Editing Autoethnography (section)

==Epistemological and theoretical basis==

Autoethnography differs from [[ethnography]] in that autoethnography embraces and foregrounds the researcher's [[subjectivity]] rather than attempting to limit it as in empirical research. As [[Carolyn Ellis]] explains, "autoethnography overlaps art and science; it is part ''auto'' or self and part ''ethno'' or culture."<ref name=":5" />{{Rp|page=31}}Importantly, it is also "something different from both of them, greater than its parts."<ref name=":5" />{{Rp|page=31}} In other words, as Ellingson and Ellis put it, "whether we call a work an ''autoethnography'' or an ''ethnography'' depends as much on the claims made by authors as anything else."<ref name=":27" />{{Rp|page=449}}

In embracing personal thoughts, feelings, stories, and observations as a way of understanding the social context they are studying, autoethnographers are also shedding light on their total interaction with that setting by making their every emotion and thought visible to the reader. This is much the opposite of theory-driven, hypothesis-testing research methods that are based on the [[positivism|positivist]] epistemology. In this sense, Ellingson and Ellis see autoethnography as a social constructionist project that rejects the deep-rooted binary oppositions between the researcher and the researched, objectivity and subjectivity, process and product, self and others, art and science, and the personal and the political.<ref name=":27" />

Autoethnographers, therefore, tend to reject the concept of social research as an objective and neutral knowledge produced by scientific methods, which can be characterized and achieved by detachment of the researcher from the researched. Autoethnography, in this regard, is a critical "response to the alienating effects on both researchers and audiences of impersonal, passionless, abstract claims of truth generated by such research practices and clothed in exclusionary scientific discourse."<ref name=":27" />{{Rp|page=450}} Deborah Reed-Danahay (1997) also argues that autoethnography is a postmodernist construct:

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The concept of autoethnography...synthesizes both a postmodern ethnography, in which the realist conventions and objective observer position of standard ethnography have been called into question, and a postmodern autobiography, in which the notion of the coherent, individual self has been similarly called into question. The term has a double sense - referring either to the ethnography of one's own group or to autobiographical writing that has ethnographic interest. Thus, either a self- (auto-) ethnography or an autobiographical (auto-) ethnography can be signaled by "autoethnography.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Reed-Danahay |first=Deborah |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/645864768 |title=Auto/ethnography : rewriting the self and the social |date=1997 |publisher=Berg |isbn=978-1-000-32085-5 |location=Oxford |oclc=645864768}}</ref>
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