Telling Contested Stories: Conflicts of Accountability in Engaged Scholarship

May 1, 2015

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In this essay, the author, a scholar of American religious life who has extensively studied ex-gay ministries, reflects on her response to being asked to publicly comment on a highly controversial NPR story about sexual reorientation counseling. The author describes how her identity as an engaged scholar compelled her to publish an article about the NPR story, despite the complexity of her feelings about the topic and inner conflict about where her accountability lies as a researcher who asked about, and heard, highly intimate, moving, vulnerable stories about a practice that she finds personally problematic and politically dangerous. The author explains how she navigated all these tensions when writing the article.