General Overview
For the final assignment in this course, you are required to write an autoethnography, which constitutes 25% of your final grade. You must submit it to Dropbox in Word Document format by 11:59PM on Day 7 of Week 12 (see syllabus for exact calendar date). This assignment should be six pages long and will require you reading about 60 pages of the assigned book.
This assignment will consist of three parts, each of them 2 pages long, adding up to a total of six pages. In the first part, you will be writing an autoethnography. You might be curious about this research method, but here’s the good news: you have been reading autoethnographies since the beginning of this course, as almost every lesson began with an excerpt from them. For now, let’s just say that autoethnography utilizes personal stories for scholarly purposes. In simpler terms, autoethnographers gain insights into others, culture, and society by reflecting on their own life experiences.
In the second part, you will conduct a cultural analysis of the topic you chose to focus on in the first part. You will achieve this by applying the knowledge acquired in this course. In the final part, you will reflect on the process of writing autoethnography referring to four assigned chapters from Heewon Chang’s Autoethnography as a Method. Keep reading, to find more detailed information about the assignment requirements and how to prepare for writing it.
Figure 1. Image by Marc-Olivier Jodoin, retrieved from Unsplash, Unsplash License.
Learning Outcomes
Figure 2. Image by Markus Winkler, retrieved from Unsplash, Unsplash License.
This assignment will enable you to practice applying anthropological knowledge to everyday life. You will utilize autoethnographic writing to explore how socially constructed aspects such as race, class, gender, nationality, and other social markers have shaped your life. Through critical reflection about your experiences, social locations and cultural perspectives, you will gain insights into this process.
By the end of this process, you will see the considerable power that ideas have to change how we view the world and our place in it, as well as their potential to help us transform it. Moreover, when you turn the anthropological lens towards yourself, by extension towards people around you, this assignment will provide an opportunity for you to further develop your self-awareness as well as intercultural competence. Suddenly, you will begin to see more clearly the role of power, privilege, and social inequality in your life. Thus, the distance between you and “others” will be bridged ever so slightly by your better understanding of their perspectives. Finally, you will sharpen your analytical and critical thinking skills while honing your writing.