On Good,Human,Autoethnographic Writing

Prologue

In his On Human Geography (intriguingly or, these days, even dangerously categorized as Anthropo-Geography), Ron Johnston, an old friend of mine, described his shift toward an anarchic model of practicing geography (see Johnston, 1988, p. 2). I detect a similar shift in my own ambition to perform as a quasi-anarchic autoethnographer. I accept, like Johnston, that the concepts of value-freedom and objectivity in social science are not only challenged but also can no longer be presented validly as a god’s-eye view of reality (or what has been called the desire for objectivity in the work of Rorty, 1991, p. 24). Again, just as autobiography can be a good source of geographical awareness (see Johnston, 1988, p. 3), so it can, and should in my view, be used as a wellspring (an abundant source and a force for action) for autoethnography. Indeed, Johnston’s approach to (anthropo-) geography, although clearly a realistic one of understanding and using its empirical material, also became that of being a good, human storyteller. As such, he came to perceive geography as one which was and is liberating, as illuminating the world, and as freeing people to act constructively in it (see Johnston, 1988, pp. 4–5). This conception of human geography, and especially Johnston’s emphasis on action, is not too different from how I regard my own role as an autoethnographer.

Johnston concluded his introductory discussion of contextual issues by stating that

although I am materially very comfortable I am unhappy with the world that I live in. I want to change it, so that everybody is materially comfortable and has a high life expectancy. But I do not want this to be bought at the expense of freedom. I want choice and fulfilment, for all. I accept that I have choice; however, it is constrained not by me but by forces apparently beyond my control . . . In order to control those forces, I need to understand them more fully because only through such understanding can I hope to build a new future with others. Understanding, and communicating that understanding, are vital. Such a task is extremely large, as I realize when I face the complexity of the world (Johnston, 1988, p. 20).

Here Johnston sounds as much like a utopian autoethnographer (such as Norman Denzin) as he does like an anarchic human geographer. Indeed, Johnston comes over to this (critically, friendly, and biased) reader as the same kind of freedom-writer (and action-promoter) I recognized in Denzin, that doyen of autoethnographers. Denzin wanted autoethnographers to convey their beliefs in freedom, solidarity, and tolerance. Again, like Johnston, the most human of geographers, Denzin wanted us to help, actively, change the world instead of merely indulging ourselves in a form of interpretive autoethnography. Denzin called for us to resist oppression and tyranny, to celebrate community, to be radical, to adopt a pedagogy of hope and heart, to seek social justice, to see writing as serious and dangerous play, and thus to inspire utopian dreams (see Badley, 2023a, p. 1089). Here, a good, human, autoethnographer—Denzin—virtually coincides with a good, human, geographer—Johnston—as they indicate the route they both enthusiastically chose.

Good

So far I have used “good” as an adjective to describe nouns such as “source,” “storyteller,” and “human.” Admittedly, “good” tends to be used in a variety of approved or enjoyable or pleasing ways, as well as in indicating a high standard and of being righteous or virtuous (see Concise Oxford Dictionary). All I want to state at this point is that “good” is meant to be “the most general adjective of commendation, implying the existence in a high, or at least satisfactory, degree of characteristic qualities which are either admirable in themselves or useful for some purposes” (from Sparkes, 1991, p. 49). Later, in my section on Writing, I discuss suggested criteria for “good” autoethnographic writing bearing in mind the warning that “valid” should not be used as a mere general term of commendation or a synonym for either “good” or “true” since to do so would be to combine sloppiness with pomposity (see Sparkes, 1991, p. 86).

Human

The crucial element in Johnston’s anarchic view of geography is the human actor, even the human as activist. For him,

the world is the result of human thinking, which has taken place in contexts that are both enabling and constraining . . . In order to survive, humans have created basic organizational forms, within which their lives are structured . . . The interactions of human agents and the structures that they have created lead to the formation of societies, complex empirical organizational frameworks (Johnston, 1988, pp. 23–24).

Furthermore, we humans, in our various interactions, interpret and change those societies and their mechanisms including the one Johnston most dealt with—capitalism, the most dominant mechanism in human history (see Johnston, 1988, p. 49).

As a realistic human geographer and researcher, Johnston saw himself as developing an understanding of the world of experiences, an approach which involved story-telling, putting together texts from other texts, so that they cohere and provide us with a framework that allows us not only to appreciate the world we live in but also to act constructively in it. The intention was and is to tell convincing stories in word, deed, picture, map, landscape, or whatever . . . And our stories are never complete but, as we learn, we enhance our narrative which helps us plan a route forward (see Johnston, 1988, pp. 81–82).

Again, Johnston’s human story-telling approach is little different from that of an autoethnographer. Both display a human touch, a concern as human beings to shape our surroundings to our needs, to invent the words, numbers, and concepts to describe what we have observed in a form that enables us to think about it and communicate with others (see Frayn, 2006, p. 5). I see this approach as a version of humanism at its best where we seek a good-enough understanding of things that will enable us to deal with them for our human purposes (see Frayn, 2006, pp. 33–70).

Indeed, one way of telling our story is to trace our autoethnographies as humans, as humanists, as possible transhumanists, and as would-be posthumanists (see Badley, 2018, p. 421). First, what makes us human creatures or human animals to begin with? One answer is to suggest that we become human through a form of nurturing: “It takes a tribe to raise a human” (Harari, 2011/2014, p. 11)—the human tribe, Homo sapiens, raises its own. We individual humans are and become the stories we tell about ourselves and about others. But even so, in the vast scheme of things, we are still nobodies who end up as ashes and dust (see Frayn, 2006, pp. 3–8).

Of course, our human stories are not the Truth as such but simply claims to be autoethnographic or historical or narrative truths, for as humans, we cannot tell it like it is (as Ernest Hemingway thought) but only tell it as we see it (as William Blake pointed out). However, our role now as manifold creatures, as human animals, is not to delegate the creation of our future to artificial intelligence or to machines or to develop ourselves as demigods or Homo deus. Instead it is about using, as a collective, our many abilities and our experience and understanding, and especially our language, to protect the planet and to save ourselves and our fellow creatures (see Badley, 2018, p. 422). Protecting and saving are key actions in our troubled world.

Our attempts to become humanists are based on the assumption that we are still weavers of narratives that encourage us to be both ecologists and verbivores. A new narrative now includes the growing belief that we are interested not only in self-protection, self-improvement, and self-control but also in caring for others and the environment we share with them (see Dennett, 1991, p. 417). We have also realized that the old achievements of traditional liberal humanists (especially those emanating from The Enlightenment and its heirs—see Badley, 2023b) are no reason for arrogance or complacency since there is still much to be done to make all human and other lives worth living.

However, the legacy of humanism is still both derided and dismissed. Earlier, humanists may well have failed to practice what they had preached or had limited their notions of humanism to their own class or culture. We don’t have to see humanism as a merely anthropocentric and parasitic cult of man but rather as an open-ended orientation toward all human (and non-human) experiences and subjectivity. Admittedly a strictly human-centered view of the world can be and has many times been devastating. Instead we can conceive of humanism as both an attempt to improve the human lot as well as a practical inquiry into ways of being human, of humanizing the human, indeed as a strategy for comprehensive and ecologically-effective global progress (see Badley, 2018, p. 424).

The Anthropocene has now become a dirty word. Disenchantment with humanism has led to calls for us becoming either transhumanist or posthumanist creatures. Humanizing the human seems not to be a compelling-enough story for those who want to transform us into something other. This intended enhancement will be brought about as much by technology as anything else. We will be modified through artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and molecular nanotechnology—a consummation devoutly to be wished, no doubt. Transhumans would be better than human—healthier, longer-living, and more intellectual and capable, both emotionally and physically. Transhumans would, of course, be aware of potential misuses of technology and, being rooted in secular humanism, would enhance themselves through better education, cultural refinement, and advances in medicine, enabled to overcome our basic biological limits (see Badley, 2018, p. 424; Bostrom, 2003).

Optimistically, “transhumans would not necessarily reject current humanist values but would continuously explore and evaluate them” (Badley, 2018, p. 425). Indeed, transhumanists and posthumanists would hope to use technological enhancement of human organisms as a means to inquire into our further development, so this story becomes one of perpetual becoming or change. However, after Montaigne and Socrates and other skeptics, can it always be presented as an unalloyed good, an entirely benign narrative? I’m inclined to believe, however, that modern critical humanism is itself a process of self-appraisal in which we become aware of our own cruelties and failings and more determined to improve as moral and practical human creatures. This should mean that we could and should try to provide better conditions for all (human and non-human) life in our shared world. This also means that we could extend our sense of “we” to those we have previously regarded as “they” or “other.”

Perhaps, also, we manifold creatures should campaign for greater human (rather than transhuman or posthuman) solidarity with others and a deeper, more effective, concern for the health of the planet itself. We don’t need to become an elite of superhumans or demigods in such a narrative. Instead, becoming more sapient and compassionate creatures should be sufficient for an enhanced self-critical humanism (see Badley, 2018, pp. 429–430). Furthermore, I doubt whether Ron Johnston would have been too interested in writing either On Transhuman Geography or On Posthuman Geography. Humanizing the human geographer would have been more than enough for him.

Alternatively, during this current crisis of humanity, perhaps we need to move beyond critical questioning toward what has been termed a “posthumanist unsmoothing of narrative that privileges a democracy where all voices, particularly those of the public commons, are heard” (see Cirell & Sweet, 2020, p. 2). The major intention here is to rethink democracy to reclaim the voice of the marginalized, to inform greater sociopolitical understanding, and to mobilize more just democracies (see Cirell & Sweet, 2020, p. 2). I’m not too convinced, however, that describing this as a posthuman unsmoothing of narrative is any advance on what Derrida imagined as a democracy to come or what Denzin urged us to campaign for when writing about his utopian dreams. Indeed, we old liberal humanists could argue that, as heirs of the Enlightenment, we want to help the family of man to become more reasonable, more tolerant, and well informed: “This is to see enlightenment thinking not as a final accomplishment but as a serious, continuing project, a crucial work in progress toward local, national, and global equality, fairness, and justice” (see Badley, 2023b, p. 8).

Autoethnographic Writing

Extending a famous phrase (from the work of Richardson & St. Pierre, 2000), I regard good autoethnographic writing as a human method of human inquiry. By “human” I mean much of what I noted in my earlier section especially by taking Johnston’s notion of the human agent or human actor as key factors in human and social development, as well as Frayn’s emphasis on the human touch. Furthermore, human writing as human inquiry is also composed of several important elements that I have previously identified and discussed. Indeed, I suggested seven overlapping processes as part of a story of helping us become more human as writers: adopting a human stance, revealing a human perspective, developing a human voice, improving ourselves as human storytellers, learning more about the craft of writing, enjoying our serious and playful manifoldness as human creatures, and continuing our human conversations (see Badley, 2019, p. 182).

I think that these processes, if seriously (and playfully) adopted, should help us become good or at least better autoethnographic writers. All I can present here is a summary of the most important aspects of each process (for a more detailed account, see Badley, 2019, pp. 182–188). By “adopting a human stance” I mean that we should always write as individual human beings, to write in the first person as “I” and “me” and “we” and “us.” Writing as an “I” or “we” should “allow readers to feel part of our human journeys as researchers and as storytellers” (see Ghodsee, 2016, pp. 25–29). Also, writing as “I” or “we” does not mean that we should ignore critical stance. Instead, creating our own critical stance should help us realize that our understandings are fragmentary, incomplete, and unique interpretations and personal stories (see Badley, 2019, pp. 182–183).

We academics have often tried to hide who we are as writers, to appear objective, to offer a god’s-eye view of the world, to write texts that are author-vacant. We have become disembodied when we should have revealed the human perspective from which we write, our angles of approach, our attitudes, our frames of reference. As readers, we should know we are being addressed by those who regard themselves as feminists or Marxists or post-humanists or whatever. My own human perspective is that of a self-critical, humanist, pragmatist by which I mean I endorse a set of admittedly fuzzy beliefs about democracy, equality, fraternity, freedom, justice, openness, solidarity, tolerance, and variety. As such, I continue to weave and become my own life story, and I hope, like Cixious, to write life, human life (see Badley, 2019, p. 183).

If we want to write like human beings to communicate with other human beings, we need to develop our human voices. Sometimes higher education suppresses voice by drawing strict boundaries—disciplines—around our thoughts and requires us to defer to the more authoritative voices of others. However, when we are encouraged to write our own stories, we are more likely to develop our own individual voices and not just the conventional voices of geographers or historians or sociologists or whoever but as persons, as human beings. Indeed, strong personal voices help us to develop effective epistemological, intellectual, and professional voices: “the really developed voice is one that is able to express itself in a multitude of voices but—once one voice has been determined—then sings wholeheartedly in that voice” (see Barnett, 2007, pp. 96–98). Writers, even autoethnographic writers, just like human actors, have to learn to use their voices to convey the rich varieties of human meaning and feeling (a feat still beyond the most sophisticated of machines?; see Badley, 2019, p. 184).

We humans have many attributes including an ability to tell effective and persuasive stories. We are a storytelling species. But how do we best learn to improve ourselves as storytellers? I have suggested more than once that we should try adopting a frivolous approach to writing by employing four processes as a useful guide: scrabbling, scribbling, scribing, and scrubbing. By “frivolous” I intend a certain human playfulness rather than a descent into total silliness or triviality. Instead of writing the impersonal and often impenetrable prose of much academic writing, I try to present my ideas with humanity, using stories and suggestions for action rather than trying to impress or baffle with jargon and theory. In our writing adventures, we could try (as essayists) to display a few examples of creativity, imagination, passion, commitment, personal engagement, and humor (see Sword, 2009, p. 322). Scrabbling for ideas, scribbling them down, scribing them into order, and then scrubbing them clean as human editors may sound trivial, but the overall intention is to produce text which is readable and useful. I suggest that, as autoethnographers, we should playfully adopt the role of story-writers by creating, where we can, human stories that matter (see Badley, 2019, p. 185).

I am still learning about the craft of human writing. I like the idea of being a literary artisan, a skilled worker who creates readable texts, even “a rude mechanical . . . a cobbler of words for a living” (see James, 2016, p. 93, as quoted in Badley, 2019, p. 186). I continue to learn the craft of autoethnographic writing by, first, selecting working titles as pretexts to greet or seduce potential readers. Second, I learn through reading like a writer, scrabbling and groping for ideas and then scribbling words down. Third, I conceive writing as dialogical, open, questioning, skeptical, and Socratic and see writers as scribes, as painstaking workers of the sentence and the paragraph (as Don DeLillo once put it). Fourth, as an autoethnographic scrubber, I aim for simplicity, try to fight clutter, work to develop a clear and unpretentious style, produce reader-focused prose, separate usage from jargon, and create accessible texts. Overall, we become artisanal when we learn that “good writing should be grasped at once, in a second” (Chekhov, as quoted in the work of Prose, 2006, p. 201). Perhaps, like Clive James, we academics and autoethnographers need to become even more like rude mechanicals and cobblers with words if we wish to achieve the fruitful dialogue required for democratic communities to flourish across the world (see Badley, 2019, p. 187).

How does our playful and serious manifoldness as human animals help us become better autoethnographic writers? First, we should remember that we have evolved from wandering bands of storytelling hunter-gatherers (see Harari, 2011/2014, p. 69). This atavistic pursuit was also a social necessity in helping us become more human as we let our imaginations play with and shape our experience and eventually prepare us for storytelling in written form. Second, as talking and storytelling animals, we learnt especially through reading and writing to reflect more critically on what we had experienced, to diminish our more despicable tendencies and embellish our humanity. “Becoming playful, self-critical, serious, humanist writers should enable us to create our assemblages and bricolages (all ways of telling stories) in the hope of making better contributions to the ongoing conversation of humankind” (see Badley, 2019, p. 187).

We can best shape the conversation of humankind by eschewing “rotten” academic writing (see Pinker, 2014) and by striving to write as human beings for a wide range of human readers, to enter the widest-possible dialogue with our fellow manifold creatures. Our autoethnographic writing thus requires us to be simpler in our approach, to aspire to a more effective process of intersubjectivity rather than a spurious claim for objectivity. We autoethnographers are not detached participant observers of humanity but writers who should emulate the argumentative give-and-take of ordinary conversational exchange. Our assemblages and bricolages and other forms of story-telling are not to be claimed as quests for certainty but rather as suggestions for action and change, experiments rather than final solutions. Human, and especially autoethnographic, writing should always be an attempt to connect with human readers for the purpose of both human and even non-human betterment.

On writing good, human, autoethnography is, first of all, a matter of writing as a self, an individual “I” or “we,” from our own lived experience, as we try to share and reflect upon our own attitudes, beliefs, and decisions. As such, we attempt, second, to offer our own insights into qualitative research to improve its practice and variety, as well as, third, to show the epistemic value and potential of our personal experience. Fourth, good autoethnographic writing usually focuses on particular events or experiences or topics to achieve, not so much objective truth but what Denzin called authorial verisimilitude including such emotions as anger, bliss, despair, disgust, joy, and love (see Adams & Herrmann, 2023).

Autoethnographic writing also requires us to reach beyond and outside our individual selves so that we might identify and challenge other cultural beliefs, expectations, and practices via processes such as thick description. Here, we can use various techniques such as fieldwork or participant observation in natural settings or accidental situations or contexts to facilitate a nuanced understanding of cultural phenomena—artificial intelligence doesn’t do nuance (see the work by Pollard, 2024, for a bright, scintillating, comparison between writing produced by AI and that created by humans). Having noted our descriptions and observations, we can then craft them into autoethnographic thick descriptions taking care to ensure that our writing links the identified fragments (words and sentences and paragraphs) coherently into writing which is neither boring nor sterile but which is, to use the words of the old English common prayer book, “understanded of the people.” What we want as good, human autoethnographers is human writing and human inquiry for human people (see also the study by Adams & Herrmann, 2023).

Epilogue

I can only make direct statements, only “tell stories,” whether or not the stories are “true” is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth. (Carl Jung, quoted in Johnston, 1988, p. 1).

I began this article as a result of re-reading Ron Johnston’s (1988) stimulating essay On Human Geography in which he adopted an anarchic model of geographical practice, an anarchic approach which appealed to me in my own sort of autoethnographic way. Furthermore, as much as anything else, I was impressed by his role as a good, human, storyteller aiming, actively, to illuminate the world and to promote human freedom. His vision of building a new future with and for others directly connected with the utopian dreams of such eminent autoethnographers as Norman Denzin. At times, Johnston sounds to me more like an autoethnographer than a geographer especially when he quotes the words of literary and political theorists: “The history of the idea of culture is a record of our meanings and definitions, but these, in turn, are only to be understood within the context of our actions” (Williams, 1958, p. 295). Johnston also emphasized that by using literary and political texts in a theoretical context, “we gain insights not only to lifeworlds but also to the creation and recreation of those lifeworlds by human agents acting within structures” (see Johnston, 1988, p. 75). The storytelling Johnston offered is one of putting texts together “so that they cohere and provide us with a framework which allows us not only to appreciate the world that we live in but also to act constructively in it” (Johnston, 1988, p. 81).

Isn’t acting constructively in the world also what most autoethnographers aim for, especially in their writing? Like Johnston, individual autoethnographers live in a world of texts (particularly stories), and as such, their (our) behavior is conditioned by their (our) interpretations of them. Indeed, like Johnston,

We use whatever information we can obtain to tell convincing, coherent stories about the stories our sources tell us, in word, deed, picture, map, landscape, or whatever. And so our stories are never complete; as we learn more from the texts, so we enhance our narrative (Johnston, 1988, p. 82).

And, don’t Johnston’s enhanced narratives sound similar to the thick descriptions of the autoethnographer?

What Johnston as a human geographer was after is, I believe, what autoethnographers are also after—a holistic search for understanding (Johnston, 1988. p. 171). Part of Johnston’s holism (and ours) is the important issue of autonomy—the freedom of action available to individuals using their intellectual tools in the context of socially given (i.e., created by other individuals) concepts—as well as the overall goal of emancipation. Such a goal (for autoethnographers as well as human geographers) requires us to convince people, humankind, that they should remove the exploitative, alienating system we now occupy by replacing it with one based on relationships between equals. Johnston’s writing shows us that just as human geography is linked to political practice, Denzin, for example, demonstrates a similar linkage for good, human, autoethnographic writing, a similar concern for human emancipation and a better democratic society (see Johnston, 1988, pp. 176–181).

Ron Johnston introduced his On Human Geography in his characteristic warm and personal style describing it as a

reflection on the whole of my life, rather than, as before, separating out Ron Johnston as academic geographer from Ron Johnston as husband, father, Sheffield resident, change-ringer, supporter of Swindon Town and Geoffrey Boycott etc. etc. . . . The present book describes where I have got to. It is not presented as a text or as a manifesto . . . this book is clearly an essay, a piece written to stimulate interest. It is certainly not a textbook; some might call it an indulgence . . . It is in no sense an autobiography . . . (see Johnston, 1988, p. 3).

But, to my stimulated mind, his essay is no indulgence but rather a kind of autoethnography in which he showed us who he is (his “auto”), demonstrated his cultural context (his “ethnos”), and wrote effectively and powerfully about his attitudes and beliefs (his “graphos”). And when he died in May 2020, he left a lifeworld enriched by his own presence and personality but newly impoverished by his much-lamented absence. The stories he told in his essay were his fables about, especially, autonomy and emancipation, his insistent truths which, in turn, stimulated his vigorous social and political activism.