Artistic Autoethnography in Human Resource Development: Deepening Empathy and Affective Understanding to Forward Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice in the Workplace

Artistic ethnography is growing in prevalence across the social sciences and has been used to explore daily lived experiences with marginalization powerfully. This approach, however, has received very little attention in Adult Education and HRD literature. Artistic approaches to autoethnography engage with aesthetics, feelings, and embodied experiences while pushing researchers to consider ways they can work outside of standard social scientific prose style writing and numerical abstraction when creating representations of lived reality. Artistic approaches to autoethnography can enhance all areas of HRD research and practice but hold salience for critical HRD, as its leading proponents have called for an emphasis on “relating,” engagement with the affective domain of workplace injustice, and “radical vulnerability” as we work to imagine and create more just organizations. The purpose of this article is to explore how artistic autoethnography can advance the critical work of HRD by carving out a nurturing space where those living with the daily discomfort of marginalization can finally share their feelings and explore insights that stretch beyond the limitations of standard academic prose.