Life pushing through: Coming to writing and mining for deep reflexivity

Abstract

As a researcher, three of my fields of interest have been the breast, breast cancer and death. In 2020, life interrupted as my mother phoned to say that a CT-scan had revealed a small growth in her left breast. Having just published an article on policy guidelines for the integrated breast cancer pathway, I was thrown into this pathway as next of kin, accompanying my mother through diagnosis and treatment. With life pushing through in this way, I started writing about the experience. In 2021, life interrupted again: the tumor in my mother’s breast had metastasized, her cancer is incurable. Increasingly, the writing became a lifeline for me. In this text, I develop a “creatography” to bring forth and give form to, by way of an assemblage of fragments, the struggles I’ve had with writing about this experience, as well as the pleasures I’ve had going off the beaten track. I highlight how we often have personal stories to tell about our relationships with professional research fields, yet we hesitate to give them substance or credit in our academic writing. I reflect on how we could and why we should engage in such emotional labour, while sharing my own process of coming to writing. I see this writing as an opening: to begin mining my own fields for deeper reflexivity.