This is probably the most vulnerable public-facing thing I’ve ever written. (And that’s saying something when you’ve written a dissertation).
I recently wrote a narrative essay for “Positionality Stories”, a Medium .com series, about how my early family experience with disability shaped my scholarly curiosities, and how my research in turn led me, through disabled community-building, to a renewed sense of who I am, how I describe myself, and how I show up in intersectional, marginalized spaces. My journey discovering my researcher and educator positionality as well as settling into my disability identity has been a reflexive and cyclical one. There’s tremendous privilege even in the way I have been able to do my own identity work, mostly on my own timeline and in my own way.
