Auto-Methods in Feminist Geography

Abstract

Given the ubiquitous encouragement of self-expression in academia, informally through tweeting and blogging, and formally through the highly stylized curriculum vitae, we find it curious that scholars using autobiographical writing and autoethnography in their research still need to provide basic rationales for choosing to use one’s own experience as data. Criticism routinely considers that telling one’s life story to be narcissistic navel-gazing. Yet there are scholars, in particular feminists, who argue that writing one’s life is an effective way to bring analytical clarity to some types of research. In writing their lives, researchers entangle themselves into their work in many different ways. They can, for example, use their own life to organize, bound, and shape their inquiry. Or they can analyze their own lives alongside the experiences of the people whom they have talked with or interviewed. Or they can trace pathways of power by recounting encounters they have had with institutions. In this introduction, we write about auto-methods, those long-standing feminist research approaches that treat researchers’ own stories and experiences as data. The contributions in this forum both unsettle conventional assumptions about auto-methods and show how feminists are pushing the boundaries of what counts as auto-methods in research. We frame our reading of these contributions by problematizing three key concepts: experience, memory, and data. Our goal here is not to provide a blanket rationale for the use of any self-expression; rather, our goal is to show that there still are radical possibilities for generating analytical insights by using one’s own experience as data.