Expanding the Possibilities of Qualitative Inquiry: A Review of Critical Autoethnograpy: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life (original) (raw)
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Book Review: Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life
2020
This review critiques Boylorn and Orbe’s Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life. Communication scholars’ account, equal parts visual and textual exploration of diversity and identity, offers the reader a unique interpretation in which our personal selves interact with the impersonal world. Through personal narratives, the authors explore the tangled relationships between culture and communication. Using auto- ethnography as a method, they present how we might further explore the aspects of race, gender, socioeconomic status, nationality, age, spirituality, and health. This review will evaluate the authors’ approach, as well as the effectiveness that autoethnography permits scholars to better understand the communicative relationships between identity and diversity.
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.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography-2006-Anderson-373-95
2015
Autoethnography has recently become a popular form of qualitative research. The current discourse on this genre of research refers almost exclusively to “evocative autoethnography” that draws upon postmodern sensibilities and whose advocates distance themselves from realist and analytic ethnographic traditions. The dominance of evocative autoethnography has obscured recognition of the compatibility of autoethnographic research with more traditional ethnographic practices. The author proposes the term analytic autoethnography to refer to research in which the researcher is (1) a full member in the research group or setting, (2) visible as such a member in published texts, and (3) committed to developing theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena. After briefly tracing the history of proto-autoethnographic research among realist ethnographers, the author proposes five key features of analytic autoethnography. He concludes with a consideration of the advantages and limitati...
Autoethnography as a Genre of Qualitative Research: A Journey Inside Out
International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2012
In this article, I argue that an autobiographical narrative approach is highly suited to educational research. I discuss how a researcher's personal narrative, or autoethnography, can act as a source of privileged knowledge. I further argue that personal experience methods can be used on a variety of topics relevant to teaching and the field of education in order to expand knowledge. Autobiographical narrative is a research genre and a methodology. It offers opportunities to highlight identity construction as it covers various aspects of the narrator's life. In an attempt to contribute to literature based on Muslim women's educational experiences, I have disclosed a series of personal experiences. I have thereby demonstrated the value of autoethnography. When writing an autoethnography, the researcher can develop a deeper understanding of his or her own life. Moreover, reading an autoethnography, one is able to view how others live their lives, which can also contribute to a deeper understanding of life in general. Therefore, autoethnography-whether read or written-has a strong, educational merit.
2015
This review explores how critical autoethnography as a qualitative research tool can be used to capture some of the social and material realities embedded in the processes of embodiment and performance and its implication for queer of color critique. Using African immigrant queer identity performances as an example, I elaborate how autoethnography can be used to highlight multiple, complex and sometimes contradictory identity negotiation strategies used by African queer migrants to navigate simultaneous systems of privilege and oppression. I show that identities of African queer migrants are ongoing processes riddled with constant negotiation and re-negotiation with systems with power which autoethnography can be used to illuminate.
Upsetting the (Schooling) set up: autoethnography as critical race methodology
This manuscript utilizes autoethnography as a critical race methodology. Specifically, the authors use generative autoethnographya collective spin-storyto illustrate how their past personal experiences are present in their current educational lives. This generative autoethnography fulfills CRT's tenets of: intercentricity of race and racism; challenging dominant Ideology; the commitment to social justice; the centrality of experiential knowledge; and interdisciplinary perspectives. We illustrate the dialectical relationship of our lived experiences in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Oakland, and how these experiences propel the educational work that we do, the voices we choose to lift up, and how we choose to lift them. Shared publicly, these stories further invite readers to critically reflect on their own personal experiences and social realities, continuing the generative praxis of autoethnography. In this way, autoethnography, like critical race method, is an analytic tool that fosters internal reflection, intra/intercultural compassion, and community activism.
Telling Our Stories: Using Autoethnography to Construct Identities at the Intersections
Scholarly inquiry into identity development is a foundation of the student affairs field; typically, such scholarship examines domains of student development as discrete entities. This paper explains the process an autoethnographic research group employed to explore how multiple identities have been shaped during coresearchers' lifetimes. Findings highlight how this methodology can contribute to new understandings of the intersection of student affairs research and practice.
Doing Ethnography, Being an Ethnographer: The Autoethnographic Research Process and I
I examine here Theory and Scholarship (taken to be formalized social scientific frameworks that seek to map out the real world and social actions in an objective fashion) via an autoethnographic lens. Chiefly, I ask how autoethnography as a research method reconfigures them: how may we extend knowledge using autoethnography? While much critique has centered on the “doing” (dispassionately?) versus “being” (going native?) of autoethnography, I argue that such a dichotomy is inherently false. Instead, doing is located within the ethnographer’s very being, so that a closer look at the autoethnographic research process is required, from conception to implementation to introspection. I attempt such a processual analysis here: drawing on an earlier social scientific project, I relate the intellectual and social process whereby it was translated into an autoethnography. Using a performative lens to illustrate the dialectical mode of doing and being in the research process, I intersperse portions of personal narrative with academic writing, to enable a disjunctural appreciation of the various layers of interpretation. While the epistemic framework I hold to here is indeed a poststructural one, privileging fragmentation and social situatedness, it also emphasizes continuity and interconnections in the research process.
Exploring Identity: What We Do as Qualitative Researchers
The Qualitative Report, 2018
Although there has been much discussion about distinctions between quantitative and qualitative research, our purpose here is not to revive those conversations, but instead to attempt to explore and articulate our identities as researchers who practice in the qualitative tradition. Using autoethnography as our methodology, we as six researchers from various social science disciplines and at various career stages engaged in focused introspection by responding individually to two questions: who am I as a qualitative researcher; and how did I come to that understanding? This reflection led to discussions of those elements and experiences that have shaped the way we see ourselves in the context of our research. The question of “identity” evolved into a discussion about “what we do.” During our data analysis, six themes emerged, representing our group’s responses: (a) building epistemology, (b) making/doing good research, (c) as an art or craft, (d) why does qualitative research need leg...
Community Autoethnography: Compiling the Personal and Resituating Whiteness
2009
Examining whiteness (in) education is a journey of identity and materiality. In this article, the authors adopt an approach to research that highlights the role of performance in constituting identity. They believe that theorizing identity in this way is facilitated through autoethnographic storytelling, which allows one to theorize material performances of identity, along with the culture in which those performances are situated. In the following, the authors dialogically theorize whiteness education through their stories. They draw upon themselves as individuals and one another as partners in humanity in order to make sense of education within a context of whiteness. They develop community autoethnography as a method with which to engage in such dialogical theorization.