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

Year 2008, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 6 - 23, 01.04.2008

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

Keywords

Narratives, Longing, Envisioning

Devika Chawla* & Amardo Rodriguez

Abstract

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• This paper was conceptualized, theorized, and stylized equally by both authors. For reasons of
• coherence and clarity, we have made a deliberate creative decision for the paper to be narrated by one
• author, the first one.
• I have written, in greater detail, about my stay in this boarding school in an auto/ethnographic essay
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