Autoethnography in the Diaspora: Returning to Pakistan Without Crossing a Border
Reflections on identity, fieldwork, & qualitative belonging after a diasporic encounter.
“Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.” - Marcus Aurelius
ATTN qualitative Inquisitor,
This is the first Qi edition of the new year. Happy New Year!
My new year usually begins after MLK Day and well into Black History Month. I am still transitioning into 2026 and looking forward to another exciting year.
In my last edition, I closed 2025 by discussing the incredible year of transformation, heart, effort, and resilience, sharing highlights from my writings, and what I hope the new year will bring. This feels like the right edition to begin the new year, as I continue to work on finding my next home.
This newsletter has become a bridge that connects my scholarship, professional and personal experience, fieldwork history, and the emotional truth of the identity journey in a way that feels honest, centered, intersectional, and qualitative.
Sometimes fieldwork happens in unexpected places. One such unexpected place was an event at Georgetown University, the first-ever Georgetown Pakistan Public Policy Conclave, last November. I came there to listen, learn, and reconnect with an intellectual community I’ve long felt part of, but distant in recent years.
I found myself in Pakistan again. There have been many moments like this…many “little Pakistans” we embrace over the years.
But this encounter was not through soil or street dust on the lips, nor the noisy Karachi motorbike or rickshaw, nor the humming of the Beethoven theme from a popcorn wala. I was back in Pakistan through conversations, nostalgia, memory, and the gentle stirrings of belonging that surfaced and retreated throughout the day.
It felt like a return to a place that is close to my heart, for one day… even though I took a brief metro train ride instead of a plane… like fieldwork, even though I wasn’t taking interviews…and like my ancestral home, even though the soil and concrete beneath my feet were American.
“No place is ever as far away as we think.” - Seneca
Returning to Pakistan Through a Pakistan Conclave
For the first time in a long while, I felt myself returning to Pakistan in a way that was more emotional, intellectual, and spiritual.
Hosted by the Georgetown South Asia Society and the Pak Futures Foundation, the event was truly a thoughtful blend of public health, public policy, culture, and politics.
The gathering brought together scholars, policymakers, writers, journalists, and the Pakistani diaspora in Washington, DC, New York City, Boston, and other neighboring cities and states. Being there reminded me of the spaces I have missed, the conversations I have been yearning to continue, and the country that remains stitched into my identity.
I wrote a shorter version of this reflection across social media last November, but I knew I needed a longer space to capture some more of the full story and how it connects to qualitative inquiry.
I listened to conversations on democracy, development, public health, climate justice, youth activism, culture, and identity. I watched younger diasporic Pakistanis step confidently into the political and intellectual arena. I felt a familiar longing to contribute and a simultaneous pressure in my chest, butterflies in the stomach, a tinge of “imposter syndrome,” and the burden of both invisibility and hypervisibility that authentic women of color often experience even in diaspora spaces.
Being present opened the door to memories from those incredible seven months of doctoral fieldwork in Pakistan, conducted between 2017 and 2019. It reminded me of the questions I asked across cities and villages of four provinces. And it even reminded me of a book that guided me through that journey, Raza Rumi’s Being Pakistani, which stayed with me on buses, in guest houses, on university campuses, in USAID and World Bank meetings, at cultural sites, and even in the delicate corners of interior Sindh.
The Conclave experience reignited the question I have asked myself throughout my twenties and thirties as a young, inquisitive Pakistani American emerging scholar:
What does it mean to be Pakistani from afar, as a daughter of immigrants, as an American Pakistani Muslim woman, and as someone who has been navigating belonging, visibility, and erasure in Academia?
This reflection attempts to scratch the surface.
It was refreshing to be with other Pakistani Americans who care about the country’s prosperity. I enjoyed every session, from the opening remarks by Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi and journalist Hamid Mir, student research posters, panels on climate change, human rights, foreign policy, to the great debate on democracy featuring the wonderful Raza Rumi among others, and the closing keynote by Ambassador Akbar Ahmed.
It was great to see familiar faces I’ve long admired and meet many new ones as well. I was happy to see one Hijabi sister on the “Disruptors” panel, where she answered questions on Islamophobia and being visibly Muslim. (I truly hope these spaces will include more Hijabi women in the future.)
While it was tragic for the chai to run out so fast at a Pakistan event, eating biryani directly with my bare hands at a DC policy space, where NYC’s new Mayor Mamdani was warmly celebrated, felt blissful.
A blend of diaspora voices filled the room. There was a small feeling of belonging and also a familiar anxiousness of taking the mic after being a listener for so long on Pakistan. But it reminded me of humility, sabr (patience), trust for God’s plan.
I appreciated the Conclave’s emphasis on moving beyond the traditional security lens and centering policy, healthcare, climate, arts, and identity — a long overdue shift in Washington.
During the “Disruptors” panel, an elder asked what senior Pakistanis can do for their youth. Dr. Adil Najam responded, “Get out of the way.” I found that amusingly appropriate. It has been wonderful to witness Pakistani diaspora youth engagement increase over the years.
I was grateful that Palestine was acknowledged, from Hamid Mir’s remarks, to diaspora activism discussions, to closing remarks from a Senator in Islamabad affirming support for Palestinian statehood. I appreciated those who noticed that I was wearing my Palestine pins. Pakistan and Palestine are truly inseparable.
Words like intersectionality & solidarity, which define the Pakistani-American experience (and the experience of any diaspora population), were exchanged throughout the day and renewed a sense of hope.
I ended the day praying at the Georgetown campus mosque, using a proper ablution space instead of reenacting that “foot in the sink” struggle (DEI), many American Muslims understand. It was a gentle moment of belonging at a major University in our nation’s Capital, a place I have called a “second home” for over 16 years.
It has been nearly 7 years since I last felt the dust of Pakistan on my lips or walked on its soil. Every attempt to engage with Pakistan, intellectually and professionally, has met some form of social, cultural, economic, or systemic resistance.
At APSA last fall, I presented a paper on invisibility, how women in Pakistan navigate purdah and subtle forms of erasure. Ironically, I have felt versions of that invisibility, and it manifested at times when expressing love for Pakistan and a desire to contribute. It is strange to study something academically while experiencing it, even in diaspora spaces.
Resistance appears in many forms. I look forward to the day I can return to Pakistan again. Until then, I’m grateful for spaces like this that keep me connected, inspired, and grounded in why Pakistan remains so close to my heart.
I appreciate the GU and Pak Futures Foundation organizers for their efforts in making this a memorable event. I hope to continue to reflect on these types of diaspora experiences and my own research and fieldwork in Pakistan.
The last time I experienced such a large diaspora gathering in Washington, DC was in 2019, at Capital One Arena, when former Prime Minister Imran Khan addressed a massive crowd — known to be among the largest Pakistani diaspora gatherings for a Pakistani Political leader in America’s nation’s capital. I was also privileged to see him speak the year before at the Jinnah Convention Center in Islamabad, delivering his First 100 Days speech in November 2018. Today, he remains imprisoned. Yet his name surfaced repeatedly throughout the Conclave—among presenters and attendees alike—as Pakistanis continue to advocate for his release.
More of my pictures from the event can be found on my LinkedIn post from November HERE.
Have you ever experienced a moment that brought a great deal of nostalgia, belonging, all at once? I share this experience, because it brings me now to a type of qualitative method I have only recently discovered but have realized I had been implementing for a long time.
Autoethnography — The Personal as Fieldwork
The term “autoethnography” tragically entered my vocabulary only recently, yet it feels like a method I have been practicing my entire life. It brings together personal narrative and scholarly inquiry, treating our personal and professional experiences as real data. Autoethnography scholars argue that personal experience can function as a legitimate site of qualitative knowledge production, linking the self to broader cultural and structural contexts (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011).
In many ways, it resembles the kind of writing I naturally gravitate toward — memoir-style reflections that speak to broader political, economic, and social truths.
When I think about my doctoral fieldwork in Pakistan, the seven months total (over two field trips) I spent moving between Islamabad, Peshawar, Lahore, Karachi and the districts and villages of interior Sindh, alongside my Master’s fieldwork in Karachi, so much of those experiences have now become an autoethnographic archive. It wasn’t just interviews or local development and governance networks I was documenting. It was also my own relationship to Pakistan — the distance, the belonging, the yearning, the challenges, the visibility, the moments I felt at home, and the moments I felt unmistakably foreign.
Carrying Being Pakistani with me everywhere around Pakistan became its own kind of fieldnote practice, a silent conversation between text, land, memory, and identity. I have an essay about the book and its journey with me around Pakistan, which I had written at that time, and I still hope to share it in the near future. It was incredible to meet Raza Rumi, again, however, and tell him of what his book meant to me during my fieldwork.
The experience at Georgetown’s first Pakistan Conclave last November was a prime example of how autoethnography doesn’t necessarily require a traditional understanding of a “field site.” In fact, I treated Washington, DC as a field site for my dissertation, and I do believe that diaspora spaces can serve as field sites. It is what I had to do for my study of Afghanistan as a secondary case study, immersing with the Afghan diaspora in DC and in Pakistan, since travel was not possible.
My emotions, discomfort, and sense of invisibility in certain rooms, and the moments where my belonging flickered back to life — all of this is data. All of this has meaning, connecting to a larger narrative. And perhaps this is what autoethnography allows: the freedom to treat the inner world with the same seriousness we give to the outer one.
Autoethnography as Method and Socio-Cultural Memory
Autoethnography is a method that blends the personal and the scholarly. It treats memory, emotion, and positionality as analytic material to be interpreted instead of a form of “researcher bias” (Chang, 2008). It recognizes that the researcher is not outside the story, looking in, but inside the story, shaped by it and responding to it. Personal memory, emotion, identity, experience, and cultural context become part of the analysis rather than something to sweep under the rug or hide.
For me, autoethnography feels natural and one honest way to write about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the intersections where I stand.
Scholars like Carolyn Ellis, Arthur Bochner, Tessa Muncey, and Heewon Chang have written that autoethnography allows researchers to interrogate the interaction between self and society, the private and the political, the personal and the structural. It produces embodied knowledge rather than detachment frm the knowledge.
My fieldwork had an autoethnographic element to it, even before I had the language for it. Each interview, each transportation ride, each conversation in Sindh, Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and the Federal areas, each encounter in Karachi or Islamabad required me to negotiate who I was in that moment… American-born. Pakistani in origin. Muslim woman. Researcher. Alien-Outsider. Insider. Listener. Witness. Fly-on-the-wall Anthropologist. Social Scientist…etc.
This is why returning to Pakistan for me post-PhD is not just about travel for leisure to meet family and friends. My return reflects research continuity, storytelling, and methodology. It is about identity, memory, and symbolism.
Positionality — Naming Who We Are in What We Study
In the last two years, I have written positionality statements into some of my academic working papers — including the 2025 APSA papers on invisibility, belonging, and mental health. I included them because it felt dishonest not to. This has become essential to my practice.
A positionality statement asks the researcher to name the identities, privileges, values, and lived experiences that shape how they approach their work. It acknowledges that our lenses are never neutral. It creates transparency and responsibility. It answers the question: Who are you, and how does that shape what you see?
I share an article here on Medium about my Academic mental health paper:
Surviving Academia, Sustaining Hope: A World Mental Health Day Reflection
We cannot study invisibility as Pakistani women, or mental health as survivors, or belonging in academia as “outsiders,” without acknowledging the emotional, psychological, and social history we bring into these topics.
Positionality is not inherently a confessional stance. The researcher is accepting that knowledge is inherently relational — formulated through who we are, where we stand, and what we have survived. Within qualitative inquiry, positionality is increasingly understood as central to rigor and ethical transparency rather than a confessional exercise (Denzin, 2014).
And in the context of autoethnography, positionality becomes even more essential. When the scholar is the site, the data of inquiry, honesty, and truth-telling become an integral part of that methodology. Transparency is essential to the rigor.
My own experiences in Pakistani diaspora spaces, my long-standing struggle with being unseen in both academic and cultural circles, and even the visceral emotions I experienced during the Conclave event — these are not distractions from the research. They become an integral part of the research.
Writing about Pakistan, fieldwork, diaspora, and identity through an autoethnographic lens demands a level of self-situating that I am only now beginning to fully embrace.
Naming who I am — a Pakistani American Muslim woman, the daughter of immigrants, a survivor, currently an independent scholar navigating the academic market — strengthens the integrity of my research rather than weakening it.
For me, positionality has become inseparable from invisibility. Critical autoethnography has been used to surface how invisibility, hypervisibility, and marginalization operate in everyday professional and cultural spaces (Ellis & Bochner, 2000).
Not only did I study invisibility in my research on gender in Pakistan, I have lived many forms of it for years. In professional circles. In diaspora communities. In academic spaces. Many Pakistani-American women have experienced this challenge. This is why the Conclave hit something deeper.
Visibility can be healing, but it can also trigger old wounds and traumas. Hypervisibility can bring surveillance and scrutiny. Invisibility brings erasure and dismissal. Standing in between those two worlds is something many women of color understand intimately. This is where research becomes personal. This is where writing becomes a form of survival. And this is where that survival could make things better for future generations, for those who share the same identity, as they follow our footsteps.
Narrative, Research, and Returning to Pakistan
When I sat in the Georgetown auditorium, I felt my fieldwork returning to me. Time elapses, but all of it remains relevant. The memory of the experience, in and of itself, is data. That’s part of autoethnography. I remembered the interviews I conducted across Pakistan. I remembered the elders in Sindh who shared stories of drought, migration, mental health, and resilience. I remembered the young women in community gatherings who spoke about gender, voice, and purdah.
And I remembered how difficult it was, as an American-born Pakistani female budding scholar, to carry both privilege and marginalization in the very same breath.
I realized how much of my future writing will be bringing together the following concepts:
the intellectual
the emotional
the social and cultural
the spiritual
the political
These reflections are all part of the same story. And I look forward to exploring more of this with you this year.
Reflection Prompts
When have you “returned” to a homeland or identity without physically traveling…through a room, a smell, a conversation, a public event, or a moment of recognition? What did it awaken in you?
Where do you feel both hypervisible and invisible at the same time—and what does that teach you about belonging, power, and voice in diasporic or professional spaces?
If your emotions were treated as data (not distractions), what would they be trying to tell you about what you value, what you miss, and what you’re meant to contribute?
“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” - Epictetus
A Reflection On Personal Storytelling
I have learned that I am a natural memoirist. I think I have succeeded in separating my creative work (more of a memoir-style writing) from my academic work. But I have now found a natural fitting category of writing that connects to my positionality, and that brings together my creative writing habits with scholarly works. And I think it corresponds well with qualitative research.
Recently, I came across a post on LinkedIn that appeared to be discouraging the expression of storytelling and the personalization of humanitarian work in conflict and war-torn contexts. I wanted to share my thoughts because I have reflected on this for many years.
While I understand where this is coming from, I am a scholar of conflict and fragility working in the field of development, activism, and human rights advocacy, and I see this a bit differently. It is essential to understand the interconnectedness of our shared humanity. Framing personal reflection and storytelling as something that takes away from the study of conflict potentially "others" suffering, and, unintentionally, reinforces a savior complex.
Many people working in these fields end up enduring their own histories of trauma and loss. For some, that experience is precisely what draws them to this work. As a memoirist, I write my own story alongside my research and advocacy. I consider that work equally important.
Honoring the struggles of others does not require erasing one’s own journey. Thoughtful self reflection can enhance accountability, humility, and ethical engagement in conflict-affected contexts.
Memoir and personal narrative are humanizing. Not indulgent. Empathy and compassion are skills that need constant nurturing through critical reflection. These skills are born from having felt pain and suffering oneself and from being willing to embrace it honestly and wholeheartedly.
Many of my favorite writers who have influenced my thinking and public conscience are/were also memoirists, including Emerson, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maya Angelou, Arundhati Roy, Brene Brown, Audre Lorde, Malcolm X, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldua, Edward Said, and Viktor Frankl. Their personal narratives were not distractions from seeking justice.
These writers prove that personal narrative has always been central to political education, public service, moral leadership, social transformation and struggles for justice, even if they aren't labeled "humanitarians."
Autoethnography and critical reflexivity are, hence, foundational to qualitative inquiry and personal storytelling. You can care deeply about others, work in service of justice, and still share your own story at the same time. These commitments actually strengthen one another.
As a person who wears multiple hats and holds various intersecting identities, I cannot agree with the idea that personal storytelling diminishes the seriousness of conflict.
I hope you can take a moment to reflect on how narrative, critical reflexivity, and sharing our personal experiences as humanitarians can also strengthen our collective commitment to justice and human dignity.
References/Resources on Autoethnography:
Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams, & Arthur P. Bochner (2011). “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS).
This is a well-known, highly cited overview, defining autoethnography as a process and product—writing personal experience to understand cultural experience. It helps in justifying rigor, ethics, and why narrative writing can be legitimate qualitative scholarship.Heewon Chang (2008). Autoethnography as Method.
A practical methods text that explores data collection, analysis, and interpretation in autoethnographic work (including exercises). It helps strengthen the “method” language in our research (how memory, emotion, and observation become analyzable material).Tony E. Adams, Stacy Linn Holman Jones, & Carolyn Ellis (2015). Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research. (OUP).
A clear, field-friendly book that explains major approaches and debates in autoethnography, including how to evaluate quality beyond traditional positivist metrics. This is especially helpful for those of us who study belonging and visibility.Norman K. Denzin (2014). Interpretive Autoethnography (2nd ed.). (SAGE).
Denzin frames autoethnography as interpretive and often critical/performative, emphasizing meaning-making, epiphanies, and the relationship between biography and power. It helps foster the “in-between” positioning and the politics of invisibility.Carolyn Ellis & Arthur P. Bochner (2000). “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed.).
This is a critical chapter that demonstrates how the field understands autoethnography within qualitative inquiry. Reflexivity and narrative inquiry are part of how qualitative knowledge is produced.Melissa Tombro (2016). Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing in the Classroom. Open SUNY Textbooks.
I’m excited to apply this comprehensive, practical guide for instructors who want to integrate autoethnographic and personal narrative writing into classroom practice. This integration would involve reflective storytelling in qualitative inquiry traditions and helping students connect self-reflection to research questions. Anyone teaching writing or qualitative methods who wishes to support learners in applying personal experience as analytic material (rather than simple self-expression) would find this valuable.
Keep Showing Up
My writings are always intended to be sincere and not intended for a large applause. Because writing has always been the way I return “home” when I am far from the people and places that have captured my heart. I am glad I have found my voice through rigorous methods of qualitative inquiry, as well as through other means, like creative writing.
Sometimes engagement helps us feel valued and visible. If this post finds you in your inbox or on Substack, I would love to hear from you!
Pakistan is one such place that remains close to my heart as a site of research, identity, and purpose. Each time I return to it intellectually, I learn something new about myself. There is something powerful about being deeply fascinated by a country and equally committed to qualitative research methods. The two work well together. They worked beautifully during my graduate studies, and I now understand that connection more clearly through the language of autoethnography. This is the power of positionality.
In the end, writing is how I continue to remind myself that I belong. That is why I must keep showing up. In writing, in research, in the classroom, or in the field, wherever that may be.
Closing Observations and Thank you!
That evening, when I walked back from Georgetown, I realized that all my work — whether academic, reflective, or creative — has always lived in the “in-between.”
At the intersections… Interdisciplinary.
Between Pakistan and America. Between the “Global South” and the “Global North.” The East and the West. Between belonging and displacement. Between scholarship and memory. Between visibility and erasure. Between fieldwork (primary data) and secondary data collection.
It is why autoethnography feels like a natural method for me. And why positionality statements have become a necessary part of my academic writing….and why I continue returning to narratives of diaspora, identity, and invisibility — even when they are emotionally taxing and difficult to write. I am excited to keep exploring more resources to learn more.
In many ways, the Conclave event last November was an affirmation for me in my decision to continue my research in Pakistan. I have been writing a monograph on qualitative fieldwork in Pakistan (a second book project which is moving forward). It may perhaps be my first book, with the goal to complete in the coming year. I had pitched an essay about these very intersections — fieldwork, diaspora, literature, and identity — and I hope to see that published soon too.
Until my next post that will look into autoethnography further, I am glad to have reflected on these moments with you — as data, as memory, with some nostalgia, and some hope to continue finding opportunities in the diaspora, and beyond, for the social and cultural immersion. The yearning for a return to this land only grows when so many questions are left unanswered.
Qualitative inquiry continues to be the most honest and transformative lens through which I understand my parents’ homeland, Pakistan, and myself. I feel connected to it in a scholarly and practical way that embraces and honors “researcher bias,” positionality, and the depth of emotional data that comes from walking on and tasting the soil of my ancestral origins.
In Solidarity & Peace,
Dr. Elsa
TOP 7 January 2026 News Highlights
Happy Black History Month!
Please stay tuned for my Feb 1st “World Hijab Day” Reflection before Ramadan! But for now, Happy World Hijab Day!
Zohran Mamdani sworn in as NYC mayor using Quran. Al Jazeera — The historic inauguration of the first Muslim and South Asian mayor in NYC.
Disappeared bodies, mass burials and ‘30,000 dead’: what is the truth of Iran’s death toll? The Guardian — Testimonies and reporting on the brutal crackdown in Iran and efforts to conceal killings.
Iran protests: rights groups say mass killings amount to crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch — More evidence of mass protester killings since January.
EU formally designates Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as terrorist organisation
The Guardian — Major diplomatic escalation following violent crackdown on protestsIsraeli airstrikes in Gaza kill civilians despite ceasefire efforts
Al Jazeera — Strikes kill at least 31 Palestinians as Rafah crossing nears reopening.Pakistan says 92 militants killed after coordinated attacks in Balochistan
Reuters — Heavy clashes highlight ongoing security challenges in the Southwestern province.Afghanistan launches $100m food security programme as crisis deepens
Reuters — Expanded humanitarian initiative amid acute hunger and economic collapse.One-third of Sudan displaced in 1,000 days of conflict, IOM warns
International Organization for Migration — Massive displacement crisis amid ongoing war.
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BOOK RECOMMENDATION
Being Pakistani: Society, Culture, and the Arts, by Raza Rumi
I first encountered Being Pakistani at a bookstore in Islamabad, during my doctoral fieldwork in Pakistan (2018), and it became my companion throughout my travels for five months—through university corridors, at USAID and World Bank briefings, in coffee shops and guest houses, on a long bus ride from Sukkur to Karachi, and into the villages of interior Sindh. As I conducted more than 180 interviews/meetings across the country, the book helped me make sense of Pakistan beyond being a research site. It became an evolving intellectual and emotional landscape I am still learning to understand from both within and afar.
Years later, encountering Raza Rumi again at the Georgetown Pakistan Public Policy Conclave in DC felt especially nostalgic—like returning to a guide who had been with me years earlier in the field. The book continues to inform how I think about what it means to “be Pakistani” across distance, adulthood, womanhood, religion, and diaspora, making it a special read for scholars, writers, and anyone seeking to engage Pakistan beyond the narrow security lenses.
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QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Why are you busy looking for your home? Your home is within you.” - Rumi
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