Writing strategies in autoethnography and memoir: Methodological legacies from three activist-scholars

Abstract

Autoethnography and autobiography are powerful means to link personal experience with cultural and political contexts. In this Note, I argue for blurring the boundaries between the two research genres. I discuss memoirs from the United States, England and Egypt—by Ida B. Wells, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Nawal El Saadawi—noting their approaches to truth and their narrative strategies. The authors were social activists and public intellectuals, whose work was accessible to a wide audience. Drawing on their examples, I invite contemporary qualitative researchers to expand our perspectives on autoethnography, and to acknowledge writing from a broader pool of genres, times, and places. We can increase our field’s ability to inspire change by reclaiming its history and scope.