Short Abstract

What moves an anthropologist to tell a story through the self? This workshop discusses autoethnography as a way to bring the researcher’s voice, embodiment, and affective experience into ethnographic knowledge production rather than hiding them behind an abstracted positionality.

Long Abstract

Autoethnography is a research approach that connects the researcher’s embodied, affective, and situated experiences with wider cultural, social, and political processes. As both a methodological and epistemological tool, it makes visible how we are moved—and how our own positionalities, bodies, emotions, and relations shape the ways we produce knowledge. Thus, we ask: how can autoethnography move anthropology in turbulent times? What happens when anthropologists engage more closely with the affects, vulnerabilities and embodied experiences through which their positionalities are produced?

This workshop explores autoethnographic practices in anthropology through migration, affect, and embodiment. We trace how our bodies, feelings and experiences in particular places become part of the field, and how political, social, gendered, and religious regimes shape—and are shaped by—our presence as anthropologists. Rather than treating positionality as something to be declared and then left aside in fieldnotes, we approach it as an affective and methodological force that can move ethnographic work forward.

In the context of contemporary debates around gender, queer lives, feminism, and migration, this workshop explores what autoethnography can offer anthropology in times of uncertainties. If our own experiences become part of the process through which we formulate our research questions, when does this become “fieldwork”? When does “positionality” become “methodology”? We invite fieldwork presentations, epistemological reflections, slide stories, photographs, poems, drawings, embodied forms of expression or other forms of creative autoethnographic engagement.