systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)

scholars began illustrating how the "facts" and "truths" scientists "found" were inextricably tied to the vocabularies and paradigms the scientists used to represent them

autoethnography is both process and product.

autoethnography is both process and product. [1]

political, socially-just and socially-conscious act

new relationships between authors, audiences, and texts

helped people make sense of themselves and others

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

increasing need to resist colonialist, sterile research impulses of authoritatively entering a culture, exploiting cultural members, and then recklessly leaving to write about the culture for monetary and/or professional gain, while disregarding relational ties to cultural members

canonical forms of doing and writing research are advocating a White, masculine, heterosexual, middle/upper-classed, Christian, able-bodied perspective

eschewing rigid definitions of what constitutes meaningful and useful research;

also implies that other ways necessarily are unsatisfactory and invalid.

Furthermore, scholars began recognizing that different kinds of people possess different assumptions about the world—a multitude of ways of speaking, writing, valuing and believing—and that conventional ways of doing and thinking about research were narrow, limiting, and parochial

these experiences are assembled using hindsight

autobiography

. In writing, the author also may interview others as well as consult with texts like photographs, journals, and recordings to help with recall (DELANY, 2004; DIDION, 2005; GOODALL, 2006; HERRMANN, 2005). [5]

times of existential crises

An ethnographer also may interview cultural members (BERRY, 2005; Nicholas, 2004), examine members' ways of speaking and relating (ELLIS, 1986; LINDQUIST, 2002), investigate uses of space and place (COREY, 1996; MAKAGON, 2004; PHILIPSEN, 1976), and/or analyze artifacts such as clothing and architecture (BORCHARD, 1998), and texts such as books, movies, and photographs (GOODALL, 2006; NEUMANN, 1999; THOMAS, 2010). [7]

ethnography, they study a culture's relational practices, common values and beliefs, and shared experiences for the purpose of helping insiders (cultural members) and outsiders (cultural strangers) better understand the culture

participant observers

epiphanies

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

telling [your] story—and that's nice—but people do that on Oprah

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.

consider ways others may experience similar epiphanies;

researchers write ethnographies, they produce a "thick description" of a culture

understanding of a culture for insiders and outsiders, and is created by (inductively) discerning patterns of cultural experience—repeated feelings, stories, and happenings—as evidenced by field notes, interviews, and/or artifacts (

autoethnographies, they seek to produce aesthetic and evocative thick descriptions of personal and interpersonal experience.

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

Reflexive ethnographies document ways a researcher changes as a result of doing fieldwork. Reflexive/narrative ethnographies exist on a continuum ranging from starting research from the ethnographer's biography, to the ethnographer studying her or his life alongside cultural members' lives, to ethnographic memoirs

autoethnography differ in how much emphasis is placed on the study of others, the researcher's self and interaction with others, traditional analysis, and the interview context, as well as on power relationships. [15]

Interactive interviews are collaborative endeavors between researchers and participants, research activities in which researchers and participants—one and the same—probe together about issues that transpire, in conversation, about particular topics (e.g., eating disorders). Interactive interviews usually consist of multiple interview sessions, and, unlike traditional one-on-one interviews with strangers, are situated within the context of emerging and well-established relationships among participants and interviewers (ADAMS, 2008). The emphasis in these research contexts is on what can be learned from interaction within the interview setting as well as on the stories that each person brings to the research encounter

frame existing research as a "source of questions and comparisons" rather than a "measure of truth" (p.117). But unlike grounded theory, layered accounts use vignettes, reflexivity, multiple voices, and introspection (ELLIS, 1991) to "invoke" readers to enter into the "emergent experience" of doing and writing research (RONAI, 1992, p.123), conceive of identity as an "emergent process" (Rambo, 2005, p.583), and consider evocative, concrete texts to be as important as abstract analyses (RONAI, 1995, 1996). [20]

community autoethnographies use the personal experience of researchers-in-collaboration to illustrate how a community manifests particular social/cultural issues

Community autoethnographies thus not only facilitate "community-building" research practices but also make opportunities for "cultural and social intervention" possible (p.59; see KARDORFF & SCHÖNBERGER, 2010)

Co-constructed narratives view relationships as jointly-authored, incomplete, and historically situated affairs. Joint activity structures co-constructed research projects. Often told about or around an epiphany, each person first writes her or his experience, and then shares and reacts to the story the other wrote at the same time