This article explores the "scope," "foundation," and "application" of autoethnography in first-year composition and critical thinking classrooms. I broaden autoethnography's scope from Mary Louise Pratt's focus on colonial power dynamics to engage rhetoric, discourse, ideology, and materiality at large. I argue that indexing this broader conceptual scope to place-based education produces "four key pedagogical effects": to increase students' "awareness" of assumptions and practices, their "engagement" with learning, their "opportunities" to encounter difference, and their "capacity" to effect change. Place-based autoethnography, in turn, spatializes writing theory by attending to student geographies. Two assignments--the "autoethnography" and "cultural artifact"--redevelop writing as a space between chaos (disorder) and cosmos (order). I suggest that writing functions as a way to take up space and endow it with place, or value. Mapping the effects and affects of cultural artifacts from their lives, students chart the meaningfulness of objects and discourses in their socialization, leading to the aforementioned pedagogical effects. Consequently, place-based autoethnography is uniquely situated to engage students ("and" teachers) with their lifeworlds.