AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AS A METHOD FOR REFLEXIVE RESEARCH Essay

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AS A METHOD FOR REFLEXIVE RESEARCH - Essay Example lentlessly attempted to overcome the divide between academic knowledge (so called cultivated knowledge) and popular knowledge (so called uncultivated knowledge). In the poststructuralist paradigm, different streams have emerged such as rhetoric analysis, discursive analysis, ethnomethodology, content analysis and so on in order to comprehend the phenomena under consideration from unconventional planes and levels. Autoethnography too is a poststructuralist approach, which is used mainly for dealing with issues related to self and identity. It is a genre in the making in both academic as well as real life practices. Autoethnography is at present an established approach in a number social science fields such as anthropology, sociology and cultural studies (Anderson, 2006; Etherington, 2004; Roth, 2005). In essence, narrative analysis is what constitutes autoethnography as an independent social science approach. Moreover, autoethnography is broadly multidisciplinary as it synthesises many theoretical tolls from a number of paradigms. According to autoethnographic approach, one could cultivate knowledge or open up a new level of discourse or inve nt a new plane of theoretical activity through the medium of a personalised style of writing. Here, the personalised style of writing would essentially be linked to or based on established scientific theory. Being part of the postmodern tradition of knowledge-making, autoethnography rejects the prevalent scienticism in almost all the branches of human knowledge (Wall, 2006). On the other hand, theorists of various hues still see autoethnography as deprived of scientific rigour, methodological validity and epistemological legitimacy. Countering this, the proponents of autoethnography assert that critical practices which are established in social science for validating knowledge could also be replicated to autoethnography in order to check its legitimacy and accuracy. In reality, the difference of opinion on the matter of