Book excerpt: Everyday Knowledge and Uncommon Truths: Women of the Academy is a thirteen chapter volume which draws on the life experience and varied backgrounds of academic women from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The book addresses a variety of issues pertaining to women’s home lives, education, teaching, research, writing, and activism. To provide diverse perspectives on women’s experiences of being and knowing in and outside the academy, contributors draw on a range of critical approaches derived from feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, critical education theory, discourse theory and analysis, narrative inquiry and life histories. Lately, there has been considerable interest by women in the academy in a discernment process involving an examination of the historically, politically and culturally situated nature of their knowledge of the world, their work in the academy and other activities in which they engage. These examinations, especially in the form of narrative inquiry, life histories and deconstructive language practices such as discourse analysis, figure prominently in breaking silences and giving voice to the many tensions that women experience in the academic workplace and other settings.