Autoethnography in Practice: A Book Review of British Contemporary Autoethnography (original) (raw)

Autoethnography in Practice: A Book Review of British Contemporary Ethnography

The Qualitative Report

In this article, we consider and offer a review of the edited volume, Contemporary British Autoethnography (2013). Within this volume, the editors, Short, Turner, and Grant, bring together 15 autoethnographic representations, which address issues of subjectivity, voice, writing, knowing, and being. Each contributor offers insights located within a particular field(s), while simultaneously sharing perspectives related to the qualitative community more generally. In this paper, we provide a brief summary of each chapter and also offer several questions generated after engaging with this volume. We invite others to participate in considering how this volume may be applied to their own research and everyday lives.

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.

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:

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.

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.

Mind the research gaps: drawing on the self in autoethnographic writing.

When writers and other scholars seek to define a ‘gap’ in knowledge for their writing, creative and/or academic, to fill, they inevitably draw on their experiences and ‘hunches’. The notion that ideas for research begin with a ‘hunch’ is ingrained in literature on methodology (Cormack, 1991). Educated guesses, organised systematically and purposefully, emerge from exploratory and reflective practice. Minding the gap – identifying, claiming and inhabiting an original space for writing – is a requirement for writers in the academy, creative or otherwise, research student or researcher. The epistemological origins of the gap go back to the self and the realm of autoethnography. However, to draw upon the autoethnographic in university discourses, artefacts and texts draws attention to another gap: the ethical gap between writers in the academy bound by a HREC (Human Research Ethics Committee) and those beyond it whose reputation licenses them to draw more freely on the world around them and its ‘others’. This study minds two gaps. It asks what the implications of inevitably drawing on the self to generate a research question might look like. Then it explores the ethical implications for researchers in autoethnographic writing who discover they need to consider the role of others in their narratives more deeply than they might as professional writers.

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.

Performing Autoethnography: An Embodied Methodological Praxis

Qualitative Inquiry, 2001

This article argues the personal/professional/political emancipatory potential of autoethnographic performance as a method of inquiry. Autoethnographic performance is the convergence of the "autobiographic impulse" and the "ethnographic moment" represented through movement and critical self-reflexive discourse in performance, articulating the intersections of peoples and culture through the innersanctions of the always migratory identity. The article offers evaluative standards for the autoethnographic performance methodology, calling on the body as a site of scholarly awareness and corporeal literacy. Autoethnographic performance makes us acutely conscious of how we "Iwitness" our own reality constructions. Interpreting culture through the self-reflections and cultural refractions of identity is a defining feature of autoethnographic performance.