The main goal of the 2025 Hawaii International Conference on Education is to provide an opportunity for academicians and professionals from various education related fields from all over the world to come together and learn from each other. An additional goal of the conference is to provide a place for academicians and professionals with cross-disciplinary interests related to education to meet and interact with members inside and outside their own particular disciplines.

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There has long been an ongoing debate about the validity of autoethnography as a research method. Some have considered the method to be self-indulgent, while others value the benefits of this form of inquiry, such as deeper reflexivity, personal engagement and stronger impact to the reader. To even begin to understand the complexities involved in autoethnography, we must start by exploring the ways in which it is entrenched in symbolic interactionism, how the self interacts with others, creating meaning through those interactions, and how those meanings are both derived from and inform the evolution of the culture that defines day-to-day existence of the individual. These meaning-making interactions between the self and our environment, be they other individuals or symbols, shape and guide us in countless ways. It is through autoethnography, in its many different forms, that we can learn reflexively and develop a more tangible understanding of our own development as it relates to the people and culture around us.

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Called "The Analytic and Critical Self: How Autoethnography is Used in Reflexive Learning", the paper I will be presenting will use my own autoethnographic experiences to plot my path in self-discovery and learning. This will be achieved through exploring the investigative component of analytic autoethnography while highlighting the inequities, social justice and activist elements of critical autoethnography.