PanSIG 2026 – Building Language Competencies through Community

Nontraditional authors in Japanese HE: a collaborative autoethnography

Conference site: https://events.jalt.org/event/74/contributions/1576/

Elizabeth Oba (National Institute of Technology, Toyama College) 
Jason Henwood (General Union) 
Jerry Talandis, Jr. (University of Toyama) 
Mukaddam Khaitova (Hokuriku University)
Theron Muller (Waseda University Faculty of Human Sciences)

May 24, 2026, 9:30 – 9:55

Our Slides

Abstract

This presentation will showcase the presenters’ experiences of writing for academic publication from within Japanese higher education (HE). We self-identify as nontraditional authors, or authors who did not follow ostensibly ‘typical’ HE faculty career trajectories of moving directly from undergraduate to graduate school, culminating in doctorates before beginning HE employment in limited-term full-time faculty positions. As such, our experiences of navigating writing for academic publication include needing to learn its requirements and conventions from outside formal schooling contexts. Thus, our experiences may be particularly well-suited to critically interrogating the dominant processes at play in writing for publication in (Japanese) HE. We explore our experiences through a collaborative autoethnography (CAE), which facilitates the creation of a safe, third space outside of the high-pressure, metrified HE employment environment to share, interrogate, and explore our collective narratives. Within this third space, we can create a supportive community that acknowledges the challenges that we face, celebrates our successes, and helps us to better cope with our respective circumstances. Our presentation will pursue two compatible goals: first, explaining what our CAE helped us to better understand about our experiences of academic publication and second, how our experiences could help to inform others seeking to write for academic publication to address and overcome similar challenges. Throughout, we will describe how CAE provided a reflexive, supportive space for us to better understand and represent our experiences, moving from a position of relative powerlessness to being more empowered to add our voices and perspectives to the scholarly record.