Personal Essay Research Articles

Arrogance of an imposter

This personal essay, offers an introspective narrative that examines the dual forces of arrogance and imposter syndrome through the lens of a paramedic’s journey. The author recounts the rigorous training, intense pressures, and emotional challenges encountered during paramedic school, field internships, and early career experiences. The narrative explores how these experiences fostered both moments of crippling self-doubt and dangerous overconfidence. Through vivid anecdotes, such as the missteps and lessons learned on a critical call, the author illustrates the profound impact of mindset on professional performance and patient outcomes.

The Permanence of Learning

This personal essay explores how the simple choice between using a pen versus a pencil in math courses reveals deeper insights about learning, mistake-making, and educational growth. Through examining the physical and symbolic aspects of writing tools, the essay reflects on how preserving our mathematical mistakes, rather than erasing them, can lead to deeper understanding. The essay weaves together personal experience with broader observations about educational norms, the nature of learning, and the unexpected wisdom found in embracing imperfection.

I Am Still a Hamilton Kid

This personal essay explores the enduring impact of Hamilton, the popular Broadway musical, on my life, weaving together reflections on its themes of ambition, satisfaction, and self-worth with my own struggles to navigate these concepts. Using key moments from the musical as a lens, I examine my relationship with empathy, validation, and the fear of failure while drawing parallels between the characters’ lives and my own.

A Personal Essay: Reflecting on My Drift into Rural Criminology

This “Journey” article is a reflection of my long years of rural crime and criminal justice scholarship, and of witnessing the growth and progression of rural criminology as a field of study within criminology. It highlights the many scholars who both helped me and helped advance rural criminology networks to what they are today – cohesive, collaborative, and creative. Although this journey essay is highly personalized, there are a series of lessons learned that are relevant to the growth of others’ scholarly development and the advance of all criminological subdisciplines, including rural criminology, in the 21st century. These are re-stated in a revised form in the Appendix.

Zhang Junya’s Story

Zhang Junya and her same‑sex partner are raising their child together in China. In this personal essay, Zhang shares how she and her partner decided to have their child, how they overcame challenges to conceive, gestate, and birth their child, and what it has been like raising their child together as queer parents in China.

Products of Conception: Imaging and Imagining Maternal-Fetal Relationships.

When my pregnancies ended in silence in an ultrasound suite, I was left with many questions that my medical training did not help me to answer. To investigate what an ultrasonically imaged embryo might represent in obstetric and maternal contexts, I turned to novels and memoirs, where I discovered that new traditions of writing about miscarriage and ultrasound are being crafted. In this paper, I consider the ghostly motifs in depictions of obstetric ultrasound in three contemporary works: Queenie (2019) by Candice Carty-Williams; Hilary Mantel's memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2013); and Maggie O'Farrell's personal essay "Baby and Bloodstream," from I am, I am, I am: Seventeen Brushes with Death (2017). In each text, the ultrasound is a contested site where obstetric and maternal miscarriage narratives collide.

Humanities and Humanism: A Personal Essay from a Disease Prevention and Reversal Team

Humanities and Humanism: A Personal Essay from a Disease Prevention and Reversal Team

Pine Trees, Trolls and Golden Windows: A Tale of Two Grandfathers

In this brief personal essay, the author explores her relationship with her two grandfathers, and traces their influence in her path to Geriatric Medicine. She reflects on lessons and stories imparted by her grandfathers, and the wisdom that can be gained from listening to the perspectives of others.

A 34-year odyssey with CJB

CJB was a vital part of Curt Bartol’s academic life over many years, as this personal essay attests. He served as manuscript reviewer and book review editor before taking on the journal editorship for a 16-year period. He was also a member of the journal’s editorial board until 2018. Both his undergraduate and graduate students were involved in the journal, with many earning their own doctorates.

Reflections on a Career in Pediatric Neuropathology, with a Note of Gratitude.

I am honored to be asked by the journal to write this personal essay about my career in pediatric neuropathology-a life of immense satisfaction, meaning, and fulfillment. My motivation to enter this discipline is highlighted, as is my decision to perform brain research in the sudden infant death syndrome, the leading cause of postneonatal infant mortality in the United States today. I also touch upon collaborations, mentoring, and experiences along the way-especially with the light microscope. I close with thoughts about the future of the discipline from my perspective as a lifelong devotee.

Liminality experienced from within: place intensification through self-built dwellings in Montenegro

ABSTRACT Liminal dwellings are self-built units without a predetermined urban planning permit and architectural plans generating ambiguous, reflexive, and change-inducing in-between neighbourhoods. Migrants from the Republic of Kosovo inhabit self-built shelters, which stimulate contextual and communal intensification of cities. Contextual addresses the spatial network established between inhabitants and their destinations in the city, and communal intensification reviles neighbourly connections. Using in-depth semi-structured interviews, diaries, and personal essays during data gathering, participants’ lived experiences were recorded in informal settlements “Bijela Gora” and “Meljine,” located in the east and west periphery of the southern region of Montenegro. Interpretative phenomenological analysis is used as a qualitative research method to survey participants’ experiences of liminalities captured via migrants’ destinations in the city, the neighbourhoods’ organisation, social trust, and repercussions from the alternation of sheds. Rather than comprehending poverty as individual misfortune, these categories are useful for altering future urban and communal developments.

Falling Back in Love with Trans-Inclusive Feminism: Canadian Creative Artists Re-Story Death and Choose Transformation

Prevailing political and popular narratives often treat the issue of trans death as an inevitability and reduce complex stories of trans life to their endings. This paper investigates the transformative potential of creative forms of resistance—specifically a selection of Canadian poetry, personal essays, and comics—and how their artistic affordances engage with transfeminism as an approach to narratives of trans existence. Rooted in Canadian author Kai Cheng Thom’s reckoning with the shortcomings of trans-exclusionary feminist thought, and informed by Chinua Achebe’s conceptualization of re-storying, this article explores how I Hope We Choose Love and Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom, Death Threat by Canadian creatives Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee, and comics from Assigned Male by trans activist and Canadian comic artist Sophie Labelle re-story “necessary” trans death to orient queer death spaces around a trans-for-trans (t4t) praxis of narrativization. Addressing the (inter)disciplinary possibilities of trans-inclusive feminism and comics studies, this article celebrates how these texts disavow and re-story the “Good” Trans Character, who dies to satisfy transmisogynistic ideologies, and theorizes the T4t Dead Trans Character, who dies to reclaim instances of trans death and recodify trans personhood as a site of hope, agency, and self-determination. In their re-storying, these texts recognize the transformative potential of trans existence and echo Thom in their urging of trans-inclusive feminism to renounce narratives of disposability and invest in the dignity of all human life.

‘I Shall Know It Well Enough When I Feel It’: Sensing the Moment in Montaigne, Woolf and Borges

ABSTRACT This article explores embodied experience and reflective distance in the personal essay and specifically in works by Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Through a reading of Montaigne’s ‘Of Practice’ and ‘Of Experience’, it argues that, in the personal essay, sensory experience is often the starting point for a movement of thought that, engaging in what may be described as a form of tentative philosophising, connects the particular bodily experience to abstraction while constantly being aware of the limitations of both. This tension between embodiment and reflection is then pursued in several essays by Woolf that are shown to be in the tradition of Montaigne in their sensitivity to the ineluctability of the human body and its sensory experience of the world in any conception of knowledge and experience but that also radically puncture ideas about the embodied human self by dissolving the temporal and spatial borders that would establish the centrality of the ‘I’. Unravelling further intertextual relations, the article moves to a reading of Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’, which is not an essay but an essayistic thought-experiment in short-story form that tests concerns that are fundamental to the essay explored in this article.

Por uma sociologia da relação escola-família

ABSTRACT This paper corresponds to a personal essay where I propose the use of the expression sociology of the school-family relationship. For this purpose, I present elements of social and theoretical legitimation - for example, through the analysis of hundreds of publications in the most varied formats, as well as through reference to the organization of academic and scientific events - which, in my opinion, support this proposal by pointing to the existence, for decades, of both a field/issue of the school-family relationship and a consolidated practice of a sociological analysis of the same. At the same time, I briefly present my own conception of a sociology of the school-family relationship.

Affirmative Action-A Crack in the Door to Higher Education.

The impact of the Supreme Court of the United States ruling against race-conscious admissions extends beyond college admissions to professional schools. Based partially on the idea that enough time had elapsed for achievement of the stated goals of affirmative action, the court ruled race-conscious admissions are unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The ruling left a crack in the door to higher education, however, allowing students to write an essay showing how race or ethnicity affected their lives. But without guidelines or a standardized approach, admissions committee members' background, personal experiences, and biases could influence evaluations.Historically, Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) have experienced residential segregation. Thus, they are products of poorly funded and understaffed K-12 schools. Grade point average and standardized tests scores are heavily weighted during the admissions process in higher education; however, these metrics largely reflect the attributes of K-12 schools and access to advanced placement and science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM) courses. These courses are often lacking in schools with predominantly BIPOC students. We must continue to develop and support K-16 STEMM programs.Higher education institutions must respond to the Supreme Court ruling. Recruitment and retention strategies should encourage, guide, and support students who pursue health care careers. Enhanced admissions processes must include a standardized, unbiased approach in assessing personal essays and the lived experience. Admissions committees should complete implicit bias and cultural humility training. Support and allocation of funds must be provided to maintain training. Safeguards must ensure applicant and institutional legal compliance.

Mirrors and portraits: the personal essay according to Luis Paniagua.

Este artículo analiza las tres primeras partes del libro Entre los árboles, la vozde Luis Paniagua (Guanajuato, 1979)con el fin de entender de qué manera un escritor mexicano nacido a fines del siglo XX se inserta en una tradición literaria que inicia en el siglo XVI, con la publicación de los Ensayosde Montaigne. “Ácido desoxirribonucleico”, el texto que da nombre a la primera parte define las características principales del ensayo tal como lo practicó Montaigne y concentra la poética personal de Paniagua, que gobernará el funcionamiento de los capítulos subsiguientes. Se advierten en esta obra dos afluentes temáticos importantes: el de la tradición ensayística y el de la herencia cultural transmitida de padres a hijos. Reconociendo su filiación con Montaigne, llamado “padre del ensayo”, Paniagua hacesuya la relación de consubstancialidad del autor con su obra. En los ensayos incluidos en las secciones “Camafeo” y “Documentos de identidad”, Paniagua pone en práctica su comprensión del ensayo como “autorretrato interior”, lo cual permite observar que las figuras del padre del ensayo y del padre biológico se funden en el texto. Destaca en el libro estudiado, además, que el yo se entiende como un ente formado por otredades textuales y vivenciales. Tanto la composición de las citas textuales como el uso del lenguaje metafórico aparecen como estrategias que permiten a la voz principal construirse gracias a las voces de otros textos.

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN LITERATURE: THE OLD, MIDDLE AND NEW KINGDOMS

This article is devoted to Ancient Egyptian literature: ancient, middle and new reigns. Ancient Egyptian literature includes a wide range of narrative and poetic forms, including inscriptions on tombs, steles, obelisks, and temples; myths, stories and legends, religious writings, philosophical works, wisdom literature, autobiographies, biographies, historical writings, poetry, hymns, personal essays, letters and court records.

Braiding the exegetical voice through creative nonfiction research

Finding or developing an exegetical voice may be confronting for the nascent writer-as-researcher: they must transition from undergraduate disciplinary skills and knowledge acquisition to postgraduate research, and grapple with creative/critical research thesis requirements. Applying the authors’ experiences supervising creative writing research candidates through Honours and Masters research projects, and in teaching the unit Manifestos at Deakin University, this paper will explore ways of traversing the perceived gap between creative and critical writing to help develop a creative/critical voice appropriate to the exegesis. To do so, this paper focuses on the experiential or personal essay form of creative nonfiction to initially identify the writer’s personal voice through a process of interweaving threads of the autobiographical, data or the factual, and the universal (Huxley, 1959). A writer’s manifesto, composed as part of a research program, then enables emerging writer-as-researchers to consolidate that voice as a bridge to writing their exegesis. Bringing together these aspects of writerly voice may lead to a complex exegetical pattern as a response to the tensions between the creative and critical in research: something like the braid this paper attempts to emulate in its structure. This paper argues that the exegesis is an experiment in voice balancing fragmentation and cohesion with a manifesto-style belief in the writing process, and creative responses to theory as rigorous approaches to research.

Edith Wharton Changed My Life

Abstract In this personal essay, the author recounts five decades of reading, teaching, and being inspired by Edith Wharton’s life and work, highlighting meetings with many noted Wharton scholars in the United States and abroad, and recounting the genesis of three of his twenty-seven books that deal with Wharton. Those works are a study of shame in her life and fiction, Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Shame; an acclaimed comic mystery, The Edith Wharton Murders; and a revisioning of her classic novel The House of Mirth from the point of view of Simon Rosedale and his family, Rosedale in Love.

The Myhre Syndrome Foundation as a global modern support group: The business of rare.

Advocacy support groups grow into national and international organizations, but they all begin with personal experiences. As the parents to a newly diagnosed two-year-old son with Myhre syndrome, my husband and I were overwhelmed with the journey ahead. Thanks to networking, primarily through social media, we located other families living with Myhre syndrome and were quickly immersed in the challenges and joy of this community. Myhre syndrome, caused by pathogenic missense variants in SMAD4, is a rare connective tissue disease characterized by short stature, hearing loss, neurodevelopmental challenges, and fibroproliferation.This personal essay, written with physician partners, describes the development of a global advocacy group for patients with Myhre syndrome. I have the honor of serving as the founding Executive Director and reflect proudly on the great strides that our marvelous support group has made. We empower the global community impacted by this rare condition by providing meaningful and accessible data, educational opportunities, and connections with others going through similar experiences. Utilizing the expertise of our Board of Directors and my corporate expertise, we discuss how we have been able to elevate our ultra-rare community into a broader, more comprehensive network.