The individual's experience of kidney failure, transplantation, and recovery is not as well documented as might be expected. Often it is written about by outsiders (medical practitioners, care providers, academics), whereas the insider's (patient's) expertise is occluded. This conforms to the experience of many people living with illness and disability. The rendering of people as other (not like the norm) comes at a cost to their humanity. People who are ill or disabled can themselves succumb to a way of writing that simplifies their experience and objectifies themselves. I consider what it means to tell the story of oneself against a background of illness autoethnography, my own story of growing up medicalized and living with end-stage renal disease. I identify three types of illness autoethnography, one of which creates a tension between researcher as agent and researcher as object of research, and compels the reader to constantly realign himself or herself.
People living with chronic illness experience impairment in various ways, not the least of which is how they are sometimes marginalised by the people with whom they interact. Over the last few decades, as social science research has moved away from the biomedical model, research methodologies have been developed to allow the voices of people with illness or disabilities to be heard and not only to be represented by others. However, these methodologies may not go as far in redressing power imbalances as was hoped, and participants' voices are often still mediated and subjugated to the researcher's requirements. As a person who has lived with a chronic condition all my life, I am concerned about how I am heard and by whom, as this has often affected my self-perception and sometimes even my safety. I am also concerned about doing violence to those about whom I speak and disempowering them further. My doctoral research concerned the problematic of writing about my own experience of a chronic illness. I chose a methodology, autoethnography, that allowed me to write solely about my own experience. In so doing, I was able to consider the complexity of my own academic and narrative voices, individually and in combination. In this paper I explore the methodological and epistemological concerns around my decision to use autoethnography, as well as the sometimes surprising issues I navigated when doing so. One of these issues was the juxtapositioning of different types of texts I had written. In isolation, some of the texts show a clear influence of the very discourses to which I was trying to provide counter-narratives. When read together with other texts, they reveal a complex web of paradoxes, tensions, and silences, which allowed me to generate new narratives and to question assumptions -my own and other people's.
As an academic with a chronic illness, it has taken me a while to understand shame’s impact on my academic identity and choices. In this article, through a process of narrative recuperation, I consider the challenges and contradictions of living as an academic with chronic kidney disease, an incurable and often debilitating illness that, for the most part, is invisible to others. By means of evocative autoethnography, I trace the trajectory of silencing shame I experienced around my condition in academia and I show how and why this changed over a number of years. My aim in doing this is to uncover subjugated knowledge of what it takes to live as a chronically ill academic and to be an advocate for other academics living with chronic illness. I theorise my study using Garland-Thomson, Shildrick and Leder, all of whom have worked with the othering effect of shame on the nonconforming body. These theorists have described ways of resisting shame and, partly thanks to them, I was able to find ways of fighting back and recovering. My intention in sharing these illness narratives is to speak back to a dominant discourse that favours invulnerability and a masculinised, disembodied way of being academic.
There are moments in history when decisive events overturn the old order and present the challenge of building a new society and inventing new forms of education. Consider, for example, the establishment of public schooling by the Freemen's Bureau in the southern United States to educate emancipated slaves in the wake of the American Civil War or the nationwide literacy campaigns in post-revolutionary Cuba. This remarkable collection that Arlene Archer and Rose Richards have put together documents another of these decisive moments and the challenges of opening access to higher education in postapartheid South Africa to students whose learning had been curtailed and intellectual abilities squandered by Bantu education and the old order of separate development. The two key terms in the title of this collection-'writing centres' and 'access to higher education'-give a quick sense of the book's concerns. To be sure, there will be a good deal of interest in how writing centres operate in South Africa on the part of what is now an international movement of writing centres (organised in the International Writing Centers Association). To my mind, though, the telling feature of the book is the link between writing centres and access. Some of the chapters emphasise this connection more explicitly than others but, whether in the foreground or background, the question of access seems ever-present in these studies of how South African students negotiate the maze-ways of academic literacy and how writing centre professionals design programmes and services. The fact that the first writing centres started in the mid-1990s at University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), University of Cape Town (UCT), and University of the I like the level of detail in these chapters-all the nuts and bolts programme description, logistical issues, and institutional questions about the role and academic legitimacy of writing centres. Everything matters: who do you choose to work in writing centres, how do you train them, should tutoring be generic or discipline-specific, what is the effect of writing centre experience on consultants' and tutors' careers, what is feedback, how do you give it, how do you approach linguistic diversity, how do you work with faculty, what kind of research makes sense for writing centres to do, how do you assess writing centre work, how do you deal with institutional marginalisation and the stigma of remediation? Overall, the chapters work together to give readers inside and outside South Africa a vivid picture of how writing centres have dealt with these questions by collecting, as Archer and Richards say, 'some of our history and research in one volume', and thereby capture a 'glimpse of who we are and what we can (and do) achieve.' I'm glad they did it. The book is important now and will be a valuable archival resource. I look forward to what unfolds in the future of South African writing centres. Writing centres and access: Harnessing diversity as a resource Few people would debate that access to education in South Africa...
On 8 June 2020, we, a diverse group of African emerging researchers, published a response to the commentary titled 'Why are black South African students less likely to consider studying biological sciences?' (1) published in the South Africa Journal of Science (SAJS). There are mounting arguments, in both print and social media, regarding the merits of the Nattrass (2020) commentary, particularly around its strong racial undertones as well as poor and unethical research practices. Nattrass' commentary has been intensely divisive, managing to engender stereotypes, anger, and disappointment. Conflicting arguments have emerged, which involve responses by other academics, politicians, and the public, but much of the furore has been strongly biased towards and along racial lines, with very little attention directed at the flawed nature of the research. Such questions as the one asked by Nattrass (1) in the title of the commentary are valid and should be explored. Such research, in fact any research, must involve scientific rigour, robust methodological approaches, sensitivity and adherence to ethical principles. With the right approach and the involvement of multi-sector collaborators, we can begin to innovatively and constructively address the potential societal challenges that may arise. Science should be respected and trusted, and should build a fundamental basis for societal benefits and decision-making processes. Issues of race, whether socially constructed or not (2) are sensitive, and should be treated as such. When dealing with sensitive subjects, it is important to be cognizant of one's inherent unconscious biases. To drive this, scientists, editors, leaders in academia and industry, government research institutions, NGOs and publishers have taken steps to promote ethical conduct in research by signing The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity (3). The Statement was founded on four principles: viz. honesty, accountability, professionalism, and stewardship, which inform the fourteen responsibilities of ethical research conduct. As researchers, it is important that we use these principles and responsibilities to guide our research, and to maintain our responsibilities to each other, to the people and to the environment. For this reason, we wish to express our concern that the Nattrass (2020) commentary and the research contained therein, has violated many of these governing principles. Moreover, in publishing this commentary with all its methodological flaws and ethical problems, the South African Journal of Science (SAJS) has also violated these principles and responsibilities.
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