Expanding Our Autoethnographic Future

Greetings! Welcome to a defining moment for qualitative research: the creation of a journal for and about autoethnography, an innovative method and orientation to research. For nearly thirty years, autoethnography has flourished in many academic contexts. Scholars from several disciplines—including, but not limited to, education, anthropology, music, gender studies, cultural studies, media studies, communication, Asian studies, sport, sociology, accounting, performance, Latinx studies, and African American studies—have used autoethnography in their research. A Google search for “autoethnography” yields nearly a million results; a Google Scholar search for “autoethnography” yields more than forty thousand sources, many of which have hundreds—even thousands—of citations. Several international conferences foreground autoethnographic research, and courses involving autoethnography are taught at many universities, and more all the time. Numerous journals welcome autoethnographic submissions, countless books and edited collections espouse autoethnographic practices, and prominent qualitative texts include chapters about the method. Autoethnography can be found nearly everywhere—even in a journal about building construction—but a journal devoted solely to autoethnography does not yet exist. Until now.