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This is not bad for a Wikipedia definition: “Autoethnography is a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore their personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings” (accessed May 2017). Ellis et al. (2011: 3) have a more academic definition: “Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience. This approach “challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing others and treats research as a political, socially-just and socially-conscious act […], thus, as a method, autoethnography is both a process and a product.” (2011: 3). Anderson (2006) offers a distinction between analytic and evocative autoethnography; he supports the more analytic form in which researchers are insiders of the research group or place, are committed to theoretical understandings of the topic and propose a critical analysis (2006: 373). Ellis and Bochner (2011) propose this methodology as “…an autobiographical genre of writing that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (2011: 739). From these multiple—and sometimes confusing—definitions found in the literature, the one I find the most useful is this one from Chang (2008), which I reproduce at length: “Autoethnography is a methodology and inquiry that utilizes autobiographic materials of the researcher as primary data. Differing from other self-narrative writings such as autobiography and memoir, autoethnography emphasizes cultural analysis and interpretation of the researcher’s behaviors, thoughts, and experiences in relation to others in society. The [product] should be ethnographical in its methodological orientation, cultural in its interpretations and autobiographical in its contents.” This is one of the definitions I emphasize the most with my students, as it is accessible, yet complete enough to unpack during class discussions. This one coincides with the most widely cited definition of Reed-Danahay (1997 and 2009), who in her book goes beyond a definition, as she explains in detail the completion of an auto-ethnography, from project design, writing and analysis, to final presentation of a public report, and evaluates the critiques and multiple reactions to auto-ethnographic accounts from inside and outside the academia.

All the definitions above are valid and useful, I suggest, however, defining Auto-ethnography by what it is not: it is not a biography, a memoir, a form of self-flagellation, a navel gazing ego-alienation trip, nor a realistic account of a person’s “true” self. I define critical auto-ethnography as a methodology (many methods can be include under this umbrella), a narrative style or writing genre, a cultural project, a perspective, a form of personal liberation path, and a way of ←37 | 38→making-place and making communities across diverse boundaries glocally (I will return to my bricolage definition later in this chapter, when I explain how I use it the classroom). Auto-ethnographies begin with a personally relevant issue that one wishes to understand in more depth and, in most cases, is associated with an area or point of tension or challenge in our personal lives, our family, community or, more broadly, through our shared human experience. As a form of qualitative methodology, it is very similar to ethnography in terms of design and implementation of qualitative research projects. It requires defining a topic, formulating research questions, doing fieldwork, identifying a specific field-site and relevant community (or in-groups), gathering primary sources (personal memory-data and written fieldnotes of field observations and reflections), and secondary sources (academic references to understand the topic, to guide the analysis, and to give ethno-historical context). It requires also organizing, editing and analyzing the data found, drafting written reports answering the research questions, and sharing research findings with publics (in writing or through other media platforms). The research project can take 6 months to a year. Sometimes, in part due to “vulnerability” issues, it could stretch over years, before an author decides to stop research, write an account and to publish the findings.

Although auto-ethnographic research requires gathering memory-data and personal documents as forms of self-reported reflections, and family archives related to the topic chosen for the project, it also requires fieldwork, as it is a research of the present, from the present (this is what makes it ethnographic). Hence doing fieldwork (participant-observation) is not optional, but central. It seems to me that the term “deep hanging-out” with yourself (this is, spending quality time with self and others, being fully present and engaged, and writing fieldnotes of the observations and discoveries) is more appropriate and suitable for obvious reasons. As I explain to my students, the “self,” besides being a moving target, is multiple, layered and very crowded. Concrete and virtual fields have also fuzzy boundaries in auto-ethnographic research, at even more extreme degrees than ethnography. As stated above, auto-ethnographic research is always a form of local and “native” ethnographies, or insider scholarship, because the data is generated around a specific individual embodied experience “from the present,” and everyone is an insider or member of a particular group and a resident of a particular locality. The field-site and community of research becomes hence the local life, place and relations of the researcher, in particular those aspects of daily life related to the topic being researched.

In describing the project that they will embark on to my students, I teach them to think of auto-ethnographic fieldwork as “deep-hanging-out” with yourself. The term “deep-hanging-out,” sometimes used to refer to informally to ethnography ←38 | 39→fieldwork (participant-observation), is of uncertain origins; James Clifford mentions that he heard it from Clifford Geertz, and Geertz alludes to how he heard it from Renato Rosaldo. I came into this term while a graduate student, it was used by a professor in a feminist anthropology seminar, and I have not found as of yet, any proper definition of it, and the tree authors mentioned above, dislike and dismiss this term as too informal and irreverent. I fell in love, instantly, with this concept, because I felt (after my first fieldwork experience) that it described much better than any of the other academic sounding term, what we actually do as ethnographers; we hang-out with people. As I explain to my students, this hanging-out could be so extended, so emotionally close and so deep, to affect a researcher’s physical and emotional health; many ethnographers have been murdered in the field, have died of accidents, have been captured and kidnapped as suspect belonging to leftist guerrillas or to the CIA, and some others had to make tough decisions of how deep to go, how far to “participate” and collaborate, for example. when doing fieldwork among police, gangs or drug addicts. In auto-ethnographic fieldwork the hanging-out is also deep, as profound, revelations and traumas are discovered, and doing the oral history with people close to them emotionally could be very, at times, tense and conflicting, but also healing (for concrete examples, see Chapter Three).

To analyze auto-ethnographic data effectively, and to be able to contextualize the personal experiences that are central to auto-ethnographic projects is necessary to gain an understanding of the socio-cultural and historical dimensions that frame our daily experiences in a particular place. When time for writing report and sharing findings come, I remain students that besides writing a first person narrative, researchers need to be careful to avoid sentimentality and confessional nostalgia, especially when it comes to the memory-data. To help them deal with this challenge, over my years of teaching I have developed a grouping of basic concepts to help students acquire critical skills, to be able to interpret their data and write about their findings critically in their final reports. I call these interdisciplinary concepts a Toolkit for Critical Analysis; some of the most basic terms are ethnocentrism, power—in its many forms—political economy, intersecting identities, identity politics, situated knowledge, etc.). The concepts in the Toolkit are linked to particular theoretical frameworks such as Post-colonial and Post-structural analysis, Black feminist and Queer theory, Critical Race Theory, through authors that have been key in my own research (such as the authors discussed in Chapters One and Four). These approaches are chosen not only because they are the most contemporary or “cutting edge” ones, but also because of my academic formation and my political and poetic dispositions. These theoretical currents and concepts have been the most useful for teaching students how to critically ←39 | 40→analyze and contextualize their auto-ethnographic data, to be able to produce more in-depth narratives. To avoid distracting the discussion of auto-ethnography, here I give only this brief notice of the academic sources from where I have taken these concepts; the practical uses and modified definitions of each are further described in Chapter Three.