Doing Autoethnography: Facing Challenges, Taking Choices, Accepting Responsibilities

Abstract

In this article, I address six particular challenges that autoethnographers may face during their journey to understand how culture flows through the self while the self flows through culture. I ask how autoethnographers zoom into personal lives while staying focused on the study of culture, whether they should prefer hard data or soft impressions, to what extent autoethnography can be done collaboratively, whether evocative autoethnography is better than the analytic one, whether we own the stories that we tell in our texts, and in what way autoethnographers are either self-indulged narcissists or self-reflexive and vulnerable scholars. Addressing these challenges, I refer to the existing literature to illuminate the choices that autoethnographers have and to elaborate on the responsibility that they have for others and themselves, alike.

Aging Adventure Athletes Assess Achievements and Alter Aspirations to Maintain Self-Esteem

“…I adopt a qualitative analytical autoethnographic methodology ( Anderson, 2006 ; Tolich, 2010 ; Anderson and Austin, 2012 ; Buckley, 2012 , 2015a , , 2016 ; Chang, 2016 ; Jones et al, 2016 ; Pace, 2016 ; Stahlke Wall, 2016 ; Winkler, 2017 ). Autoethnographic approaches can yield particular accuracy, precision and subtlety in the identification of emotional responses ( Buckley, 2015b , 2016 ; Gardner et al, 2015 ; Morin et al, 2015 ).…”

Nocne studiowanie z Bartlebym

“…W moim podejściu wszystkie głosy były tak samo ważne, chociaż nie były tak odważne i wysmakowane jak niektóre produkcje autoetnograficzne. Przychylam się do ujęcia autoetnografii w jej pojedynczych realizacjach (Winkler, 2018). marnymi odwzorowaniami, które były słabym pisaniem akademickim.…”

The challenge of articulating human rights at an LGBT ‘mega-event’: a personal reflection on Sao Paulo Pride 2017

“…The reasons for undertaking this reflection are two-fold: 1) to challenge myself by interrogating my own activist and serious leisure (Stebbins 2007) practice; 2) to provoke a critical conversation about the spaces and places of mega-events as platforms for LGBT/SOGI human rights activism. By presenting a reflection on my own flow through the event, and how the event flowed through me, I place myself in the position of vulnerable researcher (Winkler, 2017) as well as reflective practitioner engaged in a process of reflection-in-action (Schön, 1983). As Dietering et al 2016argue, 'autoethnography … pushes the researcher to connect their experience to something broader, to draw in theory, culture and social factors, to make deeper meaning ' (p.26).…”