Making autoethnography: crafting intimate, social and material relations

Abstract

Making autoethnography outlines a method for combining the practices of making (sewing and crochet) and interpretive writing to capture the relationality of the self and materials. I discuss how I have developed my fascination with making as a conduit for working through the challenges of writing autoethnography and the personal vulnerabilities that this practice can reveal. I detail how experimenting with making autoethnography through the stages of discovery, development and embedding develops a practice to interweave my interpretation of the relationality and materiality of making. Through paying attention to development over time as well as the time spent making, this approach explicitly integrates a temporal framing within autoethnographic methods. I also explore how making expresses the complexity of relationships bound through caring and grief. In embedding this methodology, I consider how attempting to capture the diversity of making though recording time, materials and skills, can take the researcher closer to unpicking the qualities of making and how these are constituted by social identities.