Autoethnography

The intellectual value of the personal in academic research has long been a debate in communication. From whether to use first person narration in scholarship to the impact of researchers on that which they study, the question of the subjective researching self continues to excite members of the field as an issue of great significance and consequence. At stake for communication theory lies the very worth of the scholarship that researchers publish. On one side of the debate, the inclusion of the personal means giving up the principle and value of objective research, reducing produced knowledge to opinion and hearsay. On the other, the exclusion of the personal perpetuates myths of objectivity that continue to erase the impact of researchers on the knowledge they produce, which obscures the way all knowledge is embedded in cultural and social value systems.

Deeply entrenched in this debate is the narrative-based method of autoethnography, a methodology of academic investigation that not only acknowledges the speaking, theorizing researcher but also centers him or her in an effort to illuminate how the experiences of that self are representative of (and in some cases constitutive of) larger social systems. Autoethnographers argue that some questions in communication can be answered only by careful, critical analysis of life experiences. To this end, they take their own self as an entry into culture. Such investigations inform communication theory as a method of theorizing, using the self as the location for that communicative work.

Autoethnography can be described best by considering the two central terms that make up the ground of the method: auto and ethnography. Auto speaks most centrally to the subject (as in the site or location) of the scholarship. As an automethod (like autoperformance or autobiography), the data and evidence one uses in order to theorize communication lie in the authorial self. Autoethnography examines the lived experiences of the self in order to question and open up one's experiences to communicative analysis. Stemming from a belief that new knowledge can be gained by communication scholars' investigating their own communicative lives, autoethnography becomes a mode of scholarship that answers unique questions that deal with the mundane qualities of an individual's life. Questions such as how one experiences racism or sexism, how minute moments of communication done by a self build larger systems of power, or how privilege or domination is experienced can be answered through autoethnography. It is important that they are self-asked and -answered because only the critically reflexive self can probe deeply into the textures of its life to see [Page 69]the everyday, ongoing repetitions in communication that produce cultural configurations.

The ethnography in autoethnography is, perhaps, the most significant diversion from other automethods. Ethnography is, most fundamentally, the storying of culture. Autoethnography shares this analytical focus. Thus, any life story may, on some level, count as autobiographical; however, autoethnography requires the link, either directly or implicitly, to the production of cultural systems. A story of how a cultural member experiences his or her disability functions as autoethnography only if the singular story builds an understanding of how disability is understood on a larger cultural level.

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