Description
Writing Philosophical Autoethnography is the result of Alec Grant’s vision of bringing the disciplines of philosophy and autoethnography together. This is the first volume of narrative autoethnographic work in which invited contributing authors were charged with exploring their issues, concerns, and topics about human society, culture, and the material world through an explicitly philosophical lens.
Each chapter, while written autoethnographically, showcases sustained engagement with philosophical arguments, ideas, concepts, theories, and corresponding ethical positions. Unlike much other autoethnographic work, within which philosophical ideas often appear to be "grafted on" or supplementary, the philosophical basis of the work in this volume is fundamental to its shifting content, focus, and context. The narratives in this book, from scholars working in a range of disciplines in the humanities and human sciences, function as narrative, conceptual, and analytical exemplars to act as a guide for autoethnographers in their own writing, and suggest future directions for making autoethnography more philosophically rigorous.
This book is suitable for students and scholars of autoethnography and qualitative methods in a range of disciplines, including the humanities, social and human sciences, communication studies, and education.
Table of Contents
1. The Philosophical Autoethnographer
Alec Grant
2. Suffering Happiness: On Autoethnography’s Ethical Calling
Art Bochner
3. Do I Love Dick? An Epistolary Address to Autotheory’s Transitional Aesthetic Objects
Alex Brostoff
4. The Developing Feminist, Philosophical Body: An Autoethnography of the Studious, Researching, Working, and Retiring Lesbian Body
Elizabeth Ettorre
5. Which Way is Up? A Philosophical Autoethnography of Trying to Stand in a "Crooked Room"
Renata Ferdinand
6. Thinking-With: Paul Ricoeur Becomes Part of Mark Freeman
Mark Freeman
7. In Search of My Narrative Character: A Philosophical Autoethnography
Alec Grant
8. An Autoethnographic Examination of Organizational Sensemaking
Andrew Herrmann
9. A Liminal Awakening
Christopher N. Poulos
10. The Personal Evolution of a Critical BlackGirl Feminist Identity: A Philosophical Autoethnographic Journey
Menah Pratt
11. Talking With Others: Autoethnography, Existential Phenomenology, and Dialogic Being
Shelley Rawlins
12. Our Bodies Know Ableism: An Existential Phenomenological Approach to Storytelling through Disabled Bodies
Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock
13. Assimilation and difference: A Māori story
Georgina Tuari Stewart
14. Concluding thoughts: Selves, Cultures, Limitations, Futures
Alec Grant
