It's About Time: Narrative and The Divided Self

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

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 problematize the process of assigning meanings to memories via language; to draw attention to the significance of institutional depression in universities; and to blur the line between theory and story.

Original languageAmerican English
JournalQualitative Inquiry
Volume3
StatePublished - 1997

Keywords

  • Narrative
  • Identity
  • Memory
  • Loss
  • Storytelling

Disciplines

  • Health Communication
  • Interpersonal and Small Group Communication

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