A critical socio-cultural autoethnography: a soldier, here, there and back again

This thesis takes an unconventional approach to much of social science in developing the idea and practice of a critical social-cultural autoethnography. In bridging the social sciences and humanities, it cultivated a more thorough social version of autoethnographic research around the metaphor of its different components akin to a diamond’s facets. The development of autoethnography has markedly changed the scene of ethnography, making reflexivity and the central researcher’s role better developed. My thesis incorporates this by building on what others have done and adding a documents of life approach. It first considers the self as auto, juxtaposed against how much the other and society are incorporated. Next, it explores the slippery relationship between fact/fiction. Here, I have created an auto/biographical novella to investigate how autoethnographers navigate the interiority of fact, fiction, knowledge and truth. The next focus for discussion concerns the exteriority and how we craft narrative, myths and stories from these claims as a part of truth and knowledge systems through a dialogical voice/writer/reader motif and also considered the role of the hero in textual narratives. I will then chart how these associations between my novella, myself and relations to other people and their accounts were shaped by knowledge claims and how they fed through relations of ruling into a power/knowledge system by examining a copy of my military orders. I then autoethnographically look at two war memorials that help me better untangle all of this. The discussion here also examined how the self can become more constricted as it becomes more social, thereby further helping me explore the socially constructed character of self and society. However, it is also crucial to consider the individual and each stipulation in developing better knowledge claims through critical thinking and learning from our history and other lives. The conclusion considers the different facets of the diamond of methodological contributions to autoethnography and also explores what a future autoethnography built on these would comprise