Academic Life

Your Lived Experience Makes You a Better Scholar

What you know from your own life can become the question that shapes your strongest work.

By Tanya Golash-Boza

During my first semester of graduate school, I took a course on the sociology of education. Midway through the semester, we read John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham’s famous article on “acting White.”

The research had been conducted in Washington, D.C., where I grew up, around the same time I was in high school. As I read, I kept thinking: That is not what acting White means.

The authors argued that Black students were accused of “acting White” when they did well in school. But that did not match what I had seen at my D.C. public high school. In my experience, “acting White” was not about being smart or taking school seriously. It had more to do with how people dressed, talked, and carried themselves. It was about style, language, and social presentation. It was about wearing Doc Martens versus Timbs.

So when we discussed the article in class, I said so.

I was dismissed.

Then the woman sitting next to me said something like, “I read an article published last year on a similar topic, and those authors argued…”

The room shifted. People listened to her. The professor engaged her point. Her comment was treated as scholarship. Mine was treated as anecdote.

That moment stung. It also taught me something I needed to understand if I was going to survive graduate school with my sense of self intact.

I had gone to graduate school in part because I believed my lived experience gave me something important to say. I had grown up riding the bus from a Black neighborhood to a White neighborhood for school. That daily ride taught me what racial segregation looked like: not only where people lived, but how resources were distributed. I saw which neighborhoods had better schools, better facilities, cleaner streets, and more public investment.

By TrailVoice - originally posted to Flickr as Rock Creek Park Trail-18, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11972653

Growing up in Washington, D.C., I learned that segregation was not abstract. Rock Creek Park marked a real divide between neighborhoods with very different levels of wealth, investment, and public resources.

But in that classroom in my first semester of graduate school, I learned that knowing something was not enough. I also had to learn how to make the academy hear me.

The lesson was not that my experience was wrong. The lesson was not that the article mattered more than what I knew. The lesson was that if I wanted to challenge the literature, I had to know the literature. I had to read the articles, understand the debates, learn the language, and figure out exactly where my argument fit.

Not so I could abandon what I knew, but so I could defend it.

This is one of the hardest lessons for many first-generation scholars, scholars of color, working-class scholars, immigrant scholars, queer scholars, and anyone whose life has brought them close to the questions they study.

You come into the academy because you know something the academy needs to know. You have seen things. You have lived through things. You have questions that did not come from a seminar room. And then, too often, the academy tells you that what you know does not count unless someone else has already published it.

That can make you doubt yourself. Don’t.

When you read an article or a book and something does not sit right with you, pay attention. You may be onto something. Take that feeling seriously enough to investigate it. That does not mean you should dismiss the scholarship. It means you should engage it.

Read more. Find out who else has asked the question. Learn what the field has already established. Figure out where the argument breaks down. Then name what is missing.

That is what scholars call a gap in the literature. But often, before it becomes a formal research question, it begins with a much simpler thought:

That’s not right.

That’s not the whole story.

They are missing what matters most.

Follow that thought.

When a theory does not explain what you have seen, that matters. When an article describes your community but gets the texture wrong, that matters. When the literature treats something as marginal and you know it is central, that matters. When scholars keep asking a question in a way that obscures the real issue, that matters.

Your lived experience is not a shortcut around scholarship. But it is also not a liability. It can help you see what others miss. It can help you ask better questions. It can tell you when an argument is elegant but false, sophisticated but incomplete, widely cited but still wrong.

The work is to bring that knowledge into conversation with evidence. Your experience gives you questions. The literature gives you context. Your research gives you evidence. Your analysis turns all of that into scholarship.

So, do not dismiss your lived experience. Do not let anyone train you to treat it as merely personal, merely anecdotal, or merely emotional. The academy has used those words for a long time to protect certain forms of knowledge and diminish others.

Everyone’s research questions are shaped by lived experience. Some scholars are trained to hide this. Others are punished for admitting it. But no one comes to their work from nowhere. We all ask the questions we ask because of what we have seen, what we have been taught to notice, what has unsettled us, and what we cannot stop trying to understand.

That is not something to run away from. It is something to embrace, especially if you are someone who comes from a background that the academy has marginalized. Your lived experience does not weaken your scholarship. It can make your scholarship stronger because it gives you a sharper sense of what matters, what is missing, and why the question is worth asking in the first place.

But also: do not stop at experience.

Read. Study. Take notes. Learn the field so well that when you speak, you can show exactly what the existing scholarship explains and exactly where it falls short.

This work can be heavy when the questions are not abstract to you. When you study violence, schools, prisons, poverty, deportation, or any other structure that has touched your own life or your community, you may carry the work differently than people who encounter it only on the page.

That does not make you less rigorous. It means you have to be honest about what you know, careful with your evidence, and protective of your own spirit. That is how you make an intervention. That is how you turn the thing you know in your bones into an argument other people have to take seriously.

Your life has given you a way of seeing. Do not let the academy take that from you. Learn the field. Sharpen your questions. Build the evidence. Then make them deal with what you know.

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Don’t Check Your Email in the Morning

You likely have heard this advice before. You may have even followed it for some time. You may have even read the book: Never Check Email in the Morning. But, if you’re anything like me, you tried avoiding email in the morning, and it worked for a while before you slipped back into your old habits.

We tell ourselves all kinds of stories for why we have to check email in the morning. Here are a few things I tell myself:

• It’s efficient to check and delete emails from my phone while drinking my morning coffee.
• It’s important to know what’s coming for the day.
• There may be something urgent I need to respond to.
• I can quickly scan my emails and then move on to other tasks.

Despite what I may tell myself, I am not that important. Nothing will happen if I don’t check my email all morning. And, although it may seem efficient to scan my email in the morning, it is not.

I recently read this great book by Cal Newport called Deep Work. In that book, he describes research which reveals it is harder to focus after checking email or social media. He explains that any activity you do affects your level of focus in the next activity you engage in. Thus, even if you take five minutes to scan your email or scroll through Twitter, that experience will leave a residue. The “attention residue” from email or social media is detrimental to your ability to focus on the next task. Email and social media are particularly detrimental to activities that require a high level of focus such as writing.


You will be able to achieve a higher level of focus and clarity in your writing if you get your writing done before checking your email and social media accounts.

I am Department Chair this year and I have to respond to lots of emails in that and other administrative capacities. During the Fall semester, I was able to handle those responsibilities while also getting my writing done in September and October. In November, however, I added three out-of-town trips to my already packed schedule and my writing fell by the wayside. Looking back, one of the main reasons I got so little writing done in November is that I began my days responding to emails. Once I opened my emails, it was difficult to achieve the focus I needed to make progress on my writing.

When I couldn’t focus on my writing, I turned to social media, which was a further distraction from my writing.

Thus, in the coming Spring semester, I am going to avoid email and all social media until I complete my writing tasks for the day. Then, I will limit both activities to specific times of the day.

My plan is to wake up at 6am, write for one hour, take my daughter to school, go for a run, have breakfast, and then sit down for my second writing session. Once my second session is over, I will check my emails. I then will close my email and check it again at the end of the day. At 5pm, I will log out of my email and close the program until the next day. In Deep Work, Cal Newport also recommends having an official end to the workday to allow the mind time to reset and refocus.

I also set up my phone so that I am limited to a total of 30 minutes per day on social media. I will only engage with social media once I have finished my writing and will avoid social media after dinner. This will allow me more time to spend focusing on my family as well as reading great books.

It should not be difficult for me to keep this routine during the month of January, as my semester does not officially start until January 14th and classes don’t begin until January 21st. Thus, no one expects a quick response from me during this time. My hope is that I will be emboldened and inspired by my writing productivity during the month of January and that I will thus keep this up for the rest of the semester.

How about you? What will it take for you to get your email and social media habits under control?

Calling all Workaholics! Fifteen Things You Can Do When You Are Not Working

I admit it: I have been called a workaholic on more than one occasion. I do make time for myself and my family, but it is hard for me to have “down time,” where I sit around and watch television or relax on the couch and stare into space. First of all, I don’t watch television, and secondly, I find staring into space boring after about … 30 seconds.

As a working mother of three children, I don’t have a whole lot of free time. But, there are moments when my husband takes the kids for the day, or when the children are off at a friend’s house, and I actually do have time to myself. It is hard for me not to use that precious time to write or do laundry. But, I find having a list of things to do other than working is helpful as a reminder of all of the things one could do in those rare moments of free time.

I suspect I am not the only person out there who has trouble relaxing and not working or doing housework. In this post, I provide a list of activities you can do when you are not working….

Fifteen things you can do when you are not working…

1. Read a novel
2. Talk on the phone with friends
3. Go for a walk outside
4. Attend an event at university concert hall or museum
5. Watch a movie or TV show at home
6. Soak in the bathtub
7. Take a dance class
8. Invite people over for drinks or dinner
9. Go to the movies, a restaurant, or a wine tasting with friends
10. Go to the gym or exercise class alone or with a buddy
11. Engage in creative activity: writing, art, crafts
12. Do yoga or meditate
13. Tend to the garden
14. Cook a new recipe
15. Listen to the radio or a podcast

If you rarely or never do these sorts of activities, you might just be a workaholic. Remember, rest and relaxation important for the mind, body and soul. Give yourself permission to do something you enjoy. You deserve a break!

The Importance of Sharing Your Work

Scholarly writing is a conversation with other academics. These conversations happen in formal venues such as academic journals and books, in less formal settings such as academic conferences and colloquia and in informal ways through the sharing of works in progress with colleagues. To be fully engaged with the conversation, it is crucial for academics to participate in all three of these sorts of exchanges.

In Print: Formal Conversations

If you are an academic with a faculty position that requires research productivity, I don’t have to tell you that you need to publish. This would have been made clear to you when you were hired, and you should have some sense of the requirements of your institution. There are all sorts of subtleties with regard to where and how much you need to publish, but you know you need to do it, somehow and somewhere.

Conferencing: Semi-Formal Conversations

You probably also know that you need to participate in conferences. Even if you find the idea of presenting your work at conferences terrifying or if you find academic conferences absolutely unbearable, you still have to do it, at least until you get tenure. Participating in conferences is crucial for attaining visibility in your field, learning about the latest trends in research, and getting feedback on your work in progress. It is very important to figure out what conferences you should attend and to make every effort to participate in them.

Sharing Work in Progress: Informal Conversations

Most new and aspiring academics know about the importance of conference participation and academic publishing, because they are visible aspects of faculty life: people put conference presentations and academic papers on their CVs. What is less visible, yet equally important, is sharing your work in informal ways with trusted colleagues. I would recommend never sending out an article or book chapter for publication without first obtaining feedback from someone you know and trust, and preferably from several people.

Getting feedback in informal ways is important because it allows you to share your work in a less polished form. If you don’t feel as if you are completely done with something, you will be more open to feedback and more willing to change your arguments and ideas on the basis of your reviewers’ suggestions.

In many cases, sharing your work can boost your confidence. We are often our own worst critics, and it can be a real pleasure to hear our colleagues point out how important and well-executed our work is. When you request informal feedback, you can expect honest advice on how to improve your work and finalize it for submission. Often, this will give you the final push you need to send your manuscript out for formal review.

Sharing your work is also important because it can save you lots of time in the peer review process. On average, peer reviews take about six months. You often can get a friend or colleague to read a paper for you and provide feedback in less than one month. (It is always important to agree on a time frame when you give a paper to a colleague for review to ensure that the process is in fact efficient.)

How to Get Feedback: Starting the Conversation

When I was in graduate school, I had no problem getting feedback on my work. Every seminar paper I handed in came back with comments; I could ask my advisor or other members of my committee for comments; and I also had my fellow graduate students on hand to ask for feedback. When I became a faculty member, it quickly became apparent to me that I needed to broaden my networks to continue to get useful feedback. There are several ways to do this.

Tit for Tat: Exchange work with a colleague

One of the best ways to get feedback from a colleague is to offer to exchange work. If both of you are at a similar stage, you can agree to meet somewhere for a morning, during which time you read each other’s drafts in one another’s presence and provide feedback that same morning. That sort of instantaneous feedback is unbeatable in terms of efficiency.

If you can’t find a friend who is at an identical stage as you, you also can ask someone to read something, with the promise that you will return the favor in the future. Many academics have close friends and colleagues with whom they have a permanent exchange relationship: they always read each other’s work at various stages of progress. The advantage to the exchange relationship is that you don’t feel as if you are posing a burden, as you know you will be returning the favor soon.

Form a Writing Group and Build Community in the Process

Another strategy is to form a writing group with colleagues who live near you. You can agree that, over the course of the semester, you will meet four times, and at each meeting, you will discuss one work in progress. This is not always the most efficient way to get feedback, but it is valuable for several reasons. First of all, the dynamics of group feedback are different from individual feedback, and you will get more in-depth and complex feedback than if you just have one reader. For this reason, this sort of group exchange is often best for work in an earlier stage of progress. Secondly, this sort of writing group helps to build community; building community is important for your mental well-being. Finally, it is good for you to know what others at your institution are up to, and it is important for them to have a good idea what you are working on. That way, if a speaker is invited to campus or if there is an initiative related to your work, you will be sure to be involved.

Everyone Does It!

Sharing your published work as well as your work in progress is crucial for any academic. If you need proof of how common this is, I suggest you open up any academic book or article and take a look at the long list of acknowledgements. Most books go on for two or three paragraphs in which the author thanks all of the people that have provided feedback during the writing progress. Most articles list a half a dozen people who have reviewed the work informally.

Whatever strategy you use, it is crucial for you to figure out a way to share your work informally with trusted friends and colleagues before going through the formal review process. It will make your work better, give you confidence in your writing, and save you time in the long run.