If you've been following me on social media for the past couple of weeks, you've probably seen a number of photos and recollections of memories from my earlier years. The image above is one of the things I've come across as I've been rummaging through my family's very scary storage space. When I first saw it, I immediately thought of how it offers as a wonderful metaphor for auto-ethnography. A concrete image is centered as imagined observations are created as an extension. Similarly, auto-ethnography centers a concrete experience (or set of experiences) and uses tools to explore and observe what exists beyond as an extension.

As I wrote in my last post, Auto-ethnography can be broken down as follows:

Auto (self) – ethno (having to do with culture) – graphy (writing).

Auto-ethnography is a piece of work. It’s also a research methodology. To be clear—a method is a certain practice (like an interview or a survey). A methodology is how those methods are used or the underlying philosophy applied to those methods. This may seem like a small point, but it's actually huge. I don’t distinguish between these words to be nit-picky. I make a point to separate them to define methods as tools that can be used in lots of different ways--in the same way a hammer can be used to build a house or to destroy something. Additionally, methodologies can have philosophical, ethical, and ideological qualities that are sometimes unnamed in research—but just because they aren’t named doesn’t mean they aren’t there. It is my practice to define as much as possible. I don’t assume that my motives are understood the same as another person’s.

I believe that most research connects to the lives and experiences of the researchers conducting it in some way. I use auto-ethnography as a research methodology because it requires me to connect my life and my experiences to my research. It goes deeper than naming one’s methodology or the way that one is positioned in her research. It requires the researcher to be specific, personal about what brought them to a certain topic, to researching a topic in a certain way, to asking certain questions, to the methods they use to collect and analyze data. This decreases the distance between the person doing research and the “other” people and phenomena the person is researching. It gives both a common point of reference (even if the experiences or people or identities are very different). It makes the research personal.

By naming my perspective, I demonstrate my knowledge of perspectives, philosophies, and realities that exist beyond and beside my own. Auto-ethnographies can show multiple, creolized, and/or hybrid identities, which allows many realities to exist simultaneously within one person and within a group of people. They don’t tend to privilege one particular identity or type of identity. They allow the multiple identities of a person and/or place to exist fluidly, chaotically, uncontrollably. As a research methodology, auto-ethnography can balance one’s own experiences with what’s going on in culture and society at large.

I use auto-ethnography as a methodology because it is a relational approach and maintaining relationships, respect, and compassion in research is important to me. I put my whole self into my work and auto-ethnography gives me permission to do that in ways that other methodologies don’t. This is not to say that auto-ethnography is the only methodology I use. I use many, often merging components of a couple at the same time. But using auto-ethnography allows me to share with others what they share with me. It allows me the opportunity (though, certainly not a guarantee) to bond with people I interact with about common experiences—and bringing people together, finding ways we are the same while also honoring differences—is what I am all about.