An Autoethnography of Becoming a Qualitative Researcher chronicles Trude Klevan's personal experiences of her doctoral journey, with Alec Grant as an external academic resource and friend, and her subsequent entry into the neoliberal higher education environment. It gives a personal and intimate view of what it's like to become an academic. This book is constructed as an extended dialogue which frequently utilizes email exchanges as data. Firmly grounded in the epistemic resource of friendship, it tells the story of the authors’ symbiotic academic growth around their critical understanding and knowledge of qualitative inquiry and the purposes of such knowledge. The tale told is of the unfolding of a close and mutually beneficial relationship, entangled within sometimes facilitative, sometimes problematic, environmental contexts. It uses these experiences to describe, explore, and critically interrogate some underlying themes of the philosophies, politics, and practices of qualitative inquiry, and of higher education. Disrupting conventional academic norms through their work, friendship, and correspondence, Trude and Alec offer a critical and epistemological view of what it's like to become a qualitative researcher, and how we can do things differently in higher education. This book is suitable for all researchers and students, their supervisors, mentors, and teachers, and academics of qualitative research and autoethnography, and those interested in critiques of higher education.

Brimming with examples, this book demonstrates how qualitative researchers can use autoethnography as a method for qualitative research. Topics include a brief history of autoethnography; the purposes and practices of doing autoethnography; interpreting, analyzing, and representing personal experience; and evaluating autoethnographic work.

Like all writing, biographies are interpretive. In Interpretive Autoethnography, Norman Denzin combines one of the oldest techniques in the social sciences with one of the newest. Bringing in elements of postmodernism and interpretive social science, he reexamines the biographical and autobiographical genres as methods for qualitative researchers. Grounded in theory and rigorous analysis, this accessible book points up the inherent weaknesses in traditional biographical forms and outlines a new way in which biographies should be conceptualized and shaped. The book provides a guide to the assumptions of the biographical method, to its key terms, and to the strategies for gathering and interpreting such materials. Denzin introduces the key concept of "epiphany," or turning points in person’s lives. A final chapter returns to autoethnography’s primary purpose: to make sense of our fragmented lives.

In this step-by-step guide to writing autoethnography, the author describes and illustrates the essential features and practices of this qualitative research method.

Autoethnography: Process, Product, and Possibility for Critical Social Research by Sherick A. Hughes and Julie L. Pennington provides a short introduction to the methodological tools and concepts of autoethnography, combining theoretical approaches with practical “how to” information. Written for social science students, teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers, the text shows readers how autoethnographers collect, analyze, and report data. With its grounding in critical social theory and inclusion of innovative methods, this practical resource will move the field of autoethnography forward.

The Creative Qualitative Researcher is designed to help readers see the range of possibilities of creative scholarship. The phrase "creative qualitative researchers" points toward scholars who call upon their literary skills to evoke the emotional and intellectual complexity of their subjects; who deploy their vulnerable, relational, and reflexive selves to expose and change problematic cultural practices; and who engage their embodied ideological and ethical sensibilities as researchers. Part I introduces chapters on four qualitative methods: autoethnography, performative writing, narrative inquiry and poetic inquiry. Each of these four method chapters presents the method written in the style it features, provides writing prompts for exploring the chapter’s themes, and offers written examples of the method. Part II, divided into four chapters, aims to develop creative qualitative research skills relevant to the methods discussed in Part I. Chapter 5 discusses empathy and ethics; Chapter 6 is a primer on creative writing; Chapter 7 identifies some alternative ideas for using the words of others; and Chapter 8 focuses on collaborative improvisation to compose scholarly work. Each of the chapters in Part II includes a large number of writing exercises, prompts and strategies to assist scholars in becoming better creative researchers. By the end of the book, readers will know what creative research might entail and will have a clear understanding of the methods. Working with the various writing strategies, readers will see the potential of creative research and gain skills for its use.

This text provides a solid intellectual grounding in the area of qualitative research. It examines theoretical underpinnings, methodological perspectives and empirical approaches.