Common—Reading—Placing—Writing

Abstract

I create here another sort-of-life text, a narrative in which I suggest ways in which we could or should practice human approaches to reading and writing. I patch together scraps recovered from the rubbish heap of my own personal and professional history.

Autoethnography as Practice and Process: Toward an Honest Appraisal?

“…Scrapheaps may even be construed as vantage points that may be scaled to help us survey a theme or a topic. Maybe, using scraps for our own purposes is a better human prospect than simply waiting to become part of a communal compost heap ourselves (see Badley, 2022b, p. 1). I see my post-academic after-life as a mixture of scrabbling, scribbling, scribing, and scrubbing:I clamber awkwardly over the scrapheap of my academic past.…”

The Seven Ages of an Academic Man? (First)

“…Instead, he tried to help himself and others become more readable by promoting a playful and serious style, by telling stories that matter, by encouraging a fruitful blue-collar approach, by endorsing human writing for human readers, by supporting slow critique and slow essaying, by examining how and why academics write, by suggesting that academics should try to write dangerously, by creating their own narratives of everyday truth, by rejecting the notion that they could offer a god’s-eye view of the social world, and by adopting a quasi-posthumous posture to inoculate themselves against the intellectual and artistic viruses that could infect them (see Badley, 2022b, pp. 4–5).…”

“Sharing a Moment”: An Open Letter

“…In my quasi-posthumous persona, I may become what I want and do what I like. I can read and write freely and boldly ( dangerously in your terms) without worrying about being too personal or not academic enough or not complying with the dominant discourse or following the latest trends (see Badley, 2022a, 2022b, 2022c). These are my own great expectations : what larks!…”