One of the first things I was taught about academic writing is that it is neutral.
Using personal pronouns or referring to ourselves in our writing was discouraged – forbidden if you were a stickler like me. Teachers told us what to write about and where to look for information, not leaving much room for individualism or creativity. The writer and the product were two separate entities creating a logical and, most importantly, ‘unbiased’ work.
This view of dispassionate or impersonal academia has forever coloured my understanding of what scholarly research is and should be. I’ve always been interested in classics, a very old and traditional field. The things that I was taught about academic writing were actively practised and perpetuated by the near 50-year-old books I was reading. Each scholar was rigid and impersonal, only showing bias through the occasional comment (often some form of racist remark).
I strove for this dispassionate form of academia in which we remove ourselves from the subject and ignore our biases.
That is, until Dr Patrick Thomsen’s lecture on knowledge genealogies in research. Dr Thomsen analysed his personal history to identify biases that might impact the research process. In the lecture, Dr Thomsen described how his research process began with his lived experiences and the recognition of observed cultural contradictions, notably his experiences with gay culture in South Korea. Acknowledgement and analysis of our specific experiences and perspective help break down biases present in scholarship. Dr Thomsen illuminated that we can use this identification to avoid any essentialist viewpoints. Furthermore, after reading Dr Thomsen’s paper on Korean Gay Men in Seattle, it is clear that passionately bringing yourself to your research isn’t a scholarly weakness. It is a strength that helps round out and makes the research process more accessible.
One piece of advice that Dr Thomsen gave us stuck with me. It was a reminder that social or cultural research is the study of a society. As a member of a society and social structures, you have the right to draw from your life and let it influence your research. The more I thought about this advice, the more I realised that, although I had supposedly subscribed to the idea of dispassionate academia, all the research that I have ever done has been drawn from my passions and experiences. No matter how hard I tried, I was always drawn to the same ideas, mainly the study of female experiences and always classics and ancient cultures. There is no point in removing yourself from your research.
