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autoethnographer: one who uses lived experience as evidence with which to explore cultural phenomena.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
"I tend to take every loss of rainforest personally. My autoethnographic poetry 'The Threat' and 'John Doe' are reflective of this."
It recounts vignettes of my’s dad’s life, his final week, the deep bond with family and friends and the ease with which he let go of life.
"I’ve already resisted that scholarship is not creative and poetry is not part of my scholarly self. I think the idea of autoethnography allows for that cultural divide between the creative and academic to be really disrupted."
This is a conversation with Patricia Leavy about writing fiction during the pandemic and her new novel, The Location Shoot.
The otherness is not somewhere out there. It’s in me. Still, my search did not stop to this discovery. It took me profoundly even further. It took me to love and poetry.
"This poem is rumination on how the personal experience of volunteering in never-before-seen flood relief efforts in the remote north reinforces the research that 'many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years.'"
Madison, Wisconsin is full of surprises, sometimes entertaining, always enlightening. But I didn’t plan for an abortion protest during a family weekend.
“Four Essays on Being Trans in the Anthropocene” in one of autoethnographic works on my queerness and informed by speculative anthropology.
"Unspeakable is a consideration of the silencing effects of stuttering, political censorship, unspeakable wartime atrocities, and the silent communication within virtual relationships."
Zona. I have always thought that names of diseases sound so beautiful. This is the story of a disease that lives with me.
"Because I was so immersed in both history, bound in good-smelling leather, no less, and in beautiful and evocative little bottles around me as playthings, I guess it needed no further prompting. It was within my blood before I could think about what I wanted to do with my life!"
Our editor Ulla-Maija Matikainen is questioning the call of otherness and narrates her discovery about the sameness that she has seen.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
autoethnographer: one who uses lived experience as evidence with which to explore cultural phenomena.
What is autoethnography? The AutoEthnographer's international team of editors offer definitions & suggested readings.
“The AutoEthnographer is an award-winning, non-profit, open-access, peer-reviewed literary and arts magazine dedicated to presenting the creative side of autoethnography, a qualitative research method uniting ethnography and autobiography that utilizes lived experience as evidence with which to explore cultural phenomena." ISSN: 2833-1400
AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING
Visitation, an Autoethnodrama in One Act
In this autoethnographic play, a woman terminates a pregnancy without telling her husband.
AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC POETRY
AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING
The process of seeking pregnancy alone (by necessity, not choice) showed me how limited reproductive rights in the U.S. truly are—even before the recent loss of Roe vs. Wade, that policy that had so shaped my generation’s belief in our bodily autonomy.
U. Melissa Anyiwo·
All ContentAutoethnographic EssaysCelebrating Dr. Patricia Leavy's Social Fiction 2024MoreReflections on MethodSpecial Issues
··31 min readThis piece is intended to give you a sense of the ways in which I use Low-Fat Love in the classroom and why just using it makes the world a better place.
This work shows that the benefits of reading multiple texts, each from a different perspective provides opportunities for students.
AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC MULTIMEDIA
Shanita Mitchell and Marlen Harrison·
All ContentAutoethnographic Art & MultimediaMorePodcastsReflections on MethodVolume 3, Issue 2 (2023)
··18 min readToday we're talking with the award-winning author, researcher, and performer, Shanita Mitchell about performance and autoethnography.
Overall, "Little Red" encompasses queerness, womanhood, and the implications of growing into an identity that isn't cherished by society.
“A Seat at the Table” is the autoethnographic manifestation of my vulnerability, anger, and anguish, of my black feminist grit."
The Ultimate Wave: Prose Poetry of the Pandemic and Parents Author’s Memo “The Wave” examines the problem of...
It is a reckoning on sisters and queers after themes of family violence, sibling disconnection and queer isolation emerge.
This poem, entitled "Work Out," is about how I dealt with 2020. It's a writing exercise I didn't realize I needed to do.
Marlen Harrison·
All ContentAutoethnographic Art & MultimediaEducationFrom the EditorsMoreReflections on MethodVolume 2, Issue 1 (2022)
··5 min read"In this brief, animated autoethnography, I utilize the concept of a sociocultural third space to consider why evocative autoethnography can benefit from its own literary and arts journal."
"'SEE ME, Windows to the Self of the Performer-Autoethnographer' explores the question, 'What can I learn about myself by making artwork as autoethnography'?
"It is my hope that these words will serve as the beginning of an ongoing dialogue about what it means to live autoethnography."
"Combining autoethnography and artwork, Supreme Justice aims to reveal the persistence of institutionalized oppression of women through history."
J.E. Sumerau·
All ContentAutoethnographic EssaysCelebrating Dr. Patricia Leavy's Social Fiction 2024Special Issues
··16 min readGratitude is a recurring theme I hear from readers of Patricia Leavy’s social fiction. This is an essay about Patricia Leavy novels.
This work is part of a larger ethnography of scars, one that addresses the intersection medicine, religion, and body politics in (among other places) Nebraska.
NEWS, INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS
How do creatives find joy in artistic performance as a form of black feminist autoethnography? Podcast & video.
"Marlen Harrison and Edward Perrin enjoyed an opportunity to volunteer with Miami-based Global Empowerment Mission (GEM) to create family necessity kits for those affected by Hurricane Ian."
"Editor Guillermo Gil reviews Renata Harden Ferdinand's An Autoethnography of African American Motherhood: Things I Tell my Daughter."
SPECIAL ISSUES
EDUCATION, INTERVIEWS, PODCASTS, & REVIEWS
REFLECTIONS ON METHOD