Autoethnography

Here are some resources for students who may be contemplating carrying out an autoethnographic research project.

There is a new journal that has recently been established.

The Journal of Autoethnography (JoAE) is a refereed, international, and interdisciplinary journal devoted to the purposes, practices, and principles of autoethnography

The library has a useful collection of e-books on autoethnography.

Two papers that are worth perusing before you embark on an autoethnographic approach are:

Adams, T. E., & Herrmann, A. F. (2020). Expanding Our Autoethnographic Future. Journal of Autoethnography, 1(1), 1-8. doi:10.1525/joae.2020.1.1.1

and

Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2010). Autoethnography: An Overview. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1). doi:10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589

The Ellis et al. paper is a useful beginning point.

This quote from that paper is a good indicator of how this approach is carried out:

When researchers do autoethnography, they retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity. However, in addition to telling about experiences, autoethnographers often are required by social science publishing conventions to analyze these experiences. As Mitch ALLEN says, an autoethnographer must
"look at experience analytically. Otherwise [you're] telling [your] story—and that's nice—but people do that on Oprah [a U.S.-based television program] every day. Why is your story more valid than anyone else's? What makes your story more valid is that you are a researcher. You have a set of theoretical and methodological tools and a research literature to use. That's your advantage. If you can't frame it around these tools and literature and just frame it as 'my story,' then why or how should I privilege your story over anyone else's I see 25 times a day on TV?" (personal interview, May 4, 2006) [8]

Some samples of autoethnographic research

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