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The Tension of the Reflective Confession: a Form of
Cultural Capital?
You might be asking yourself what is the point of the creative writing piece
above? How can it be valid research? It‘s just a subjective story that isn‘t
seriously adding to the academic body of knowledge. It‘s light-hearted,
clearly self indulgent and explicitly personal. Bourdieu was opposed to the
concept of ‗self‘, arguing it was a bourgeois fabrication of the middle
classes used to legitimate their cultural and social capital. Therefore in
adopting a reflective stance that is self revealing, as a white middle class
well educated woman, I might be using a confessional style of reflecting to
legitimate my values, prejudices and research positioning. Consequently,
Skeggs (2004) argued ‗self‘ was a process that concealed class
distinctions through its emphasis on a particular set of values at the
expense of others. However, the personal is political (Richardson 1997)
and so is identity (Butler 1999). Personal experience does not necessarily
strive for truth. It is time related, sometimes time dependant and is
arguably socially, culturally, politically and emotionally constructed. So that
in this creative writing, I tried to portray emotions while also capturing the
political and cultural tensions we discussed during our co-inquiry meetings,
especially the impact of interruptions, reflecting in our own time and the
work-home balance. Mantzoukas and Jasper (2004) found ward nurses
were expected to reflect on practice in their own time and space. They
concluded from their interpretive ethnographic research that:
―The concept of reflection appears to be invalidated by the
organisational hierarchy of the wards on the basis of a power
struggle game. The ward structure portrays reflection as an
abnormal method of practice and knowledge development.‖
(Mantzoukas & Jasper 2004 p. 925)
They found nurses gave validity to knowledge based on ―hard scientific
knowledge that doctors possessed‖ while ignoring the multifarious
knowledge used by nurses (ibid p.928-31). This was similar to my
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