Autoethnographic Research: Annotated Bibliography

Overview of autoethnographic research

Hayano (1979) first introduced the term “auto-ethnography” in response to his questions around the issue of how people could create ethnographies of their own cultures, but the extent of its relevance and application only arose in the coming years. This relevance was due to the shift away from canonical forms of research that were “author evacuated texts” (Sparkes, 2000, p. 22) towards a more personalised approach. This was a direct echo of the post-modern movement burgeoning at the time, which questioned the scientific paradigm that qualitative research was subjected to. Rather autoethnographies “are highly personalized accounts that draw upon the experience of the author/researcher for the purposes of extending sociological understanding” (Sparkes, 2000, p. 21).

This approach, which combines aspects of ethnography and autobiography (Ellis et al., 2011), found legitimacy based in the postmodern critique of how the mediums of scientific research - its lexicon and paradigm – constrained the findings of a study (Krizek, 1998; Kuhn, 2012) or as Richardson (2000) puts it “form and content are inseparable” (p. 923). In that way scientific research’s goal of pure objectivity is challenged as unattainable.

Often a paradigm developed for one set of phenomena is ambiguous in its

Within this existential consideration, Richardson (2000) finds autoethnography as a writing style - combining the readable style of autobiography into the ethnographic approach - which may produce something that will make it off the shelf. If relevant research is what is intended to be produced, then its readability must be a primary