Academia is a death cult and yet it saved her life, writes Laura Shepherd. This book returns the favors. With courage and meticulous precision, she investigates how academia causes her pain, dooms our profession, and inflicts death on the body politic. Her ceaseless searching and beautiful writing mean to change our profession so that we center grief, care, collaboration, and love. Laura writes this transformation via a profound humility, with exact excavations of uncertainty, and through the cultivation of fired hope. This work is a gift to be savored.
— Naeem Inayatullah, Ithaca College
This book is a gift and an offering. With her characteristic care, feminist wisdom, and generosity, Laura Shepherd has crafted a book that accomplishes what the best stories do: The reader feels seen, held, gently prodded, and accompanied.
— Roxani Krystalli, University of St Andrews
Drawing on a wide range of personal reflections, Laura Shepherd reveals—at times with brutal honesty—how everyday experiences have shaped her scholarly contributions that so many of us know and appreciate. The ensuing journey takes the reader back and forth between memoir, epistemology, and feminist politics.
— Roland Bleiker, University of Queensland
Laura Shepherd’s personal narratives are not contained by a what—“British,” “middle class white woman,” “scholar,” or any other reified, inanimate object. Instead, her book reveals a who that, because it is made of entanglements, is unrepeatable, relational, indeterminate, plural, and political. This journeying self reaches inside and outside, staying with us as she walks away from the spotlight so the reader can become present and visible within the story. As a result, the encounter with Laura is nurturing, healing, illuminating, and freeing. This is political narrative at its best.
— Paulo Ravecca, Editor of Journal of Narrative Politics