The Self, and Other Stories

Book excerpt: The Self, and Other Stories is an autoethnographic reflection on the value in the act of writing, illuminating the life of the researcher—in particular the researcher as human. Shepherd explores the multitudes of the academic, feminist self through expanding vocabularies of how scholars, researchers, writers, teachers, and academics can make sense of their worlds. At the intersection of international relations theory and the personal, Shepherd presents seven reflexive essays on aspects of being and knowing as she has encountered them. The essays are grounded in and inspired by her experiences as a way of asking readers to imagine how knowledge production in the social sciences might look different if we could create and hold space for different ways of writing, being, and knowing. The disciplining practices which produce our limited modes of academic expression can be encountered otherwise. She calls on us to reflect on academic subjectification across the interconnected spaces we simultaneously inhabit and produce.