Narratives on Longing, Being, and Knowing: Envisioning a Writing Epistemology

Abstract

In this paper, I problematize the inextricable relationship between how I constitute knowledge and how I articulate knowledge. Through various narrative reflections I explore my own reckoning with dominant ways of articulating knowledge that reinforce ways of constituting knowledge that are inherently strange to me. I also outline my sojourns and departures into and from emergent modes of articulating knowledge such as personal narrative and autoethnography. Even though I acknowledge the emancipator nature of these modes, I show myself in tension with them in terms of their fit with my own geographies and topographies. I conclude with a discussion of a larger project I envision which implicates new modes of articulating knowledge that assume a much larger notion of self and personhood. I argue that a larger notion of self is vital to the making of a more expansive and inclusive definition of knowledge