Facts or Fictions? Aspects of the Use of Autobiographical Writing in Undergraduate Sociology

Abstract

Sociology undergraduates are generally routinely trained not to use the first person nor to incorporate personal experience in their academic writing. In this article, I question this, arguing instead for the value of autobiographical writing as part of undergraduate sociology, and pointing to some of the sociological traditions that would support such an approach. Drawing on the experience of inviting sociology students to undertake autobiographical writing for a course on `Gender Inequalities', I examine some aspects of how we may regard such work in sociological terms, in particular, how to regard the truth-claims of autobiographical writing. I suggest that, rather than seeing a dichotomous choice between treating such writing as facts or fictions, we need instead to consider how our subjectivity is itself socially constructed. Society thus can be seen to occur `inside' ourselves. To use ourselves as sources for sociological analysis is a challenging project requiring students to learn to regard their autobiographies in terms of how sociological audiences will receive them.