Good Autoethnography

As Pelias astutely argued more than two decades ago, we devote much of our waking life to critique and evaluation.1 We assess our and others’ (re)actions. We determine whether certain foods, drinks, and flavors will quench us, give us energy, make us sick. We appreciate caring and supportive friends, family, strangers, and students, and we try to avoid those who harm us with their words and deeds. We note how bodies and desires change with time, age, circumstance. We make choices about the places we (won’t) visit and the clothing we (won’t) wear. For those of us who instruct, we assess students (e.g., grades) and they assess us (e.g., course evaluations). We may favor exciting and enthralling stories over boring and unrealistic ones, and, as academics, we often make decisions about good and not-so-good research, journals, publishers. Indeed, across a multitude of contexts, we evaluate the quality and desirability of choices, objects, and entities, and we make decisions about which/who is (not) worthy of our energy and attention.As editors of this journal, we spend much of our time critiquing and evaluating autoethnographic manuscripts. Did the author use autoethnography appropriately? Does the manuscript align with our editorial vision? Accept, Revise not-so-good autoethnographies might never be found or, if they are, might promote bad ideas, be ridiculed and dismissed,4 or be terribly misunderstood. (And if an author doesn’t care about audiences, about readership and being read, then there isn’t a need to publish their manuscript.)Here, with this editorial, we offer some general insights about the evaluation process—what we’ve learned these past few years about what passes, for us and for reviewers, as good and not-so-good autoethnography. And as we have done in our previous editorials,5 we will again emphasize the core components of “autoethnography”—the “auto-,” the “-ethno-,” and the “-graphy.”The “auto-” of autoethnography relates to one-self, an author’s subjectivity, their lived experience. For manuscripts to do/use autoethnography, we expect the author to share and be self-reflexive about their decisions and experiences. We expect manuscripts to offer unique insights about doing social research, often with the goal to improve research practice, or to demonstrate the epistemic potential of personal experience—that is, to show how we can use this experience to study specific issues and topics more effectively than other research methods.We don’t think the auto- component is difficult to comprehend, yet we receive manuscripts that contain very little personal experience or reflection on this experience. For example, a thirty-page manuscript that espouses to do/use autoethnography but includes only one to two pages of the author’s experience isn’t good autoethnography—there isn’t enough autoethnographic “data.”Sometimes we’ve had authors claim that a manuscript that includes only the personal experiences of others (e.g., oral histories, interviews) is autoethnographic because the manuscript uses others’ reflections on their personal experiences. We find this justification unfounded and inappropriate, as it would make any study that relies on others’ experiences “autoethnographic.” Surveys, interviews, focus groups, and oral histories often gather and analyze the experiences of others, and doing a grounded theory or thematic analysis on others’ experiences isn’t the focus or purpose of autoethnography. By collecting and then taking apart other peoples’ stories, and treating the stories as objective data, they become “narratives-under-analysis.”6 This is not to say these other forms of qualitative research aren’t valuable. They are. They are just not autoethnographies.For manuscripts in this journal, we expect the author’s experience to be prioritized—used, reflected on, and theorized throughout a manuscript. Of course, others’ experiences may be included in a project (which we’ll mention in the next section) but the author’s insights, experiences, and reflections should be present throughout the manuscript.And which personal experiences? And how should an author use them? For us, personal experience must be used deliberately and for the purpose of offering unique insights about social life about a specified topic—insights not possible using other methods. For example, we often reject “life chronology” manuscripts that attempt to assemble disparate moments from a person’s life without much focus or purpose. In tone and form, life chronologies read like this:I was born in 1972. My parents divorced in 1976. I enjoyed math in grade school. As a child, I had three dogs and one fish. I attended college. I got a job. I married. I changed jobs. I divorced. I had Covid. I like to visit my sister. Traveling is fun. Twitter is fun too.Life-chronologies tend to be rote ramblings about a myriad of topics and personal experiences—and, for us, are examples of not-so-good autoethnography. Generally, good autoethnography is focused on one event or experience, or several experiences around the same topic or theme.Similarly, one aspect of the auto- that is missing from life chronology writing is the expression and the experience of emotion. As writers and researchers, we just don’t know things; we feel them. Good autoethnography does not downplay the fact that people are emotional beings.7 We experience love, anger, despair, joy, bliss, disgust, and all the other feelings that comprise the range of human emotions. In good autoethnography, the narrative’s verisimilitude is built through the author’s emotional integrity.8And yet, the mere sharing of personal experience does not make a project “autoethnographic.” The -ethno- is a core component of auto-ethno-graphy. The -ethno- is the component that pushes us outside of and beyond ourselves. As such, a manuscript must demonstrate a working knowledge of the key principles and practices of ethnography, or it can’t be considered good autoethnography.The primary goal of ethnographic research is to identify, and sometimes challenge, cultural expectations, beliefs, and practices, and then, via “thick description,”9 facilitate a nuanced understanding of these cultural phenomena. Ethnographers use various techniques to accomplish this goal.Ethnographers value fieldwork—sometimes referred to as “participant observation” and “deep hanging out”—in “natural settings,” accidental situations10 or contexts that exist regardless of a researcher’s presence. They may do such fieldwork by immersing themselves in and recording the everyday happenings of an in-person and/or online community,11 or they may demonstrate what it may mean and how it may feel to live with a particular trait, identity, experience, or relationship across a variety of contexts.12 Some ethnographers do archival research or conduct formal or informal interviews with persons who’ve had specified kinds of experiences.13 And some ethnographers engage extant theories and research,14 as well as more popular texts15 (e.g., films, books, news reports, blogs, social media posts) about certain topics.16 An ethnographic study need not use all of these techniques, but it should use at least a few of them, or else the -ethno- component of autoethnography goes unfulfilled.Once the ethnographer completes some of these tasks, the goal is then to craft that thick description of their observations of, and experiences with, specified cultural expectations, beliefs, and practices. This process is the “-graphy” component of good (auto)ethnography.When -graphy is used as a suffix, it is used to emphasize the art and practice of engaging and creating specific processes and representations. Cartography—the art and science of map-making; photography—the art and science of capturing and processing images; musicography—the art of writing music; choreography—the art of staging movement and dance.Auto-ethno-graphy is comprised of not one but two kinds of -graphy: the -graphy of autobio-graphy, the art of writing about one’s life; and the -graphy of ethno-graphy, the art and science of representing—producing a vivid and concrete, thick description—of cultural expectations, beliefs, and practices. Together, we have autoethnography, the art and science of representing one’s life in relation to cultural expectations, beliefs, and practices.In addition, ethnography (and thus autoethnography) is one of the few research methods that includes -graphy as a core component. We don’t do interview-graphy or content-analysis-graphy research, nor do we create case-study-graphies or phenomenology-graphies. And so, if an author doesn’t care about -graphy, if they craft sterile and boring texts—a sin for both serious autobiographers and ethnographers—then they are not doing good autoethnography.17For this journal, an outlet that takes writing as a primary medium for representation, good ethnography requires good writing. Good autobiography requires good writing too. Autoethnography thus requires really good writing. Really good writing requires having a command of a specified language (for this journal, we are limited to English). As such, to evaluate autoethnography, especially written autoethnographies, we begin by assessing basic writing practices: the structure and assemblage of symbols into coherent fragments (e.g., words, sentences) in a particular language. If authors are careless with their writing and submit work with an abundance of errors, or incomplete or difficult to comprehend sentences, then we might misunderstand the work or consider the work to be inadequate.18 Although minor errors are common in any manuscript, an abundance of errors can suggest a carelessness in craft and an author’s apathy about their observations and arguments and, correspondingly, readers’ ability to understand the text. And if a text can’t be deciphered or easily understood, then it likely won’t be read, understood, shared, and used.Finally, although the introduction-literature review-methods-findings-discussion-conclusion formula may be expected of many research reports, this sterile formula for writing up research isn’t conducive for doing good autoethnography. Granted, many of us (ourselves included!) learned to write this way when doing our thesis and dissertations, as part of being socialized as social scientists. The format, however, is generally a bad fit for autoethnography. Neither of us have ever read an autobiography structured in such a way, nor have we read many, if any, good ethnographies that follow the formula. Although there are some solid autoethnographies that follow this structure, a manuscript that follows it will, upon initial editorial review, be wholly suspect. To us, the format suggests that the author hasn’t read much about autoethnography, isn’t familiar with examples of good autoethnography, and, more broadly, doesn’t have much concern for the -graphy component of the method.* * *The connective tissue between the “auto-,” “-ethno-,” and “-graphy” is the idea that you, the researcher, are the research tool.19 Your mind, body, instincts and intuitions, interests, emotions, experiences, perspectives, values and beliefs, and everything else makes you a one-of-a-kind research instrument. We want to experience the world through your senses and your voice, and we want to learn about topics that you find worthy of your energy and attention.Although we are also working on a fuller book manuscript about assessing autoethnography that should be published in 2024, we use this editorial to describe our understanding of the core components of autoethnography—components that we rely on for evaluation. Determining “good autoethnography” means starting with these components. We expect manuscripts to foreground the author’s personal experience, and there must be a purpose for sharing these experiences. If the manuscript contains unfocused lived experience, demonstrates a lack of awareness about the cultural discourse about a topic, and offers a sterile and boring read, then the author isn’t doing good autoethnography. As such, their work—their insights, arguments, voice—may never be published, read, understood, shared, or used.