Mobile Autoethnography As a Method for Understanding Lived Experience of Urban Mobility

Document Type : Brief Communication

Author

PhD Student, Department of Urban Planning, Faculty of Art, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract
Aims: However, with the emergence of “Mobilities Turn” and consequently the “New Mobilities Paradigm”, different flows and modes of movement are considered as actions constructing various individual and collective lived experiences, enabling the new experience of the expressed concepts from among the moving experiences. No comprehensive and proper methodologies have been developed for understanding these mobile lived experiences although two decades have passed since the emergence of this new paradigm and this epistemological issue in the field of social sciences. The study tries to develop the methodology to understand these mobile lived experiences – the methods that can reach the hidden meanings of these mobile experiences.
Methods: After examining this methodological gap, the study explain and proposes “mobile autoethnography” as a new approach to understand these lived experiences in motion

Findings: mobile autoethnography is an approach enabling the researcher to understand the lived meanings in the actions of movement in everyday life environments through the lived experience of self and others within the framework of the new mobilities paradigm.

Conclusion: Autoethnography is an emerging approach in ethnography which aims to understand everyday life’s experience can be used to understand mobile lived experience in the field of urban mobility in urban studies disciplines.

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