Writing Philosophical Autoethnography is the result of Alec Grant’s vision of bringing the disciplines of philosophy and autoethnography together. This is the first volume of narrative autoethnographic work in which invited contributing authors were charged with exploring their issues, concerns, and topics about human society, culture, and the material world through an explicitly philosophical lens.
Each chapter, while written autoethnographically, showcases sustained engagement with philosophical arguments, ideas, concepts, theories, and corresponding ethical positions. Unlike much other autoethnographic work, within which philosophical ideas often appear to be "grafted on" or supplementary, the philosophical basis of the work in this volume is fundamental to its shifting content, focus, and context. The narratives in this book, from scholars working in a range of disciplines in the humanities and human sciences, function as narrative, conceptual, and analytical exemplars to act as a guide for autoethnographers in their own writing, and suggest future directions for making autoethnography more philosophically rigorous.
This book is suitable for students and scholars of autoethnography and qualitative methods in a range of disciplines, including the humanities, social and human sciences, communication studies, and education.
1. The Philosophical Autoethnographer
Alec Grant
2. Suffering Happiness: On Autoethnography’s Ethical Calling
Art Bochner
3. Do I Love Dick? An Epistolary Address to Autotheory’s Transitional Aesthetic Objects
Alex Brostoff
4. The Developing Feminist, Philosophical Body: An Autoethnography of the Studious, Researching, Working, and Retiring Lesbian Body
Elizabeth Ettorre
5. Which Way is Up? A Philosophical Autoethnography of Trying to Stand in a "Crooked Room"
Renata Ferdinand
6. Thinking-With: Paul Ricoeur Becomes Part of Mark Freeman
Mark Freeman
7. In Search of My Narrative Character: A Philosophical Autoethnography
Alec Grant
8. An Autoethnographic Examination of Organizational Sensemaking
Andrew Herrmann
9. A Liminal Awakening
Christopher N. Poulos
10. The Personal Evolution of a Critical BlackGirl Feminist Identity: A Philosophical Autoethnographic Journey
Menah Pratt
11. Talking With Others: Autoethnography, Existential Phenomenology, and Dialogic Being
Shelley Rawlins
12. Our Bodies Know Ableism: An Existential Phenomenological Approach to Storytelling through Disabled Bodies
Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock
13. Assimilation and difference: A Māori story
Georgina Tuari Stewart
14. Concluding thoughts: Selves, Cultures, Limitations, Futures
Alec Grant
Biography
Alec Grant, PhD, is Visiting Professor in the Department of Psychology and Education, Faculty of Professional Studies, University of Bolton, UK.
"Each scholar in this volume edited by Alec Grant offers a beautifully crafted provocation, a disturbance, a disorientation, a tilting of perspective that challenges autoethnographers to take seriously and engage with the philosophical dimensions of their work from conception to completion. For sure, this is no easy task, but it is essential if autoethnography is to avoid complacency and continue to grow and flourish as a dynamic genre of inquiry in the future. There is so much on offer in the pages of Writing Philosophical Autoethnography for both novice and experienced autoethnographer alike. It is a gift of kindness that should be gratefully accepted and cared for by anybody fortunate enough to read it." -- Professor Andrew Sparkes, Leeds Beckett University, UK
"The present day confronts us with so many complex ethical, political, and spiritual questions, and it is the challenge of today’s writer to chart both the inner world and the other world, and the space between. In Writing Philosophical Autoethnography, Grant has given the contemporary writer a toolkit for developing their art. It offers a deep investigation into what our setting does to our thoughts and feelings and what our thoughts and feelings do to our setting. It charts continents, the soul and literature from around the globe, and marshals them into one compelling thesis. A feat." -- Andy West, author of The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy
