Dr. Paula Stone. Senior Lecturer Primary Education recently gave a talk at our Faculty’s recent Narrative Research Day. Here she reflects on her presentation:<\/p>\n
You\u2019re brave, was a constant refrain when I told people I was writing autobiographically for my doctoral thesis. I can\u2019t deny that writing autobiographically for an academically assessed piece of work, was risky. Ignoring accusations of self-indulgency, self-absorption, narcissism or solipsism, in the spirit of feminist epistemology, I decided to tell the story of who I was, to who I am now, during which, I shared not only the facts about the past and the present, but also my feelings as I struggled with my \u2018self\u2019 as a middle-aged, middle-class woman who was raised in poverty. <\/p>\n
As a young woman, I occupied the position of white, working-class and female, with the related ways of knowing and being. But I have achieved within the education system, I am what Bourdieu and Passeron would call \u2018une miracul\u00e9e\u2019 – an educationally highly successful member of a disadvantaged group, who has survived and thrived in education, despite the unjust distribution of capital in the academic system. <\/p>\n
When I started to work at the university, despite my academic success and the concomitant upward mobility, I felt like an academic tourist \u2013 a visitor or a stranger in the academic field. But through auto\/biography, an approach first established by Liz Stanley, which challenges the divisions between self\/other, public\/private, immediacy\/memory, personal and political, I was able to, for the first time, examine my feelings of illegitimacy. I discovered that my past and present were intimately connected, and I realised that my enduring feelings of illegitimacy were not only psychological and but also sociological. <\/p>\n
Finding my voice as a woman from working-class origins, as someone who has embodied feelings of insecurity and inferiority all her life, has been more difficult than I anticipated. And yes, writing my auto\/biography has created tremendous emotion and the temptation to hide from it was, on occasion, almost irresistible. But using Pierre Bourdieu and Axel Honneth as psycho-social analytical frameworks I was able to examine, how the complex issues of il\/legitimacy and agency continue to impact the formation of self and identity for an individual who has crossed class boundaries. <\/p>\n
As Carl Rogers taught, growth and change can only happen when we experience empathetic understanding of our frame of reference, and I have now begun to understand mine. My PhD has provided what Homi Bhabha calls a third space, a space in which I have been able to renegotiate how I see my \u2018self\u2019 and create someone new. <\/p>\n
My story is an individual story but it could also be what Richardson calls a \u2018collective story\u2019 – a story which tells the experience of a sociologically constructed category of people in the context of larger socio-cultural and historical forces. <\/p>\n
So rather than being self-indulgent, I would like to suggest that my research was self-knowing, self-respectful, and self-luminous. I know that I have created new meanings for myself through documenting my life story, and my hope is that I have done the same for anyone who reads my thesis. Through sharing my own personal experience of my movement across class categories, I aim to raise awareness of the types of challenges encountered by people who, like me, have occupied both a working-class and a middle-class habitus within the same lifetime. <\/p>\n