Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on my experience moving from the role of researcher to the role of artist and how that shift helped me recognize the importance of vulnerability in academic scholarship. This paper draws from my experience turning my research on family narrative into a bookmaking project.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will reflect on my experience moving from the role of researcher to the role of artist, and it will explore how that shift helped me recognize the importance of vulnerability in both academic scholarship and art practice. I will draw from my experience turning my research on family narrative into a bookmaking project, titled Three Mean Cows: Oral Narrative as Structural Form. Three Mean Cows is based on a personal experience narrative told by my mother, and it uses bookmaking as a way to explore narrative structure.

To maintain academic authority, researchers and students often assert a distance between their personal and academic selves, and academic discourse often hides the messy, vulnerable, process of honing one's craft as a writer and researcher. Three Mean Cows drew upon family narrative research, which by necessity entangled the personal and the academic; meanwhile, the experience of presenting my research in an art form outside my primary area of training, left me feeling quite vulnerable. This paper aims to open up a conversation about what it is like to embrace the intimate and vulnerable dimensions of academic research and art practice, and it will explore why that choice can often feel in conflict with our professional, academic selves. This paper will also explore what it is like to take ethnographic material and present it in vastly different forms for different audiences.