Autoethnography is a research method that focuses on the self–the author’s personal narrative–within a particular cultural context. Autoethnography uses personal evidence, narrative data, and published research to draw attention to problematic assumptions within our culture.

For your final project this semester, worth 125 points, you will write an autoethnographic essay. As we’ve discussed in looking at published samples of autoethnographic essays, you are the primary source. Drawn from our readings and based on our collaborative definition of autoethnography, this assignment asks you to do the following:

1. Focus on your personal experience in relationship to a particular community or cultural context.
2. Push back against the status quo by addressing stigmas or resisting stereotypes.
3. Draw on published texts to establish the cultural conversations in which your narrative intervenes.
4. Integrate qualitative data collection and analysis in your essay.

This assignment requires you draw upon multiple sources of evidence. As mentioned above, you are the primary source for this essay; your secondary sources will include one assigned text from our class and one source you choose from outside of class. You also be required to integrate qualitative data drawn from our course blog for this assignment.

Qualitative data is narrative data that is collected and interpreted in a systematic way. You will collect qualitative data from the writing your peers generated in our course. You will code this data to begin to understand the experience of others in our classroom community. According to researcher Kathy Charmaz, “coding is the pivotal link between collecting data and developing an emergent theory to explain this data. Through coding, you define what is happening in the data and begin to grapple with what it means” (113). Your goal in coding your peers’ writing is to formulate some connection between your experience and that of others.

You have creative freedom for this assignment, in that I’m not looking for a specific structure to your work as much as I’m looking for you to incorporate the above four principals and required sources of autoethnography, which are drawn from Jackson and Grutsch McKinney’s text Writing+Self+Culture: Autoethnography for/as Writing Studies. You can create your own structure for this piece, integrate multiple languages (and multiple Englishes), and mix genres and media. I encourage you to have fun with this over the next 2-3 weeks.

You’ve created some of your own resources for this assignment like this list of qualities of autoethnographic essays and possible topics. Your final autoethnographic essay will be assessed according to this rubric.

Below are benchmark dates towards your final project:

• 11/21: Blog Post 5 due: Considering models of autoethnographic essays & how they speak back to cultural conversations.
• 11/26: Practice coding our writing in class to understand the cultural conversations of which we’re a part.
• 12/3: Coding exercise due as a post to your site. Writing Center visit + extra credit opportunity. Character-building writing activity.
• 12/5: In-class Writing Workshop: Integrating Evidence
• 12/10: Peer Review of Autoethnographic Essay: Come to class with a shitty draft!
• 12/12: LAST CLASS. Celebratory Reading of Autoethnographic Essay! Assign About page
• 12/17: DUE DATE for FINAL Autoethnographic Essay and About page.

Works Cited

Charmaz, Kathy. Constructing Grounded Theory. 2nd ed., Sage, 2014.

Jackson, Rebecca L, and Jackie Grutsch McKinney. Writing+Self+Culture: Autoethnography for/as Writing Studies. Utah State UP, 2021.