AutoethnoGraphics emerges at the intersection of autoethnographic inquiry and graphic practice, where narrative and image are treated as co-constitutive modes of working with lived experience.
Autoethnography is a mode of inquiry that begins from lived experience. It treats the self not as a fixed object of study, but as a site where social, cultural, and institutional forces are encountered, negotiated, and made sense of (Ellis et al., 2011).
Rather than separating the researcher from what is being studied, autoethnography works through their entanglement (Holman Jones, 2016) and reflexivity (Etherington, 2004). Experience becomes both material and method: something that is reflected upon, and something through which reflection occurs.
It is not simply the narration of personal life. It is an interpretive practice that situates individual experience within broader social, political, and cultural contexts (Denzin, 2014), while remaining attentive to memory, affect, embodiment, and relation (Adams et al., 2015).
Embracing Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) framework of autohistoria-teoría, this approach treats the researcher’s body and lived experiences as vital sites of data, transforming silence into a space of radical resistance and knowledge production.
Within AutoethnoGraphics, autoethnography is not only a methodological choice but a way of gathering voice.
It allows stories to remain situated rather than abstracted, and to retain the textures of lived life that are often lost in conventional scholarly writing: hesitation, contradiction, partial memory, emotional intensity, and the unevenness of experience.
These qualities are not treated as noise to be removed, but as part of what knowledge looks like when it is lived.
From this foundation, visual forms, the Graphics part, enter as companion practices—extending, refracting, or holding aspects of experience that narrative alone cannot fully carry.
Adams, T. E., Holman Jones, S., & Ellis, C. (2015). Autoethnography: Understanding qualitative research. Oxford University Press.
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
Denzin, N. K. (2014). Interpretive autoethnography (2nd ed.). SAGE Publications.
Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 36(4), 273–290.
Etherington, K. (2004). Becoming a reflexive researcher: Using our selves in research. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Holman Jones, S. (2016). Living dialogues: Materiality, vulnerability, and truths. International Review of Qualitative Research, 9(2), 228-237.