TY - JOUR
T1 - Telling about policy
T2 - Writing for reflexivity
AU - Freeman, Richard
N1 - Funding Information:
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author’s work in Ethiopia was partly funded by the then Scottish Executive’s Humanitarian Health Fund, as explained in the text, though this paper was conceived and written separately. The author alone remains responsible its content.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2023.
PY - 2023/12
Y1 - 2023/12
N2 - How might we engage global or transnational practitioners in talking and thinking about policy? This article offers a particular kind of practitioner, already concerned with advocacy, engagement and organizational development, a way of thinking about what they do and, in turn, what policy is and does and how it is made. It presents a research-based, narrative account of a policy officer visiting a country for the first time, as the trip – and the policy work on which the officer has embarked – is reconstructed in conversation with a professional mentor. This dialogue generates a reflexive self-awareness in the protagonist-practitioner, and the reporting of it prompts a similar reflexivity in the reader: The reader-practitioner learns vicariously, by watching a counterpart learn. A supplementary discussion engages with the very different presumed academic readership of this journal, reflecting on the credibility and validity of the story as a mode of academic writing and on its design and form as pedagogy.
AB - How might we engage global or transnational practitioners in talking and thinking about policy? This article offers a particular kind of practitioner, already concerned with advocacy, engagement and organizational development, a way of thinking about what they do and, in turn, what policy is and does and how it is made. It presents a research-based, narrative account of a policy officer visiting a country for the first time, as the trip – and the policy work on which the officer has embarked – is reconstructed in conversation with a professional mentor. This dialogue generates a reflexive self-awareness in the protagonist-practitioner, and the reporting of it prompts a similar reflexivity in the reader: The reader-practitioner learns vicariously, by watching a counterpart learn. A supplementary discussion engages with the very different presumed academic readership of this journal, reflecting on the credibility and validity of the story as a mode of academic writing and on its design and form as pedagogy.
KW - practice
KW - policy
KW - narrative
KW - dialogue
KW - reflexivity
KW - writing
UR - https://journals.sagepub.com/home/gsp
U2 - 10.1177/14680181231190364
DO - 10.1177/14680181231190364
M3 - Article
SN - 1468-0181
VL - 23
SP - 441
EP - 456
JO - Global Social Policy
JF - Global Social Policy
IS - 3
ER -