Ethics in Autoethnography and Collaborative Autoethnography

Autoethnography as an approach to inquiry has gained a widespread following in part because it addresses the ethical issue of representing, speaking for, or appropriating the voice of others. In this article, I place the emergence of autoethnography within its historical context and discuss the contributions and limitations of autoethnography as an approach to inquiry. I examine ethical aspects of autoethnography, showing how the method is rooted in ethical intent, yet autoethnographers nevertheless face ethical challenges. I suggest that collaborative autoethnography, a multivocal approach in which two or more researchers work together to share personal stories and interpret the pooled autoethnographic data,…