First-Year Research Seminar: Autoethnography

(4 Credits)

Autoethnography is a genre of ethnography that narrates the self in relation to the social, cultural, and political worlds in which the author is embedded. In critical theorist Mary Louise Pratt’s definition, it is “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in was that engage with representations others have made of them”; in this way, autoethnography is a radical genre that often speaks from the margins to the center. Drawing on feminist genealogies of autoethnography in socio-cultural and visual anthropology, this research seminar will explore the genre to ask questions about how knowledge is produced in the social sciences, foregrounding issues of objectivity/subjectivity, collaboration, and authority. Through writing exercises, object-based analysis, and archival research, students will work toward producing an autoethographic text. We will read several book-length autoethnographies, which may include Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer, S. Lochlann Jain’s Malignant and Audre Lorde’s Zami. We will also look at visual and material culture forms of autoethnography, including work by artists Richard Fung, Catherine Opie, and Annie Pootoogook.