Poststructuralist writing at work

In this paper the author focuses on the processes of writing involved in using poststructuralist theory to analyse her work at a school for students categorized as ‘emotionally/behaviourally disordered’. While the work at the school is the crucial material for this exploration, the author turns her gaze on the detail of writing about this work beginning with the diary/notes she wrote on the detail of their daily lives at the school. She examines how, in the process of this writing, she begins to unfold the loops of reflexivity between the reading, the doing, the thinking, and the writing of a particular piece of poststructuralist work. She explores how binaries such as theory/practice, thought/word, and public/private were played out in writing about her work and makes more visible the ways writing and publishing worked to constitute both herself and the writing in powerful ways. She also explores the dangers and possibilities of working and writing differently at the margins and the ways formal academic writing came to constitute her differently—looping from one who was seen as an expert in the dominant discourses to one who was doing quirky work and back to one who was an expert.