Teaching By Fire: Together, Talking About Autoethnography
After eight miles, we finally reach the summit of Mt. LaConte. Wet from the downpour that occurred halfway up the trail, we enter the lodge to dry off around the fire. Cindy offers us some Baileys Irish Cream that she has carried up the mountain in a plastic flask. We take her offering eagerly, and now understand why her pack was so much larger than ours!
“I don't really understand what you all do,” says Cindy, looking at Art, Tony, and me. “I know you all work in the Communication Department at USF (University of South Florida), but you seem to write stories.”
“We all do autoethnography,” Carolyn replies, as she pours Baileys into her steaming coffee. “Autoethnography is the study of self in culture. We're particularly interested in how people tell stories about their lives.” Art and Tony make eye contact and smile, both seeming to know that an intellectual discussion about autoethnography is about to happen.
“But what is your method for doing research?” Cindy asks. “Do you study how people speak? Do you conduct interviews about social issues? Do you have a laboratory?”
“Autoethnography is a method for doing and writing research. It is a method that uses personal experience to understand cultural experience (Ellis, 2004; Holman Jones, 2005); it is a way of doing research that allows a researcher to use personal experience to describe and analyze the everyday ‘actual empirical life’ of culture” (Blumer, 1969, p. 31).
“Autoethnography doesn't sound like traditional research,” Cindy says, “especially because it uses and values personal experience.”
“The method isn't traditional,” Carolyn replies. “Autoethnography developed in response to three issues with traditional research. First, there was the crisis of confidence—concerns about what research was; how research should be done; and ways a researcher can, and should, represent others. Second, there were scholars challenging the bias against the use and valuing of personal experience in research. Third, there was an increasing awareness of and respect for human difference and identity politics—that is, an awareness that the kinds of people we claim to be, or are perceived to be, matter (Ellis & Bochner, 2000).
“Gradually,” Art says, joining the conversation, “scholars across a wide spectrum of disciplines began to consider what social sciences would become if they were closer to literature than to physics, if they privileged stories rather than theories, and if they were self-consciously value-centered rather than pretending to be value free (Bochner, 1994). Many of these scholars turned to autoethnography because they wanted to concentrate on ways of producing meaningful, accessible, and evocative research grounded in personal experience, research that would sensitize readers to experiences shrouded in silence and to forms of representation that deepen our capacity to empathize with people who are different” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000).
“I've never heard of the crisis of confidence,” Susan responds, “but I understand the importance of leaving out personal experience in research—so that the research won't be biased. How does a person's identity influence the research process or what this person knows?”
“Well, let me first describe the crisis of confidence,” Art replies. “This will provide a better understanding of the need for and use of personal experience as well as the increased importance of identities.”
“In the 1980s,” he says, “many scholars became troubled by social science's limitations (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). In particular, they realized that the ‘facts' and ‘truths' scientists ‘found’ were inextricably tied to the vocabularies and paradigms the scientists used to represent them (Rorty, 1982). They began to understand the impossibility of and lack of desire for master, universal narratives—that is, stories that apply to and are relevant for all people in all places at all times (Lyotard, 1984). Scholars began to recognize new relationships between authors, audiences, and texts (Radway, 1984). And they began viewing stories as complex, formative, meaningful phenomena that taught morals and ethics, introduced unique ways of thinking and feeling, and helped people make sense of themselves and others” (Bochner, 2001, 2002).
“There was also a growing need to resist colonialist, inhumane research practices,” Tony adds, “specifically the researcher's practice of entering a culture; exploiting cultural members; and then recklessly leaving to write about the culture for personal, monetary, and professional gain, all the while disregarding the researcher's relationships to the culture and with cultural members” (Ellis, 2007).
“And even though some researchers still assume that research can be done from a neutral, impersonal, and objective stance” (Atkinson, 1997; Delamont, 2009), Art says, “most recognize that such an assumption is not tenable (Bochner, 2002; Rorty, 1982). For instance, a researcher decides who, when, where, and how to research, what questions to ask, and what topics to avoid. These decisions are tied to institutional requirements (such as institutional review boards), resources (such as funding), and personal circumstance (such as a researcher's studying cancer because of personal experience with cancer). A researcher may also change names for protection (Fine, 1993), compress years of research into a single text, and construct a study in a predetermined way (such as using an introduction, literature review, methods section, findings section, and conclusion). Autoethnography emerges as a method to acknowledge and accommodate a researcher's influence on research; the method doesn't advocate hiding from this influence or assume that it doesn't exist.”
“In addition,” Tony says, “scholars interested in identity and standpoint theory began recognizing that different people possess different ways of speaking, writing, valuing, and believing. These differences can stem from race (Boylorn, 2006; Marvasti, 2006); gender (Crawley, 2002; Pelias, 2007); sexuality (Foster, 2008); age (Paulson & Willig, 2008); ability (Couser, 1997); and class (Dykins Callahan, 2008). For the most part, those who advocate for traditional ways of doing and writing research advocate for a white, masculine, heterosexual, middle- and upper-class, able-bodied perspective. Following this logic, a traditional researcher not only disregards other ways of knowing but also implies that these other ways are unsatisfactory and invalid. Conversely, autoethnography works to recognize how the kinds of people we claim or are perceived to be influence interpretations of what we study, how we study it, and what we say about what we study” (Adams, 2005).