english

Goals
The goal of this assignment is to help you think about how specific experiences or themes in your life shape your perspective, especially your perspective in this class. It is also an opportunity to get to know you.
Instructions
Autoethnography is a type of writing that presents and examines the personal experiences of the writer. It can serve two goals: understanding the writer’s perspective and position (where they are coming from, what “baggage” they bring to the study), and presenting the topic of study from an immediate, first-hand point of view. This week’s module includes a guest video by Dr. Katherine Borland of Comparative Studies and the Center for Folklore Studies, which is absolutely essential to understanding how to do an autoethnography assignment.
This autoethnography essay asks you to explore your position as a scholar through some kind of autobiographical event or aspect of your life. This is not a biographical statement, and should not read like a college admissions essay. Rather, it’s a piece of writing (or video, or audio, or some other form of your choosing) that includes some personal narrative and some critical analysis of how that narrative shapes your perspective as a student in this class (particularly your perspective on identity, power, or privilege). If you want to talk about a specific experience, it need not be the most profound experience of your life. It could be a conversation with your neighbor or something you realized while walking across the Oval. Autoethnography usually involves unpacking meaning from mundane, everyday experiences.
When I spoke with a fellow teacher abut this assignment, we each talked about how we might approach it: She said: “I might begin with being from (in a sense) both the U.S. South and North, because I have lived in both regions at various times in my life, and my parents and family are from New York on one side and North Carolina on the other. I would focus around a specific aspect of that theme, such as a moment I realized what it meant to be a relatively privileged White person studying slavery and its aftermaths in both regions during high school and college, and how that influenced my understanding of race as I continue to work on the intersection of religion and race in American politics. Or I might tell a specific story from my first year of college, of being treated differently by someone from New England after they found out I was from the South, because my beliefs, accent, and education did not fit their preconception of a person from that region and their preconception didn’t fit me. I’d then discuss what perspective that gave me in thinking about American identity, and in particular about the Northerners’s understanding of the South and how it is inextricably tied to the South’s historical economies and treatment of African Americans.”
Myself, I would probably talk about a seemingly simple, mundane disagreement I had with my husband that ended up revealing a lot about our different prejudices, having grown up in different classes and with different cultural norms. Being in a multiracial marriage has brought with it some challenges that has led to a much deeper understanding of the socialization we both had as children, and how it still controls so much of how we perceive the world. Resolving those differences and learning how to live in harmony has taught me a lot about my own values and beliefs, how to be creative in developing new norms as a family, how to respect cultural norms that differ from the ones I was socialized into, and has helped me grow to be more accepting of others’ standards and values even if I don’t adopt them for myself. I live daily with a recognition that what I take as a given in social interaction is not a given for everyone, and I incorporate that perspective into my scholarly work around cultural differences. Because I’m grounding my analysis in this particular disagreement, and my surprise at the assumptions we both employed in that moment, I would focus on the way his Vietnamese family’s constructions of masculinity and what it means to be a husband in contrast to my own family’s constructions of femininity and marriage as an institution with particular roles and responsibilities led to a deeper understanding of how I move through the world carrying particular ideas about gender and relationships that has been shaped by my family’s cultural identity–ideas that I am now better able to examine as a scholar as a result of my personal experiences.
You can take many approaches; just make sure that your main focus in the essay is how your experiences shape your perspective as a scholar. Make sure you at least skim Week 3’s readings and modules before you begin to write so you learn more about what autoethnography is like.
Clarifying note: when I say “as a scholar”, I mean “as a person who is thinking about ideas like identity, power, injustice, and/or global literature” like we’ll do in this class, not just as a college student. That said, you do not need to disclose anything about yourself you do not wish to in order to do well on this assignment. In fact, please do not disclose anything you feel might bring you harm. One important part of shaping yourself as a scholar is determining the right moments to disclose who you are, and to whom. You are ultimately the best judge of what is safe for you, but your TA can talk with you about questions or concerns if they arise for you.
Requirements
Most of you will do this assignment as a written text. In that case, your essay should be 350-500 words (about 1 single spaced page). You must submit it as a Word document or PDF file in this Carmen assignment dropbox. You can, however, choose a different medium to express yourself, as long as it’s about the same effort to complete and each of the main components outlined above are addressed. Choose your medium based on your goals, skills, and the message you want to convey. If you’re not sure if what you have in mind is appropriate, please teach out to your TA to talk it through.