Exploring Practitioner-Researcher Identity: A Personal Narrative Inquiry Through Poetry and Metaphor

The Once Upon a Narrative Professional Practice Fellowship employed qualitative longitudinal research to explore academic librarians’ lived experiences of practitioner-research. The project adopted narrative inquiry and repeated in-depth interviews to discover participants’ research journeys. Poetic inquiry was used to re-present participants’ stories, as it conveyed the emotionality of their experiences, and facilitated collective reflection on broader sectoral issues (Faulkner, 2009). This chapter presents a personal narrative inquiry of my Professional Practice Fellowship. Personal narrative inquiries are autobiographical and employ an individualised approach. Personal data collection included a reflective account of my prior learning experiences, social media posts, poetic stanzas and metaphors from my research journal, a workshop transcript, and reflective conversations. Data analysis was an iterative process guided by a synthesised framework, occurring concurrently with the crafting of poems. This research explores my storied experience as a novice insider researcher and seeks to answer the question: What are the key factors influencing the development of my identity as a Library and Information Studies (LIS) practitioner-researcher? Five narrative poems, accompanied by contextual notes, reveal the factors shaping the layers of my identity as a practitioner-researcher. A creative approach to data re-presentation facilitated a deeply individualised approach to knowing. Through writing poetry, using metaphor and reflexivity, I made sense of the complex emotions arising from my insider research and my boundary-crossing role as a practitioner and researcher. Personal narrative inquiries allow researchers to share their own storied experiences and embodied emotions, enabling collective insights from their lived experience.