"I" in academic and scholarly writing

[rm]

This is not a search for advice. This is a point of curiosity to me, because my education was sort of extreme and obsessive on this point, and it occurs to me that perhaps other fifth-graders were not scarred for life by writing papers that said things like "this author feels that Disney World would be an idea summer vacation destination for her family."

So, inquiring minds and all that....

[Poll #1563413]

Comments

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

My degree is in anthropology, and it's common practice now for ethnographers to use the first-person, as well as explicitly talking about themselves. Whole positionality thing.

This may be some kind of weird exception, but I was taught in ethnography that attempting to erase myself from my accounts is dishonest, because I was there and I had reactions and the opinions I had about what I saw will affect my account of it. As a result, I should include that information so that the reader can get a better picture of what was actually going on (including, if necessary, filtering out BS that came from my assumptions or judgements or other personal stuff, which they can obviously do better if they have a better sense for me as an ethnographer and a person).

[mawaridi.livejournal.com]

This is what I have been taught in sociology as well, which has some overlap/similarities with anthropology. It's impossible to erase the researcher's influence from the data, so it is important to acknowledge the researcher's embodied participation in the construction of knowledge through the research process.