The Reflexive Self in Autoethnography by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

                                     The Reflexive Self in Autoethnography: 

Toward an Interactionist Theory of Lived Identity

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

An Opening Moment

At 5:30 a.m. I unlock the church courtyard for the morning shower program. The sky is still dark, the pavement cold, the smell of bleach clinging to my hands from the night before. As I greet the first man in line—sleeping bag over his shoulder, half-smile on his face—I hear myself say, “Good morning, brother,” and realize that in that utterance something passes between us that is neither professional nor private. It is the fragile recognition of shared humanity—my own moral self reflected in another’s tired eyes. Later, when I write about this moment, I notice how my voice trembles, how I both reveal and protect myself in the telling. That tremor—the moral residue of encounter—is the data of autoethnography. It would be nearly impossible to locate it in a conversation-analytic transcript: no prosodic contour, no repair sequence captures its ethical density. Yet this trembling is what a sociology of dignity must learn to hear.

1. Autoethnography and the Reflexive Moral Self

Autoethnography arose from the interpretive and post-positivist revolutions in qualitative inquiry. Rejecting positivist neutrality, it embraces reflexivity—the recognition that the researcher is part of the very world being studied. Emerging in the 1980s and 1990s amid the “crisis of representation” (Clifford & Marcus 1986), it braided symbolic interactionism’s concern for meaning and moral identity (Mead 1934; Goffman 1959; Denzin 1989) with feminist standpoint theory (Smith 1987; Harding 1991; Haraway 1988) and narrative inquiry (Bruner 1990; Ricoeur 1984). Carolyn Ellis, Arthur Bochner, and Laurel Richardson transformed ethnography into a relational, emotional, and performative practice. In The Ethnographic I (2004), Ellis made the self an instrument of moral inquiry. Bochner’s Coming to Narrative (2014) cast storytelling as both method and therapy. Richardson’s “writing as a method of inquiry” (1997) turned text itself into analysis. Later voices—Tami Spry, Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, Andrew Sparkes, Tanya Titchkosky, Ronald Pelias—extended this to performance, disability, embodiment, and affect, declaring that vulnerability itself could be method. Autoethnography thus installs the reflexive moral self at the heart of research. The act of writing becomes both analysis and transformation: a confrontation with one’s participation in moral worlds.

II. Theories of Self and Identity in Autoethnography

Across this sprawling tradition, one can distill a theory of selfhood with five intertwined dimensions: relational, narrative, embodied, moral, and political. The self is relational: following Mead and Cooley, selfhood is dialogic, emerging through recognition and response. Ellis and Adams extend this to the written encounter between author and reader—the self as ongoing conversation. It is narrative: identity is constructed through emplotment (Bruner 1990; Ricoeur 1984). Bochner’s concept of “narrative repair” and Ellis’s “emotional recall” frame writing as a ritual of re-authoring the past, translating pain into moral understanding. It is embodied: the self is known through the body’s vulnerability, illness, desire, or exhaustion (Frank 1995; Sparkes 2002; Titchkosky 2003). It is moral: emotions are signals of accountability. Following Goffman and Scheff, the self is an affective barometer of moral order. It is political: experience is situated in power. Feminist and critical race autoethnographers—hooks (1994), Lorde (1984), Boylorn (2013), Alexander (2018)—show how personal narratives expose structural inequality and claim dignity.

III. Interactionist Lineage and the Reflexive Project of Self

Autoethnography is profoundly interactionist, though often without naming it. Its reflexive, social, and moral logic descends from Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society (1934), Blumer’s symbolic interactionism, and Goffman’s dramaturgy. Norman Denzin’s Interpretive Interactionism (1989, 2014) explicitly bridges these genealogies, defining experience as the intersection of biography, culture, and emotion. It also resonates with Anthony Giddens’s (1991) notion of the reflexive project of the self—identity as an ongoing narrative integration of past, present, and future. The autoethnographic self is precisely this reflexive project in motion, written through moments of moral crisis and transformation.

IV. Phenomenology and Complementarity with Conversation Analysis

Conversation Analysis (CA) and autoethnography occupy complementary territories. CA reveals the procedural machinery of interaction—how identity and order are sequentially achieved. Autoethnography uncovers what that machinery feels like to live. If CA provides sociology’s skeleton, autoethnography supplies its bloodstream. Critical Interactionism depends on both: CA for the observable, autoethnography for the experiential. The two together constitute a reflexive critical empiricism—a way of knowing that honors procedural accountability and moral resonance alike. CA purists sometimes critique autoethnography as “undisciplined.” This tension is real. But Critical Interactionism answers it through anchored accountability: autoethnographic insight must remain tethered to observable interactional phenomena. The researcher’s emotion is not evidence of the event, but data about how moral accountability is lived through it.

V. Lived Experience, Subjectivity, and Transformation

Autoethnography elevates lived experience to both object and method. Subjectivity is not a contaminant but an analytic lens through which the world becomes knowable. The researcher becomes an instrument resonating with the moral texture of everyday life. Transformation—personal, social, ethical—is central. Writing reconfigures memory and meaning. Bochner’s (2014) “narrative repair” and Ellis’s (2007) “emotional recall” describe how autoethnographers re-author trauma, shame, and moral conflict into self-knowledge. The process is simultaneously analytical and existential: a method of seeing and a practice of becoming.

VI. Vulnerability as Epistemology

Vulnerability, far from self-indulgence, is a disciplined form of knowing. Ronald Pelias (2019), Tami Spry (2001), and Ellis (2009) treat vulnerability as an epistemic stance—a willingness to expose one’s moral and emotional entanglement with the field. It makes visible the human cost of social structures and the affective labor of research itself. Thomas Scheff’s (1990) work on shame, pride, and social bonds illuminates this further: vulnerability is the precondition for solidarity. To write vulnerably is to practice social connection as inquiry.

VII. Emotion, Embodiment, and Moral Knowledge

Emotion anchors moral knowledge. Scheff’s Microsociology, Hochschild’s Managed Heart, and Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotion all position feeling as a moral signal. For autoethnographers, emotion is epistemology—it is how we recognize the dissonance between ideals and lived realities. When Ellis recounts her partner’s death or Holman Jones performs queer identity, emotion is not accessory but argument. To say “I wept” is to testify to the moral weight of social life—the moment when sociology meets conscience.

VIII. Knowledge, Power, and Intersectionality

From feminist and decolonial thought, autoethnography inherits a politics of location. Knowledge is situated (Haraway 1988). The autoethnographic self speaks from somewhere—from a body, a history, a positionality. Writers like Boylorn (2013), Alexander (2018), and Chávez (2012) treat storytelling as counter-narrative, reclaiming authority from dominant epistemologies. The method exposes privilege as well as oppression: reflexivity becomes accountability, not confession. Autoethnography thus functions as both method and moral stance—one that aligns with Patricia Hill Collins’s (1990) call for epistemic justice and with bell hooks’s (1994) pedagogy of engaged voice.

IX. Ethics of Autoethnography

Because it trades in lived experience, autoethnography raises distinct ethical questions. Who owns a story that involves others? How accurate can memory be? What is the cost—to writer or reader—of emotional exposure? The field has responded with principles of relational ethics (Ellis 2007; Adams et al. 2015): the responsibility to protect others’ dignity, to balance truth with care, and to acknowledge the affective labor of disclosure. Institutional Review Boards, often ill-equipped to judge narrative risk, are being challenged to recognize vulnerability as ethically productive rather than dangerous.

X. Reflexive Incompleteness

Autoethnography is, by its nature, incomplete. Every self-portrait is partial; every story excludes as much as it reveals. But incompleteness does not mean “anything goes.” Partiality is not license for sloppiness but a recognition of perspectival truth. The reflexive self remains accountable—to the empirical world, to the recognition of others, to the moral facts of suffering and dignity. Knowledge is unfinished, but it is not arbitrary. As Laurel Richardson reminds us, we write from partial perspectives and open hearts; as sociologists, we must also write from disciplined attentiveness.

XI. Why Ordinary Ethnography Is Not Enough (2025)

In 2025, a comprehensive microsociology demands three layers of analysis: video-recorded transcripts that capture the procedural order of interaction (CA precision); ethnographic field notes that reveal institutional and spatial contexts; and autoethnographic reflection that discloses the moral and phenomenological depth of experience. Only by integrating these levels can we grasp how structure and feeling, sequence and conscience, co-produce the moral order of everyday life.

XII. Conclusion: Toward a Moral Epistemology

Autoethnography complements Critical Interactionism by returning moral consciousness to the analytic frame. It ensures that our sociology remains human—that we not only observe what happens but also interpret what it means and feel what it costs. The result is a moral epistemology for the twenty-first century: EMCA shows how order is accomplished; Symbolic Interactionism shows what it means; Autoethnography shows how it feels; and Critical Theory shows for whom it matters and at whose expense. To study interaction, then, is also to live it. Autoethnography reminds us that data are not just transcripts but encounters that mark the soul. It is not a retreat into subjectivity but an advance into moral accountability—a sociology with a pulse.

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