Write Where It hurts serves as a digital space for scholars engaging in personal and emotional research, teaching, and service. It provides relevant news, information, and resources for this community while offering an ongoing elaboration of stories from people doing deeply personal intellectual work in varied fields, disciplines, and methodological and theoretical traditions. The site, as well as the ongoing conversation, seeks to present a safe and inclusive space for people to discuss, learn about, and find support for emotionally charged teaching, research, and service endeavors. As a result, voices from teachers and researchers from various backgrounds, disciplines, experiences, and career paths are encouraged to contribute their own stories, advice, and / or resources in this space.


Since doing deeply personal work is both the subject of conflict and debate within the academy and potentially tied to aspects of the self one might not wish to see disseminated publicly, Write Where It Hurts reserves the right to publish posts anonymously or with the authors’ identification depending on the wishes of the author in question. Put simply, authors will decide if their posts are anonymous or not, and Write Where It Hurts will not under any circumstances share personal information about our authors with anyone or for any reason. As teachers, researchers and activists committed to social justice for all and inclusivity of all voices, we thus leave decisions about anonymity to the authors themselves, and commit to protecting any information we are asked to keep private (i.e., only the editorial staff has access to rough submissions and information from these will not be shared with anyone).


In order to maintain the site’s commitment to diversity, inclusion, support, and respect for all people, we offer the following suggestions for contributors. All contributions can be submitted via email to

  1. Attempt to contextualize personal experiences in relation to larger social patterns so that sharing your experiences may offer something to other readers. This may mean talking about influences in your life, social locations you are in or were in at one point, and / or research on a given topic you discuss.
  2. While contextualizing experience is important, it is equally important to speak only for yourself. Avoid naming other people without permission and attempt to speak in general terms to protect the identities or experiences of others. NOTE: This does not include publicly available actions, speeches or events, but please provide links when using such material so readers may become familiar with the reference.
  3. When possible and if you feel comfortable and safe doing so, please share your own social location or standpoint whether this involves your own disciplinary experience or experience tied to varied social identities.
  4. Please proofread posts for grammar, spelling and clarity. Use meaningful subheadings when relevant, and attempt to focus each individual post on one specific aspect of teaching or studying where it hurts (i.e., you can always do multiple posts to cover other aspects or other elements of your selfhood that influence your work).
  5. Please attempt to keep posts within 8 paragraphs in length if possible. While we may post longer pieces on a case-by-case basis, we strive to provide posts that are easily digestible for a wide readership.


            In general, we will not edit posts people offer for the site in terms of content, advice, or experience. However, we may at times offer suggestions for the piece, and / or link previous posts and other online resources within posts. All that said, the posts are the intellectual property of the authors, and we will not seek to reproduce these in any format without explicit permission from the authors.


            Write Where It Hurts is not a for-profit website and we don’t have a budget. Rather, we donate our time and energy to run and maintain it. As such, we do not offer compensation to authors’ who post on the site, but we are incredibly grateful to those that do share their stories.