Autoethnography as Pedagogy in a Wilderness Literature Seminar: Situating the Self Within a Contested Cultural Landscape

A fundamental question to consider when teaching environmental history concerns the stories we tell in making sense of our relationships with natural and cultural landscapes around us. This study focused on how these stories took shape within a Wilderness Literature seminar that I teach at my university, using autoethnography as pedagogical tool in helping students to situate themselves within these stories. The study drew on post-structural notions of self (Weedon, 2004) and Foucauldian discourse analysis (Kahn & MacEachen, 2021) for its theoretical framing. It employed critical autoethnography as its methodological orientation (Adams et al., 2022; Bolorn & Orbe, 2020), while using an embedded case study research design (Yin, 2018). Findings revealed that students were challenged to explore and reflect on their personal identities vis-à-vis the broader social and cultural discourse embodied in the literature that we explored in the course through lessons designed to support autoethnographic engagement with the material.