Giving oneself to writing: syncopations in the life of a woman religious

Abstract

This article demonstrates how personal storylines, their break points or syncope moments, when exposed to feminist poststructural analysis and written against the accepted authority and patterns of meaning making, reveal other ways of interpreting and knowing that can be transformative and productive of social change. This work examines the dynamism, power, and unexpected outcomes of the immersion of the seven years of study, research, and writing the author gave to her doctoral investigation. It attempts to bring the reader into the process of the change itself, to share the approaches to analysis and writing the new, to point to the liberatory potential of such an approach for practical, realistic, and politically relevant social change.

Notes

* Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of Australia, 1 Thomas Street, Lewisham, NSW 2049, Australia. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paula M. Smith *

* Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of Australia, 1 Thomas Street, Lewisham, NSW 2049, Australia. Email: [email protected]