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“Blogging and Academic Identity”
Author(s) -
Estes Heide
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12017
Subject(s) - scholarship , narrative , realm , context (archaeology) , sociology , identity (music) , conversation , disability studies , media studies , queer , psychology , aesthetics , gender studies , literature , history , political science , art , philosophy , archaeology , communication , law
Abstract As a blogger, I write about issues that arise in my academic work, but in a different context, a different style, with a different audience. My academic and pedagogical approaches to the environment in literature are descriptive, while in the blog I take an activist ecological stance. I live in the realm of disability studies, and in the blog I try to make sense of the impacts on my academic identity of negotiating the demands of chronic illness. The hidden nature of much disability, mine included, poses a challenge to disability narratives within both academic and popular cultural formations; insights from queer, feminist, and post‐colonial theories complicate the ways in which disability studies imagines the body and its social contexts. Narrative scholarship and questions about the place of activism within scholarship provide points of contact between ecocriticism, disability studies, and the study of blogging as social and academic phenomenon. Blogging provides a forum for quick feedback and for conversation with a more diverse audience than traditional academic publishing venues, and can enrich and extend academic discourse.