Description: At a time when 'knowledge' has usurped traditional skills as the means to productivity, when we find ourselves in the 'knowledge society' or 'information age', what we regard as 'knowledge', how it is produced and with what political privileges, is of central concern to social science researchers. But where knowledge in the knowledge society often refers to 'knowledge work' (Aronowitz and de Fazio, 1994), our interest is in knowledge about learning, identity and agency, and especially about knowledge relating to personal growth and self development. In this paper we story the process of a part of a large scale research project currently being conducted in the UK, illuminating how the personal knowledge the interviewee brings to the research process mingles with that of the researcher, the latter including theories of others: the 'experts'. What we are attempting here is two-fold: firstly to provide as intense scrutiny of our own research work as we subject others to (Goodson and Anstead, 1993); and secondly to explore how "personal knowledge" and "expert knowledge" may be woven together, or discarded, in the process of creating new knowledge. We ask, in the context of self-knowledge, 'whose knowledge counts, to whom, and for what purpose?' Methodology: We discuss how the personal knowledge of a number of respondents drawn from a larger life history data set is interpreted and reconstructed by Goodson and Adair as researchers, drawing on our own personal/expert knowledge as well as that of a range of 'experts' in the fields of psychology, sociology and education. We take as our starting point, a recently constructed conference paper entitled "In Search of 'Home': Becoming and Belonging" (Goodson and Adair, forthcoming 2006), which explores how places of origin that are not fully secure, may provide the impetus for individuals to seek to reconstruct a new self. Through the analysis of our own writing, we consider what has been voiced and what silenced, and ask what frames our storying of other people's lives in this particular telling. This research is 'live' and still in progress; as such what is presented is a working paper for the purpose of discussion with a broader research community. We see this discussion as also forming an important part of the knowledge creation. Conclusions: We suggest that in an era when it is deemed "critical that new knowledge is created on the basis of and through a rich public domain that consists of the knowledge of all peoples and communities, including knowledge that is rooted in experience, practice and local knowledge" (UNESCO, 2005) it is imperative that the educational research community critiques it's own rationales for, and means of, knowledge production to work toward the promotion of social justice and democratic research where 'voice' is not only heard but given an equal place along side the voices of more powerful others. We conclude by asking of others, to what extent our approach lives up to this ideal.