You know a problem from the inside.
Perhaps you have worked in the field, lived in the place or known some of the people involved.
That position may make a question visible to you.
But how much of what follows can your own position actually settle?
In June 2014, Keith Lyons wrote about a grave.
For more than thirty years he had visited Emmanuel Churchyard in Buckley, where members of his family were buried. One of the graves he visited belonged to an uncle, Gerald, who had died during the Second World War.
Beside Gerald's grave was another.
Private E. Davies.
Keith had been wondering about him for some time.
Then he decided to investigate both men.
His family position matters immediately.
Without Gerald being his uncle, without Keith repeatedly visiting that grave, without those two young men lying beside one another in a churchyard that mattered to him, there is no obvious reason for Edwin Davies and Gerald Lyons to become one inquiry.
Keith's position gave him the question.
It did not give him the answer.
For that, he had to look elsewhere.
He found a photograph of Gerald. He followed military and memorial records. He found information about Edwin Davies and a report of Edwin's funeral in the Flintshire Observer. He compared the two men's ages, service and deaths.
And some things remain uncertain.
Keith wondered whether the illness from which Gerald died might have been connected to an earlier torpedo attack.
His relationship to Gerald could not settle that.
Neither could proximity to the grave.
The family connection had done something important, but quite specific.
It had made a question visible and made that question matter.
The historical claim still has to answer to the records.
That is a useful distinction.
Being close to a subject can help determine what you notice without giving you privileged access to everything that happened.
When experience changes the comparison
A different kind of position appears in Pool of Dreams.
In 2013, Keith and Sue were staying near Wylie's Baths in Coogee and swimming there regularly.
The place took Keith towards the history of Mina Wylie, one of Australia's first female Olympic swimmers.
But it also took him backwards through his own life.
He remembered learning to swim at Buckley Baths in the 1950s under Latham Catherall. He remembered joining a water-polo team. He remembered Colin Hardy, his swimming lecturer at Loughborough College during the 1970s.
Keith wrote of Hardy:
“He taught me how to observe technique and to do so with confidence.”
Then, swimming decades later at Wylie's, Keith started thinking about long-term learning outcomes. He connected what he was doing in the water that day with what earlier teachers had given him and with the practices he had carried into his own teaching career.
This is more than saying, I remember my old swimming teacher.
Keith's biography changed the comparison available to him.
A swimming pool in Coogee is not simply a historical site.
It became a place from which Keith could compare:
what he was taught;
what stayed with him;
what he later tried to develop in his own teaching;
and what long-term learning might look like across decades.
His experience gave him a perspective from which to make that comparison.
But again, there is a boundary.
Keith's memory of Colin Hardy belongs to Keith.
The extended recollection of Hardy that Keith included from Di Bass belongs to Bass.
Mina Wylie's history remains Mina Wylie's.
And Keith's long experience of benefiting from particular teachers does not prove that their pedagogy would have worked in the same way for everyone else.
Personal experience had changed the inquiry.
It had not become a universal verdict.
When where you live enters the judgement
Position does not have to be historical.
Sometimes it is simply where you are living and the conditions you are working under.
At the end of 2014, Keith was preparing an open online course in sport informatics and analytics.
In #UCSIA15 A family meeting, he connected that project directly to living in Braidwood, a rural town in New South Wales.
Keith described the community as caring, sharing and convivial. He also noted something more practical: access to high-speed broadband was limited.
He wrote that part of his fascination with open asynchronous resources had grown from seven years of living in that rural community while trying to share and cooperate through digital networks.
His position was doing analytical work here too.
Living with constrained connectivity changed what he noticed about online learning.
Asynchronous participation is not merely a technical option.
From where Keith was sitting, it answered a real condition of participation.
His experience of Braidwood also shaped the kind of social atmosphere he hoped the course might create. He wondered whether some of the qualities he valued in his local community might carry into a dispersed online one.
That is a reasonable place for experience to enter a design judgement.
But it still does not settle the question.
Keith's experience of Braidwood could explain why he valued certain kinds of openness, patience, sharing and asynchronous access.
It could not, on its own, establish that the social qualities of a small rural town would successfully transfer to an online course.
The source itself contains hope and belief rather than proof of that outcome.
That difference matters.
Your own conditions can expose a problem that someone working elsewhere might barely notice.
They can give you reasons for preferring one design over another.
They can sharpen the question.
But the fact that a solution makes sense from your position is not the same thing as knowing it will work for everyone else.
Being in the story is not enough
There is a temptation to make the distinction too easy.
In these Clyde Street posts, Keith was often visibly present.
Sometimes his life was vividly present.
That did not mean his position was always being used analytically.
In Warmth on a Rainy Day, Keith and Sue were in Coogee waiting for two important hospital appointments.
It is raining.
On the way to a hairdresser they encountered a piece of guerrilla knitting wrapped around a traffic-crossing post. It had the word L.O.V.E. knitted into it.
When they returned twenty minutes later, it had disappeared.
Keith and Sue wondered who took it and hoped that other people had also had the chance to smile at it.
It is personal.
It is located.
Keith and Sue were unmistakably part of the story.
But that is largely what the post is: a small first-person account of an encounter.
Keith's position did not visibly reorganise an analysis, establish a comparison or create an evidential boundary.
That does not make the post less worthwhile.
It simply shows that being present in an account is not the same thing as one's position doing analytical work.
That boundary is important because otherwise almost any autobiographical writing could be treated as analysis after the fact.
It is not enough that a memory is moving.
It is not enough that an experience is personally important.
Something has to change in the inquiry.
What job is your position doing?
The Clyde Street cases suggest that there is no single job for personal position.
In the churchyard, Keith's family relationship made a historical question visible.
At Wylie's Baths, his learning biography made a comparison across decades possible.
In Braidwood, living with rural connectivity shaped what he noticed about the design of open learning.
And in Coogee, on a rainy day, personal experience remains simply part of the story.
Those differences are more useful than a rule saying either:
keep yourself out of the analysis
or:
your lived experience is valuable evidence.
Both are too crude.
Sometimes your position is part of the reason you noticed the problem.
But making your position visible does not entitle it to answer every question that follows.
The distinction is especially clear in The Man Next To My Uncle.
Keith knew why Gerald mattered to him.
He knew why the neighbouring grave caught his attention.
He could describe what decades of visiting that churchyard meant from his own position.
But when he wanted to know who Edwin Davies was, he had to leave his own experience and consult other sources.
That movement is important.
Your position may tell you where to look without telling you what you will find there.
Proximity has limits
The same problem appears whenever we work from inside a situation.
An experienced coach may notice why a small detail in a familiar training environment deserves investigation. A researcher studying their own professional community may recognise why a particular question matters. A teacher evaluating a course they helped design may understand conditions that would otherwise need to be reconstructed.
Those positions can help make questions visible. They do not decide what the answers must be.
But each creates its own risk.
Familiarity can make assumptions invisible.
Personal experience can feel representative when it is not.
Long involvement can make somebody else's perspective seem more accessible than it really is.
A relationship can tell you a great deal about your own experience of another person without giving you ownership of theirs.
Clyde Street does not resolve those difficulties with a technique.
It gives us something more modest and more useful: cases in which the contribution of position can be inspected.
What did Keith's family relationship contribute?
A question and its significance.
What did the archives contribute?
Information that the relationship itself could not provide.
What did decades of swimming and teaching contribute at Wylie's Baths?
A comparison and a way of interpreting long-term learning.
What did other people's histories and testimony contribute?
Material that remained theirs.
What did rural life contribute to #UCSIA15?
A particular sensitivity to participation, connectivity and community.
What remained unproven?
Whether those qualities would transfer in the way Keith hoped.
The point is not to eliminate ourselves from our inquiries.
Nor is it to promote experience above other kinds of knowledge.
It is to become clearer about what our position is actually doing.
What would you still need from somewhere else?
That may be the most useful question to carry forward.
Suppose your own experience makes a pattern immediately visible.
What follows?
Perhaps it places you where a question becomes visible that another person might not immediately see.
Perhaps it allows a comparison across time or settings.
Perhaps it helps explain why one detail matters.
But then ask what your position cannot provide.
Do you need records?
Data?
Another person's account?
A different perspective?
Evidence from somewhere outside your own experience?
A way of testing whether what feels true from where you stand survives beyond that position?
The purpose is not to distrust experience.
It is to give it the right-sized role.
Keith's position in these Clyde Street posts sometimes materially shaped the inquiry.
It was never, simply because it was his, sufficient to settle everything that followed.
That leaves the judgement with us:
Question to carry
What is my own position helping me see here — and what would I still need to know from somewhere else?
Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “The Man Next To My Uncle” — 14/06/03
Keith Lyons, “Pool of Dreams” — 13/09/30
Keith Lyons, “#UCSIA15 A family meeting” — 14/12/27
Keith Lyons, “Warmth on a Rainy Day” — 13/08/09