Autoethnography
Autoethnography: An Overview
By Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams and Arthur P. Bochner
"In particular, they wanted to concentrate on ways of producing meaningful, accessible, and evocative research grounded in personal experience, research that would sensitize readers to issues of iden tity politics, to experiences shrouded in silence, and to forms of representation that deepen our capacity to empathize with people who are different from us."
"As a method, autoethnography combines characteristics of autobiography and ethnography. When writing an autobiography, an author retroactively and selectively writes about past experiences. Usually, the author does not live through these experiences solely to make them part of a published document; rather, these experiences are assembled using hindsight."
"When researchers do ethnography, they study a culture's relational prac tices, common values and beliefs, and shared experiences for the purpose of helping insiders (cultural members) and outsiders (cultural strangers) better understand the culture."
"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."
"They must use personal experience to illustrate facets of cultural experience, and, in so doing, make characteristics of a culture familiar for insiders and outsiders. To accomplish this might require comparing and contrasting personal experience against existing research."
"Autobiographers can make texts aesthetic and evocative by using techniques of 'showing', which are designed to bring 'readers into the scene' - particularly into thoughts, emotions, and actions - in order to 'experience an experience'."
Toward a Moderate Autoethnography
By Sarah Stahlke Wall
"Autoethnography is an intriguing method that is increasingly utilised to study social phenomena through the lens of the author/ researcher’s personal experience. Approaches range from analytic to evocative, although evocative autoethnography is becoming more prominent."
"In this article, I draw from the reviews I have done to address topics such as applications and purposes for autoethnography, the degree of theory and analysis used within the method, data sources and dissemination of findings, and ethical issues. Ultimately, I propose a moderate and balanced treatment of autoethnography that allows for innovation, imagination, and the representation of a range of voices in qualitative inquiry while also sustaining confidence in the quality, rigor, and usefulness of academic research."
"The high potential that is inherent in this approach and the rich opportunities that exist for the emer- gence of unique perspectives on social phenomena."
"Thus, autoethnography has tremendous potential for building sociological knowledge by tapping into unique personal experiences to illuminate those small spaces where understanding has not yet reached."
By Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams and Arthur P. Bochner
"Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)."
"They realized that stories were complex, constitutive, meaningful phenomena that taught morals and ethics, introduced unique ways of thinking and feeling, and helped people make sense of themselves and others."
"Gradually, scholars across a wide spectrum of disciplines began to consider what social sciences would become if they were closer to literature than to physics, if they proffered stories rather than theories, and if they were self consciously value-centered rather than pretending to be value free."
"Even though some researchers still assume that research can be done from a neutral, impersonal, and objective stance, most now recognize that such an assumption is not tenable. Consequently, autoethnography is one of the approaches that acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the re searcher's influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or as suming they don't exist."
"As a method, autoethnography combines characteristics of autobiography and ethnography. When writing an autobiography, an author retroactively and selectively writes about past experiences. Usually, the author does not live through these experiences solely to make them part of a published document; rather, these experiences are assembled using hindsight."
"When researchers do ethnography, they study a culture's relational prac tices, common values and beliefs, and shared experiences for the purpose of helping insiders (cultural members) and outsiders (cultural strangers) better understand the culture."
"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."
"They must use personal experience to illustrate facets of cultural experience, and, in so doing, make characteristics of a culture familiar for insiders and outsiders. To accomplish this might require comparing and contrasting personal experience against existing research."
"Autobiographers can make texts aesthetic and evocative by using techniques of 'showing', which are designed to bring 'readers into the scene' - particularly into thoughts, emotions, and actions - in order to 'experience an experience'."
"Thus, the autoethnographer not only tries to make personal experience meaningful and cultural experience engaging, but also, by producing accessible texts, she or he may be able to reach wider and more diverse mass audiences that traditional research usually disregards, a move that can make personal and social change possible for more people."
By Sarah Stahlke Wall
"Autoethnography is an intriguing method that is increasingly utilised to study social phenomena through the lens of the author/ researcher’s personal experience. Approaches range from analytic to evocative, although evocative autoethnography is becoming more prominent."
"In this article, I draw from the reviews I have done to address topics such as applications and purposes for autoethnography, the degree of theory and analysis used within the method, data sources and dissemination of findings, and ethical issues. Ultimately, I propose a moderate and balanced treatment of autoethnography that allows for innovation, imagination, and the representation of a range of voices in qualitative inquiry while also sustaining confidence in the quality, rigor, and usefulness of academic research."
"The high potential that is inherent in this approach and the rich opportunities that exist for the emer- gence of unique perspectives on social phenomena."