Liberating Scholarly Writing: The Power of Personal Narrative (review)

In Liberating Scholarly Writing: The Power of Personal Narrative, Robert Nash advocates a redefinition of scholarship. Drawing upon philosophy, postmodernist theory, and the insights of memoir writers and other scholars who use personal narrative in their work, Nash makes the case for academia, and in particular professional schools such as schools of education, to accept and value what he calls scholarly personal narratives (SPNs). Scholarly personal narratives are pieces of scholarship that use the author's personal beliefs and experiences as a springboard and framework for scholarly inquiry. In an SPN, the author explores deeply some aspect of her or his personal life and uses this exploration, integrated with references and insights from other scholarship, to examine larger theoretical and practical questions in an academic field.

Nash passionately expresses his belief in the value of SPNs and shares the words and experiences of students and colleagues who have become SPN converts. He details the postmodern theory of truth to explain how work that uses a personal story in place of "objective" observation can still be scholarship. He offers ten "tentative guidelines" for writing a successful SPN, and he explores the ethical and political issues surrounding SPN writing in the academy. He encourages readers to use SPN writing to challenge and expand the boundaries of academic discourse and warns us to do so in a way that finds common ground with our skeptical colleagues rather than separating us from them.

Beyond these more abstract discussions of SPNs, a significant portion of Liberating Scholarly Writing is dedicated to describing in some detail the work of eight students who wrote SPNs for their dissertations or master's theses. Coming from sociology, a discipline at least somewhat open to questions about the place of the researcher in the research narrative, I was perhaps predisposed to Nash's general point of view. I found several of the SPNs he describes intriguing and would easily describe them as quality scholarship. With others I was less sure, and with all eight of the examples Nash offered I wished that he had shared more of the SPN itself and spent less time describing his own relationship with the SPN's author.

In the end, I was left with curiosity about the genre but did not have sufficient information about it. Liberating Scholarly Writing is more a manifesto and a testimonial than a guide to writing scholarly personal narratives. I felt that I would need to read much more in order to fully understand the value and importance of SPNs, and to pursue much more than that in order to actually undertake SPN writing myself. Because Nash wants this form of scholarship to be incorporated in professional schools, where such personal writing has made fewer inroads than in some other disciplines, he presents it with a sort of mystique that makes it seem more novel than perhaps it actually is. He left me with the impression that learning this genre requires the unique experience of taking his intense graduate course in SPN writing, which is one of the main sources of his examples throughout the book.

That said, if Nash's mission was to get readers thinking about SPN, he achieved that goal with me. At the very least, I came away from Liberating Scholarly Writing with some inspiration to think about using other forms of writing in my academic work and with a list of published scholarly personal narratives to read. The clearly written text is relevant to any academic discipline, not only to the professional school faculty and students Nash writes for most directly. If you seek writing guidance or practical tips for conducting an SPN project, Liberating Scholarly Writing will not likely serve your needs, although it will provide references to many other works that might. If you are simply curious about an alternative form of scholarship, Liberating Scholarly Writing provides a useful, albeit not completely satisfying, introduction. If you are already on your way to doing SPN...