Artistic Autoethnography

Abstract

This chapter explores the dynamic interface between autoethnography and artistic research. Over the past two decades, new and creative approaches have proliferated in both fields, with artistic researchers and autoethnographers establishing critical and creative ways of conducting their research, and championing such approaches within the academy and beyond. There has been a significant overlap between these fields in acknowledging the insights that come from researchers’ own subjectivities, voices, and experiences. With their focus on flexible approaches, emergent in nature, both fields have embraced creative processes as key elements in their design. As such, both fields have become highly popular with artists and academics searching for ways to make their creative processes and life experiences fit within the confines of the academy. That said, not all artistic research is autoethnographic and not all autoethnographic research is artistic. Instead, both fields seem to have found a comfortable companionship side by side with an overlapping interface ripe for exploration. When projects sit at the interface between artistic research and autoethnography, artists ask deeply autoethnographic questions through artistic means and deeply artistic questions through autoethnographic means. At this interface, a dynamic combination of approaches and multi-modes of communication become possible. In order to explore this interface further, in this chapter I first draw on a wide range of literature to describe some of the ways artistic autoethnographies are shaped. These examples come from visual art, drama, performance studies, music, dance, and film to illustrate the kinds of contexts in which artistic autoethnography can take place. Building on this literature, I then focus on three key traits of artistic autoethnographies and explore issues associated with representing such studies