Auto-ethnography, an alternative method and form of writing, can make for uncomfortable reading. A transgressive account in the context of professional practice opens out a professional’s life, remaking power relations in the process. Relational ethics is an emerging growth area for auto-ethnographers, given the ethical implications for everyone represented in a transgressive telling. Future directions include fresh juxtapositions of layered auto-ethnographic texts and collaborative accounts that break with the self–other dichotomy.
Auto-ethnography, power relations, relational ethics, remaking professional practice, transgressive writing
Denshire, Sally. “On Auto-Ethnography.” Current Sociology, vol. 62, no. 6, Oct. 2014, pp. 831–850, doi:10.1177/0011392114533339.
Autoethnographers have grappled with how to represent others in the stories they tell. However, very few have written about the need to protect themselves in the process of doing autoethnographic writing. In this paper, I explore the ethical challenges faced when writing about a potentially-ongoing disorder, such as anorexia, when the research process triggers previously disengaged unhealthy thinking or behaviors for those involved. In the story-writing process, I felt a strong pull to go back into anorexia, as I immersed myself in my research on this topic. The compulsion to publish became intertwined with the compulsion of my anorexia, illustrated by the need to control both and present a certain “face” as a researcher.
Using a meta-autoethnographic format, I walk the reader through the choices I made in an attempt to protect myself as a researcher in the process of publishing an autoethnography about anorexia. I also explain the lessons I learned, which can be applied to persons doing autoethnographies on topics that may affect their own personal well-being. This paper reveals the importance of writing through our pain in an ethical fashion and that the ethics of doing autoethnography is not just about protecting those implicated in our stories, but also ourselves.
autoethnography; meta-autoethnography; writing-stories; ethics; anorexia
Chatham-Carpenter, A. (2010). ‘Do thyself no harm’: Protecting ourselves as autoethnographers. Journal of Research Practice, 6(1), Article M1. Retrieved [date of access], from http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/213/183
A methodological textbook on autoethnography should be easily distinguishable from the standard methods text. Carolyn Ellis, the leading proponent of these methods, does not disappoint. She weaves both methodological advice and her own personal stories into an intriguing narrative about a fictional graduate course she instructs. In it, you learn about her students and their projects and understand the wide array of topics and strategies that fall under the label autoethnography. Through Ellis’s interactions with her students, you are given useful strategies for conducting a study, including the need for introspection, the struggles of the budding ethnographic writer, the practical problems in explaining results of this method to outsiders, and the moral and ethical issues that get raised in this intimate form of research. Anyone who has taken or taught a course on ethnography will recognize these issues and appreciate Ellis’s humanistic, personal, and literary approach toward incorporating them into her work. A methods text or a novel? The Ethnographic ‘I’ answers yes to both.
Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Rowman Altamira, 2004.
What is deemed ‘good’ or ‘humane’ care often seems to be underpinned by a standard ideal of an able-bodied, autonomous human being, which not only underlies those ‘social and professional structures within which narratives and decisions regarding various impairments are held’ (Ho, 2008), but also co-shapes these structures. This paper aims to explore how a relational form of auto-ethnography can promote good care. Rather than being based on and focused toward this standard ideal, it challenges ‘humanity’ by showing how illness narratives, public discourse, and policy are framed by ethical questions. It illustrates how normative ideas dictate policy and public discourse. It critically questions this constitutive power by shifting attention to the lived experiences of people with chronic illness and disability. By highlighting and reflecting together on the first author’s life with a chronic illness and his son’s disability, and thereby framing the narrative, it will be argued that, in order to improve care practices, personal illness and disability narratives and the way they interlock with public narrative and auto-ethnographic methodologies should be investigated.
auto-ethnography; care ethics; disability; chronic illness; humane care
Niemeijer, Alistair and Merel Visse, “Challenging Standard Concepts of ‘Humane’ Care through Relational Auto-Ethnography” Social Inclusion, vol 4, no 4. 2016.