Dear Students:
I am excited to begin this semester in this new course. This semester we will learn how the personal becomes the political. We will discover how to make sense of a moment, an event, or a period of our lives in the context of community–family, neighborhood, city, state, nation, and global. Autoethnography is a methodology that is in the realm of what we call “qualitative” research. “Quantitative” is the kind that relies on large datasets and mathematical equations to understand causal mechanisms in our sociopolitical and economic world. It is a controversial method, but one I hope we find beneficial to what we are trying to do: Use our experiences to speak to much larger issues.
I will be doing the work with you, so you will get to critique my work as I critique yours. We will be thinking hard to create a research project that is meaningful to us as individuals and to others who may be struggling to understand and analyze similar experiences.
Sincerely,
ProfSi (prof-see)