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[Extract] The predicament at the heart of Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall’s recent book is that although girls have long testified to the violence they suffer, they are often disbelieved by the adults who have the power to investigate their claims. Children and young people are not seen as credible witnesses because the perceived association of childhood with naivety prevents adults from seeing children as equipped to understand the world and speak reliably about their experience of it. Doubly disempowered, girls also face gendered discrimination that leads to silencing.

Mita Banerjee’s Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography claims to focus on “what happens to the humanities” as they “export some of ...

This paper analyzes the concept of nostos through a reading of Italian-Canadian writer Genni Gunn’s autobiographical travelogue Tracks: Journeys in Time and Place (2013) to show how its narratives of movement contest meanings of home and homecoming. Gunn initiates new ways of thinking about return by taking the migrant traveler as its central figure and envisioning home as a “practice of displacement” (Evelein 21) wherein “home” is not achievable through physical return, but through memory. Specifically, Gunn subverts traditional notions of home by reimagining Italy through her travels to foreign places, which ultimately serve as sites of return to her homeland via cartographies of memory. In Gunn’s exploration of nostalgia, her narrative presents her identity as an Italian-Canadian immigrant as no longer defined by national borders, but rather as a condition of movement. Gunn uses the framework of travel to link acts of homemaking and homefinding so that the meaning of nostos emerges as a kind of dwelling-in-displacement.

The number of migration museums is growing all over the world. These new museums seek to actively shape debates about immigration, and they often rely on immigrants’ personal stories to engage museum visitors and immigrant communities in dialogue. The article uses the case study of France’s National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris and its collection of personal stories (The Gallery of Gifts) to explore this new form of story-activism and our concepts of hospitality. Drawing on Hélène du Mazaubrun’s, Jacques Derrida’s, Joan Stavo-Debauge’s and Paul Ricoeur’s ideas about gifting, hospitality, and recognition, I examine some challenging politico-ethical questions prompted by these immigrant story exhibitions.

Prison is a marginal space that is hidden from society, and life writing by prisoners thus offers valuable insights into prison life. This paper examines prisoner writing, as a genre neglected by a...

Since the memoir boom in the 1990s, non-fiction forms have continued to increase in popularity and market share, and hybrid forms such as autofiction and semi-autobiographical novels have established a pronounced place in literary culture. Yet many creative writing programmes remain focussed on fiction, reflecting students’ overwhelming interest in pursuing the novel as a form, and reluctance to see their own lived experiences as material for creative work. However, rather than seeing the novel and memoir as competing or dichotomous forms, we suggest that the trend in literary culture is to witness a collapsing of these distinctions in favour of hybrid works which sit on a spectrum of perceived truth claims. This article outlines a pedagogical response to a gap that exists between students’ understandings of the novel and memoir genres, and the increasing complication and hybridity emerging between those forms. We outline the pedagogical theory informing our approach, which emphasises complex and hybrid thinking, experimentation and reflective authorship practice. We argue that teaching novel and memoir in tandem encourages students to view life writing and fiction as existing on a spectrum of formal possibilities rather than fixed generic types, and cultivates students’ awareness of these developments in the field.

This paper explores the epistemological potential opened up by focusing on material culture within life writing. Dynamics of social class, cultural legitimacy, and aspirational labour are foregroun...

Life Writing’s choice to feature twenty-first century autoethnography offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of constructed self and culture in w...

The notion of the identity project fosters a persistent emphasis on consumer goals and plans and has dominated many interpretations of consumers undergoing transformation. This article contrasts this self-will view by introducing the lived experience of poetizing. Poetizing represents our moments of humble vulnerability when we wonder about life circumstances that we do not control or understand as we experience transformation. In those moments of humble vulnerability, we are possessed by our identities, rather than owning an identity project. By adopting the theoretical lens of poetizing, we enrich our capacity to represent the messiness of life and make space for a critical understanding of the accidentality of identity in creation and its embedded vulnerability.

If British academic memoirs disclosed the personal origins of professional careers, they also became themselves intellectual performances subject to critical disciplinary judgment. Ambiguity, irony...

Mass Observation (MO) was formed in Britain in 1937 as an innovative research project, to develop new methods for accurately gauging public opinion, thereby contributing to a more democratic form of politics and public policy formation. The archive of its first phase (1937-49) was transferred to the University of Sussex in 1970. In 1981 it was revived as the Mass Observation Project (MOP), which continues to the present. The documentation which MO and MOP together generated includes a significant body of life writings. The purpose of this cluster of articles is to introduce the ways in which the interaction between the aims and approaches of MO's founders and its later MOP refounders, and the responses of its contributors, produced specific forms of life writing; and to explore aspects of the 'afterlife' of these texts – their contextualisation, publication, and interpretation. This introduction situates the original, multifaceted and idiosyncratic, MO project within wider political and cultural trends of the 1930s, and then examines MO's methods, which aimed at 'the observation by everyone of everyone, including themselves'.

The diary form affords multiple generations of women with a vehicle for expressing themselves, and is particularly germane to younger writers, developing a voice, and shaping a sense of self as they emerge from childhood. Charting her travels from Ireland to Bath, the manuscript diary (1796–97) of Charity Lecky is exceptionally useful in exploring intersections with other genres, particularly the novel, while also affording us with an adolescent’s observations on life, and on Bath as international marriage market. The categories of youth, gender, and nation all play strong roles in Charity’s evolving sense of self, and enable us to explore these intersections and how they can inform a young person’s sense of worth. Frequently dismissed by male contemporaries as preoccupied only with balls and marriage prospects, the voices of such figures were repeatedly marginalised. This article prioritises both these voices and the diary form itself, and fuses their legitimate interest in courtship with a concern and fascination with national identity, recognising the value of young women’s opinions, and demonstrating how we might better understand the evolution of personal identities through inclusion of such source material.

We reflect on experiences we have had working, living and walking alongside our students. We interpret these experiences to reveal the silences at play as we walk stories into being together and attune ourselves to the places we both create and inhabit. We ground our exploration of the connection between walking and curriculum in life writing and literary métissage (Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2009). Throughout, we draw inspiration from Abram (1996) to explore the notion of walking as quiet participation, which we characterize as a bodily attunement toward each other and the more-than-human world, and we point to its possibilities for how we work and live alongside one another.

This is part two of the essay exploring the activities of strikers at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL over a 14 day-period in the early spring of 2018. These days were part of the 2018 Uni...

Peter Fitzpatrick (1941-2020) was a much-loved and inspirational scholar, friend and mentor. He contributed significantly to the intellectual, organisational, and cultural life of postcolonial legal studies, critical legal studies and law and the humanities – fields he helped to consolidate. This paper examines the reciprocal interplay between Peter’s life and work, between significant people, events, ideas and values, and the ways he made and re-made himself. It assesses and clarifies his key ideas and their intersection with his ethics and lived experiences. It illuminates his struggle, especially from the 1990’s onwards, to place ethics centre-stage in both life and law. Drawing on archival and secondary research, including interviews with his family, former colleagues and students, this contribution to legal life writing adds to what we already knew about his personal and professional biography. It is hoped that the paper will encourage those who are less familiar with Peter’s work, or who find his writing daunting, to tackle it anew and appreciate its significance.

This article examines life writing as a research method to uncover new insights about the interrelationships between beings and place including with fashion and clothing. In it, the practice of usi...

The Moroccan feminist sociologist Fatema Mernissi (1940–2015) is probably best known for her pioneering scholarly work on gender equality in Islam. This paper, however focuses on her life writing: her memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, published in 1994 and her reflections on its Eurocentric reception, which culminated in the publication of her work of creative non-fiction Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems in 2001. Written in popular genres in accessible registers, Mernissi’s texts translate her scholarly feminism into stories of the everyday in order to encourage her readers to see possibilities of feminist practices within and against oppressive social structures. Both texts deal with the way in which women’s agency is circumscribed by particular horizons of constraint determined by their social contexts and thus the texts contrast local, particular forms of constraint with more diffuse forms of oppression that characterise western modernity. This paper offers a reading of her harem childhood to trace some of the alternative modes of enacting small freedoms that the memoir documents. As becomes apparent in Mernissi’s reflections on the memoir’s reception, these achievements seem to be largely illegible within meritocratic scripts of success. In contrast, Mernissi asserts that care for self and other – via modes of storytelling, performance, artistic production and looking after one’s physical wellbeing – mark direct, albeit subtle, forms of resistance even if they are not recognised as such. Drawing on a popular cultural repertoire, the well-known figure of Scheherazade emerges in Mernissi’s texts as a central role model for women crafting pockets of resistance and webs of care. In this way, Mernissi’s texts offers a Moroccan perspective on the debate of the conditions of possibility of ordinary feminist practices inspired by popular artistic forms. Keywords: Fatema Mernissi, life writing, Scheherazade, ethics of care, storytelling, Moroccan feminism

The process of imperialism and colonialism was established on the covert idea of economic and political exploitation of the underdeveloped eastern cultures by the dominant west. With the process of decolonization, the marginalized and the poor have been given a centre space alongwith the reversal of the order where those who were the object for centuries, suddenly refuse to be subjected to misrepresentation and domination, and begin to constitute their own discourses. Literature serves as a medium of honest self expression and platform to express the true self for women. American society has triply disempowered and disenfranchised African American women on the basis of race, gender and class. Many African American women writers attempt to break down traditional structures and dislocate narrative strategies in order to re-examine subject identity and to demonstrate the complexity of female experience. By writing about their lives the marginalized are valorized and their oppression turns into empowerment. Life writing helps females to explore subjectivity and to assume authorship of their own life. The account of the life of African American women writers chronicles their frequent encounters with racism, sexism and classism as they describe the people, events and personal qualities that helped them to survive the devastating effects of their environment.

The following analysis looks at current discussions surrounding testimony in the form of life writing. In particular it looks at how competing theories of mediation fare when applied to concrete ex...

In this article, Sally R Munt reflects on issues of social class discrimination in higher education in an engaging conversation with Louise Morley, both from the University of Sussex.

Lists can be found everywhere online: from the interfaces of search engines and social media to so-called listicles, lists are an inherent part of most of the Internet. Social media applications in...

This study argues that Indigenous Australian women’s life writings reveal the empowerment of Indigenous Australian women in terms of expressing their voices and experiences as Indigenous Australian women in Australian society. This study is a qualitative research that collect qualitative data from books and journals through library research. The data are analyzed by applying interdisciplinary approach and presented descriptively. The result of this study shows that Indigenous Australian women’s life writings, If Everyone Care: Autobiography of Margaret Tucker by Margaret Tucker (1977), My Place by Sally Morgan (1987), and Kick the Tin by Doris Kartinyeri (2000) express their political and educative voices in order to enhance their life and potency in Australian society.

This article examines how the autobiographies of Harriet Martineau and Margaret Oliphant represent the work of writing in relation to the domestic labour and familial duties that are gendered as “w...

The notion of roots, of place and belonging, is always charged with significant emotional investment in diasporic imaginary. The mythogenies of birth, origin, nation, faith and all the other tropol...

Although he was most commonly regarded as a poet of the rural world, Robert Bloomfield's success as a writer is inextricably linked to the urban and artisanal culture that shaped both his sense of ...

Despite increasing engagement with queer theory and its literature in African scholarship, representations of transgenderism have received very little attention, relegating transgender identity to ...

The author encourages family members to write about their memories of shared events from the past in an attempt to foster a sense of connection after bereavement. When one impactful shared experien...

Recent developments in literary and life writing scholarship have interrogated the division and hierarchy between subject and object or human and non-human. This material turn interests me as it su...

This autoethnographic essay examines how life writing can engage with environmental accountability and human and animal relationships through the material and symbolic presence of the figurine. It ...

This is the second of two special issues of Life Writing dedicated to Tibet’s rich auto/biographical tradition, in all its forms and styles. 1 Ideally conceived as an ‘introduction’ to traditional ...

This article purports to explore the autobiographical dimension of a recent publishing phenomenon, brainy books. It’s my contention that these books display a constant dialectic tension between their source (academic research) and their target (non-academic readers), and one way of reconciling both sides consists in resorting to rhetorical strategies in order to make their research more accessible. One of these strategies is openly autobiographical. Through two case studies—Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) and Paul Dolan’s Happiness by Design (2014)—I study the various functions of this autobiographical dimension: perlocutionary, contextualizing, illustrative and finally autobiographical beyond functionality. It’s my overall aim to demonstrate that the authors’ choice to include personal anecdotes or even confessions in books primarily meant to spread knowledge to a larger audience makes brainy books a fascinating subject for life writing studies.

This article analyzes undocumented Latinx nonfiction life-writing as creative resistance to dehumanization and as a vehicle for new conceptions of Latinx subjectivities and experiences. It investig...

This article discusses the personal narratives (both published and personal interviews collected for the purpose of this study) of female survivors of wartime rape in post–World War II Germany and postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. The authors examine how the women succeed in finding their words both for and beyond the rupture caused by the rapes through examples of life writing that challenge the dominant masculinist historical narrative of war created for ideological reasons and for the benefit of the nation-state. Using theories of trauma and insights by feminist scholars and historians, the authors argue that a transnational reading of survivors’ accounts from these very different geopolitical and historical contexts not only shows multiple points of mutual influence, but also how these narratives can make a significant contribution, both locally and globally, when it comes to revisiting how wartime rape is memorialized, and how lessons learned from the two contexts can be relevant and applicable in other situations of armed conflict as well.

This article compares aspects of the autofictional modes of self-representation at play in Genet’s Journal du voleur [The Thief’s Journal] and Herve Guibert’s Mes parents [My Parents]. Despite their different historical periods of production (1949 and 1986, respectively), each text deploys key aspects of the seemingly autobiographical text (recounting the event of birth, significance of the family name, dawning sense of sexual desire and identity) in order to portray a sense of being at odds with prevailing strictures of belonging and good taste. Despite foregrounding a sense of ‘misfitting’, which is primarily located in experiences of, and related to, gay sexuality, the texts also testify to the enduring appeal and imposed potency of the socially sanctioned desire for straightforward autobiographical selfhood. Taken together, the texts suggest a reading which foregrounds shifting textual pluralities of reimagined, transitory, textual forms of selfhood rather than a named singular self

This article examines the fashioning of the authorial persona of British playwright, screenwriter, and director David Hare through autobiographically inflected extra-theatrical interventions. Both exploratory and explanatory companion pieces that frame his artistic work, Hare’s lectures, essays, and memoir capture and stage the field migrations between art and activism that lie at the heart of his public profile as a politically engaged celebrity playwright and astute social commentator. It will be shown how Hare exploits the generic properties of non-fictional life-writing formats that raise, and ostensibly meet, audience expectations of sincerity and authenticity and therefore become ideal vehicles for Hare’s ‘autobiomyth’ of the prophetic writer-propagandist who strives to appeal to the moral conscience of his readership. Hare’s conception of the authorial persona is informed by a Romantic tradition of strong authorship that is intimately connected with truth-telling discourses and that relies on the author’s combined identities of artist and politically engaged commentator. This contribution argues that Hare’s proclivity for non-fictional life-writing formats ties in with a sense of discomfort about his position as a playwright between establishment recognition and self-declared radicalism.

Evocative objects, suggests Sherry Turkle (2007), demonstrate the inseparability of thought and emotion in our relationships to certain objects. This is even more the case with objects that have become things, untethered from and exceeding their everyday use. There is a comforting solidity about things that offers a contrast to the shifting consciousness of the writer. But then things, too, begin to morph and shift: childhood objects opening an infinity of stories, the cracked teacup conjuring another time and place, people now dead. Life writing from and through things both dramatises and contests dualities such as self and other, order and chaos, exposure and concealment. This essay follows things and draws on thing theory and contemporary material culture studies to explore the way evocative objects become contradictory partners in life writing.

Working from the premise that learning to live well in our places is quickly becoming a necessity of human survival, in this article we weave together divergent experiences of our shared place, the Wabanaki Confederacy or Eastern Canada, and literatures and literacies of that place. This article is methodologically framed using the concept of “métissage” as it has been taken up in Canadian curriculum studies as a form of intertextual life writing. Through our métissage, we are ultimately concerned with theorizing the idea of reading place—making sense of the ways in which settler colonialism has historically made, and continues to make, itself felt on Land. The idea of reading place, however, also demands that we actively engage in disrupting the normativity of settler colonial presence on Land—particularly as manifest through literature and literacy. Toward speaking back to the normativity of this settler colonial presence, the authors draw on divergent pedagogical and literary practices toward ensuring indigenous futurities. Keywords: settler colonialism; literacies of the land; literacy

In this article I focus on a selection of radio plays by the Austrian author Gerhard Rühm and analyse them from the perspective of life writing, starting with Irene Kacandes' findings on the increased referential effect of experimental life writing (2012). I want to extend the notion of experimental life writing to the medium of the experimental radio play and investigate whether and how the experiments with spoken language, voice, and musicalisation of language contribute to an effect of realness and create an aural world infused with lived experientiality. I'm particularly interested in the relationship between individualised, figurative voices and sounds, as they are to be expected in (auto)biographical art, and the defiguration and deindividualisation in the experimental, synthetic manipulation of human language and voice. Situating the corpus in the history of the German Neues Hörspiel, my analysis hopes to prove that the reality effect of the experimental (auto)biographical radio play does not, or at least not only, refer to an individual biographical self. Instead, the complex constellation of text and paratext, of scripted and spoken language, and of voice and music opens up the referential level for a broader, more general human experientiality. Most importantly, the technical possibilities of the radiophonic medium allow an intricate play with the semantics of referential language, with masking and unmasking voices, and with the exploration of the pathos of speaking together.

Purpose Arguably, how psychohistorians treat entrepreneur life-writing interiorizes the autobiographer’s self, thereby limiting the extent to which self can be accessed by researchers. By advocating a different approach, based on socio-narratology, this paper provides insight into how entrepreneurs in both the distant and recent past construct narrative identities – the textual corollary of “storied selves” – within their autobiographies. Design/methodology/approach The object of analysis is the failed entrepreneur autobiography, straddling two sub-genres – “projective” and “confessional” – which both serve to rehabilitate the author. Findings Narratological analysis of Nick Leeson’s Rogue Trader autobiography reveals how the author deftly draws upon the culturally recognizable trope of the “rogue as trickster” and “rogue as critic” to contextualize his deceptive and illegal activities, before signaling his desire for rehabilitation by exiting banking and futures trading – thereby enacting the “rogue as family man”. Practical implications The application of a narratological methodology opens up new avenues for understanding the interplay between Western cultural institutions, entrepreneur selves, and autobiographical writing. Originality/value This paper shows that narratology provides a new methodological window through which management historians can view entrepreneur autobiographies.

While the history of Chinese settlement in Canada is touted as an example of perseverance despite racist opposition and of socio-economic success under Canada’s immigration and multiculturalism policies, it is important to remember the very active role that Chinese Canadians played in their own trajectory. Throughout its history, the Chinese Canadian community has engaged in civic and political activism, on the one hand, and the promotion of positive stereotypes associated with assimilation into Euro-Canadian society on the other. Both of these approaches can be seen in the political memoirs of two prominent Chinese Canadian women: My Journey by Olivia Chow, a Member of Parliament who focused her career on a plethora of social justice initiatives; and Heart Matters by Adrienne Clarkson, a former Governor General who deemphasizes her Chinese heritage in order to mould herself into the ideal Canadian citizen. Despite these clear differences in political ideology and personal identity, both Chow and Clarkson’s memoirs reveal the ways in which Chinese Canadians can not only claim full belonging as Canadian citizens, but also interrogate systemic forms of racism and inequality.

Donna Haraway’s cyborg is a widely traveled figure with an important relation to life writing. This article traces the cyborg through modes of life writing and routes through feminist science fiction and science studies. It examines attachments and anger, looking at the return of the alienated cyborg in recent accounts of Haraway’s work. One of Donna Haraway’s most charismatic and widely travelled figures is that of the cyborg. It emerges as a figure in her writing in the 1980s and 1990s, and enables important interventions in thinking about lives as always already technological and prosthetic. One of its gifts is that it offers a different way into this than either technological evolutionism or the posthumanism of actor-network theory. The cyborg is a figure of specificity, of fiction but also of real-life couplings of technology and flesh, which are neither evolutionarily determined nor neutral but, in Haraway’s terms, are non-innocent encounters. The non-innocent relationality of the cyborg is posited as one of responsibility, which, in Haraway’s lexicon, evokes both an ability to respond to others and an ethics of encounter. The cyborg is a singular figure, although, in Haraway’s work, singularity is always multiple and allows for thinking about the life of life story and technology.1 The figure has generated strong attachments, multiple stories, and anger over the last thirty years. This article traces a partial examination of the manifesto as life writing, and surveys debates about and practices of cyborg life writing, including autobiography and fiction. It examines the possibilities of the cyborg, including anger, rejection, and reconfiguration (as embryo and doppelg€anger), as well as its relation to life itself more broadly conceived.

The Eminent Scholars Archive (ESA) was established to record aspects of the history of the Faculty of Law at Cambridge University. It is based on 28 interviews with scholars and, currently, has 66 hours of audio recordings and transcripts, but also includes over 800 photographs and numerous associated items including biographies, bibliographies, obituaries and eulogies. Entries for faculty members cover the period from WWII to the present, while 13 entries focus on the incumbent Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science. The archive is a rich source of information for researching aspects of legal communities, and in this contribution I focus on three aspects: personal histories of scholars, faculty history, and more socially-broad topics. In the first category I seek to show how the ESA identifies crossroads in the personal legal journeys of professors Higgins, Baker, Smith and Crawford, while I use their common remembrances to record an institutional landmark. For the latter, I selected the 1995 Faculty move from the Old Schools to the Foster building on the Sidgwick site. Finally, I show how ESA illustrates components of legal life writing in a broader societal context. Here I compare the experiences of curators of family histories at the British Library, and ‘group biographies’ of court officials as researched at LSE, with aspects of documenting careers of senior legal academics at Cambridge.