Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner

July 26-27

This workshop will be of interest to both novice and advanced students, researchers, and practitioners seeking to integrate autoethnographic storytelling and narrative into their research, teaching, and everyday life. The course will offer researchers effective ways to explore the personal, relational, and contextual dimensions of their work, with relevance across disciplines, including applied fields in health, medicine, and education.

We will guide workshop attendees in the following areas:

• the history of autoethnography and narrative as approaches to doing research
• becoming storywriters and living the writing life
• fundamental ethical issues, dilemmas, and responsibilities in qualitative research
• the intersection of ethnography with autoethnography
• how remembering transforms meanings by moving them from past to present
• publishing autoethnographic and narrative research

In working through several prose and multi-media exemplars, workshop attendees will gain experience in:

• writing vulnerably about crucial turning points they and their research participants have lived through
• envisioning writing about life’s messiness
• practicing thinking with stories
• imagining how to do research creatively and collaboratively
• considering doing research that is relevant to real people leading actual lives
• pondering the moral and ethical concerns of their work

Workshop attendees will have an opportunity to do narrative and personal writing and to discuss how these practices might fit into their ongoing qualitative research projects.