ABSTRACT
In the first part of this book I included various accounts of my own experience. Writing about experience, one’s own history, is never a simple or uncomplicated affair. It involves selection, interpretation and memory, ‘a complex interplay between the self writing now and the self recalled then, at different stages of personal history’ (Barr 1999a). The stages are also constructed in relation to an ordering of priorities, political preoccupations, meanings and emotional understanding, as well as social context, political consciousness and expressions of identity. Together they produce ideas that are shaped by their context, but which also provide a way of thinking through connections, interrogating possibilities in the present and re-imagining the future.
