This book assists research students, supervisors, practitioners, and associated others to successfully navigate their research journey by highlighting research student experiences leading to student success. It reveals the research journey through an auto-ethnographic study based on the research student’s narratives accompanied by digital artifacts. It also includes commentary from the perspective of a researcher development specialist who assisted this researcher throughout this journey. This book provides insights into research journeys through layered accounts and meanings, which include the first author’s life events spanning almost two decades alongside higher education pursuits. It presents the perspective of a K-12 teacher-researcher moving into higher education in her local university, who is a Southeast Asian female international student embarking on her second-chance degree in a predominantly Australian learning environment/culture. Accompanying this is the perspective of a research training and development professional who has also undertaken higher degree by research studies.

Carolyn Ellis is the leading writer in the move toward personal, autobiographical writing as a strategy for academic research. In addition to her landmark books Final Negotiations and The Ethnographic I, she has authored numerous stories that demonstrate the emotional power and academic value of autoethnography. This volume collects a dozen of Ellis’s stories—about the loss of her husband, brother and mother; of growing up in small town Virginia; about the work of the ethnographer; about emotionally charged life issues such as abortion, caregiving, and love. Atop these captivating stories, she adds the component of meta-autoethography—a layering of new interpretations, reflections, and vignettes to her older work. An important new work for qualitative researchers and a student-friendly text for courses.

Advances in Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry pays homage to two prominent scholars, Arthur Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, for their formative and formidable contributions to autoethnography, personal narrative, and alternative forms of scholarship. Their autoethnographic—and life—project gives us tools for understanding shared humanity and precious diversity; for striving to become ever-more empathic, loving, and ethical; and for living our best creative, relational, and public lives. The collection is organized into two sections: "Foundations" and "Futures." Contributors to "Foundations" explore Carolyn and Art’s scholarship and legacy and/or their singular presence in the author’s life. Contributors to "Futures" offer novel and innovative applications of autoethnographic and narrative inquiry. Throughout, contributors demonstrate how Bochner’s and Ellis’ work has created and shifted the terrain of autoethnographic and narrative research. This collection will be of interest to researchers familiar with Bochner’s and Ellis’ research. It also serves as a resource for graduate students, scholars, and professionals who have an interest in autoethnographic and narrative research. This collection can be used in upper-division undergraduate courses and graduate courses solely about autoethnography and narrative, and as a secondary text for courses about ethnography and qualitative research.

Reflecting on Autoethnographic and Phenomenological Experiences: A Caregiver’s Journey is a unique critical qualitative inquiry study that uses the author’s experience as a caregiver to his wife suffering from dementia as the basis of a critical autoethnography. It explores components of positive caregiving that may be not only melancholic and empirical, but also emotionally painful. The book employs multiple approaches that include critical narrative, phenomenology, autoethnography and experiential writing. Through a phenomenological lens of an insider that includes self- and other-hood, marriage, career, fatherhood, suicide, despair, triple grief, loss, caregiving, cooking, housekeeping, advocating mind reading, and encouraging, a narrative illustrating self-reflection on particular experiences is constructed. These culminating experiences result in first-hand and didactical understandings by the caregiver. Individual, personal, and subjective interpretation of relational happenings are explored. Reflective journaling and observations of the seasons of marital life seek to understand if and how shared experiences transcend multiple contexts and help the reader understand experiences of dementia. Reflecting on Autoethnographic and Phenomenological Experiences: A Caregiver’s Journey is a volume that will be invaluable to qualitative inquiry researchers, autoethnographers, and those readers interested in the research of caregiving. Perfect for courses such as: Autoethnography | Advanced Qualitative Inquiry | Disability Studies | Educational Research | Research | Philosophy | Qualitative Research/Inquiry

Reading Autoethnography situates autoethnographic insights within the context of two fundamental concerns of critical qualitative inquiry: justice and love. Through philosophical engagement, it gives close readings of written passages taken from leading autoethnographers and frames the philosophical project of autoethnography as one that is both political and interpersonal. It does this to highlight how autoethnographic lessons can allow us to think through how we may achieve a flourishing for all — something that is both related to justice as it pertains to the political, and when situations are in excess of justice, related to love as it pertains to feeling at home in the world with others. As such, this book will be of interest to those who have a burgeoning interest in autoethnography and seasoned autoethnographers alike; anyone interested in critical qualitative inquiry as a discourse promoting justice and love; and any scholar who has encountered the ethical question of: "What ought we do?"

Brimming with examples, this book demonstrates how qualitative researchers can use autoethnography as a method for qualitative research. Topics include a brief history of autoethnography; the purposes and practices of doing autoethnography; interpreting, analyzing, and representing personal experience; and evaluating autoethnographic work.

Academic Autoethnographies: Inside Teaching in Higher Education invites readers to experience autoethnography as a challenging, complex, and creative research methodology that can produce personally, professionally, and socially useful understandings of teaching and researching in higher education. The peer-reviewed chapters offer innovative and perspicacious explorations of interrelationships between personal autobiographies, lived educational experiences, and wider social and cultural concerns, across diverse disciplines and university contexts. This edited book is distinctive within the existing body of autoethnographic scholarship in that the original research presented has been done in relation to predominantly South African university settings. This research is complemented by contributions from Canadian and Swedish scholars. The sociocultural, educational, and methodological insights communicated in this book will be valuable for specialists in the field of higher education and to those in other academic domains who are interested in self-reflexive, transformative, and creative research methodologies and methods. “This book illuminates how autoethnography can engage authors and researchers from varied epistemological backgrounds in a reflexive multilogue about who they are and what they do. The creative representations of the lived experience of doing autoethnography sets the book apart both methodologically and theoretically, revealing how rigor and critical distance can serve to position autoethnography not only as a personal self-development tool but a tradition and method in its own right.” – Hyleen Mariaye, Associate Professor, Mauritius Institute of Education, Mauritius “This compelling book foregrounds autoethnography as an innovative and creative research methodology to generate reflexive sociological understandings of teaching and researching across disciplines in higher education. Rich, evocative and authentic accounts reveal unique possibilities for the transformation of teaching, learning and research at personal, professional and socio-cultural levels.” – Nithi Muthukrishna, Professor Emerita, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Autoethnography for Librarians and Information Scientists illustrates that autoethnography is a rich qualitative research method that can enhance understanding of one’s own work experiences, whilst also facilitating the design of tailored experiences for a variety of audiences. Starting with the position that librarians and information scientists require deep insight into people’s experiences, needs and information behaviour in order to design appropriate services and information interventions, this book shows that using only conventional methods, such as questionnaires and focus groups, is insufficient. Arguing that autoethnography can provide unique insights into users’ cultural experiences and needs, contributors to this volume introduce the reader to different types of autoethnography. Highlighting common challenges and clarifying how autoethnography can be combined with other research methods, this book will empower librarians and information scientists to conceptualise topics for autoethnographic research, whilst also ensuring that they adhere to strict ethical guidelines. Chapters within the volume also demonstrate how to produce autoethnographic writing and stress the need to analyse autoethnographies produced by others. Autoethnography for Librarians and Information Scientists is essential reading for any librarian, information scientist or student looking to deepen their understanding of their own experiences. It will be particularly useful to those engaged in the study of service provision, user studies and information behaviour.

How do we look at autoethnography in the wider context of research methods scholarship? What does it mean, and why is it important as a methodological approach? James Salvo takes a three-stranded theory approach to teach the skills of reading autoethnography critically; to understand the underlying theoretical assumptions in autoethnography and the construction of the Other (the author within and with-out of the text).The book reads autoethnography closely to draw out autoethnography's philosophical contribution to understanding our being with intimate others and Others, something that is, ultimately, essential to our happiness as flourishing human beings and as research scholars.

“It is time to chart a new course”, writes Norman K. Denzin in Interpretive Autoethnography, Second Edition. “I want to turn the traditional life story, biographical project into an interpretive autoethnographic project, into a critical, performative practice, a practice that begins with the biography of the writer and moves outward to culture, discourse, history, and ideology.” Drawing on C. Wright Mills, Sartre, and Derrida, Denzin lays out the key assumptions, terms, and parameters of autoethnography, provides a guide to using and studying personal experience, and considers the dilemmas and political implications of textualizing a life. He weaves his narrative through family stories, and concludes with thoughts concerning a performance-centered pedagogy and the directions, concerns, and challenges for autoethnography.