Key Ideas

• Autoethnographers work to provide dense descriptions of a person's experience with a culture in order to better understand this culture and an individual's experience in it.
• Autoethnography developed in response to oppressive, colonialist, and inhumane research practices, and from recognition that human differences matter.
• Autoethnography is both process and product, a way of doing and representing research.
• Autoethnographers combine aspects of autobiography and ethnography: similar to autobiographers, they value personal experience and evocative writing; similar to ethnographers, they work to provide dense descriptions of cultural experience.
• Autoethnography can take a myriad of forms, all of which depend on an autoethnographer's goals for a project.
• Benefits of autoethnography include (1) its therapeutic possibilities, that is, its ability to help authors, research participants, and audience members transform their lives; and (2) its valuing of relational ethics—the interpersonal ties and responsibilities researchers have to those they study.

We begin this chapter by providing an example of what autoethnography is and does. We then discern characteristics of autoethnography and conclude by asking questions about our opening, introductory experiences. We weave conversation, personal reflection, and analysis throughout, and, in so doing, show how autoethnographic writing, research, and representation can look and feel.