Situating Autoethnography in the Research Landscape of Language Education

In this chapter, I share my current macro look at the field of language education and my individual experience with doing and writing solo and collaborative autoethnography. I discuss how autoethnography as a qualitative research methodology has gained traction so fast in the field in the last two decades, despite its existing marginalized position. That is, autoethnography was picked up in the landscape of language education research where colleagues have questioned the theorization of the nature, use, learning, and teaching of language as well as learning-to-teach and teacher education. Autoethnography also fits very well in the onto-epistemological orientations undergirding the “turns” ongoing in the field of language education. Additionally, those who interrogated colonized/colonizing ways of knowledge generation through research utilized autoethnography to foreground agency/voices/identities of marginalized communities and to address epistemic injustices.