ABSTRACT
I want to think differently. Sought with passion to create the world anew, autoethnography allows me to work toward “writing a world to come” (Deleuze, 1995). Drenched in trauma or permeated with beauty, autoethnography is a story of self in society (Reed-Danahay, 1997). It is not a new practice: Ethnographers have long written personal accounts of their experiences in the feld. Malinowski, for example, shared his thoughts, passions, and reflections in A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Word (1967). But such accounts were considered superfluous, external to “real” research, and self-indulgent. Since the postmodern turn and the paralleled crises of an absolute in research — the crisis of Truth, representation, and identity — self-narratives for some have moved from margin to center. Comprising a methodology in its own right, autoethnography after the postmodern turn is a methodology and a text that is literally a sum of its parts: writing [graphy] that moves back and forth between self [auto] and culture [ethno] (Ellis & Bochner, 2000).
