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