Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. Please note that this issue is the slightly delayed July one, held up because of holidays. This month’s mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
– New! Thinking with Elias: The Established-Outsider Figuration, ‘Race’ and Whiteness
– New! Thinking with Elias: South Africa and its murder rate
– From the Weekly blog: Admiral Lord Nelson’s letter
– From the Weekly blog: Nixon’s letter of resignation
– From the Weekly blog: Scientific articles and scientific letters
2. New Book Announcement ‘Gendering the memory of work’
3. [FQS] Newsletter July 2016
4. University of Twente- Summer School – Doing Narrative Analysis – 24-26 August
5. Lifewriting Annual – Call for Book Reviews
6. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39.1 (Winter 2016): “Verse Biography”
7. Call for Abstracts: International Workshop ‘Translating Feminism: Beyond the Canon (ca. 1945-1990)’, Glasgow 4-5 November 2016
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are five new items of project news we would like to share this month:
New! Thinking with Elias: The Established-Outsider Figuration, ‘Race’ and Whiteness
Is ‘race ‘and racism a matter of skin colour or cultural differences or some combination of these? Why should such things result in tensions, prejudice and conflict and how do these pan out over the generations? What about personal prejudice? Sociologist Norbert Elias is not often thought about as a significant contributor to analysing the dynamics of race and racism, although one of his major writings, The Established and the Outsiders, provides a cogent and helpful explanatory framework for understanding such matters around power relations in society. To read more about this, please click here: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/thinking-with-elias/the-established-outsider-figuration-race-and-whiteness/
New! Thinking with Elias: South Africa and its murder rate
The most recent crime statistics for South Africa were released in September 2015. They raise some interesting issues including those concerning the murder rate, or intentional homicide rate, and have relevance for the generally shared perception of South Africa as in a number of ways a violent society. They also provide an opportunity for thinking about how the theoretical ideas of Norbert Elias might be relevant to comprehending the changing murder rate within the fabric of South African society over time, and because aspects of this might provide a route to thinking about its other changes over time. To read more about this, please click here: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/thinking-with-elias/south-africa-and-its-murder-rate/
From the Weekly blog: Admiral Lord Nelson’s letter
This post examines a curious letter from Horatio Nelson to Emma Hamilton, who were involved in an extra-marital affair. The letter is undated, and many questions about context rise up around it. It certainly conveys that something dramatic had happened, but not what this was, and the letter itself is written in a quite dramatic way. To read more about the letter and its context, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/nelsons-letter-the-importance-of-context/
From the Weekly blog: Nixon’s letter of resignation
This post concerns the letter written by (ex-)President Richard Nixon when, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, he resigned as President of the United States. Nixon’s single-sentence letter of resignation put into motion a bureaucratic process, which is discussed in terms of temporality and space.
To read more about this, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/when-nixon-became-ex-president-of-the-us/
From the Weekly blog: Scientific articles and scientific letters
‘The letter’ can be helpfully thought of as a proto-genre, not in a developmental sense, but that other forms of writing (aka genres) morph into it, and it morphs into others. Many kinds of documents, including journal articles and communications pertaining to them, originated as letters. Though the peer-review processes of prestigious physics journals, for example, allow for communicative exchanges between people separated in time and space, and enable person A to communicate their research to the rest of the alphabet, and they also allow the rest of the alphabet to respond and to do so rapidly. Conversely, it is difficult to think of an example where social scientists and humanities scholars communicate rapidly and semi-dialogically in this way while still producing peer reviewed and cutting-edge work. Why? To read more about this, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/scientific-articles-and-scientific-letters/
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2. New Book Announcement ‘Gendering the memory of work’
‘Gendering the memory of work’ by Maria Tamboukou has just been published and it might be of interest to your department, networks, research groups and e-list members. This book explores gendered aspects in the memory of work by looking at auto/biographical narratives and political writings of women workers in the garment industry. The author draws on cutting edge theoretical approaches and insights in memory studies, neo-materialism and discourse analysis, particularly looking at entanglements and intra-actions between places, bodies and objects.
Tamboukou aims to enrich our appreciation of the role of women’s labour history in the wider realm of cultural memory, as well as in the politics of women’s work. The book addresses a significant gap in the literature by focusing on the memory of work from a gendered perspective. It also examines the relationship between workspaces and personal spaces: the intimate, intense and often invisible ways through which workers occupy workspaces and populate them with their ideas, emotions, beliefs, habits and everyday practices.
The book will be a theoretical and methodological toolbox for students and researchers in the interface of the social sciences and the humanities, as well as a vital resource in women’s labour history. It will be particularly relevant for sociologists, cultural theorists, feminist scholars and social historians.
This book explores gendered aspects in the memory of work by looking at auto/biographical narratives and political writings of women workers in the garment industry. The author draws on cutting edge theoretical approaches and insights in memory studies, neo-materialism and discourse analysis, particularly looking at entanglements and intra-actions between places, bodies and objects. The book is a theoretical and methodological toolbox for students and researchers at the interface of the social sciences and humanities, as well as a vital resource in women’s labour history.
In launching the book, Routledge is offering a 20% discount citing the code: FLR40, should you want to ask your libraries to order it. I attach here the announcement /discount offers in case you would want to circulate it.
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3. [FQS] Newsletter July 2016
Dear All,
Today I would like to draw your attention to the following news:
A. Articles, published in FQS in July 2016
B. Conferences and Workshops
C. Links
D. Open Access News
Enjoy reading!
Katja Mruck
This newsletter is sent to 19,170 registered readers.
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A) ARTICLES, PUBLISHED IN FQS IN JULY 2016
Niklas Barth, Antonius Schneider (Germany): Why Doesn’t Charles Bovary Want to be a General Practitioner Anymore? On the Mediality of Interviews with General Practitioners in Their Advanced Training
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs160317
Regula Fankhauser (Switzerland): To Observe and to Be Observed: How Teachers Perceive Videography and Experience its Camera Gaze in Continuing Education
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs160392
Christian Herfter, Johanna Leicht (Germany): Interpretation as a
Language-Game: Between Individuality and Exemplarity
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs160381
Xavier Montagud Mayor (Spain): Analytic or Evocative: A Forgotten Discussion in Autoethnography
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1603124
Jakub Niedbalski, Izabela Slezak (Poland): Computer Analysis of Qualitative Data in Literature and Research Performed by Polish Sociologists
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs160344
Michelle Salmona, Dan Kaczynski (USA): Don’t Blame the Software: Using Qualitative Data Analysis Software Successfully in Doctoral Research
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1603117
B. CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS
16-17 August, Tampere, Finland
Summer Seminar “Possibilities of ‘Data’ in Social Research”
http://datainsocialresearch.blogspot.de/
25-26 August, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Conference “Reflecting on the Future of QDA Software: Chances and Challenges for Humanities, Social Sciences and Beyond”
http://tinyurl.com/h8ms7fk
29-31 August, Aalborg, Denmark
Mixed Methods Research Design-Basic Workshop http://tinyurl.com/jq3d2oc
1-2 September, Aalborg, Denmark
Mixed Methods Research Design-Advanced Workshop
http://tinyurl.com/zkzg999
1-3 September, Krakow, Poland
ESA-Research-Network 20 “Qualitative Methods”: Midterm Conference “Qualitative Methods and Research Technologies”
http://www.esa-cracow.pl/
5-7 September, Barcelona, Spain
7th Iberoamerican Congress of Qualitative Research in Health http://www.congresoiberoamericanoinvestigacioncualitativa2016.org
8-10 September, Lisboa, Portugal
“Rethinking Power in Communicative Capitalism. Critical Perspectives on Media, Culture and Society”. European Sociological Association Research Network 18: Sociology of Communications and Media Research RN18 Mid-Term Conference http://esarn18.tumblr.com
11-16 September, Leicester, UK
9th International Conference “Social Science Methodology” (RC33) http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/sociology/research/rc33-conference
30 September-3 October, Venice, Italy
AEON Conference on Social Sciences and Arts http://aeonconferences.org/
20-22 October, Alpbach, Austria
24th International Conference Eating Disorders http://www.netzwerk-essstoerungen.at/kongress16/index.html
15-18 November, Havanna, Cuba
International Conference “New Political Science”/International Symposium of Philosophy http://www.globallearning-cuba.com/new-political-science-2016.html
2-4 March 2017, Frankfurt/M., Germany
International Conference “International Dissidence: Rule and Resistance in a Globalized World”
http://dissidenz.net/konferenz-2017/
11-13 May 2017, Helsinki, Finland
“Intersubjectivity in Action” Conference http://blogs.helsinki.fi/iia-2017/
11-14 September 2017, Taipei, Taiwan
1st RC33 Regional Conference on Social Science Methodology http://survey.sinica.edu.tw/rc33-taipei/
C) LINKS
D-Place: Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment https://d-place.org/home
Writers wanted: A web resource exploring how visual methods and strategies for e-learning can bridge social differences, is looking for authors wishing to contribute content http://www.designtoolbox.co.uk/
D) OPEN ACCESS NEWS
See http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/3/republished_feeds/6 for more open-access news.
—> Texts
Ingrid Ladner: Interview Caroline Edwards, The “Gold Route” to Open Science. Scilog http://scilog.fwf.ac.at/en/article/4482/the-gold-route-to-open-science
Glyn Moody: Open Access: All Human Knowledge Is There — So Why Can’t Everybody Access It?
http://tinyurl.com/hlvx6uq
Richard Poynder: The OA Interviews: Michael Bon, Founder of the Self-Journal of Science http://poynder.blogspot.de/2016/05/the-oa-interviews-michael-bon-founder.html
Richard Poynder: SocArXiv Debuts, as SSRN Acquisition Comes Under Scrutiny http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/socarxiv-debuts-as-ssrn-acquisition.html
Oya Y. Rieger: arXiv@25: Key Findings of the User Survey http://tinyurl.com/jz22kuo
—> Journals/Newsletter
Directory of Open Access Journals
http://www.doaj.org/
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue, 2(1)
http://catalystjournal.org/ojs/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/6
First Monday, 21(7)
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/485
Journal of Media Innovations, 3(1)
https://www.journals.uio.no/index.php/TJMI/issue/view/252
Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 4(1)
http://jspp.psychopen.eu/issue/view/5
mediaesthetics – Journal of Poetics of Audiovisual Images, new
http://www.mediaesthetics.org/index.php/mae/issue/view/5
Momentum quarterly. Zeitschrift fuer Sozialen Fortschritt / Journal for Societal Progress, 5(2) http://www.momentum-quarterly.org/index.php/momentum/issue/view/28
On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, new http://www.on-culture.org/journal/issue-1/
The Scout Report, 22(22)
https://scout.wisc.edu/
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FQS – Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung
/ Forum: Qualitative Social Research (ISSN 1438-5627)
http://www.qualitative-research.net/
English / German / Spanish
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4. University of Twente- Summer School – Doing Narrative Analysis – 24-26 August
SUMMER SCHOOL
DOING NARRATIVE ANALYSIS
Place: University of Twente, Drienerburght
Date: 24 – 26 August 2016
Participants: The Summer School “Doing Storyline Analysis” is meant for PhD students, postdoc and experienced researchers who want to improve their competence in doing narrative analysis. Knowledge and experience with qualitative research are recommended (for required prescience please contact Anneke Sools). The summer school builds on two previous courses, but is also open to researchers who did not attend these. An introductory workshop will be given on the first day.
Costs: 350 euro (including lunch and reader, excluding dinner and stay). PhDs of the University of Twente are free of charge.
Organisation: Storylab Utwente, Prof. dr. Gerben Westerhof & dr. Anneke Sools
To register for the Summerschool Doing Narrative Analysis please send an e-mail to pgt@utwente.nl . After your registration we will send you a confirmation with further details.
Learning goals
At the end of the course, the participant is able to:
· Carry out story line analysis;
· Interpret narratives that are “impossible to tell”;
· Relate individual stories to broader socio-cultural narratives;
· Report results on narrative research;
· Translate results from narrative research to practice contexts.
Content
The focus of the Summer School is doing narrative analysis. The first day is dedicated to doing story line analysis. Anneke Sools will give an introduction and recapitulation of story line analysis for respectively novice and more experienced narrative researchers. Participants apply story line analysis together and work on their own data. The second day, narrative analysis is placed in broader contexts. Cigdem Esin focuses on the relation of individual stories to broader sociocultural narratives in particular historical contexts. Furthermore, Els Maeckelberghe focuses on the analysis of the novel Hersenschimmen (Out of Mind in English) by the Dutch author Bernlef. The novel describes the process of dementia from the perspective of the person with this illness. The third day focuses on how impact of narrative research can be created. Anneke Sools and Gerben Westerhof will discuss how results of narrative analyses are reported in scientific domain. Anthony Papathomas discusses how to translate results of narrative research to practice contexts. Each day there will be interactive lectures, but participants also work on their own research and data. The participants have to prepare themselves through studying a reader the texts and home assignments.
Lecturers:
Cigdem Esin is senior lecturer in Psychosocial Studies and co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research of the University of East London. Her research interests are in interactions between individual stories and grand socio-cultural narratives within historically specific contexts.
Anthony Papathomas is lecturer in Sports and Exercise Psychology at Loughborough University. His research employs qualitative methodologies as a means to understanding the impact of sport and exercise on mental health.
Els Maeckelberghe is senior lecturer Ethics in Medicine at the University Medical Centre Groningen. Her research focuses on health care ethics, research ethics and scientific integrity and addresses the importance of narrative understandings for health care.
Gerben Westerhof is professor in Narrative Psychology at the University of Twente. His research focuses on how life stories contribute to identity development and mental health across the lifespan with a focus on later life.
Anneke Sools is assistant professor in Narrative Psychology at theUniversity of Twente. Her research focuses on methodological innovations in story line analysis as well as on the role of building resilience by imagining future stories.
For more information, please contact Anneke Sools via a.m.sools@utwente.nl or Gerben Westerhof via g.j.westerhof@utwente.nl
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5. Lifewriting Annual – Call for Book Reviews
deadline for submissions: December 1, 2016
full name / name of organization: Rob Ward (Brown University)
contact email: Robert_P_Ward@brown.edu
Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies (AMS Press) seeks reviews of recent publications, including autobiographies, memoirs, letters, and so on. Word length: 1000-1500 words. Citation style: Chicago, 16th edition (author/date). Deadline for submission: December 1st, 2016. Expected publication of volume 6: 2017. Please get in touch with short proposals and questions.
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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6. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39.1 (Winter 2016): “Verse Biography”
Guest Editor: Anna Jackson
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Anna Jackson. “The Verse Biography” iii–xvi.
While the verse novel is now established as a literary genre, the verse biography has not been similarly acknowledged, even though many of the formal tensions and strategies are similar. Recognizing that the work of “life writing” that such texts perform, and the relationship between historical fact and poetic representation that they negotiate, are distinct to the verse biography, this Special Issue opens up the genre as a field of study, within the context of biography and life writing studies more generally.
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Jessica Wilkinson, “Experiments in Poetic Biography: Feminist Threads in Contemporary Long Form Poetry” 1–22.
This essay examines long poems by contemporary women poets that represent examples of “poetic biography,” to consider the diversity of ways in which feminist poets are writing/documenting the lives of historical figures. I am chiefly concerned with investigating the potential for poetry to expand the field of biographical writing in relation to the female historical voice (as “both the writer and the written).
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Helen Rickerby, “Articulating Artemisia: Revisioning the Lives of Women from History in Biographical Poetry” 23–33.
In “The New Biography,” Virginia Woolf warns against mixing “the truthof real life and the truth of fiction.” But does poetry inhabit a liminal space, where ordinary rules of fiction and non-fiction don’t apply? Is factual the same as true? And what does the form of poetry bring to biography. This essay reflects on these ideas in relation to the author’s own practice of writing biographical poetry, focusing on poems about the lives of women from history published in My Iron Spine (2008), using as a particular example “Artemisia Gentileschi, 1593–circa 1642.”
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Erin Scudder, “Storying the Portrait: The Case of Mae West” 34–44.
In portraiture, the single captured moment is inwardly and outwardly referential, rather than storied in a narrative way that unfolds across time. With reference to poetry by Paisley Rekdal and Edward Field, this essay explores the prospect of creating an equivalent in writing for the portraitive experience of ‘inhabiting’ a single moment.
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Toby Davidson, “The Master and the Mask: Francis Webb’s Verse Biography” 45–64.
Upon his death in 1973, Francis Webb was eulogized by a young Les Murray as “a master of last lines, of last stanzas and final phrases.” Shortly after his first collection, A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948), Webb experienced his first bouts of mental illness which, while limiting his freedom, also led to a series of extraordinary verse biographies of the saintly, the tyrannical, the artistic and the institutionalized which few Australian poets have been able to match.
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Joan Fleming, “’Talk (why?) with mute ash’: Anne Carson’s Nox as Therapeutic Biography” 64–79.
This essay reads Anne Carson’s Nox as a work of therapeutic biography. An analysis of Carson’s iterative translation of Catullus’s poem 101, and her visual and textual strategies of fragmentation, bring the author’s search to understand her estranged brother into complex relation with an ethos of mystery and lament.
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Airini Beautrais, “’Automythography’ in Poetry: Tusiata Avia’s Bloodclot” 79–92.
What effect can poetry have on the composition of an autobiographical narrative? This essay seeks to shed light on the relationship between narrative and formal aspects of poetry through an analysis of a text that is at once poetry, narrative, and autobiography. Tusiata Avia’s Bloodclot straddles mythology and autobiography, merging the legend of the Samoan goddess of war Nafanua with the author’s own life. In considering how poetry is used to convey this double narrative, I argue that in Bloodclot segmentation through verse form is highly conducive to the articulation of narrative, both autobiographical and mythological.
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Robert Sullivan, “Hii-Stories and Haa-Stories: Polynesian Poetics as Collective Biography” 93–108.
This essay examines indigenous markers which appear in closely read texts by a number of New Zealand Māori poets as carvings, genealogies, large and small narratives revealing in some way the cultural life-worlds of the writers. One claim is that collective biography is a traceable essence in the poetry.
Contributors 109–10
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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7. Call for Abstracts: International Workshop ‘Translating Feminism: Beyond the Canon (ca. 1945-1990)’, Glasgow 4-5 November 2016
First Workshop of the Leverhulme Trust funded International Network ‘Translating Feminism: Transfer, Transgression, Transformation (1945-1990)’
University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, 4-5 November 2016
Across the world, feminist thought– broadly defined, and including any debate on the improvement of women’s social status – has been instrumental in allowing women to articulate their experiences of inequality, as well as imagine and demand political and cultural change. This workshop will be dedicated to a variety of feminist texts, authors and debates, across the world in the second half of the 20th Century. Going beyond specific schools of ‘feminist translation’, we propose an inclusive, case study based approach, which asks fresh questions around the actors, sites and practices of translation. We aim to offer new insights, drawn not primarily from texts usually considered part of the feminist canon, but rather from lesser-known, though significant, authors and groups. In considering actors, we will consider not only trained translators, academics and publishers, but also feminist activists and collectives, NGOs, politicians and writers. In analysing practices, we discuss linguistic strategies as well as dissemination. We will aim to identify sites which facilitated and shaped translation, and establish wider geographic and sociological patterns of transmission.
What exactly happens when a politically motivated text is translated, linguistically and culturally? Who were the translators, what were their aims, and for whom did they translate? What kinds of strategies and practices did they employ when adapting a text to locally resonating discourses and politics? How do processes of translation re-shape political programmes and visions of a fairer society? And how do cultural encounters influence self-narration, as central to feminist consciousness and critique?
We propose to re-think translation as a political act and as central to the articulation of political projects. Our case studies ask in what ways the translation process holds transformative and transgressive power, and how the unlocking of ‘other’ worlds creates the possibility of re-inventing the self. Furthermore, we invite authors to critically interrogate the sometimes naïve understandings of cultural globalisation and the transnationally connected post-1945 world, some of which suffer from a teleological bias and point to an inevitability of ever-growing connections, thus failing to investigate tensions and the limits of connectivity.
Possible themes and strands include:
– the global travels of a text
– transnational and transcultural feminist networks
– translation practices by feminist collectives
– transnational lives, travel and translation
– multi-lingual texts
– self-translation
– feminist critiques of translation
– the gendered contexts of translation work
Practical arrangements:
Presenters will have approx. 15 minutes to discuss their paper, and panels will consist of 3-4 papers. The pre-circulation of papers is intended to foster deep engagement with each other’s work. Presenters may be asked to act as
discussant for another paper.
The keynote talk remains to be confirmed.
Please include the following in your proposal:
– A 300-word paper abstract
– A 200-word biographical statement with main publications and current affiliation
– State if you are seeking funding, with reference to the following criteria:
Limited funding to cover travel and accommodation is available for researchers working on temporary contracts, and for academics working outside Europe and North America.
Please send your proposals to the organisers by 9 September 2016. You will be notified by 21 September and will be asked to circulate a draft of your paper by 14 October.
Proposals and any possible questions should be sent to:
Dr Maud Anne Bracke Maud.bracke@glasgow.ac.uk
Dr Penelope Morris Penelope.morris@glasgow.ac.uk
Dr Emily Ryder Emily.ryder@glasgow.ac.uk
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Last updated: 2 August 2016
