography, educational research and cultural studies to reconsider conventional research paradigms, embrace uncertainty and complexity, and reinvent what academic writing might become for the self, others, and futures yet to be envisaged.