The Self, and Other Stories

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
Outlining her emotional quagmires with stunning precision, Shepherd enables an alternative register for political writing: one where the admission of anxieties and discomfort can be the starting-point for intimate yet transformative encounters with the self and the world. The book offers a dwelling place for anyone trying to inhabit the discipline while retaining other ways of being in (and with) the world. Overall, Shepherd offers a hesitant but embodied roadmap of how to continue living and imagining. In a sense, the book is a feminist love letter and a reminder that we can love something fiercely enough; to hold it, shamelessly reimagine it and let it go when it no longer holds us. * International Affairs *