On first-person narrative scholarship: Autoethnography as acts of meaning (original) (raw)
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Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories
Journal of Transformative Praxis, 2021
Autoethnography covers a wide range of narrative representations, thereby bridging the gap of the boundaries by expressing autoethnographers' painful and gainful lived experiences. These representations arise from local stories, vignettes, dialogues, and role plays by unfolding action, reaction, and interaction in the form of self-narration. Likewise, the autoethnographic texts must exhibit the autoethnographers' critical reflections on the overall process of the inquiry. These exhibitions shall alert the autoethnographers' research ethics, reflexivity, alternative modes of representation, inquiry, and storytelling. The original articles in this issue that rises from the domain of critical social theories within the various ranges of theoretical perspectives include journeying through informing, reforming, and transforming teacher education; critical ethnographic research tradition; a critical and political reading of the excerpts of myths; climate change education and its interface with indigenous knowledge and general traits of the participants as transformed teachers.
Evocative Autoethnography:Writing Lives and Telling Stories (preface)
is comprehensive text is the rst to introduce evocative autoethnography as a methodology and a way of life in the human sciences. Using numerous examples from their work and others, world-renowned scholars Arthur Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, originators of the method, emphasize how to connect intellectually and emotionally to the lives of readers throughout the challenging process of representing lived experiences. Written as the story of a ctional workshop, based on many similar sessions led by the authors, it incorporates group discussions, common questions, and workshop handouts. e book:
Writing the Self: Introducing Autoethnography
Ethnography in anthropology has for a very long time been focused on the study of the ‘Other’. Field methods and techniques have been developed accordingly. While ethnography is a method of qualitative research that describes human social phenomena based on fieldwork of a community which is not the researcher’s own, in autoethnography the researcher studies the ‘Self’. The benefits of autoethnography are many - research of such a personal nature might give us insight into problems often overlooked in culture. These could be issues such as the nature of identity, ethnicity, sexuality, political life and undercurrents etc. However, there are many who criticize this form of ethnography as sentimental, unscientific and personal. This could, if done subjectively, lead to rewriting of one’s collective memory as well. This paper discusses autoethnography as a method of enquiry and puts forward a review of some of the prominent anthropological works done in the area. It also discusses the ethics of doing such a narrative yet experimental ethnography in anthropology.
At Play in the Fields of Qualitative Research and Autoethnography
International Review of Qualitative Research, 2019
This "playful," layered performance autoethnography is a strange account of spoiled identity, gatekeeping, and the fear surrounding qualitative research and autoethnography. Based on the theoretical sensibilities of Georg Simmel and Jacques Derrida, the strange account is advanced here as a technique for writing about secrets or threatening situations. Strange accounts place readers in safe proximity to the secret while keeping the secret "in play." Strange accounts serve practical, relational, and analytical purposes by disguising or omitting information about the situation, the identities of those involved (including the authors), when and where the events took place, and its meaning, while also following a guideline of compassion and an ethic of care.
Whose Story Is It? An Autoethnography Concerning Narrative Identity
The Qualitative Report, 2015
This paper is divided into three parts, each separated by centrally spaced asterisks. The first part, co-written on the basis of the standpoint interests of both authors, outlines the historical, philosophical, theoretical and methodological contexts for the use of autoethnographic short stories in the social and human sciences. The functions and representational practices of this genre are reviewed and discussed, and the main criticisms leveled by its detractors responded to. This sets the scene for the second part of the paper, an autoethnographic short story. Effectively a story of stories, it was constructed directly from the first author’s memories of his early life in relation to textual material and was written exclusively by him. In part three, some of the significant issues raised in the story are discussed in relation to larger co-evolving social, cultural and therapeutic frameworks from a reflexive and narrative identity perspective. It is written as, and represents, an e...
Handbook of Autoethnography, 2013
Video by Stacy Holman Jones at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRHdcikk5EA Introduction: In many ways, autoethnography represents a challenge to some of the very foundations and key tenets of much social science research in its exhortation explicitly to situate and “write in” the researcher as a key player—often the key player—within a research project or account, as illustrated by the opening excerpt from my autoethnographic account of being a female distance runner. Despite its burgeoning popularity, increasing sophistication and sustained challenge to more orthodox forms of qualitative research, there are those who view autoethnography’s focus on “self” with deep suspicion and scepticism, accusing the genre of flirting with indulgent, “navel-gazing” forms of autobiography. For many of us, however, it represents a fresh and innovative variation of ethnography—and more!—where an ethnographic perspective and analysis are brought to bear on our personal, lived experience, directly linking the micro level with the macro cultural and structural levels in exciting ways. For us, too, autoethnography provides rare discursive space for voices too often muted or forcibly silenced within more traditional forms of research, opening up and democratizing the research space to those seeking to contest hegemonic discourses of whatever flavor. """
Autoethnography as a Poetics of Worlding and a Politics of Becoming
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2019
This article analyzes the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects and the poet Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric as autoethnographies of affective encounter in which the authors stylistically fracture their positionalities such that the embodied evidence of experience becomes visceral political potential. In Ordinary Affects, Stewart uses autoethnography to conjure the intensities of affect that manifest in everyday moments and spaces of encounter, detailing disparate scenes of immanent force to provide an antidote to academic studies that render power inert as they employ totalizing systems such as “neoliberalism” to analyze its effects. Using “she” to index the difference between her first-person identity as a writer and a body that imagines and senses the political-as-becoming, Stewart invites readers to participate in a poetics of worlding during which the author does not play expert witness. In the American lyric Citizen, Claudia Rankine also splits her narrative voice and uses both “I” and “you,” while evoking affective encounters of racialization that are forces of habit and routines of violence. Her poem includes not only personal anecdote or feeling but also events and texts of popular culture, enlisting her readers to take part in a poetics of worlding and a politics of becoming through which the author bears witness to “I” through “you.” In effect, Rankine and Stewart use autoethnography to resist portraying political life as bound by discursive logics of self and subjecthood.
How Do We Craft Autoethnography? A Modest Review
The Qualitative Report, 2024
I am writing this review as an essential reading for readers and writers of the book-Crafting Autoethnography: Processes and Practices of Making Self and Culture, edited by Jackie Goode, Karen Lumsden, and Jan Bradford, which explores the art of crafting autoethnography (Goode et al., 2023). As a novice autoethnographer, I have grappled with challenges and explored borders while shaping my narrative as a self-narrator of autoethnographic writing. So, in this review, I have attempted to engage readers by offering the invitation, encouraging initial reading as entry to the book, subsequent re-entry, and eventual exit as my evaluation of the book. This book resonates with me, emphasizing the significance of writing our lives and stories, developing self-awareness through performative, philosophical, and artistic writing, and shaping our identity-advocacy and transformation. Through diverse perspectives-from sociology to the visual arts-the contributors of the book illuminate their processes, inviting novice and veteran autoethnographers to write to explore the intricate craft of autoethnography.