Autoethnography

Abstract

Asked to write a manifesto for autoethnography, I find myself writing, instead, a manifestory for auteothnography—a cry for scholars to engage the vibrating force of story-craft in service of our life-enhancing, knowledge-constructing, world-building praxis of the autoethnographic craft. I write to expose. I write to shine light. I write to open up the world to a new way of seeing, feeling, thinking, reflecting, smelling. I write it into a story of a life, a story of a human working like hell to navigate this choppy, murky, oddly human water we've all been shoved into. I write to build bridges, to probe and make meaning, to start a dialogue, to bring memory to light, to write relationships into being.