ABSTRACT
While ethnographically oriented research has become more widely adopted in applied linguistics in recent years, autoethnography and critical ethnography are less commonly used as investigative approaches. Autoethnographic texts as those ‘in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them’ (Pratt, 1991, p. 35) and critical ethnography is a form of ethnography that seeks to understand the impacts of inequality in social and educational settings with a view to encouraging social change. This chapter will explore the origins of these two approaches and their differing and overlapping epistemologies through a discussion of key studies that illustrate the deployment of the approaches in applied linguistic research and their affordances for researchers.
