One of the first references to these kinds of subjective accounts as ‘autoethnography’ can be found in Heider’s (1975) study of the Dani people of Western New Guinea, where he applied the term to the Dani schoolchildren’s cultural accounts of themselves. Later on, Hayano (1979) also used the same term, when suggesting that ethnographers should research the cultures of their ‘own people’ as opposed to studying separate cultural groups ‘as if they existed apart from other peoples or world economic and political forces’ (p. 99). The next decade of the 1980s saw a general ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences (Riessman, 2008), partially associated with the ‘paradigm shift’ that challenged existing established approaches to scientific research based on positivist quantitative traditions. This shift had a significant impact on further development of autoethnographic approach. Positivism was considered a prevailing research paradigm in social science from the beginning of the twentieth century with its main argument being that the world of experience was an objective world, and the role of the researchers was to find truth by eliminating any researchers’ subjective judgements and interpretations. According to Sprague (2010, p. 79), ‘positivism could be described as an epistemology of the fact’. Crotty (1998), helpfully, summarized the claims made by positivists as follows: ‘Scientific knowledge is utterly objective and that only scientific knowledge is valid, certain and accurate’ (p. 29). So, in simple terms, the ultimate aim of positivism was to adopt ‘scientific’ methods to uncover the laws that govern societies in the same way as scientists used those methods to discover the laws that govern the physical world. As these dominant positivist perceptions started to be gradually replaced by qualitative approaches, researchers began to prioritize ‘the meanings people bring to situations and behaviour and which they use to understand their world’ (O’Donoghue, 2007, p. 17). As Henn, Weinstein and Foard (2014) explain, social researchers had to acknowledge that they could only understand human behaviour if they were able to explore the subjective motives and intentions that underpinned human actions. Thus, ultimately, qualitative approaches to social research brought forward the idea that different individuals experienced and comprehended the same reality in very different ways and, in order to understand human action, researchers needed to see the world through the eyes of the actors doing the acting. This new-found emphasis of social sciences on personal and subjective perceptions and accounts resulted in renewed interest in personal narratives, autoethnographies and life histories, reaching worldwide popularity in the 1990s. As observed by Gannon (2017), during the late 1990s, autoethnography began to appear in its most recognizable form as a qualitative research methodology with its own established practices and principles. In 1996 Ellis and Bochner ‘formalized’ autoethnography as a new form of qualitative research, which contested traditional practices of ethnographic writing, bringing researchers’ subjectivity to the forefront of their research inquiries.

Today, autoethnography has been widely acknowledged as an innovative, creative and rigorous approach that utilizes people’s ‘stories’ to provide an epistemologically adequate template for reporting and assessing research within the context of a post-positivistic understanding of knowledge generation (Polkinghorne, 1997). Without any doubt, autoethnography has gained a firm position within the existing range of recognized approaches to qualitative studies. However, researchers’ wide appreciation of this approach has also brought about a few controversies and disagreements about its definition and its purpose.

More recent definitions of autoethnography offer more variations to the earlier versions. For example, Denzin (2018) defines autoethnography as an account of one’s life as an ethnographer, reflexively writing the self into and through the et...