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How do we reconcile the complex and subjective dimensions of ethnographic research as they pertain to ethnographers themselves? What is to be made of the compelling draw the ethnographic process tends to have on its researchers? This article uses hermeneutic phenomenology to examine how ethnographers’ lifeworlds make possible the doing of ethnographic research. I draw on moments from past research to argue for an inexorable link between lifeworlds and ethnography, which results in ethnographers being definitively, yet uniquely and contingently, “chosen” to live as ethnographers. This multilayered snapshot of ethnographic subjectivity seeks to embolden the reflective space necessary for promoting a fuller sense of accountability by ethnographers, a fuller understanding and awareness of the complexities inherent to ours and others’ ethnographic stories.

This story tells about an accident that occurred at the 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. The first author presents her autoethnography of her partner’s fall and her subsequent reaction. Then to complicate and deepen her telling, she crafts a second multivoiced account from the responses of eight people who were part of the event. The participants’ stories are juxtaposed to tell a multivoiced tale and to theorize what happened in an experience-near mode. Twice-told multivoiced autoethnography brings other voices, subjectivities, and interpretations into our autoethnographic accounts, providing a collective consciousness and offering the possibility of initiating conversations about the values of care and empathy connected with the project of autoethnography.

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