Not all who Wander are Lost and all who Wonder are Found

Abstract

This paper is designed to problematise and enhance through this doing the effectiveness of autoethnography as a method of inquiry. Autoethnographic research generally finds a home within the postpositivist proclivities and phenomenological inquiry-based practices of the humanities and the social sciences. By attempting to engage a decentring of the human in (autoethnographic) research practice, this paper suggests the need for a turning toward affectively informed posthuman theorising as practice by engaging the nonhuman as well as and in relation to the human in such inquiry. Drawing upon Spinoza's claim that all bodies (human and nonhuman) have the capacity to affect and be affected, the paper argues that autoethnographic practices need to attend to all aspects of spatial and temporal relationality and that theorising with and through affect enhances the effectiveness of inquiry into what a body, any body, can do.