With Emma

Auto-ethnographic Close Reading - an approach to critical play

Meaning: The study of what humans are doing and why they are doing it.

Auto-ethnographies analyse personal, situated, embodied experiences to contribute to cultural knowledges. Close readings facilitate text-centric analysis, without minimising the players role as a creative collaborator.

• unpicking and unpacking
• Mindful meta-interpretation (play is already an interpretive act)
• Power, values, omissions, aberrations (what assumptions are made? What is presented as normal/unmarked?)

Put a little more simply: Auto-ethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience. This approach challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing others and treats research as a political, socially-just and socially-conscious act.

We are each members of multiple cultures and sub-cultures, which reflect who you are, how you spend your time, what you value, or things you have. The purpose of auto-ethnographic writing is to teach outsiders about your culture through both personal and empirical research, but perhaps, too, to help people within your culture better understand themselves.

The target audience for your auto-ethnography is outsiders to your culture who may or may not have a positive or accurate understanding of your culture. In other words, auto-ethnographies "speak back" to outsiders who have misunderstood or misrepresented your culture.

Cultural attributes can be broken down into these categories:

• The things we have
• The things we do
• The things we believe
• Places we've lived