Introduction. Why Autoethnography
Introduction. Why Autoethnography
Introduction. Why Autoethnography
Why Autoethnography?
Anne-Marie Deitering
1
2 The Self as Subject
“What’s that?”
“Exactly what it sounds like.”
On one level, autoethnography is exactly what it sounds like. It
is a qualitative, reflexive, ethnographic method where the researcher
is also the subject of inquiry. And just at that level, there were many
things about autoethnography that made me uncomfortable. The idea
of self as subject was strange. I was a little bit intrigued, a little bit
alienated, and a little bit suspicious.
I am a person who has always done well in traditional academic
contexts. I am really good at reading (and performing to) the rules of
the academic game, and at the same time I also get genuine pleasure
out of the ideas, forms, and modes of expression that can be explored
in traditional scholarship. Both of these things mean that I have been
rewarded, repeatedly, for staying in my comfort zones as a student. And
they mean that I have also been well rewarded for staying in my com-
fort zones as an academic librarian, as a researcher, and as a writer.
Right around this same time, I was reading a book about creativ-
ity and reflective learning. Fairly early on, I came across this pas-
sage—“The most memorable critical incidents students experience
in their learning are those when they are required to ‘come at’ their
learning in a new way, when they are ‘jerked out’ of the humdrum
by some unexpected challenge or unanticipated task.”3—and realized
with a start that my extensive, established comfort zone was likely
holding me back as a teacher and as a learner. This realization didn’t
fade; my thoughts returned to it for days. I made a promise to my-
self: for at least a year I would stay open to discomfort in learning. I
wouldn’t shy away from (and would even seek out) unfamiliar ideas
and experiences. When I encountered autoethnography I was dis-
comfited, but I remembered this promise. I put my discomfort aside,
but not my skepticism. My inner voice raised a lot of questions.
those. Thinking about how a researcher can use deep reflection and
rigorous analysis to create knowledge that is meaningful and useful to
others is interesting. Thinking about a method where the researcher
is a visible and subjective participant in the research process speaks to
values I feel strongly about. And yet, my inner voice is still there ask-
ing questions of epistemology—Can a method like this be research?
What is research? Why do we do it? Why do I ask these questions?
Why do I answer them the way I do?
So before I get into the reasons why I find autoethnography
interesting, and the values that I think it aligns with, I think I need
to spend a little bit of time uncovering the assumptions that I am
bringing to this discussion. I trained as an historian before I was a
librarian, and that lens is still important to me. However, at this point
I probably identify most strongly as a qualitative social scientist. My
socialization as a researcher happened in two communities: history
and librarianship, and both of these contexts matter. The epistemo-
logical assumptions I bring to autoethnography are grounded in all of
these experiences.
I think we do research in community and that how we do it—the
questions we ask, the methods we use, the evidence we interpret—
should depend on what the community needs. There’s a practical
edge to this view of research, and a social component as well: we do
research to help ourselves, and our community, do the work. What
we do is determined (at least in part) by what the community needs
to get things done. In the disciplines, work usually means doing more
research (though it could also mean teaching, or setting policy). In
librarianship, the picture is more complicated. Doing more research
is only one part of our work, but many parts of our work are about
research—about preserving, organizing, describing, and using it. This
is especially true in academic librarianship. To do our work we need
to understand and think critically about research, and sometimes that
means thinking creatively about doing research differently.
I think that the choices that we make to use (or appreciate) a
research method are not neutral, natural, obvious, or inevitable. They
are choices that are situated, contextual, and also social; we make our
choices as individuals and also as members of communities. There
4 The Self as Subject
And what the researcher does is not neutral. There are episte-
mological assumptions embedded in autoethnography, as there are
in all research methods, and these methods can align, or clash, with
personal and professional values.
Reinharz shows that part of becoming socialized as a researcher
is internalizing the values of the discipline or community. When these
values conflict with lived experiences, that conflict can lead to disil-
lusionment, alienation, or burnout. Librarianship has a longstanding
commitment to the particular, the local, and the specific. As a profes-
sion, we clearly value stories—preserving, sharing, and discovering
them—and we are committed to helping people create their own. We
believe that every book has its reader and every reader their book.14
We believe that we need diverse books, and we need more stories to
understand our world.15 Personal, reflexive, story-based methods like
autoethnography align with these values and also build on a culture
of reflective learning and reflective practice that is already strongly
influential within academic librarianship.16 Autoethnography’s focus
on the narrative and reflective, on the particular and subjective, al-
lows voices and perspectives that are lost in aggregations of data to be
heard. Librarianship, especially academic librarianship, lacks diversity
in some important ways.17 Surveys and other data collection methods
that rely on numbers to achieve statistical significance will never be
able to honor the experiences of librarians who are part of the few
instead of the many.
Introduction 9
work in the university, and we are subject to the rewards systems and
social structures of the university even when those systems and struc-
tures were not built for us. This is a problem; this leads to research
that doesn’t help anyone. This leads to work that is shoehorned into
forms and conventions that are traditional and safe even when those
methods aren’t right for the questions being asked or the populations
being studied.
To truly build knowledge about practice, that knowledge needs
to be situated, personalized, and rigorous. In Situating Composition,
Lisa Ede points a way forward. She describes a similar divide between
research faculty in her field, composition studies, and the instructors
and adjuncts who teach the bulk of composition courses on most
campuses. She argues that critiques of teachers that are built on a
theory/practice binary will always fall short. Using theory as a lens to
examine teaching (or librarianship, or social work) from the outside,
without understanding the deeply situated nature of the work, will
inevitably lead to analysis that is incomplete. She criticizes academia’s
tendency to distinguish knowledge from lived experience and makes
a strong case for theorizing practice—a case that is equally compel-
ling for academic librarians. When we situate theory within practice,
we can look at knowledge holistically, integrating abstract knowl-
edge and lived experience into a coherent whole. We can understand
knowledge in terms of relationships, in context, and not abstracted
through the lens of borrowed theory.20 In other words, to develop
meaningful practice knowledge and to theorize from practice, we
need to do localized, personal, embodied, affective, deeply situated,
critical, reflective research. Autoethnography is a method that allows
the researcher to do all of those things.
it can be generated from story, and it works together with story: “The-
ory asks about and explains the nuances of an experience and the
happenings of a culture; story is the mechanism for illustrating and
embodying those nuances and happenings.”23 The presence of culture
in the narrative is not an afterthought—it should be there from the
start, “reciprocal” and “interanimating.”24
These narratives might push you to reflect upon your own expe-
rience. It is likely that you will find that some grab your attention and
others leave you cold. You should expect to relate to some more than
others, like some more than others, and find some more useful than
others.
6. Revision Is Essential
In traditional research, the writing stage is frequently described
as “writing up the results.” This implies that the real work of making
meaning from data is complete before writing starts, and the re-
searcher need only transcribe those findings. In practice, things are
rarely so straightforward, but that image still remains.
Any writer knows that the process of writing and revising is a
learning process. This seems to be particularly true, and particularly
important, in autoethnography. The questions and the focus of the re-
search both emerge as the researcher writes and revises. Writing can
generate new connections and ideas. Writing through an experience
can help us make sense of that experience. Writing can clarify our
memories and help us generate new ones. Rewriting can bring new
details and juxtapositions forward.
During revision, the author can start from a new point, try a dif-
ferent format, use new metaphors or symbols, write from a different
character’s perspective—any or all of these can jump-start new ideas
and new insights. Several of the authors in this collection used well-
thought-out, formal processes to collect and analyze data about their
experiences and still found that the bulk of the analysis happened as
they wrote and revised. And once the focus of the piece is identified
and clarified, then the author has yet another type of revision to do.
They decide how to structure the story and how to describe the char-
acters and events. They figure out the literary and storytelling tech-
niques to communicate that meaning clearly and evocatively.
pieces. To finish and share them, the author needs to remember that
they are never really finished: “As an autoethnographer, I tell a situ-
ated story, constructed from my current position, one that is always
partial, incomplete, and full of silences, and told at a particular time,
for a particular purpose to a particular audience.”33
Memories shift, and perspectives change. New experiences shed
new light on past events. And the same holds true for the reader, who
may bring new and different insight to the piece every time they read it.
The essays in this book should be read as specific, grounded, the-
orized interpretations of moments in place and time. As much work
and revision that went into each one, they are not finished and will
never be complete. They changed as they were being written, revised,
read, and reread. And they will likely change for you too, as you read
and revisit them.
Notes
1. Karina Douglas and David Carless, “A History of Autoethnographic
Inquiry,” in Handbook of Autoethnography, ed. Stacy Holman Jones,
Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast
Press, 2013), 91.
2. Hope Sneddon, “The Experiences and Spatial Interactions of Individu-
als with ‘Invisible Disabilities’” (undergraduate capstone, Western Or-
egon University, 2014), http://www.wou.edu/geography/files/2015/05/
Sneddon2014CapstoneFinal.pdf.
3. Alison James and Stephen D. Brookfield, Engaging Imagination (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014), 6–7.
18 The Self as Subject
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Introduction 21