How to write an autoethnography
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An Autoethnography is an autobiographical narrative within a cultural context, it holds culture and self together by interweaving them.
As I was reading Catherine Russell’s book, Experimental Ethnography, one of the things that first struck me was the origins of autoethnography. They talked about how it originated from queer culture. It makes total sense to me why it would. I could imagine that doing a typical autobiography as an LGBT person would really be difficult. Especially explaining your struggles without mentioning and discussing predominant attitudes towards the LGBT community at the time. Only focusing on their story without cultural context a lot would be missed.
To clearly and impactfully tell their story in such a way that a wide audience could relate to them, they have to discuss and show the cultural attitudes of the time and how they affected them. When they do that, it transcends a mere autobiography into a micro slice of history that has a far-reaching impact.
The Autoethnography
The autoethnography holds culture and self together by interweaving them
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As I noted in my post ‘Inspirational People‘, by chance, one day last week I saw posts on social media about two new articles which I decided to read that day. The post ‘Inspirational People’ was related to one of the articles, ‘Into the Shimmering Void‘ by Maud Rowell. This post is about the other article – ‘Japan, the Ambiguous, and My Fragile, Complex and Evolving Self‘ by Linus Hagström.
The abstract about the article is as follows,
This essay takes literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel lecture from 1994, Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself, as a point of departure for thinking about Japan, the ambiguous and how the already fragile and complex narrator that is I has evolved ambiguously over time in relation to a similarly ambiguous and changing imagination of Japan. Based on aikido practice—the narrator’s gateway to Japan—the essay ends up proposing a different understanding of and approach to ambiguity to Oe’s.
As I have not studied Japanese literature a great deal, although I am aware of Oe, I was not familiar w
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Autoethnography
Research method using personal experience
Autoethnography is a form of ethnographic research in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings.[1][2][3][4] It is considered a form of qualitative and/or arts-based research.[3]
Autoethnography has been used across various disciplines, including anthropology,[5]arts education, communication studies,[6]education,[5][7][8]educational administration, English literature, ethnic studies, gender studies, history, human resource development,[9]marketing, music therapy,[10][11]nursing, organizational behavior,[12]paramedicine, performance studies, physiotherapy, psychology,[13][14]social work,[15]sociology,[16] and theology and religious studies.
Definitions
Historically, researchers have had trouble reaching a consensus regarding the definition of autoethnograp
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