From Autoethnography to Meta-Ethnography of Autoethnographies: A Brief History and Worked Example of Evolving Methodologies

• In Event: Reflections on Practices in the "Field": Lessons in Creative, Critical, Postcritical, and Community Research

Abstract

The creation and study of personal narrative as “critically reflexive self-stories” gained notable traction during the past two decades (e. g., Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001; Ellis, 2004; Hughes & Pennington, 2017). Autoethnography continues to expand across the academic curriculum, and it is recognized increasingly as empirical research (Chávez, 2012; Hughes, Pennington, & Makris, 2012). There are over 20 iterations of autoethnography (Hughes & Pennington, 2017). These iterations are being published in selective peer-reviewed journals, like Medical Education (Farrell, Bourgeois-Law, Regehr, & Ajjawi, 2015), Educational Researcher (Laubscher & Powell, 2003; Hughes, Pennington, & Makris, 2012), and Communication Education (Banks & Banks, 2000). They are also being published the peer reviewed journals of nursing (Peterson, 2014), sociology (Richardson, 2000; Sparkes, 2000) and ethnography (Whitinui, 2014).
Autoethnographers practice critical, reflexive self-inquiry through “an active, scientific, and systemic view of personal experience” (Hughes & Pennington, 2017, p. 7) to elucidate understandings of the self and context, and their entanglement. Autoethnographers use their own experiences to describe and often critique “cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences” (Adams et al., 2015, p. 1), thereby, interrogating the intersections of self and the social world. Literary and cultural critics applied the term to autobiographies that self-consciously explore the interplay of the introspective, personally engaged self with cultural descriptions mediated through language, history, and ethnographic explanation (Ellis, 2004, p. 38). Emphasizing the emotional and relational is essential as well (Adams et al., 2015).
Many contemporary autoethnographers also adopt commitments to social justice and craft autoethnography to address discrimination, dispossession, and oppression as well as connection, joy, and resistance (Laubscher & Powell, 2003, Hughes 2008, Hughes, 2020, and RedCorn, 2021. However, there has been less effort towards qualitative meta-synthesis. With the advent of meta-ethnography, Noblit & Hare, 1988 defensible pathway opened toward learning what additional insights might be gained from developing a reputable process for meta-synthesizing qualitative studies, like a process for meta-synthesizing of autoethnographies that share similar phenomena of interest.
This presentation offers a brief history of autoethnography (e.g., Ellis, 2004), and meta-ethnography of autoethnographies (Hughes & Noblit, 2016). It describes some of autoethnography’s different forms, and proposed criteria for credibility, and trustworthiness. Moreover, a worked example (Britten et al., 2002) of each method will demonstrate one example from an autoethnography (Hughes, 2017) and one example from a meta-ethnography of autoethnographies (Hughes & Noblit, 2016). The presentation closes with learning key lessons from engaging autoethnographies to engaging the meta-ethnography of autoethnographies with implications for educators, educational researchers, and educational leaders.

Author

• Sherick Andre Hughes, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill