Understanding and Encountering the Ethics of Self and Others in Autoethnography: Challenging the Extant and Exploring Possibilities

Abstract

In cultural and institutional contexts, autoethnography examines personal and professional experiences. While conducting and representing autoethnography, these considerations raise ethical challenges for self and others. This expository paper examines and explores the various forms of the ethics of self and others in autoethnography in South Asian contexts. Furthermore, ethical positions in an autoethnographic inquiry are presented and explored by challenging the extant and exploring the possibilities. Moreover, ethical standards are maintained based on the first author's experiences. We also realized that the emerging challenges of the ethics of self and others in autoethnography are ongoing and real. Likewise, we brought the first author’s lived experiences of conducting autoethnographic inquiry in his personal, professional, and cultural contexts (i.e., South Asian contexts) as a guiding principle. Above all, following the foundational understanding of ethics in autoethnography, one may engage with others in the account of self-experiences. The paper concludes by highlighting possible procedural and situational ethics pertaining to Dharma and Karma in autoethnography as a transformative educational research methodology (Luitel & Dahal, 2020) that might be demonstrated while conducting an autoethnographic inquiry.