Autoethnography as a Tool of Researchers’ Identity Work Through Retrospective Care

Autoethnography holds significant potential as a critical and reflexive research method, particularly in supporting the researcher’s own retrospective sensemaking and identity exploration. As a method grounded in connecting personal experience with the surrounding cultural, political and social constructs, autoethnography invites deeper examination of the relationship between the research process and the researcher’s sense of self and other identity related processes. In this reflective essay, I discuss how autoethnography can serve as a tool of researcher’s identity work, made possible through retrospective care and allowing the research to unfold in researcher’s own terms and time. By illustrating the political, temporal, and collaborative dimensions of autoethnography, this essay contributes to ongoing conversations about the entanglement of method and identity, and lays groundwork for further inquiry into how autoethnography may function simultaneously as both a scholarly method and a personal way of identity exploration or activism.