Autoethnography

Autoethnography is a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. Autoethnography is a self-reflective form of writing used across various disciplines such as communication studies, performance studies, education, English literature, anthropology, social work, sociology, history, psychology, religious studies, marketing, business and educational administration, arts education, and physiotherapy.The concept of autoethnography…synthesizes both a postmodern ethnography, in which the realist conventions and objective observer position of standard ethnography have been called into question, and a postmodern autobiography, in which the notion of the coherent, individual self has been similarly called into question. The term has a double sense - referring either to the ethnography of one's own group or to autobiographical writing that has ethnographic interest. Thus, either a self- (auto-) ethnography or an autobiographical (auto-) ethnography can be signaled by 'autoethnography. (p. 2)I can't review someone I feel sorry or hopeless about...I'm forced to feel sorry because of the way they present themselves as: dissed blacks, abused women, or disenfranchised homosexuals - as performers, in short, who make victimhood victim artA theory is falsifiable ... if there exists at least one non-empty class of homotypic basic statements which are forbidden by itI knew I had to contribute to knowledge about coming out by saying something new about the experience...I also needed a new angle toward coming out; my experience, alone, of coming out was not sufficient to justify a narrative.I convey the sadness and the joy I feel about my relationships with my adopted child, the child I chose not to adopt, and my grandmother. I focus on the emotions and bodily experiences of both losing and memorializing my grandmother'Reflexivity includes both acknowledging and critiquing our place and privilege in society and using the stories we tell to break long-held silences on power, relationships, cultural taboos, and forgotten and/or suppressed experiences....how others can perceive my ideas as relationally irresponsible concessions to homophobic others and to insidious heteronormative cultural structures; by not being aggressively critical, my work does not do enough to engage and improve the lives of others.I believe you should try to construct the story as close to the experience as you can remember it, especially in the initial version. If you do, it will help you work through the meaning and purpose of the story. But it's not so important that narratives represent lives accurately – only, as Art(Arthur Bochner) argues, 'that narrators believe they are doing so' (Bochner, 2002, p. 86). Art believes that we can judge one narrative interpretation of events against another, but we cannot measure a narrative against the events themselves because the meaning of the events comes clear only in their narrative expression. (p.126)What is clear ... is that the assumptions of interpretive inquiry are incompatible with the desire for foundational criteria. How we are to work out this problem, one way or another, would seem to merit serious attention.Self-narratives ... are not so much academic as they are existential, reflecting a desire to grasp or seize the possibilities of meaning, which is what gives life its imaginative and poetic qualities ... a poetic social science does not beg the question of how to separate good narrativization from bad ... the good ones help the reader or listener to understand and feel the phenomena under scrutiny. (p. 270)Much like the autoethnographic texts themselves, the boundaries of research and their maintenance are socially constructed (Sparkes, 2000). In justifying autoethnography as proper research, it should be noted that ethnographers have acted autobiographically before, but in the past they may not have been aware of doing so, and taken their genre for granted (Coffey, 1999). Autoethnographies may leave reviewers in a perilous position. ... the reviewers were not sure if the account was proper research (because of the style of representation), and the verification criteria they wished to judge this research by appeared to be inappropriate. Whereas the use of autoethnographic methods may be increasing, knowledge of how to evaluate and provide feedback to improve such accounts appears to be lagging. As reviewers begin to develop ways in which to judge autoethnography, they must resist the temptation to 'seek universal foundational criteria lest one form of dogma simply replaces another' (Sparkes, 2002b, p. 223). However, criteria for evaluating personal writing have barely begun to develop (DeVault, 1997). (p. 26) Autoethnography is a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. Autoethnography is a self-reflective form of writing used across various disciplines such as communication studies, performance studies, education, English literature, anthropology, social work, sociology, history, psychology, religious studies, marketing, business and educational administration, arts education, and physiotherapy. According to Maréchal (2010), 'autoethnography is a form or method of research that involves self-observation and reflexive investigation in the context of ethnographic field work and writing' (p. 43). A well-known autoethnographer, Carolyn Ellis (2004) defines it as 'research, writing, story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political' (p. xix). However, it is not easy to reach a consensus on the term's definition. For instance, in the 1970s, autoethnography was more narrowly defined as 'insider ethnography', referring to studies of the (culture of) a group of which the researcher is a member (Hayano, 1979). Nowadays, however, as Ellingson and Ellis (2008) point out, 'the meanings and applications of autoethnography have evolved in a manner that makes precise definition difficult' (p. 449). According to Adams, Jones, and Ellis in Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research, 'Autoethnography is a research method that: Uses a researcher's personal experience to describe and critique cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences. Acknowledges and values a researcher's relationships with others.... Shows 'people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles'' (Adams, 2015). 'Social life is messy, uncertain, and emotional. If our desire to research social life, then we must embrace a research method that, to the best of its/our ability, acknowledges and accommodates mess and chaos, uncertainty and emotion' (Adams, 2015). 1970s: The term autoethnography was used to describe studies in which cultural members provide insight about their own cultures. Walter Goldschmidt proposed that all 'autoethnography' is focused around the self and reveals, 'personal investments, interpretations, and analyses.' David M. Hayano was an Associate Professor of Anthropology at California State University in Northridge. As an anthropologist, Hayano was interested in the role that an individual's own identity had in their research. Unlike more traditional research methods, Hayano believed there was value in a researcher 'conducting and writing ethnographies of their own people.'