Lives & Letters Mailing: April 2015
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness project update:
– departures and new beginnings
– new articles in early 2015
– new project blog posts
– WWW extension to end of 2016
2. Time, Freedom and Narrative, PG conference, 3 July 2015, University of Manchester
3. Oxford Centre for Life-Writing: Events in Trinity Term 2015
4. Events at the Scottish Oral History Centre, University of Strathclyde
5. Biography and/as Experimental Fiction, 5 June 2015, Goldsmiths
6. Reflecting on Story’s Place in our Lives, The Storytelling Project, Oxford, 3-5 September 2015.
7. My Dear Bessie, Mass-Observation on BBC Radio 4, Monday 20 April
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness project update:
There are four items of project news we would like to share:
Departures and new beginnings:
There are soon to be changes in personnel on the project, with Andrea Salter leaving Edinburgh to take up the post of School Research Facilitator in Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Her new role will involve stimulating interdisciplinary research between Cambridge academics and those elsewhere in the UK and overseas. Andrea has worked closely with project PI Liz Stanley since 2003, including on the Olive Schreiner Letters Online (2008-2012), and has been responsible for managing the running of the Lives & Letters (formerly NABS) mailing list since 2007. Her beneficent presence will be much missed, but what a fab opportunity for her.
Taking over the RA post on the Whites Writing Whiteness project is Emilia Sereva. Emilia is another Edinburgh person and has worked closely with Liz around her doctoral research, on the British family funeral firm and the transaction of funerals. There is a close connection between WWW and Emilia’s close familiarity with and use of the work of Norbert Elias, which provides the conceptual architecture and an important aspect of the methodological tools of WWW. In addition, Emilia has been the Webmistress for the Sociology webpages and part of the School graduate webpages at Edinburgh, so she brings a high degree of web savvy to the post.
Au revoir Andrea, and a warm welcome to Emilia, whose email address is Emilia Sereva e.p.sereva@sms.ed.ac.uk.
New journal articles by Liz Stanley in early 2015:
The following peer-reviewed articles are or will soon be available to read in the course of the next few months. Ideas for several of these have been ‘tested’ in blog form, while more information about the publications can be found here: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/readallabout/project-publications/
(2015) ‘Operationalizing a QLR project on social change and whiteness in South Africa, 1770s – 1970s’ Int J Social Research Methodology 18:3: 251-65.
(2015) ‘The death of the letter? Letterness and the many ends of letter-writing’ Cultural Sociology – see Online First, March 2015.
(October 2015) The scriptural economy, the Forbes figuration and the racial order: Everyday life in South Africa 1850 – 1922’ Sociology 49: 5.
(2015, date nya) ‘What is a migrant letter?’ accepted by Journal of Family History
New project blog posts:
Several new blog posts are now available, the most recent concerning WWW website usage statistics since the site was launched in October 2012: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/www-website-use/
No-cost extension to the WWW project:
Project funders, the Economic and Social Research Council, have agreed a ‘no-cost extension’ to the WWW project until end December 2016. This is because of Liz Stanley’s extensive time commitments during the project’s early days (on the REF panel and as former Head of Sociology at Edinburgh). It’s very good news for finishing project work and ensuring more publications.
With best wishes,
Liz Stanley and Andrea Salter
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2. Time, Freedom and Narrative, PG conference, 3 July 2015, University of Manchester
Time, Freedom and Narrative
University of Manchester
Friday 3rd July 2015
An interdisciplinary postgraduate conference hosted by doctoral students at theCentre for New Writing and the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester
‘[How] are we to interpret history’s claim, when it constructs a narrative, to reconstruct something from the past? What authorizes us to think of this construction as reconstruction?’
(Ricoeur, Time and Narrative Vol. 3)
‘The conjunction of identification and foreknowledge contains the relationship between human beings and God, between freedom and fate, and these relationships are inherent in the most basic perspectival structures of narrative.’ (Currie, The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise)
Narrative has a long and rich history in the humanities and social sciences. Although first developed in the field of literary theory, the concept soon migrated across disciplinary boundaries, and has become a productive analytical tool within areas as diverse as history, psychology, and translation studies.
This interdisciplinary postgraduate conference, featuring keynote speaker Professor Mark Currie (Queen Mary University of London), brings together research perspectives from across the academic spectrum in a discussion of narrative and its interaction with notions of time and freedom. We welcome contributions on all aspects of the relationships between these three concepts, including but not restricted to:
• Narrative processes in literature and in wider society
• Time and/or freedom as a matter of content and form in fiction
• Time and/or freedom in experimental literature
• Narratives of the past and of the future
• Narrative and social change
• Narrative as a means of sustaining/challenging political power
• Narrative construction in the digital age
• Narrative and the notion of free will
• Narrative and the ‘free’ press
• Freedom as a temporal construct
• (Capitalist) time as a social construct
• Narrative and personal identity
Please send proposals of up to 300 words, together with a 50-word biographical note, to: timefreedomnarrative@gmail.com
Extended deadline for submissions: 20 April 2015
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Best wishes
Valerie O’Riordan
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Centre for New Writing
University of Manchester
www.valerieoriordan.com
www.bookmunch.wordpress.com
http://www.themanchesterreview.co.uk
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3. Oxford Centre for Life-Writing: Events in Trinity Term 2015
Oxford Centre for Life-Writing: Events: Trinity Term 2015
www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing; oclw@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
Unless otherwise stated, all events are open to all, free of charge, with no reservation required.
Thursday 7 May (Week 2), 5.30-7pm, Florey Room, Wolfson College:
Seminar: ‘Life-Writing Operations’. The speakers (all OCLW visiting scholars) will present their current life-writing projects, and discuss the use of archives and memoirs in life-writing, and alternative methods of writing biographies.
John Bak: ‘Editing Tennessee Williams’ Ur-Memoirs’
Lorraine Paterson, ‘Global Exile: Tracing a Life of Deportation from French Indochina.’
Jennifer Cooke, ‘The New Audacity: Contemporary Women’s Life Writing and the Politics of Intimacy’
Thursday 14 May (Week 3), 5.30-7pm, Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College:
Reading & Seminar: Siddhartha Bose, ‘Memory as Imagination in a Globalised World’. Siddhartha will be reading from his books of poetry, Kalagora and Digital Monsoon, showing clips from his theatre work and film, as a way into exploring the relationship between memory, imagination and globalised environments. He will reflect on how the very idea of writing lives in the 21st century, of creatively using memory and imagination, are being renegotiated in radical ways in contemporary thought and aesthetic practice.
Saturday 16 May (Week 3), 10am-4.30pm (tbc), Haldane Room/PRD, Wolfson College:
Workshop: ‘Disputed Lives’. Led by Hermione Lee, Elleke Boehmer, Rebecca Abrams, Kate McLoughlin and Jacob Dahl, this full-day workshop will focus on the challenges contradictory accounts about their subjects’ lives pose to life-writers. £70 (£55 unwaged). For more details & to register please visit http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=1784&prodvarid=1012
Friday 29 May 2015 (Week 5), 5.30-7pm, Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College:
Lecture: President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, renowned politician, diplomat, and former President of Latvia (1999-2007), will talk autobiographically about her life and career.
Tuesday 2 June (Week 6), 5.30-7pm, Buttery, Wolfson College:
Seminar & Reception: Lyndsey Jenkins, ‘The Hunger Games: Constance Lytton, Jane Warton and the Suffragettes’. OCLW DPhil scholar Lyndsey Jenkins will speak about her new book, Lady Constance Lytton: Aristocrat, Suffragette and Martyr, which tells the story of Constance Lytton, an unexpected but important militant suffragette in the Women’s Social and Political Union. The talk will be followed by a drinks reception, to which all are welcome.
Tuesday 9 June 2015 (Week 7), 5.30-7pm, Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College:
Reading & Seminar: ‘Re-reading with Anne Sexton’. Victoria van Hyning will introduce, play, and lead a discussion on poet Anne Sexton’s last public reading, delivered at Goucher Colleger just four days before her death in 1974. Participants in the seminar discussion: Jo Gill, Erica McAlpine, Leo Mercer.
Monday 15 June 2015 (Week 8), Haldane Room, Wolfson College:
Seminar: ‘The Author in the Medical Imagination’. The third of a series of seminars organised by Joanna Neilly (Wadham, Oxford) under the general theme of ‘The Author in the Popular Imagination’, features Ann Jefferson (New College, Oxford) with Geoffrey Wall (York) as Respondent. The seminar series is supported by OCLW and TORCH.
Tuesday 16 June 2015 (Week 8), 1-2pm, Haldane Room, Wolfson College:
Life-Writing Lunch Seminar: prize-winning British novelist and travel-writer Joanna Kavenna, author of The Ice Museum (2006), Inglorious (2007) and The Birth of Love (2010). Joanna Kavenna will talk about time, memory and the self. She’ll discuss individual experience and how we pass through different stages of life – the child, the teenager, the adult, perhaps the parent, later the elderly person – changing all the time. Yet, there is something continuous within this process of individual metamorphosis, otherwise we would cease to recognise ourselves; we would lapse into incoherence. How do we fashion our life stories? How do we fathom and describe the changing self? Free of charge. Please book online at http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=2047&prodid=10139. A sandwich lunch will be provided.
We look forward to seeing you at these events!
With best wishes,
Rachel Hewitt (on behalf of myself, Hermione Lee and Elleke Boehmer)
Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW),
Wolfson College Research Clusters,
Wolfson College,
Linton Road,
Oxford.
OX2 6UD
oclw@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing
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4. Events at the Scottish Oral History Centre, University of Strathclyde
Dear colleagues,
The next seminar of the Scottish Oral History Centre will be held on Monday, April 20th in the Centre (University of Strathclyde, Curran 6.24, www.strath.ac.uk/maps). For our final seminar of the 2014-2015 academic year, we welcome Dr Graham Smith, chair of the Oral History Society. Graham teaches and researches oral history, public history and the history of medicine at Royal Holloway, University of London. His particular and current interests are in the mediation of memory, especially in small social groups. He is also a trade unionist, active in campaigning for better university governance, and serves on his College’s Academic Board.
He will present his paper ‘The man who killed my grandfather: the (mis)use of oral history in mediations of memory, from memorialisation to video games’, in which he will consider how institutions gain the necessary authority to mediate memory. The paper uses a case study, with particular reference to oral history, to investigate what makes institutional claims about the past authoritative. Please find the full abstract for Graham’s paper attached.
The seminar will open at 5:00pm for light refreshments, with the paper starting at 5:30pm.
I hope you will be able to attend the seminar.
Best wishes,
Andy Clark
Andy Clark
PhD Candidate in History
HaSS Graduate School
University of Strathclyde
Lord Hope Building
141 St James Road
Glasgow
G4 0LT
Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to announce an additional seminar taking place in the Scottish Oral History Centre during this academic year. Dr Kate Prebble, from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, will present her paper ‘We can do this but we need to do it our way’: Oral history accounts of setting up a forensic psychiatric service in Auckland, New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s – creating an institution in the context of deinstitutionalisation?’
This will be held in the Centre, Curran 6.24 (www.strath.ac.uk/maps), on Wednesday May 20th, beginning at 5:30pm. Please find attached the full abstract for Kate’s paper.
An additional reminder that we welcome Dr Graham Smith, Chair of the Oral History Society, this coming Monday (20th April), also beginning at 5:30pm.
Best wishes,
Andy
Andy Clark
PhD Candidate in History
HaSS Graduate School
University of Strathclyde
Lord Hope Building
141 St James Road
Glasgow
G4 0LT
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5. Biography and/as Experimental Fiction, 5 June 2015, Goldsmiths
Contact: julia.lajta-novak@sbg.ac.at
Biography and/as Experimental Fiction
5 June 2015
Goldsmiths, University of London
Richard Hoggart Building, Room 137
This one-day conference deals with intersections of biography and/as experimental fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. While for scientists an experiment is a common way of proving or disproving a hypothesis and thus of arriving at certainties, fiction writers have long been demonstrating that literary experiments tend to have the opposite effect: they open up alternative and multiple ways of reading and pose new epistemological challenges. Similar experimental tendencies can be identified in 20th and 21st century biography, which has seen a proliferation in narratives that disrupt conventional generic expectations and question, or even satirize, traditional modes of representation, often overtly crossing over into the domain of fiction as they tell a historical character’s story. From Woolf’s and Stein’s modernist experiments in biography to Amia Lieblich’s Conversations with Dvora written as imaginary dialogue, from A.J.A. Symons’s meta-biographical Quest for Corvo to Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s self-searching Autobiografía del general Franco and Janice Galloway’s typographically conspicuous biofiction of Clara Wieck Schumann, writers have extended the range of the biographical through formal innovations commonly associated with the fictional mode. If experimentation has been a staple diet of fiction writers and a defining criterion of much canonical fiction for centuries, the “battle for ‘experimental’ biography”, Carole Angier argues, “has to be fought anew in every generation” as positivist Victorian values prevail to this day (The Arvon Book of Life Writing 58).
This conference will look at narratives about historical characters that constitute innovative explorations of biography’s formal possibilities in their respective cultural and historical contexts. We welcome papers that explore the insights generated by such texts, consider what is gained by specific biographical-fictional experiments and where – as experiments are sometimes prone to – they fail or fall short.
Organisers:
Dr. Julia Lajta-Novak, University of Salzburg
Prof. Lucia Boldrini, Goldsmiths, University of London
Keynote speakers:
Janice Galloway
(Scottish novelist, librettist, poet, author of short fiction)
Prof. Max Saunders
(Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research, King’s College London)
Please email your abstract (250 words) + brief CV and academic affiliation to Julia.Lajta-Novak@sbg.ac.at by 13 April 2015.
Delegates will be informed whether their paper has been included in the programme by 16 April 2015.
We plan to publish selected papers from the conference.
Attendance will be free of charge. Light refreshments will be provided.
Programme, travel and registration information will be published at
http://www.gold.ac.uk/ecl/events/biography-and-as-experimental-fiction/.
—
Dr. Julia Lajta-Novak, M.A.
Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow (FWF)
Department of English and American Studies
University of Salzburg
Erzabt-Klotzstraße 1
5020 Salzburg
AUSTRIA
Tel.: +43 (0)699 81761689
http://www.uni-salzburg.at/ang/lajta-novak
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6. Reflecting on Story’s Place in our Lives, The Storytelling Project, Oxford, 3-5 September 2015.
Reflecting on Story’s Place in our Lives, The Storytelling Project
Thursday 3rd September – Saturday 5th September 2015
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
Call for Presentations:
Earlier meetings of the ‘Storytelling: global reflections on narrative’ project have brought together participants with both personal and professional interests in the unique role that storytelling plays throughout our lives – in shaping us as people and in allowing us to shape our societies, our cultures and our day to day activities. We have been challenged by philosophers, literary theorists, artists, psychologists, film makers, historians, teachers, psychotherapists, nurses and many others, into reflecting on the place that story plays in our lives and the ways in which we consciously and unconsciously employ it. We have also been engaged, entertained and challenged by traditional storytellers from Ireland, New Zealand, Canada, the Philippines, India and elsewhere as well as by theatrical and musical performances, digital stories, films and performance art.
For our 8th global meeting we invite participants to continue to reflect on and celebrate story in challenging ways, and especially welcome abstracts from those who bring together reflections from both professional and personal perspectives.
Human life is conducted through story, because the telling of stories comes naturally to us. Almost every time we speak we engage in storytelling, and sharing stories is arguably the most important way we have of communicating with others about who we are and what we believe; about what we are doing and have done; about our hopes and fears; about what we value and what we don’t. We make sense of our lives by telling the stories that we live; and we learn about other lives by listening to the stories told by others. Sometimes, under the influence of the culture in which we are immersed, we live our lives in ways that try to create the stories we want to be able to tell about them.
The importance of the stories we tell and the stories we hear is recognized in every culture. The work of many professions, including medicine, nursing, teaching, the law, psychotherapy and counselling, involves a great deal of time listening to and communicating through stories.
Story is a powerful tool for teachers, because by telling stories they can help students to integrate what they are learning with what they already know, by placing what they learn in a context that makes it easy to recall. Story also plays an important role in academic disciplines like philosophy, theology, anthropology, archaeology and history as well as literature. Narrative methods for the collection of data are increasingly used in research in the social sciences and humanities, where the value of getting to know people in a more intimate and less distant way – almost as if we are getting to know them from the inside, is increasingly valued, and academics in many disciplines have begun to realise the value of storytelling as a model for academic writing.
Most of us have lots of experience of relating to other lives through narrative forms, including the stories we encounter as children, the books we read and the TV programmes we watch – the dramas; the documentaries, and for those who will own up to viewing them, the ‘reality’ TV shows. When we are moved by a play, a movie or a novel, we are moved because we begin imaginatively to live the lives of the characters that inhabit them. If we are lucky we will encounter as we grow up, fictional stories that stay with us like old friends, that we will revisit again and again throughout our lives, as a way of coming to terms with and responding to the things we experience.
Reflecting on Story’s Place in our Lives, the 8th global meeting of the Storytelling project, provides a space in which stories about story can be told, and in which the use of stories in the widest possible range of aspects of human life, can be reported. Abstracts are invited for individual contributions and for symposia of three closely related papers. They may address any aspect of story or narrative, including, for example:
– Story as a pedagogical tool in academic disciplines such as history; anthropology, psychology, theology, cultural theory, medicine, law, philosophy, education, and archaeology.
– Narrative and the gathering of stories of lived experience, as a research approach in any area of academic, professional and public life.
– The place of story and storytelling in the practice of journalism; PR advertising; conflict resolution; architecture; religion; tourism, politics and the law, and in clinical contexts such as medicine, psychotherapy, nursing and counseling.
– Finally abstracts may feature storytelling in any aspect of culture, including music (from opera to heavy metal, folk and sacred music); fine art; theatre; literature; cinema and digital storytelling.
Alongside traditional conference papers, earlier conferences in the Storytelling: global reflections on narrative project have included a huge range of presentations, including traditional storytelling; the screening of award winning films; theatrical performances (including cabaret) and workshops aimed at engaging participants in active learning about story and its possibilities in, for example, research and therapy. This has enriched our conversations greatly, and so participants are encouraged to propose presentations of all kinds.
What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 5th June 2015. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 7th August 2015. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: STORY8 Proposal Submission.
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs:
Gavin J Fairbairn and Susan Fairbairn: gsstory@inter-disciplinary.net
Rob Fisher: story8@inter-disciplinary.net
The conference is part of the Persons series of ongoing research and publications projects conferences, run within the Probing the Boundaries domain which aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore innovative and challenging routes of intellectual and academic exploration. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.
Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation.
For further details of the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/storytelling-global-reflections-on-narrative/global-reflections-on-narrative-call-for-presentations/
Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
Dr. Rob Fisher
Priory House
149B Wroslyn Road
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1993 882087
Email: story8@inter-disciplinary.net
Visit the website at http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/storytelling-global-reflections-on-narrative/global-reflections-on-narrative-call-for-presentations/
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7. My Dear Bessie, Mass-Observation on BBC Radio 4, Monday 20 April
I just wanted to let you know that My Dear Bessie will be broadcast
on BBC Radio 4 on Monday at 14:15. The programme featured letters from
the Mass Observation Archive written between Chris Barker, a solider
in North Africa, and Bessie Moore, a Morse code interpreter for the
Foreign Office. The letters will be read by Benedict Cumberbatch and
Louise Brealey. More details: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05r78dw.
Best wishes,
Jessica
Jessica Scantlebury
The Mass Observation Archive
The Keep
Woollards Way
Brighton
BN1 9BP
j.c.scantlebury@sussex.ac.uk
+441273 337515
www.massobs.org.uk
www.thekeep.info
twitter.com/MassObsArchive
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Last updated: 14 August 2015
