Telling Your Story: Autoethnographic Writing

Catalog description

Autoethnographic Writing is an intensive writing course in which students draw on, analyze, and interpret their lived experience(s) while connecting it/them to formative aspects of identity, cultural rules and resources, communication practices, traditions, shared meanings, and larger social and political issues. Autoethnography is a form of autobiographical writing that relies on self-examination, socio-cultural research, critical self-analysis, and interpretative synthesis. Autoethnographies situate the lived experience of the author within broader contexts of cultural norms and values, communication practices, histories and traditions, symbols, shared meanings, and/or social and political events. Autoethnographic writing is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, as the author examines both personal experience(s) and related aspects of time-periods, popular dynamics, political phenomena, et cetera. Reading, researching, and writing about the complex links between experience and context offers unique benefits to students who wish to gain deeper insight into the complexity of their own lives and the lives of others.