Leaning Into Autoethnography: A Review of Heewon Chang’s Autoethnography As Method

To lean in means to press forward or to move toward something. Leaning in is a deliberate way to approach something whether it is a strong wind or a new skill. This idiom was used recently in Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandburg's new book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. As a novice qualitative researcher who is more comfortable with a scientific writing style, I use lean in to describe my stance toward autoethnography. Chang's (2008) book enabled me to lean into or move toward an understanding of how I might use this method in my own research. My doctoral education courses included statistics and quantitative research methods. It was not until post-doc that I took any formal courses in qualitative research. Given the various approaches to autoethnography, Chang offers a comfortable entry point because of its objective stance. Chang (2008) distinguishes autoethnography from other self-narratives such as autobiographies, memoirs, and personal essays. While these forms of self-narratives and autoethnography share the common characteristic of the personal story, autoethnography is distinct in that it moves beyond the personal story into an analysis and interpretation of a culture. It is a way to analyze and interpret a culture using one's personal story. It is a method that "combines cultural analysis and interpretation with narrative details. It follows the anthropological and social scientific inquiry approach rather than descriptive or performative storytelling" (p. 46). The Two Camps and the Triad Chang (2008) describes two polarizing camps of autoethnographers stating the "war between objectivity and subjectivity is likely to continue, shaping the discourse of autoethnography" (p. 46). She categorizes researchers including Ellis, Bochner and Denzin on the subjective side with their more evocative and "emotionally engaging" approaches and Anderson and Atkison on the objective side taking more of an "analytical, theoretical, and objective approach" (p. 46). While Chang depicts the approaches to autoethnography as "opposing" and some "straddle both positions," I prefer the way Ellis and Bochner (as cited in Chang) describes the approaches to autoethnography as a triad with varying emphasis on auto (self), ethno (culture) and graphy (process). The visual of a traid triggers a mental image of a discussion rather than a debate about the ways people approach autoethnography. Chang acknowledges Ellis and Bochner's explanation and refers to a "triadic balance" when she describes autoethnography as being "ethnographic in its methodological orientation, cultural in it interpretive orientation, and autobiographical in its content orientation" (p. 48). Figure 1 is a reproduction of a doodle I made in the sidebar of Chang's book as I processed this representation. It is this triadic balance of reflection, analysis, and interpretation that I find appealing and useful. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] An example of a subjective approach is Denzin's (2014) interpretive autoethnography. Denzin defines interpretative autoethnography as "the life experiences as performances of a person" (p. 1). Using the term, pentimiento, "something painted out of a picture which later becomes visible again," (p. 1) to describe stories, Denzin emphasizes the performative nature of autoethnography and the idea that a life is like a painting with layers of meaning. An example of an objective approach is Anderson's (2006) "analytic ethnographic paradigm" and presents five features that differentiate this style of autoethnography from the evocative style. These features are that "the researcher is (1) a full member in the research group or setting, (2) visible as such a member in the researcher's published texts, and (3) committed to an analytic research agenda focused on improving theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena" (p. 375). Although Chang (2008) does not define her approach as analytic, I would place her in the objective camp. …