Critical Memoir and Identity Formation: Being, Belonging, Becoming (original) (raw)
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Critical Memoir and Identity Formation
Critique can function as more than a scholarly pursuit; it can become a valued skill for surviving as an outsider within an academic context. Because universities are complex, largely reproductive systems, being a hard worker and following the rules does not necessarily lead to reward or even much notice. Increasing demands and multiple layers of political machinations foster disillusionment and alienation. Participating in programs, grants, and other initiatives only increases the perils, not to mention running the gauntlet of publishing and tenure. As egotistical as I may be, it is best to remember that the academic universe is not the only place fraught with crushing hegemonic pressures. Being a parent, teenager, or restaurant server all necessitate the ability to analyze the forces that impose limitations and subvert one's agency to author ethical, answerable acts. Fortunately, critique has long been expressed through many productive means such as music, cartoons, jokes, parodies, postings on social media, clothes, hair styles, body art, gestures, and of course, various types of composing and writing.
Projecting an academic identity in some reflective genres
Iberica Revista De La Asociacion Europea De Lenguas Para Fines Especificos, 2011
Research on academic writing has long stressed the connection between writing and the creation of an author's identity . Identity is said to be created from the texts we engage in and the linguistic choices we make, thus relocating it from hidden processes of cognition to its social construction in discourse. Issues of agency and conformity, stability and change, remain controversial, however. Some writers question whether there is an unchanging self lurking behind such discourse and suggest that identity is a "performance" (see for instance while others see identity as the product of dominant discourses tied to institutional practices . All this has been of particular interest to teachers and researchers of EAP because students and academics alike often feel uncomfortably positioned, even alienated, by the conventions of academic discourse. They sometimes complain that the voice they are forced to use requires them to "talk like a book" by adopting a formal and coldly analytical persona.
Narrative, Identity and Academic Storytelling
ILCEA Revue de l’Institut des langues et cultures d'Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie, 2018
Understanding narrative as the stories we tell about ourselves in our professional academic lives, I focus here on the genres which, most explicitly, allow us to do this. I want to explore how we construct representations of ourselves, what I shall call ‘identity narratives’, in three rather neglected academic genres where the requirements of anonymity and impersonality are more relaxed. In thesis acknowledgements, bio statements and personal webpages writers are released from formal conventions of disciplinary argument and have an opportunity to reveal something of how they want to be seen by others. The question arises, however, of how they use the opportunities these story-telling genres offer.
Critical Autobiography as Research
2017
Identity is a reflection of how people view themselves within the social structure (Campbell, 2010; Hill & Thomas, 2000). Too often these identities are mirror images of normalized labels and affiliations defined by, and through, social norms and values. Introspective of social constructs and teachings of normalcy, often times one's identity and status is never questioned (Ramsey, 2004). Juxtaposing systemic thinking with personal knowledge, this article offers insights into the uses and contributions of critical autobiographical research as a both paradigm of research and practice. This article seeks to link the application of critical autobiography with educational practice and theory to promote social justice, identity development, and lifelong learning. Keywords: Autobiographical Research, Narrative Inquiry, Identity Development Autobiographical stories are more than personal narratives. Stories reflect a set of values, rules, and norms that govern a person's learning an...
2017
"Curriculum" is an expansive term; it encompasses vast aspects of teaching and learning. Curriculum can be defined as broadly as, "The content of schooling in all its forms" (English, p. 4), and as narrowly as a lesson plan. Complicating matters is the fact that curricula are often organized to fit particular time frames. The incompatible and overlapping notions that curriculum involves everything that is taught and learned in a particular setting and that this learning occurs in a limited time frame reveal the nuanced complexities of curriculum studies.
It's About Time: Narrative and the Divided Self
Qualitative Inquiry, 1997
When I learned that my father had died while I was attending a national communication conference, two worlds within me—the academic and the personal—collided, and I was forced to confront the large gulf that divided them. In this article, I weave the story of that experience into the wider fabric of disconnections that promotes isolation and inhibits risk taking and change within universities and academic disciplines. In the process, I question whether the structures of power constitutive of academic socialization are not as difficult to resist as those of one's family, and the consequences as constraining. I use personal narrative to show how storytelling works to build a continuous life of experience, linking the past to the future from the standpoint of the present; to proble matize the process of assigning meanings to memories via language; to draw attention to the significance of institutional depression m universities; and to blur the line between theory and story.
I am well aware that what I have to say here, which for a long time I wanted to leave at least partly in the implicit state of a practical sense of theoretical things, is rooted in the singular, and singularly limited, experiences of a particular existence, and that the events of the world, or the minor dramas of university life, can have a very profound effect on consciousnesses and unconsciouses. Does that imply that what I say is thereby particularized or relativized?
SOTL in the South, 2021
Academic publishing plays a visible role in the lives of academics in the contemporary university. This paper, located in the academic literacies field of critical enquiry, illustrates the complex ways in which two South African academics understood and discursively constructed their identities through their writing for a recently published book exploring lecturers’ teaching and learning contexts and practices. The autoethnographic sensitivity of the research enabled the elicitation of critical self-reflective accounts, presented through detailed individual reflective sketches. The analysis uses the concepts of autobiographical self, discoursal self and affiliation (Ivanič, 1998; 2005) to show how these writers were able to discursively represent themselves in the book. It further highlights how continued disparities and inequities that characterise academic publication are experienced by the writers. The findings demonstrate the value of the social practice view of writing and its capacity to make visible how writers enact various linguistic, rhetorical and stylistic resources as they discursively construct their alignment to their scholarship community. In particular, it illuminates generative spaces where academic development practitioners can lead dialogues to re-examine current publication practices, their consequential nature for writers and explore possibilities to support emergent SOTL authors.