9. Autoethnography as a Creative Methodology: Exploring Place and Identity Through Autobiographical Narrative Landscapes

Expanding on key concepts across anthropology and cultural geography that have provided a starting point for practice-based, doctoral research into the different ways landscapes shape senses of place and identity, this paper shows how incorporating the principals of autoethnography into a creative writing practice helped to deepen and broaden more usual authorial perspectives. Autoethnography as a methodology ‘seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)’ (Ellis et al. 1). As an approach to qualitative research, the researcher’s own experience may be reflexively incorporated within the context of a broader framework by utilising creative writing techniques that engage readers in potentially more evocative ways, challenging ‘canonical ways of doing research and representing others,’ by using ‘tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. Thus, as a method, autoethnography is both process and product’ (Ellis et al. 1). Writing in this context is ‘a way of “knowing”—a method of discovery and analyses’ (Richardson 923). This approach naturally lends itself to narrative non-fiction in particular, enabling an enquiry that goes beyond works of traditional travelogue and memoir by transcribing experiences of landscape through personal narratives that together offer new perspectives on our deep and dynamic relationships with place.