My Auto. (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
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. """
Book Review: Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research
2016
The field of second language writing (SLW) has embraced a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative research approaches. This is evidenced by a number of prominent researchers and theorists advocating for the continued expansion of the research methods that we welcome in our journals and that we nurture through graduate education (e.g., Connor, 2011). One family of research approaches that has enjoyed a growing place in our field has been ethnographic ones. They have been valued in part for their ability to engage with research topics on various levels by considering not only the phenomenon under examination but its place in a wider sociocultural milieu and the impacts of these contexts on the experiences being studied. Under-recognized (and utilized) in SLW, however, are autoethnographic approaches to researching L2 writing.