Abstract
Legal academic writing seldom reflects on its choice of research topic and writing style. The published text rarely incorporates thoughts about the choice of genre or format, and their fit with the research question itself. This chapter observes its own pre-writing process rather than making an argument or a claim as most academic writings do. An injury made me discard my initial plan for the chapter, and the notion of the ‘body’, which the editors had assigned me as the object of a hypothetical interdisciplinary study, became the material subject of the writing process itself. Experiencing bodily constraints changed my reading practice and necessitated different media and writing strategies. The resulting text is a personal record of reading and thinking in a particular period of time.
And were it true, we do not think all philosophy is worth one hour of pain.
—Blaise Pascal, Pensées, A Dutton, New York (1958): section 79. Retrieved August 26, 2021, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-0.txt
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Notes
- 1.
https://twitter.com/YaelBerda/status/1329816313133477888?s=20 accessed 26 August 2021.
- 2.
https://twitter.com/NegarestaniReza/status/1328010109759447040?s=20 accessed 26 August 2021.
- 3.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai.
- 4.
Critique of Pure Reason (1998) Cambridge University Press: section B6, p 138.
- 5.
One editor asks about my sources and use of literary references. I did not have a research plan or literature review for this piece for the reasons that I have explained and also because the initial brief for the contribution was to provide a personal reflection on the writing process. I find that much thinking happens when reading, listening, watching, without a particular aim. Research questions seem to gestate in the back of the mind without overtly taking the centre stage; fragments of arguments make random sideways appearances rather than linearly or step by step. In the first year of the pandemic, my access to books in the library shrank radically. I owe immense thanks to my literary friends online who have sustained me with wonderful reading materials during my period of injury.
- 6.
Cahiers, 2000 (orig 1973), ‘Affectivity’.
- 7.
chica marx @mckenziewark, 3 June 2019 https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/1135360067040157702?s=20 accessed 5 July 2021.
- 8.
See https://twitter.com/allartmarkets/status/1326863833185529856?s=20 accessed 5 July 2021.
- 9.
My thanks to Liz MacFall for sharing the reference.
- 10.
See https://twitter.com/EcologyMagic/status/1319551663561211904?s=20 accessed 5 July 2021.
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Kang, H.Y. (2022). Cross-Disciplinarity as a Practice of Critical Linking: How Does a Scholar Relate Different ‘Bodies’? Writing from Within the Body as a Research Process.
In: Herman, D., Parsley, C. (eds) Interdisciplinarities. Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89297-5_8
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