When I suffered a serious leg injury recently, an emerging feeling of bewilderment shook my self-perception, activating a downward slide in my self-identity and general confidence. My ability to convey the physical pain and attendant emotions was further undermined in my attempts to seek medical advice where I found myself increasingly positioned and disadvantaged by the discourses prevalent in these medical settings. Indeed, I was struggling to explain the physical and psychological manifestations to the health professionals. However, I found a degree of solace from my exploration of writing that centers on illness and injury, with a number of these investigations assisting me with my visits to health specialists, as I explain in this paper. As such, this paper utilizes autoethnography as testimony to chart aspects of my experiences in relation to the connections between discourse, identity, pain, and writing. In doing so, I describe a series of emotions and events related to this injury as a means for tracking changes in my autobiographical self during this period and providing unique insights into my experience.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Summer 2023
Research Article|
July 01 2023
Intrepid Ghosts and Writing Identities Available to Purchase
Don Carter
Don Carter is a teacher education academic at the University of Technology Sydney. He has published widely on education issues, including pre-service-career change teachers, literacy development and curriculum history, theory and design, and the teaching of writing. He is particularly interested in writing that captures the flavors and vicissitudes of human experience and how teacher education students might access such writing in their in-school teaching.
email: [email protected]
Search for other works by this author on:
email: [email protected]
Journal of Autoethnography (2023) 4 (3): 392–410.
Citation
Don Carter; Intrepid Ghosts and Writing Identities. Journal of Autoethnography 1 July 2023; 4 (3): 392–410. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2023.4.3.392
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.
Could not validate captcha. Please try again.