Critical autoethnography is, most simply, the study and critique of culture through the lens of the self. Critical autoethnography merges the practices of autobiography—writing about the self—and ethnography—the study of and writing about culture. Critical autoethnography is a thoroughly qualitative and intimate method in that it provides us with nuanced, complex, and specific insights into particular human lives, experiences, and relationships. Where quantitative approaches to research give us general insights into the cultures and experiences of large groups of people, telling us about the who, what, when, and where of life, critical autoethnography teaches us about the why and how and so what of those lives. Further, where some autoethnographies might provide rich and detailed descriptions of cultures through the lens of personal experience, critical autoethnographies work to bring attention to the ways cultures are created and compromised through institutional, political, social, and interpersonal relations of power. That is, they focus on how our experiences within cultures are enlarged and/or constrained by relations of power. Critical autoethnographers view their work as a means of pointing out the politics of their positioning, explicitly acknowledging the inevitable privileges and marginalizations they experience and the “responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain,” including the practices of research itself (Madison, 2012, p. 5). They do so by creating accounts of intersectionality, a term coined by legal, feminist, and critical race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991). Intersectionality calls to attention to how oppressive institutions, attitudes, and actions in cultures including racism, xenophobia, sexism, heternormativity, classism, religious and spiritual fundamentalism, ageism, and ableism do not function independently but instead are connected and mutually influencing. Such accounts strive to “capture the complexities of intersecting power relations that produce multiple identities and distinctive perspectives on social phenomena” (Hill Collins, 2016, p. 135). Autoethnographers do so by being as critical of their own intersectional positionings within cultures as they are of their relationships with others and by ethically, honestly, and unapologetically foregrounding and interrogating these positionings in their work. As Tami Spry (2016) puts it, “One of the things we do best in autoethnography is critical reflection upon the effects of hegemonic power structures even, and especially when, we may be the arbiters of such structures” (Spry, 2016, p. 37).

For critical autoethnographers, the mode of personal telling accomplishes three intersecting goals. Firstly, critical autoethnography asks authors and readers to examine systems, institutions, and discourses that privilege some people and marginalize others. This goal, to borrow another term from Black feminist thought, serves a ‘diagnostic’ role; critical autoethnographers analyze “analyzing socially unjust practices” as well as the “limitations of existing scholarship in understanding these processes” (Hill Collins, 2016, p. 135). Here, existing knowledge about culture and cultural experience is problematized and questioned.

Secondly, critical autoethnography aims to mobilize and develop the explanatory frameworks that critical theory provides us—frameworks such as Black feminist thought, queer theory, materialist and new materialist critiques—by putting that theory into action through storytelling (Madison, pp. 14, 20–21). In other words, theory and story work together in a dynamic relationship that performance studies scholar Della Pollock describes as “doing theory and thinking” story (Pollock, 2005, p. 1). As a critical theory project, this knowing and being and is not about creating stable, coherent, finished, and identifiable knowledges but instead focuses on engaging with the world as shifting, partial, unfinished, and animated by feeling and imagination (Holman Jones, 2016, p. 4; Pollock, 2005, p. 3). The kinds of knowing produced in critical autoethnographic works are as dynamic, diverse, and intersecting as the people who create and are featured in those works. This diversity, dynamism, and complexity affords a perspective on theory that likewise avoids the totalizing and prescriptive claims of Theory with a capital T. Instead, critical autoethnography engages in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) and José Esteban Muñoz (2006) describe as ‘weak’ theory and theorizing—claims to knowledge and understanding that “do not position themselves in [a] masterful, totalizing fashion” but instead stitch together theory, experience, and critique in a “provisional and heuristic approach” (Muñoz, 2006, p. 682). Taking this approach to theory and theorizing, critical autoethnography works to join the specific and the concrete with the larger and more expansive insights and tools for transformation that theory offers us, linking ideas with the people, places, and positions they originate for and from. In other words, critical autoethnography builds bridges between the analytical, observational view from above featured in the language of theory (and valorized in academic scholarship) with what Donna Haraway describes as the specific, complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured “view from a body” that stories offer us (Haraway, 1988, p. 589).

Finally, critical autoethnography seeks to “build new knowledge about the social world in order to stimulate new practices” (Hill Collins, p. 135). Critical autoethnographers work toward realizing this ‘constructive’ goal by imagining and writing new “interpretations and trajectories for action” that address the issues important to cultural actors and that imagine new ways of doing scholarship (Hill Collins, p. 135). Here, critical autoethnographers focus on linking analysis and action by presenting the insights of theory in context, in practice and performance, and in people’s lives. Striving to meet this goal asks critical autoethnographers to write and embody these trajectories for action and new ways of doing scholarship, even when the way forward is not simple or clear (Holman Jones, 2016, p. 5). Instead, critical autoethnographers reach toward what José Esteban Muñoz (2009) calls “utopian performatives”—they write into a future not as a static and unachievable ideal but instead as stage for taking up and taking on identities and positions that remind us “that there is something missing … that the present is not enough” (p. 100; see also Spry, 2016). Utopian performatives imagine a future that is not yet here, desiring another “way of being in both the world and time,” though, importantly, this desire for a future not yet here “resists mandates to accept that which is not enough” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 96).

In linking story and theory, the personal and the political, critical autoethnography is a particularly agile approach for understanding and transforming the lived experience of culture as it is encountered and lived within systems of power, oppression, and privilege (Boylorn & Orbe, 2013, p. 19). Critical autoethnography helps us create ‘living bodies of thought’—work that uses story to bring theory alive and shows us how stories are embodiments of knowledges that can and do create movement and change in the world (Holman Jones, 2016). As “an embodied method,” critical autoethnography “articulates and makes material what is and should ...