EMBRACING VULNERABILITY

This essay narrates the formation of my scholarly life in Sri Lanka, which taught me the heritage wisdom that humility is indeed resourceful for research and pedagogical activity. My life as a scholar from the global south has been marked by experiences of lack, disruption, and trauma. In all those cases of vulnerability and precarity, rather than treating them as an exception that I should ignore or overcome, I embraced them as generative of knowledge construction and intellectual inquiry. Though humility and vulnerability are not dispositions valued by empirical and positivistic science that has informed higher education since European modernity, they benefitted me in many ways. They endowed me with an intellectual honesty that enabled me to always keep moving in knowledge formulation that is sensitive to changing contexts and conditions, adopting self-criticism and reflexivity. Young scholars need not consider vulnerable life and professional conditions as disabling.