Autoethnography

  

What is Autoethnography?

If we break down the word "autoethnography" into it's component parts, we can gain more understanding of it's meaning.

·       Auto = self

·       ethno =culture

·       graphy = scientific study of

What's the goal of autoethnography?

Your job is to teach outsiders about your culture through both personal and empirical research, but perhaps, too, to help people within your culture better understand themselves. In “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Mary Louise Pratt defines an autoethnographic text as a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (Pratt).The target audience for your autoethnography is outsiders to your culture who may or may not have a positive or accurate understanding of your culture. In other words, autoethnographies "speak back" to outsiders who have misunderstood or misrepresented your culture.

Purpose

The goals of this assignment, as they relate to our course are to

·       Craft writing to express your unique experience during the COVID-19 Pandemic

·       Describe in detail your own unique experiences to evocatively convey your experience in a way that educates others

·       Explore a specific genre of writing: autoethnography

·       Explore qualitative research writing

Directions

1.    Use introspection to begin making notes/developing a theme about your experience (this will act as your working thesis)

2.    Begin research

1.    Talk to others who you shared your experiences with and record these conversations as fieldnotes. Autoethnographies can have the words/thoughts of others—as long as they pertain to your experience

2.    Self-reflection (what you already know through experience)

3.    Read about the autoethnographic method https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-teaching-autoethnography/chapter/7-the-autoethnography-project/

4.    Observations/ Field notes: continue to take fieldnotes of your ongoing experience to date

4.    Use your analysis and research to help identify and clarify attitudes, beliefs and ideas that are shared in your “subcultural” group that have shaped your experience. Consider different aspects of your identity (sex, gender, class, occupation, student status, where you live, race, sexuality, political affiliation, etc.).

Requirements

·       Include quotes from interviews

·       Include quotes from course reading material (where relevant)

·       Include descriptions, images, and quotes from your field notes

·       Analyze and draw conclusions about your experience in an evocative way.

We are each members of multiple cultures and sub-cultures. Culture here does not have to mean ethnicity or socio-economic status (although it could mean those things if you so choose). It could also reflect who you are, how you spend your time, what you value, or things you have.

Study a culture, not just yourself

While you will be able to share snapshots of your own experience to help illustrate your culture, you will also need to draw larger conclusions through research and analysis about the culture of, for example, COVID-19 virus survivors/college students/essential workers, in general. When you include personal examples, and good autoethnographies often do, analyze a specific memory/experience you had that reveals insight into the culture to which you belong. 

Then you can take the analysis to the next level and see how your experience may be typical or atypical or how it may vary from other people’s understandings of what it is like to be “x.” You will use primary research, like interviews of members of your culture, to develop your research beyond just your own experience. Your personal experience is one piece of data in what should be a wider data set you give your readers.

One Strategy to get you started:

·       Choose a specific incident from your personal history that reveals something important about your experience. Free-write about it.

·       Add interpretive analysis to your narrative of the event. How might this experience be representative of an aspect of the experience of COVID-19? In what ways is it typical or atypical?

Another: Describe the language of your culture:

·       What types of words, phrases, pronunciation--that is language do you use to describe the virus and your experience?

·       How might this language clash (or not clash) with the language of others?

·       How does the language you (and others like you) reflect your values and beliefs?

Another: Describe important artifacts of your experience (think masks, etc.???)

·       What types of objects are important to your experience (either physical or not)?

·       Why are these things/objects/artifacts important?

·       In what ways do outsiders read or mis-read these objects?

Another: Describe important traditions of your culture (think dating? Socializing, playing sports)

·       What traditions or rituals are important to your life?

·       What do these traditions or rituals look like? Give a detailed account from personal experience, field notes, or an interview.

·       Why are these traditions/rituals important?

·       In what ways are these altered now?

What might your research reveal about you in the context of culture?

·       What does your research reveal about your place in American culture?

Putting it together

·       Move beyond this list. Rearrange your writing around a point you'd like to highlight

·       What's the most important thing you want to say?

·       Compare and contrast the points you've surfaced in the previous steps. For instance, what do the rituals and cultural objects you've discussed have in common? What is something about your culture these examples together prove?

·       Think about what you want your readers to encounter first? What example, story, description do you want them to see first? Do you want to immediately immerse readers in something really unfamiliar, to emphasize their lack of understanding, for instance? Do you want to lead with a powerful quote from an interview? An image of your culture in a ritual? As an ambassador of your culture, what first-impression might others within your culture want outsiders to have?