Handbook of Autoethnography

Toward a Moderate Autoethnography

“…This, as Denzin (2006) argues, is just ''déjà vu all over again'' (p. 419); it prevents autoethnography from offering something new. On the other hand, Ellis and Bochner (2006) and many of the authors in the Handbook of autoethnography (Holman Jones et al, 2013a) show us a formless, evocative, literary method that, in the end, bears little or no resemblance to its ethnographic origins and is ambiguous in its contributions. Eisner (1988) pointed out that knowledge is rooted in experience and noted that personal experience requires a method for its representation.…”

“…In the Handbook of ethnography (Holman Jones et al, 2013a), several exemplars are included, presumably as a way of illustrating the characteristics of an excellent autoethnographic text. Virtually all of them are stories, poems, and dialogue with little or no abstraction or connection to theory and literature.…”

Critical Autoethnography Conference 2016: A Factionalized Review

“…When Esther and I came last year we really felt at home. Anne Harris and Stacy Holman Jones, the co-conveners from Monash University, envisioned a gathering that would create a community of scholars, artists, and teachers interested in autoethnography, and also interested in -to use Judith Butler's (2015) construction, assembling a "we," a collective of scholars that creates the freedom to speak and a community dedicated to asking critical questions about how we might act in the world together (Holman Jones, 2016b).…”

“…Two years ago, when we were first dreaming up this conference, we envisioned a gathering that would create a community of scholars, artists, and teachers interested in autoethnography … Our goal in putting together this year's call for participation was to create work that asks what happens when we connect the affective, the animal, and the vibrant objects of our lives and the autoethnographic; when we connect the singularity of one person's experience in meaning and in time to what Brian Massumi says is a "vital movement" that can be "collectively spread" (Massumi, 2002, p. 250;Holman Jones, 2016b) … Further, autoethnography is an affective force, where the affective is, as Kathleen Stewart puts it, "a surging, a rubbing, a connection of some kind that has an impact" (2007, p. 128). Affect is not a quantifiable or mutually shared emotion.…”

“…It is not the elusive search for the "evocative" in our writing or moving others to tears in hotel conference rooms. It is "not about one person's feelings becoming another's" at all, "but about bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities: human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought" (Stewart, p. 128;Holman Jones, 2016b Fledglings and masters all arrived for a feast with the heart and the soul.…”