ABSTRACT
This chapter describes autobiographical and ethnographic practices of writing and research applied to the study of meaning-making and emotional life experiences. I refer to this work as autoethnographic inquiry, a term introduced by Hayano in 1979. Autoethnography connects the ethnographic impulse, or the "gaze outward" at worlds beyond our own, to the autobiographical impulse, or the "gaze inward" for a story of self (Neumann, 1996, p. 173). Through describing concrete and intimate details of a particular life lived, autoethnographies also show social processes, conceptualizations, and ways of life experienced more generally by groups of people living in similar circumstances (Reed-Danahay, 1995).
