Returning the person–
and the personal–
to scholarly communication
Because scholarship cannot meaningfully change the world if nobody wants to read it.
Scholarship is a human act.
Scholarly communication shapes how knowledge moves through the world: who can engage with it, who feels invited into it, and what becomes possible because of it.
Yet many forms of academic communication ask writers to suppress their humanness - including their presence, voice, creativity, complexity, and lived experience - in the name of legitimate science.
This project explores what becomes possible when scholarship remains rigorous while also becoming more human, meaningful, communicative, and alive. Learn More
Why the Person–and the Personal–Belong in Scholarly Communication
Our Research is Alive… and Inherently Subjective
Don’t use “I” when you write. Only refer to yourself in the third person. Make sure you bracket yourself out of your research. Failure to bracket yourself out of your work can raise questions about its rigor and validity.
Well, guess what? A human being conducted that study. They selected the topic, honed in on the problem, developed their research question, selected their method, implemented their research design. Every decision was colored by the individual’s ontology and epistemology - what they believe the world to be, what they believe can be known, and how they believe one can know it.
How does a researcher bracket that level of humanness out of their work? They cannot. An ontological discussion in a journal article does not change the fact that every decision and insight on the page is colored by that personal worldview. So let’s stop pretending that we can bracket the self out of scholarship. Instead, let’s own the role of our humanness in this living work, and accept our subjective nature as an enervating condition of the work
Our Audiences are Alive…and Desire Connection
Look at an electrical socket and see a human face. view a cave painting and experience life
We Quest for Knowledge, Insight…and Impact
We conduct research for a reason. We share results for a reason. If we have powerful results, but nobody understands - or connects with - what we communicate from it, then why did we do the research in the first place?
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