Autoethnography

TONY E. ADAMS
Northeastern Illinois University, USA

CAROLYN ELLIS
University of South Florida, USA

STACY HOLMAN JONES

Monash University, Australia

Autoethnography is a research method that uses personal experience (“auto”) to

describe and interpret (“graphy”) cultural texts, experiences, beliefs, and practices
(“ethno”). Autoethnographers believe that personal experience is infused with
political/cultural norms and expectations, and they engage in rigorous self-
reflection—typically referred to as “reflexivity”—in order to identify and interrogate
the intersections between the self and social life. Fundamentally, autoethnographers
aim to show “people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the
meaning of their struggles” (Bochner & Ellis, 2006, p. 111).
Here we offer a brief history of autoethnography, particularly within the communi-
cation discipline. We then describe key characteristics of autoethnography and iden-
tify the purposes of doing autoethnographic research. We conclude by providing three
examples of the ways we approach doing and writing autoethnography.

A brief history of autoethnography

The term “autoethnography” first formally appeared in the 1970s. Heider (1975) used
“auto-ethnography” to describe the practice of cultural members giving an account
of the culture. Goldschmidt (1977) called all ethnography “self-ethnography” in that
ethnographic representations privilege personal beliefs, perspectives, and observations
(p. 294). Hayano (1979) referred to “auto-ethnography” to describe researchers who
“conduct and write ethnographies of their ‘own people’” (p. 99). Even though these
authors distinguished between cultural insiders and outsiders as well as identified ways
in which a researcher’s perspective can inform the research process and product, none
of them explicitly foregrounded the inclusion and importance of personal experience
in research.
Although few scholars explicitly used the word “autoethnography” in the 1980s,
many researchers, especially qualitative, interpretive social scientists, continued to
write about the importance of storytelling and personal narrative, identified the limi-
tations of traditional research practices, and illustrated how a researcher’s perspective

The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods. Jörg Matthes (General Editor),
Christine S. Davis and Robert F. Potter (Associate Editors).
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0011
2 A UTOETHNOGRAPHY

informs and facilitates research processes, products, and the creation of culture (see
Bochner, 2014). Ethnographers, in particular, could no longer hide behind or try to
perpetuate an aura of objectivity and innocence; any attempt to do so signified at
best a lack of awareness and at worst an abuse of research “subjects,” as many of the
ethnographer’s observations came to suggest more about the ethnographer and the
ethnographer’s agenda than about the cultural “others” being studied.
In the 1990s, “autoethnography” became a method of choice for using personal
experience and reflexivity to examine cultural experiences, especially within com-
munication. Key texts include Carolyn Ellis’s Investigating Subjectivity (coedited with
Michael Flaherty, 1992), Final Negotiations (1995), The Ethnographic I (2004), and
Revision (2009), and Art Bochner’s Coming to Narrative (2014). Ellis and Bochner
also coedited Composing Ethnography (1996) and Ethnographically Speaking (2002),
and they coauthored the most cited essay about autoethnography, “Autoethnography,
personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject” (2000). (As of January 2017,
this essay has been cited nearly 4,000 times.) Ellis and Bochner also edited two book
series—Ethnographic Alternatives (AltaMira Press) and Writing Lives (Left Coast
Press)—each of which included books with autoethnographic features authored by
numerous communication scholars, including Tony Adams, Anna Banks, Stephen
Banks, Robin Boylorn, Rob Drew, Tom Frentz, Bud Goodall, Stacy Holman Jones, Lesa
Lockford, Annette Markham, Kristine Muñoz, Mark Orbe, Ron Pelias, Chris Poulos,
Janice Rushing, Lisa Tillmann, and Nick Trujillo. The three of us (Stacy, Tony, and
Carolyn) edited the Handbook of Autoethnography (2013) and published a textbook
entitled Autoethnography (2015). Derek Bolen, another communication scholar,
organized the annual Doing Autoethnography conference, an event now entering its
sixth year, and Stacy Holman Jones and Anne Harris organize the annual Critical
Autoethnography conference in Melbourne, Australia. Other key communication
scholars relevant to, or who frequently use, autoethnography include (among others)
Keith Berry, Devika Chawla, Dwight Conquergood, Aisha Durham, Craig Gingrich-
Philbrook, Rachel Griffin, and Tami Spry. Many of these communication scholars (and
others) attend the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, now in its thirteenth
year and hosted by Distinguished Professor of Communications, Norman Denzin.
The Congress always has promoted autoethnography; more than 100 presentations on
autoethnography were scheduled at the 2016 conference.

Doing auto/ethnography

Understanding autoethnography requires working at the intersection of autobiography

and ethnography. When we do autobiography—or write about the self—we often call
on memory and hindsight to reflect on past experiences; talk with others about the
past; examine texts such as photographs, personal journals, and recordings; and may
even consult with relevant news stories, blogs, and other archives related to life events
(e.g., Goodall, 2006). Then we write these experiences to assemble a text that uses
tenets of storytelling devices, such as narrative voice, character development, and
dramatic tension, to create evocative and specific representations of the culture/cultural
 A UTOETHNOGRAPHY 3

experience and to give audiences a sense of how being there in the experience feels
(e.g., Ellis, 2004).
When we do ethnography, we observe, participate in, and write about a culture
and/or a cultural experience (e.g., body image, dating, parenthood, depression, care-
taking, death). We enter the cultural “field” for an extended amount of time, take “field
notes” about our participation, and interview cultural members (“insiders”) about
their experiences, thoughts, and feelings. Typically, ethnographers approach cultural
communities inductively, allowing observations to guide what they write, that is, their
“findings.” Then they consult with, and often connect their findings to more formal
research about their experiences. One aim of ethnography is to create a representation
of cultural practices that makes these practices familiar for cultural “outsiders.” This is
accomplished through the use of thick, vivid, and concrete description, which offers
readers a sense of being there in the experience.
Taken together, the process, principles, and practices of autobiography and ethnog-
raphy contribute to the way we write and practice autoethnography, as well as the goals
and purposes we have for autoethnographic work.

Purposes and practices of autoethnography

If we want to do autoethnographic research, we must have a sense of the core ideals of

autoethnographic methods and how autoethnographers accomplish these ideals. We
must also know why researchers use autoethnographic methods. In this section, we
describe the purposes and practices of autoethnography and discuss why we chose to
do and write autoethnography.
First, given the focus on personal experience, autoethnographers speak against, or
provide alternatives to, dominant, taken-for-granted, and harmful cultural scripts, stories,
and stereotypes (e.g., Boylorn, 2014). Autoethnographers offer accounts of personal
experience to complement, or fill gaps in, existing research. These accounts may show
how the desire for, and practice of, generalization in research can mask important
nuances of cultural issues, such as eating disorders (Tillmann, 2009), depression (Jago,
2002), social class and appearance (Hodges, 2014), and norms of masculinity, desire,
and the body (Berry, 2007).
A second purpose of autoethnography is to articulate insider knowledge of cultural
experience. This assumption suggests that the writer can inform readers about aspects
of cultural life that other researchers may not be able to know. A person who has directly
experienced institutional oppressions and/or cultural problems, such as racism, loss, or
illness, can talk about these issues in ways different from others who have limited expe-
riences with these topics. Insider knowledge does not suggest that an autoethnographer
can articulate more truthful or more accurate knowledge as compared to outsiders, but
rather that as authors we can tell our stories in novel ways when compared to how others
may be able to tell them.
Historically, ethnographers traveled into unfamiliar cultural settings (the field),
established rapport with cultural members, and made observations about the culture
(conducted fieldwork), and then left the culture and frequently never returned. Back
4 A UTOETHNOGRAPHY

home, they wrote a representation of the people they studied in an effort to make the
culture familiar for unfamiliar audiences. Often, cultural members did not have access
to the representation, and were not informed of what the ethnographer wrote and said.
Conversely, given the ethnographer’s distance from the culture, she or he (typically
“he”) did not have much investment in the politics of the representation, specifically
how readers of the account could use the representation against the culture and its
members.
However, many autoethnographers—especially those who hold critical, feminist,
queer, and postcolonial positionings and commitments—critique these ethnographic
practices. As Smith (1999) observes, social research is “not an innocent or distant
academic exercise but an activity that has something at stake and that occurs in a set of
political and social conditions” (p. 5). As such, the third purpose of autoethnography
is to show how researchers are implicated by their observations and conclusions and to
encourage autoethnographers to write against harmful ethnographic accounts made by
others—especially cultural “outsiders”—who try to take advantage of, or irresponsibly
regulate, other cultures (e.g., Crawford, 1996). Borrowing the words of Blair, Brown,
and Baxter (1994), autoethnographic texts often closely align with feminist principles
by revealing the ways in which these stories are produced; discussing the author’s
motivations for, and emotions in, writing; legitimizing “experiential and narrative
‘evidence’” (p. 385); and claiming a “transformative or interventionist political stance”
(p. 386; see also Holman Jones, 2005).
Given the focus on personal experience, autoethnographers also describe moments of
everyday experience that cannot be captured through more traditional research methods.
Doing autoethnographic fieldwork allows what we see, hear, think, and feel to become
part of the “field.” Autoethnographers can write about experiences that happen in pri-
vate contexts, such as the bedroom or bathroom, or everyday interactions when others
make offensive comments, or internal feelings of dissonance or confusion. For example,
how might we study racist comments in everyday settings? It is impractical to create
such a study in a laboratory setting where our purposes would not be disclosed. We
could interview others about racist remarks they hear or make, but these others may not
remember or admit to making these statements nor recognize or define their remarks as
racist. However, the use of personal experience permits autoethnographers to describe
and record the ways in which racism is experienced in the most mundane of settings,
such as while shopping at a grocery store or teaching in a college classroom (e.g., Boy-
lorn, 2011), or in everyday conversations with neighbors (e.g. Ellis, 2009).
A final goal of autoethnography is to create texts that are accessible to larger audiences,
primarily audiences outside of academic settings. For example, communication scholar
Robin Boylorn creates accessible autoethnographic texts for a wide audience through
her contributions to the Crunk Feminist Collective, an online blogging site whose Face-
book page has more than 34,000 members (Cooper, Morris, & Boylorn, 2017). She also
recently published an essay in an international news source (Boylorn, 2015), informed
by her experience as a Black woman, that uses existing research to describe and critique
cultural uses of language, particularly Black and White uses of the term “bae” to describe
a relational partner. As of January 2017, Boylorn’s essay has more than 2,000 “shares”
via social media sites and more than 1,000 comments. We believe that the accessibility
 A UTOETHNOGRAPHY 5

of autoethnography makes such attention possible; it is a method researchers can use

to engage both academic and nonacademic audiences.

Examples of doing and writing autoethnography

In this section, we offer three examples—one from each of us—describing how we

approach doing and writing autoethnography. We then discuss how these examples
are representative of our approaches to the form. We also suggest questions, goals, and
ethical concerns we take up in our autoethnographic work.

Carolyn
Much of my recent work has focused on stories told by Holocaust survivors. In particu-
lar, I have worked with survivor Jerry Rawicki for seven years. After doing a traditional
oral history interview, he and I began to engage in compassionate interviewing and
storytelling (Ellis & Rawicki, 2013; Ellis & Patti, 2014; Patti, 2013), which encompass
the goals and values of autoethnography. In compassionate interviewing, researchers
and participants listen deeply to, speak responsibly with, feel passionately for, share vul-
nerably with, and connect relationally and ethically to each other with care. In compas-
sionate storytelling, researchers—sometimes with participants—write and tell stories
empathetically and respectfully, accompanied by a desire to relieve or prevent suffering.
With Jerry, I have integrated my roles of friend and researcher so that they blend and
complement each other rather than conflict. Foremost in my mind is a consideration
of our relationship, one focused on Jerry’s well-being and the possibility of renewal and
purpose in his life (and mine). I can do the research I do, which involves emotional
sharing, because Jerry and I are close friends. Our friendship was formed around our
interest in the Holocaust, trauma, and loss, but it now includes much more—caring for
each other’s families, other survivors, day-to-day concerns, and problems in living. I
have no intentions to leave the field; there is no field to leave since Jerry is a part of my
life (Ellis, 2017).
For example, in “With heart” (2014), Chris Patti and I suggested that, as researchers,
we need to make space in our collaborative work for participants’ life events and also
be available to support them during these passages. At one point during our research,
Jerry’s wife died and Sal, the survivor with whom Chris was working, became critically
ill and died. Instead of viewing these events as tangential interruptions to our projects,
we treated them as opportunities to be present, acknowledge personal loss, and offer
support as caring family and friends would. In being compassionate listeners, we let
the conversations go where they needed to, related our own stories of loss, and under-
stood that losses accumulate and that recent losses might be related to and stimulate
vivid memories of experiences in the Holocaust that need retelling, reinterpreting, and
deep listening. Thus, in our article, we tell the stories of “being with” our participants
during these traumatic and intimate moments, show how we strove to listen deeply, and
examine how we revealed and learned about ourselves and about trauma in the process.
6 A UTOETHNOGRAPHY

I offer here a brief edited example of my interaction with Jerry after the death of his
wife:
“The death of my mother and sister at Treblinka is like a haze,” Jerry says. “But Helene’s [his wife’s]
death brings back the memories. One misery links to the other. When you think about the Holocaust
and you have a personal loss, you compare them.”
“From what you tell me, it sounds like it’s more emotional for you to think about how your mother
and sister died than it is for you to think about losing your wife to cancer,” Carolyn responds, and
Jerry nods. “Can you stop yourself from thinking about those images [e.g., gas chambers] when they
come up?”
“I couldn’t function if I didn’t,” Jerry responds. [ … ] “What also makes me sad is that I wasn’t
with Helene when she died.”
“Sometimes people die only when we go away; they can’t let go while we are there,” I say.
“Were you with your first husband when he died?”
“Yes, but what does it mean to have died? I left Gene and when I returned, he was taking his final
breath. I believe he was gone before then.”
“Did you hold his hand?”
“Yes, and I told him to let go.”
There is a pause, and then, “When I am sad about not being with Helene when she died, I think
about how my mother and sister were alone when they were killed. Well, they were with lots of
others, but I had left them. We didn’t know then about the gas chambers and all. So to me right now
the pain in my heart is that I abandoned them. I just hope that as they were marching to the ovens
that their minds went blank. I hope they didn’t know what was happening, because otherwise the
pain, the terror is unimaginable.”
“I think about that with my brother, too, when he died in an airplane crash. Did he feel fear? Was
he conscious that he was dying?” We sit silently, contemplating our losses. I reach out and take his
hand (Ellis & Patti, 2014, pp. 100–101).

Jerry and I share goals for our compassionate research. We seek to learn through our
dialogic exchanges more about Jerry’s experiences and feelings as well as to understand
the perils and joys of being involved in a compassionate research process. Ultimately,
we hope to make a positive difference by providing one story in detail about a life and
the trauma experienced.

Tony
“Any woman would be happy to receive those flowers,” the grocery cashier says about
the roses in my shopping cart. The statement surprises me: I interpret what the cashier
says to suggest that she assumes I am a cisgender male; that the roses, often a symbol
of love and support, are for a cisgender woman; and that the “any woman” about whom
she speaks is not just a friend, but someone I am wanting to date, or with whom I am in
an intimate relationship. Of course, friends buy roses for each other especially in times
of illness and death, but the tone and inflection of the woman’s voice suggests that I
chose these roses for someone more special than a friend. In this fleeting moment in
this busy store, I avoid asking the cashier what she means by her comment and what
assumptions she has made about me. I simultaneously feel guilty for perpetuating, or
allowing, the stereotype that I am heterosexual to proceed unquestioned.
I think about a similar moment that happened a week before during a class I was
teaching when a student asked about my “wife.” I did not want to publicly make the
 A UTOETHNOGRAPHY 7

student uncomfortable by telling him that I do not have a wife (or a girlfriend), that
I openly identify as gay/queer, and that I am in a relationship with a man. But I also,
simultaneously, felt disingenuous appearing as though I was passing as heterosexual
in that moment, especially since many of the other students knew about my same-sex
relationship and my self-proclaimed gay/queerness. I recall another moment in a
grocery store when, while passing through the checkout line, I heard the cashier call a
customer a “flaming faggot” and I felt compelled to indicate to the cashier my sexuality
(Adams, 2011, p. 136).
I offer these personal interactions to provide examples of how I approach doing
autoethnography, and to offer insider accounts of experiences of being a particular kind
of (nonheterosexual) person. First, for me these patterns of experiences—moments
when others ask about, or assume, my heterosexual identity—are common; they
unexpectedly happen in a variety of times and places—for example, in the grocery
store or the classroom—and illustrate how cultural assumptions of heterosexuality can
characterize everyday interactions.
Second, I illustrate the dissonance I feel by not clarifying or correcting others about
their (incorrect) assumptions of my sexuality, especially since coming out as anything
but heterosexual can be risky and even dangerous. For example, I also have been
criticized for coming out in my classroom by a student and then the president of the
university, and I worried about losing my job. If I focused more on the “auto” part of
these experiences, I may just write about these experiences. But the “ethno” part of
autoethnography also requires me to merge personal and cultural experience, to show
how I make sense of these events and, more generally, to offer insights about the ways
in which cultural issues such as hetero/sexuality can infuse everyday interactions.

Stacy
When I was about to become an adoptive mother, I wanted to understand my experi-
ence in relation to the experience of others I encountered in my research and met along
the way: social workers, doctors, and government officials; adoptive parents and chil-
dren; and prospective parents who were participating in the adoption process. I also
wanted to connect with my grandmother who, until the time I told my family about my
plans to adopt, I had not known was an adopted child herself. My research interests and
writing created an opening, a chance to talk with my grandmother about an event that
had a profound effect on her life, but one that she had not discussed in any detail with
anyone in our family (Holman Jones, 2005). This inside-out journey then extended to
the people who have read my and my grandmother’s adoption stories and who have
since offered their stories (Harris, 2014).
My autoethnographic projects often begin with personal experiences that I want
and need to understand more deeply and meaningfully. Often, these experiences are
epiphanies—transformative moments and realizations that significantly shape or alter
the (perceived) course of our lives (Denzin, 2013). Epiphanies prompt us to pause and
reflect; they encourage us to explore aspects of our identities, relationships, and com-
munities that, before the incident, we might not have had the occasion or courage to
explore. For example, my grandmother died not long after I published my essay on my
8 A UTOETHNOGRAPHY

journey as an adoptive mother as told in and alongside her adoption story. My grand-
mother’s death was a crucial incident in my life; returning to my autoethnographic
writing on adoption allowed me a space to remember and memorialize our relationship.
This writing also prompted me to consider other losses that I was not ready or able to
consider until, or because of, her passing, namely the decision to not adopt a second
child and the sense of loss that I felt about this choice. As I note in my writing about these
losses, “If we are, indeed, at least ‘one loss behind’ in our grieving, becoming aware of
our ongoing (and perhaps unfinished) grief can help us revisit losses as they exist in rela-
tionship” (Holman Jones, 2011, p. 336; Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015, pp. 46–48).
Though our insights may be grounded in our experiences and allow us to better
understand key events in our lives, our accounts and interpretations might embarrass,
harm, or expose others (Ellis, 1995). As I write above, I was not able to share my
writing about adoption and loss with my grandmother. In addition, I am only now
able to share and talk about this work with my child, who was a baby when I began
writing about adoption and who is now 15 years old. Even though the perspectives on
adoption are my own, my inability to share my work with my grandmother is especially
painful because she, more than anyone else in my family, was a supportive, careful,
and critical reader of my writing; I know that her comments would have improved
my work. And while I was, and am, thoughtful about what I reveal about my child, we
recently have had difficult conversations about the availability of my work online, its
potential accessibility to her school friends, and as a possible source of embarrassment
(Adams et al., 2015, p. 59).

Conclusion

Although we focus primarily on the autoethnographic work of communication

researchers, the method has gained prominence across disciplines. Our coedited
Handbook of Autoethnography (Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013), for example,
includes more than 40 essays written by scholars representing more than a dozen
disciplines, including anthropology, communication, education, counseling, art,
sociology, performance studies, poetry, gender and women’s studies, critical and
cultural studies, media studies, geography, music, psychology, and sport and exercise.
As the ever-increasing interest in learning about and doing autoethnography sug-
gests, those writing autoethnographically value stories, personal experience, and critical
research. We try to make our writing and research accessible and interesting to many
kinds of readers, and, in so doing, improve our own and others’ lives. We respect our
participants, our friends and families, and all who become characters in our stories, and
we try to interrogate harmful cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences. Autoethnog-
raphy, as a method, humanizes research by focusing on life as “lived through” in its
complexities; showing that you as readers and we as authors matter; and demonstrating
to others who are involved in or implicated by our projects that they matter, too.

SEE ALSO: Critical Ethnography; Ethnography of Communication; Ethnography/

Ethnographic Methods; Evocative Writing; Fieldwork; Personal Narratives as a Method
of Writing; Reflexivity; Thick Description
 A UTOETHNOGRAPHY 9

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Tillmann, L. M. (2009). Body and bulimia revisited: Reflections on “a secret life.” Journal of
Applied Communication Research, 37, 98–112. doi:10.1080/00909880802592615

Further reading

Adams, T. E., & Manning, J. (2015). Autoethnography and family research. Journal of Family
Theory & Review, 7, 350–366. doi:10.1111/jftr.12116
Bochner, A. P., & Ellis, C. (2016). Evocative autoethnography: Writing lives and telling stories.
Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Boylorn, R. M. (2013). Sweetwater: Black women and narratives of resilience. New York: Peter
Lang.
Manning, J., & Adams, T. E. (Eds.). (2015). Connecting the personal and the popular: Auto-
ethnography and popular culture. The Popular Culture Studies Journal, 3, Special issue.
Sikes, P. (Ed.) (2013). Autoethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Spry, T. (2011). Body, paper, stage: Writing and performing autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA:
Left Coast Press.
Wyatt. J., & Adams, T. E. (Eds.) On (writing) families: Autoethnographies of presence and absence,
love and loss. Rotterdam: Sense.

Tony Adams is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication,

Media and Theatre at Northeastern Illinois University. He studies and teaches about
 A UTOETHNOGRAPHY 11

interpersonal and family communication, autoethnography, qualitative research, com-

munication theory, and sex, gender, and sexuality; he has published four books and
more than 50 articles, book chapters, and reviews in these areas. For more information
about his work, visit www.TonyEAdams.com

Carolyn Ellis is distinguished university professor in communication at the Univer-

sity of South Florida. She has published numerous books, articles, and personal stories
situated in emotions and interpretive representations of qualitative research, particu-
larly autoethnography. Her current research focuses on collaborative witnessing and
compassionate interviewing and storytelling with Holocaust survivors. For more infor-
mation, see http://communication.usf.edu/faculty/cellis/

Stacy Holman Jones is a professor in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia and in the Department of Communication
Studies at California State University, Northridge. Her research focuses broadly on how
performance constitutes socially, culturally, and politically resistive and transformative
activity. She specializes in the use of critical qualitative methods, particularly critical
auto/ethnography, and performative writing. She is the author of more than 60 articles,
book chapters, reviews, and editorials and the author/editor of eight books. She is the
founding editor of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, a journal dedicated to
publishing innovative, experimental, aesthetic, and provocative works on the theories,
practices, and possibilities of critical qualitative research.