Handbook of Research in Social Studies Education Book

Some notes from the chapter on "Autoethnography: Making the personal political" by Stacy Holman Jones:

Autoethnography is essentially a "balancing act" (p. 764). As Holman Jones quotes of Spry (2007, p.710): Autoethnography is "a self-narrative that critiques the situadedness of self with others in social contexts."

"...the ongoing dialogue between self and world about questions of ontology, epistemology, method, and praxis" can help us make sense of our biases and the ways in which we conceptualize, and tell stories (p. 766). Understanding this can help us move and act differently, and more importantly, it can help us consider things from a more reflexive point of view as we observe how we connect as individuals with our community, the self-consciousness and monitoring of self that takes shape. Autoethnography is in some ways unworking what has happened and examining how did things begin, with the intention being to tell stories.

The ways we express ourselves, through communication, exemplify how we move, and how we see ourselves, and that is to a large extent politically-charged. It is about not only looking into how we construct ourselves, but how our selves are in reality constructed. So the aim is to understand what happens in between our performances, to think twice about our positions, and to see how they affect us on a personal level.