Trans autoethnographies

9th Nordic Trans Studies Conference, December 8-9, 2025, Örebro University

As an interdisciplinary field, Trans Studies has roots in trans organising in/against, and outside academia including feminist and queer theory, the social and medical sciences. Additionally, the field of Trans Studies has a substantial and ongoing tradition of engaging autobiographical work – both historical and current. The importance of positioning oneself in one's research, as well as writing from and through one's own embodied and lived experiences, has been an integral part of much of the scholarly work done within the field of Trans Studies.

Autoethnographic writing and research in general can help us connect individual experiences to the collective, cultural, social and to larger systems of power, and can be a tool for reflecting lived experiences and material effects of structural oppression as well as our complicity in them. It is a way of writing oneself into culture and into realities.

In this work group we want to open up conversations and collective reflections about the multiple ways we use our own embodied experiences, autoethnography, autobiography and in other ways write ourselves into our research and scholarly practices.

Format

This working group is discussion based.
The participants will be requested to send in a short input detailing their own entry points into the topic, questions they wish to discuss or examples from their own work.
The working group will be closed and have a limited number of participants.

Bios

Nico Miskow Friborg (they/them) is a Mad, queer, trans coalition organiser and PhD candidate at Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger. Nico’s work explores t4t organising, coalition-building, and mundane trans care in Denmark, and is anchored in collective knowledge creation that contributes to trans liveability and collective trans liberation.

Luca Tainio is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland, and an Adjunct Lecturer at Karlstad University in Sweden. His research focuses on questions of transmasculinity and embodiment, as well as knowledge-production.