The Ethnographic I and Intimate Journalism

As a sociology and communication ethnographer, I specialize in writing autoethnographies-ethnographies that focus on personal and emotional life. In this paper, originally prepared for the China Communication Forum of 2004, I introduce and demonstrate an autoethnographic perspective to doing social science research. Additionally, I discuss the relationship of ethnography to American journalism, in particular, intimate journalism, which tries to evoke the everyday, intimate lives of people and make emotional connections among the reader, writer, and story told