Symbiotic Autoethnography

Moving Beyond the Boundaries of Qualitative Methodologies

Liana Beattie

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350201613
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Éducation
• Categoria: Recherche dans l'éducation

Autoethnography is generating increasing levels of interest in research circles, gaining popularity as an innovative and inciting qualitative approach. Drawing on the vast diversity of researchers' opinions on autoethnographic praxes, this book presents a cogent analysis of the ongoing debates in the field before moving on to the discussion of a new approach to both theorizing about and 'doing' autoethnography: a 'symbiotic autoethnography'. This approach synthesizes central aspects from the diversity of existing arguments into one adaptable 'framework' that combines key characteristic features of autoethnographic research. The author uses the concept of 'symbiosis' in its broader sense to denote close interdependence and interrelation between its suggested seven attributes, including temporality, researcher's omnipresence, evocative storytelling, interpretative analysis, political (transformative) focus, reflexivity and polyvocality. The book offers both experienced and novice researchers a theoretically informed multi-functional and multi-disciplinary methodological tool that can accommodate the dynamics of diverse personal experiences within a topography of specific professional, cultural and socio-political contexts.

Part 1 ‘De-mystifying’ Autoethnography

1 What Is Autoethnography?

Introduction

From the day we are born, our worlds are filled with stories – stories that emerge from books, movies, pictures, photographs, conversations, fairy tales, legends, gossips and fables. Like air, these stories are omnipresent and indispensable, as they provide timeless connections between our histories, our cultures, our values and our knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. Our stories continuously merge, clash and intertwine with other stories, gradually fusing into narratives that invisibly infiltrate not just our thoughts, our experiences and our perceptions but the entire macro-fabrics of cultures, politics, economies and societal orders. In recent years, the paradoxes and controversies of such narratives exhibited themselves worldwide from the UK vote to leave the European Union to the election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States, from the rise of support for the right-wing parties in French, Italian and Hungarian elections to the establishment of authoritarian states, such as Putin’s Russia and Erdoğan’s Turkey. These events and developments bring the value of stories to the forefront of public inquiry, creating an opportunity for researchers to examine the impact of individual narratives on the context of current and emerging sociopolitical perspectives. Indeed, if we accept Reed-Danahay’s (1997) widespread view that autoethnography is a story of the researcher’s life and experiences, which combines auto- (self), -ethno- (the sociocultural connection) and -graphy (the process of writing the story), we can argue that autoethnography represents the most appropriate way of researching a social phenomenon through examining the researcher’s personal experiences of that phenomenon. However, before going deeper into the debates about the existing definitions and purposes of autoethnography, I consider it useful to have a quick look at its origins.

A short historical overview

As the word ‘autoethnography’ suggests, this approach is closely associated with ethnography – a field of anthropology which focuses on exploring cultural practices and behaviours of the participants in their natural environments. Ethnographic studies spread their roots at the beginning of the twentieth century and were, mostly, associated with examining remote cultural groups and populations. The concept of ethnography presents an important aspect within the term ‘autoethnography’, linking the significance of cultural contexts back to traditions of early anthropological investigations. However, as the field evolved, these studies fell under increased scrutiny in terms of the Western researchers’ prerogatives to make authoritative claims about ‘exotic others’. These debates sparked a new interest within research circles towards the issues of researchers’ subjectivity, motives and individual perceptions. Autoethnographic approach developed in response to these compulsions of social researchers to place more value onto the ethnographers’ self-observations and self-reflections throughout their research studies. In the late 1950s, Mills (1959), convincingly, asserted that social scientists were not supposed to act as some autonomous beings, investigating the society from outside, but should place themselves at the centre of their intellectual work. Behar (1996) agrees that autoethnography emerged as a result of efforts by researchers to create an intermediate borderland between ‘analysis and subjectivity, ethnography and autobiography, art and life’ (p. 174). The outcome of that drive was twofold: first, it impelled the researchers to become full insiders within the communities and cultures being studied, and second, it added more rigour to the ways in which ethnographers interacted with the phenomena under investigation (Hayano, 1979; Holt, 2003; Bochner and Ellis, 2016). Thus, around the 1970s social scientists developed a stronger interest in exploring social phenomena from an insider researcher’s perspective – that is, taken by a researcher who is a member of the community being studied – rather than an outsider perspective. Consequently, this has led social researchers towards the need to understand better the nature of their self-engagement with research topics, creating a fertile ground for incorporating their subjective self-reflective accounts into their research studies.

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.

Defining autoethnography

Probably, the best way to start ‘de-mystifying’ autoethnography is to anchor its position within a wider spectrum of qualitative research. A brief look at the existing descriptions of ‘autoethnography’ reveals a general consensus amongst researchers (Denzin, 1989; Reed-Danahay, 1997; Ellis and Bochner, 2000; Chang, 2008; Trahar, 2009; Stanley and Vass, 2018; Grant, 2019; Sparkes, 2020) that autoethnography falls under a broad category of narrative research. Yet, this is as far as the conformity goes in relation to autoethnographic inquiry. Specifically, discussing definitional quandaries, Reed-Danahay (1997) warned us as early as in the 1990s that the term had already generated multiple meanings. Indeed, as a proof to that, Ellis and Bochner (2000), soon after, identified thirty-nine different types of research that indicated autoethnographic orientation and, thus, could, potentially, compete with each other in terms of their interpretation of the term. However, these early attempts to define autoethnography were not positioned within the ‘omnibus spectrum’ (Hayano, 1979, p. 103) of autoethnography as such, even though their studies contained specific autoethnographic features as we understand them today. An example of this can be found in Goldschmidt (1977), who did not use the term ‘autoethnography’, yet defining all types of ethnography as ‘self-ethnography’, arguing that all ethnographic representations privilege personal beliefs, perspectives and observations. This definition resonates convincingly with the very first ‘official’ reference to autoethnography by Hayano (1979), who described it as a type of research that involves researchers conducting and writing ethnographies of their ‘own people’ (p. 99). In terms of later definitions of autoethnography, Reed-Danahay (1997) defined it as a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context, a point of view that was also supported by Denzin (1997), who emphasized that autoethnography involved the ‘turning of the ethnographic gaze inward on the self (auto), while maintaining the outward gaze of ethnography, looking at the larger context wherein self-experiences occur’ (p. 227). Scott-Hoy (2002) attempted to summarize these definitions by describing autoethnography as a genre of both writing and research, which emerged as a blend of ethnography and autobiographical writing that incorporated ‘elements of one’s own life experience when writing about others’ (p. 276).

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...