ABSTRACT
I reflect on my professional life as a social scientist and educational researcher, including being a supervisor of about 50 doctoral students, in this chapter. I use my own intellectual autobiography as a basis for this reflection. This kind of personal reflection and narrative style of writing, based on the concept of stories and qualitative research is now a relatively commonplace approach in the social sciences (Deem 1996; Frame and Burnett 2007; Sikes 2006; 2008; Weiler and Middleton 1999; Weiler 2008; Weiner 1994). Whilst there are many versions of reflections and personal reflexivity, they are all attempts to locate ‘the personal’ in the wider social and political context of social relationships as understood in the social sciences (Wright Mills 1959). It has slowly emerged from the so-called biographic or personal turn (Chamberlayne et al. 2000) dating from the early 1990s. Most recently, the Economic and Social Research Council have recommended a narrative style for writing the end of award research project reports (2009; Society Today website www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/index.aspx). I have used personal reflection in several previous studies, such as my extended
account in Personal and Political: feminisms, sociology and family lives (David 2003a). In an essay entitled Personal Learning on Professional Doctorates: Feminist and Women’s Contributions to Higher Education (David 2007), I considered the development of doctoral education, and my reflections on developing a professional doctorate in education. These have been conscious attempts to use feminist theorising to locate my own personal journey in relation to those of others of similar generation and gender. Developments in narrative writing and personal reflections, often drawing on feminist
perspectives, and emerging social scientific approaches, have grown apace during my academic life, which spans over 40 years. As I noted in Personal and Political, this approach to academic writing was not de rigeur when I started out life as a social scientist. Indeed it was completely other, and expectations were that one wrote in the third person, as if that made one more objective. Indeed, subjectivity was frowned upon, and social scientific methods tended to focus on either quantitative approaches, or qualitative methods within a positivist framework. Value commitments, and the pursuit of social and/or gender justice were certainly not recognised as appropriate to the academic or scholarly endeavour (David 2005). Thus, my professional life as an academic social scientist has witnessed dramatic
changes, which have indeed been linked to wider socio-political developments, too. I
have also tried to illustrate how these wider changes are linked together with a feminist project in higher education in a couple of essays written together with Sue Clegg (Clegg and David 2006; David and Clegg 2008). I have also attempted to develop a specific and feminist analysis of doctoral education and studies together with Diana Leonard and Louise Morley (Morley et al. 2002; 2003), although our aim to develop a research project on doctoral assessment through an investigation of the viva voce was not successful.
