Never Quite (dis)Abled :
Influences on My Research on Fraternity & Sorority Experiences
PIETRO A. SASSO
This is a scholarly personal narrative informed by the work of Robert Nash of “Liberating Scholarly Writing: The Power of Personal Narrative” and Jeremy Snipes of “Coming Full Circle: A Scholarly Personal Narrative of Religion and Spirituality in Graduate Education.” Snipes suggests a scholarly personal narrative is influenced by autoethnography. Nash describes the nuances of scholarly personal narrative (SPN) as it “helps us to understand our histories, shape our destinies, develop our moral imaginations, and give us something truly worth living and dying for.” Nash further states an SPN is “meant to benefit the reader, touch
readers’ lives by informing their experiences, by transforming the meaning of events … by saying, in the end, what simply happens to the writer is not truly what matters.” Nash encourages a SPN to explore the personae in which the individual narrative of the researcher, as the author, is used to contextualize and connect to issues, concepts, and themes that carry more universal meanings for the reader. This is an introspective process that shifts outward toward cultural inequities or issues of collective consciousness (Snipes, 2020). In this autoethnographic SPN, I share some of my own
developmental arc through personal experiences and benchmarks beginning from early childhood to my fraternity experience. This narrative will foreground issues of ability and culture. I will connect these experiences to offer how they have influenced my fraternity/ sorority research agenda and offer suggestions for the future of this area of scholarship and inquiry. I draw this current SPN from data sources that include past positionality statements in my qualitative research and reflections when completing counseling coursework during persistence to completion of my doctoral degree. These data sources serve as the primer to the SPN that follows.
