Evocative Autoethnography

Arthur P. Bochner is Distinguished University Professor of communication at University of South Florida and one of the leading figures in autoethnography and personal narrative. His most recent book, Coming to Narrative, won best book awards from both the National Communication Association (NCA) Ethnography Division and the International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry. He is coauthor of Understanding Family Communication, coeditor with Carolyn Ellis of two influential edited volumes on interpretive ethnography-Composing Ethnography and Ethnographically Speaking-and coedits the Writing Lives book series. Carolyn Ellis is Distinguished University Professor of communication and sociology at the University of South Florida and one of the leading figures in autoethnography. She was honored with the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award in Qualitative Inquiry from the International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) and with the career Legacy Award from the National Communication Association (NCA) Ethnography Division in 2013. In 2014, the NCA awarded Ellis and Arthur Bochner the Charles H. Woolbert Research Award for their 2000 chapter, "Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject." In 2015, she was honored with the title of NCA Distinguished Scholar. Her book The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography is the foundational work on autoethnographic methods.

• PrefaceIntroductionPart One: Origins and History1. Coming to Autoethnography2. The Rise of AutoethnographyPart Two: Writing and Telling Evocative Stories3. Storytelling and Story Writing4. Thinking with ‘Maternal Connections’Part Three: Ethical Dilemmas and Ethnographic Choices5. Doing Evocative Autoethnography Ethically6. The ‘Ethno’ in Evocative AutoethnographyPart Four: Blending Evocative Genres7. Thinking with ‘Bird On The Wire’8. Memory and TruthCodaReferencesIndexAbout the Authors

I have been engaged, as a teacher and researcher, with autoethnography for over a decade.Reading this book has me wish that I had encountered it back at the start; perhaps I could havebypassed much of the confusion I experienced about issues such as paradigm wars, researchgenres, the place of the “I” in research inquiry and such like.David Mc Cormack, Maynooth University, British Journal of Guidance & Counselling