Practice-Based Research: Teaching Resource

What is auto-ethnomethodology?

The “auto” portion of auto-ethnomethodology enters when the creative practitioner-researcher uses this approach for self-observation. Deborah Brandt builds upon Garfinkel’s overview of the approach in arguing for auto-ethnomethodology for creative writers, noting that "[s]ense-making in writing entails more than producing a coherent and appropriate text; fundamentally, writers must also make continual sense to themselves of what they are doing" (1992, 324). The process of this continual sense-making is often expressed in notes, journal entries, comments on revised drafts: observable paratexts to the composition.

Note that this goes beyond mere reflection, which is unfortunately the most common method of “sense-making” or self-observation that occurs in creative practice (particularly creative writing, wherein writers on creative writing courses are often encouraged to submit their creative work with a reflective appendix). Both Harold Garfinkel (1967) and Linda Flower & John Hayes (1984) note that self-reflection is a problematic method in that individuals either do not have enough distance from their own activities to recognise patterns and sequences of significance, or they are so distanced from the actual activity that their memories cannot be considered accurate. Brandt, however, makes an argument in favour of auto-ethnomethodology, to an extent:
[B]oth ethnomethodologists and cognitive theorists in composition argue for approaching social actions as they are subjectively meaningful to the actors themselves, studying, that is, the acting, thinking, articulating perspectives of people in the process of doing something (1992, 323).
The perspective of the creative practitioner, and how that practitioner ascribes meaning to his/her own activities, is thus a rather important perspective in studying the process of creativity.

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