academic subjectivity

I'm currently in graduate school. I hope that this post will be one to start a theme of my struggles to find a perspective from which to write and understand what I learn. I inherently prefer writing with the word "I" and using it to organize narratives, however this, in many disciplines, goes against very explicitly stated traditions. For today, I'd like to quote an article whose author writes on his use of "I".

Before all of this, a note on my purposeful use of the active subject in this essay is warranted. Autoethnographers have noted the highly tactical enterprise of using the first person in academic writing (Peterson & Langellier,1997). Such tactics sometimes serve as confessionals, in efforts to render texts transparent (van Maanen, 1988). However, the “I” that this essay evokes, unlike the fully-formed modern subject, is a textual, constructed and strategic “I,” designed to underscore the partiality, contingence and temporal quality not only of such insight as “I” have to offer, but of knowledge claims in general. My efforts at generating such texts are relatively recent (Ganesh, 2008; Ganesh, in press), but in many ways, as I do so, the voice with which I speak to myself draws from oral practices that stem back to my childhood: for instance, this voice evokes memories of stories that my grandmother told me; stories told in a voice that are at odds with the realist trope in which most of us write. So, in personalizing this text, I hope to both problematise realist tropes, and actualize what Ellis and Bochner (1996) have called the therapeutic function of research and writing.

And here's the APA citation for ya:
Ganesh, S. (2009). OrganiZational communication and organiSational communication: Binaries and the fragments of a field. Communication Journal of New Zealand, 10(2), 6-17. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.