Social writing profiles

Speaking the self involves constructing a position. Talking about writing in the first person can identify academics’ social location, while constructing and/or contesting their positioning and cultural resources. Analysing first-hand accounts of writing is a way to understand how academics construct this component of academic work. This paper presents profiles of academics who adopted social writing (Murray 2015). I distilled observations, interviews and conversations gathered over ten years in three profiles: professor, researcher and academic. While using subjective accounts of writing experiences in this way may seem confessional (Swan 2008), it shows that social writing creates opportunities for academics to perform, and contest, this role. In addition, these profiles complement previous research by adding representations of writing selves to social writing theory and practice. This paper concludes by suggesting that writing profiles are a method for using self-writing – both pure and distilled – to position writing in academic work.