ibid., 9. 41 Andre Novoa, “Mobile Ethnography: Emergence, Techniques and Its Importance in Geography,” Human Geographies 9, no. 1 (2015): 97–107. 42 Michael Q. Patton, “Autoethnography,” in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods
Search Results
Race and the Micropolitics of Mobility
Mobile Autoethnography on a South African Bus Service
Bradley Rink
Self-Fashioning and Auto-Ethnography
Samuel Baron's Description of Tonqueen (1686)
Anna Winterbottom
Samuel Baron's A Description of the Kingdom of Tonqueen (1686) contains many tropes of the European travel narrative. However, its author was no stranger to the country, but was born to a Vietnamese mother and Dutch father in mid-seventeenth-century Hanoi. Here I discuss how Baron fashioned his identity during his life to attract multiple patrons in the unstable maritime world of Southeast and East Asia. I re-read his Description as an example of “auto-ethnography,” showing how the author shaped his work to achieve certain ends. A comparison with a contemporary Chinese description of northern Vietnam reveals many similarities in tone and approach and helps situate Baron's text within the commercial and diplomatic exchanges of the region.
Each Female Fan Has Her Own Story
Three Fandom Autoethnographies
Tamar Rapoport and Efrat Noy
This article advocates autoethnography as a critical feminist methodology for using personal testimony to investigate women’s experience and performance of fandom The article’s centerpiece is an analysis of the personal testimonies of three women—researcher-fans of different ages—of a fan-owned club Hapoel Katamon Jerusalem. In addition to revealing women’s gendered-based experiences and the different ways in which women acquire and perform fandom, their personal stories prove valuable for exposing the gendered regime of the football field. Moreover, they reveal how women who are not fluent in the hegemonic language of fandom make their way in the fandom field as they seek their own voice and position in it. The analysis suggests that women’s participation can disrupt the hegemonic masculinity of fandom and challenge its established boundaries, thereby problematizing accepted definitions of the authentic fan.
Anxious Breath
An Autoethnographic Exploration of Non-binary Queerness, Vulnerability, and Recognition in Step Out
Lara Bochmann and Erin Hampson
the embeddedness and interdependence of our theoretical and experiential sense-making processes, autoethnography has been the method used for the analysis of the film Step Out because it allows us, as both producers and researchers, to “recognize the
BlackGirl Geography
A (Re)Mapping Guide towards Harriet Tubman and Beyond
Loren S. Cahill
Blackgirls have a long subaltern legacy of being geographers. We have complicated the settler-colonial project of cartography uniquely through our radical placemaking efforts towards achieving safety, inclusion, and liberation. In this autoethnographic article, I trace my own socio-spatial-sensory reflections that I experienced during my visit to Harriet Tubman’s Homeplace, Senior Home, and Grave Site in Auburn, New York. I attempt to unsettle the undertheorized renderings of Tubman by interrogating her personal freedom dreams, liberation geography, and womanist cartography. I then map the intergenerational solidarity that Blackgirls have forged with Tubman more contemporarily through their own space making. I conclude by unpacking what ontological lessons both knowledge producers and organizers can glean from Tubman’s geographic sacredness and savvy.
An Image of Africa in Sihle Khumalo's <em>Dark Continent My Black Arse</em>
Parody and Counter-Travel
Maureen Amimo
The history of travel writing positions the genre as a form that invents and circulates problematic image(s) of Africa. Emerging from this biased background, postcolonial African travel writing offer reimaginations regarding how to think about the continent differently. This article explores how Sihle Khumalo’s Dark Continent My Black Arse, performs this reimagination through counter-travel. I interrogate Khumalo’s appropriation of parody on three sites—naming, landscape, and the body—to counter the prevalent (mis)representation of the continent and propagate alternative ways of imagining Africa in travel writing. This article argues that although parody as counter-travel strategy is a poignant tool for critiquing the negative representation, authorial prejudices allow for slippages that propagate the same set of biases the form intends to critique.
Michelle Bumatay
This article explores the strategies Gabonese cartoonist Pahé deploys to disrupt media-driven images of Africa in both his autobiographical series La vie de Pahé ['The Life of Pahé'] and the fictional series Dipoula, co-created with French cartoonist Sti. It focuses on the role of humor as a way to mock Western hegemony while exposing how sustained colonial logic informs Western representations of Africa. Using humor that thrives on misrecognition, Pahé thwarts readers' expectations and facilitates new possibilities for thinking through the relationship between Europe and Africa, while also drawing attention to the attendant relationship between Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées and other Francophone comics.
George Orwell’s Ethnographies of Experience
The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London
Michael Amundsen
George Orwell is most widely known as the teller of dystopian tales of oppression. A closer look at his oeuvre reveals a courageous truth seeker who frequently lived and worked with his literary subjects. In his fieldwork he used the methods of classic ethnography including participant observation, semi-structured interviews and field notes. This article argues that Orwell was an ethnographer in his research methods and that both Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier are ethnographic texts with valuable insights into marginal groups in the early to mid-twentieth century in Europe. The writer’s clear-sighted and humane depiction of ‘otherness’ shows his skill as an ethnographer. His personal investment with his subject matter, reflexivity and attention to broader social and political phenomena in his narratives mark Orwell as an autoethnographer.
Andrew Dawson
personal nationalisms ( Cohen 1996 ), the relationship between national identities within oneself. In the manner of so much lockdown anthropology, this is an auto-ethnography ( Reed-Danahay 1997 ), which considers my experience of being an immigrant from
'Jewish' Ethnic Options in Germany between Attribution and Choice
Auto-ethnographical Reflections at the Jewish Museum Berlin
Victoria Bishop Kendzia
This article explores the issue of ethnic attributions versus options pertaining to Jewishness in Germany. The methodology is a combination of standard ethnographic fieldwork with Berlin-based high-school students before, during and after visits to the Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) and auto-ethnography detailing and analysing my own experiences in and outside of the research sites. My goal is to illustrate particularities of interactions in sites like the JMB by contrasting the way in which Jewishness is handled in and outside of the standardised research situation. Further, the material points to continuities between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. My analysis aims to open up further, productive discussion on this point.