Assessing Autoethnography: Notes on Analysis, Evaluation, and Craft

Assessing Autoethnography provides readers with multiple ways to analyze autoethnographies and other forms of personal narrative writing. Given the proliferation of such forms across academic contexts, the book offers a guide of what autoethnography is, why it matters, and how to do it.

Taking each of the three parts of auto-, ethno-, and -graphy in detail, Herrmann, and Adams, provide criteria and points of discussion to ensure robust assessment of an autoethnographic work as a whole. Every chapter is accompanied with exemplars and considers issues such as ethics, storytelling, and good writing. The book discerns the kinds of personal experiences that often work best for autoethnographic projects and provide ways to evaluate fieldwork, interviews, and representations.

Written by two experts in the field, Assessing Autoethnography offers guidance to scholars and dissertation advisors, across diverse disciplines, in producing autoethnographic work and utilizing autoethnographic methods. The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Communication Studies, Education, Sociology, Women’s and Gender Studies, Critical Race Studies, Mass Communication, English, and other related disciplines.

Andrew F. Herrmann (Ph.D., University of South Florida) is Professor of Communication at East Tennessee State University. He is the founding co-editor (with Tony Adams) of the Journal of Autoethnography. He edited the award-winning Routledge International Handbook of Organizational Autoethnography (2020). He is co-editor (with Art Herbig) of the Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture book series (Lexington Press).

Tony E. Adams (Ph.D., University of South Florida) is Caterpillar Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Bradley University. He has published ten books, including Narrating the Closet: An Autoethnography of Same-Sex Attraction, Autoethnography (co-authored with Stacy Holman Jones and Carolyn Ellis), and both editions of the Handbook of Autoethnography (co-edited with Stacy Holman Jones and Carolyn Ellis).