From Autoethnography to (Auto)ethnography: Making Sense of My Father’s Death and Ethnographically Understanding Others

• In Event: Questioning Self in Between Spaces: Narrative Constructions of Motherhood, Fatherhood, Spirituality, and Counterculture

Abstract

This paper explores my failure to engage in ethnographic scholarship at a national cancer center as the catalyst for reevaluating autoethnography. In doing so, I attempt confront metatheoretical critiques that autoethnographic scholarship is potentially narcissistic, and critically, theoretically, and aesthetically suspect. Building constructively from these critiques, I tell the fragmented and complicated story of my father’s death from cancer, which highlights elements essential to an autoethnographic perspective that addresses valid critiques to the theory/method.

Author

• Chris Patti, University of South Florida