A Promise of Purple Wildflowers: An Autobiography – A Quest of Becoming Free

• In Event: Making Sense of Experience Through Autobiography and the Arts

Abstract

This article accounts how a women academic shares her autobiographical narrative in a university setting, while encountering pervasive forms of gender inequality and how she struggles to overcome these obstacles in her everyday professional life. She locates her argument in critical social theory. The writer attempts to make sense of her experience relating gender inequality as an academic by asking the following question: How can I use my experiences as a woman in higher education to challenge gender inequality? Autobiographical narratives served as a personal and powerful tool to talk about inequality in education. Autobiographical research has the potential to change the learning, values and identities of individuals, institutions and the larger society.

Author

• Desiree Pearl Larey, University of the Free State