ABSTRACT
In traditional social science, we are trained to keep ourselves, our lives, our histories, and our conversations at arm’s length. We learn to speak and write in the ‘third person,’ not the ‘first’—in expository prose, not narrative. When Courtney and I were working in Singapore, we had the opportunity to work with some of the best and brightest Asian scholars of a generation. But it was obvious that their graduate training in the finest institutions, like that of so many others, was synchronic and ahistorical. They were often unaware of the cultural histories, political and economic contexts of the ideas or disciplinary fields they professed. So we and our colleagues began to weave and share different generational and, indeed, cultural stories about the lives, origins, and histories of our own ideas, methods, and paradigms.
