ACADEMIA Letters Autoethnography Patience Kabamba, UPN Université Pédagogique Nationale-Kinshasa The term autoethnography is taken from the collective book of the same name written by Carolyn Ellis, Tony Adams and Arthur Bocher which appeared in Oxford university press in 2015. They defne autoethnography as follows: “Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to system- atically describe and analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience. This approach challenges canonical ways of doing research and of representing others and treats research as a political, socially just and socially conscious act. A researcher uses the principles of autobiography and ethnogra- phy to make and write autoethnography. So, as a method, autoethnography is both a process and a product.” In today’s MDW I would like to talk about the personal experience that I have just had as a worker in three diferent companies in North America, during the last six months of the year 2021. This experience contrasts completely with what I have done so far as a university professor. The interest of this story is to bring out the diferences that there could be between the students who come from the families of the employees of these types of companies and those who come rather from the families of those who are commonly called “white collar”. I don’t think there is behavioral determinism about coming from a family of workers or a family of rather well-to-do employees. I make a diference here between what Bourdieu calls in The Distinction (1984) the employees who always try to resemble the bosses, in their attire and in their language, and the workers who are in a social position of revolt: “They drink red wine, burp and fart ”. They are in cessation, writes Bourdieu. The experience I have just had as a worker at Harley Davidson [HD] (producer and seller of luxury motorcycles), at Assurant (repairer and resellers of mobile phones) and fnally at Academia Letters, January 2022 Corresponding Author: Patience Kabamba, patience.kabamba@gmail.com Citation: Kabamba, P. (2022). Autoethnography. Academia Letters, Article 4627. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4627. 1 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0