Writing the personal

This chapter offers reflections on writing the personal against the grain of academic praxis and mainstream understandings of researching and writing which are premised on detached and disembodied approaches. In other to do so, the text is interspersed with poetic narrative to explore this at the individual level, and provide an immediate embodied and affective connection between the author and the reader. Further, risks and challenges inherent to writing the personal are stressed in terms of exposure, vulnerability, and collaborative endeavours. The value of writing the personal is stressed in juxtaposition to these challenges, explicitly positioning the personal as a central node in the understanding of organising and organizations. Further, the chapter highlights the relationship between the individual and collective project of writing the personal, and its political value. Personal writing, and methods that foster this approach such as ethnography and arts-based methods, are considered in addition to writing about the personal in terms of content.