An Introduction to Responding Autoethnography

Abstract

In this article, I introduce the concept of responding autoethnography. The immediate inspiration for this concept was Ellis’s text on the amassing of many autoethnographic stories to generate collective consciousness. In my text, I present a different approach to collective consciousness and the relationship between stories: that is, collective consciousness is not a fusion of horizons; it is not a unified story, but a dirty, chaotic, pulsating, cluster of diverse elements. It is not a collective consciousness in the Marxist sense, but a form close to the Deleuzian complex. The second source was the issue of taking into account other autoethnographic texts so as not to reduce them. Responding autoethnography would be another way of taking into account the voices of other researchers, a form of answering beyond the dominant way of appropriating someone else’s thought. I will present responding autoethnography on the example of experiencing the pandemic.