Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing is a bumper one and contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
– New Trace: ME Pringle’s Diary
– New How-To: Selecting an Archive
– New! Google Analytics Report Jan-June 2016
– From the Blog: Familiar Names & Network Connections
– From the Blog: Screen Writing
2. Edinburgh Gender History seminars 2016-17
3. Autobiographical Narratives and the Uprisings of the Global South (9/23/201; 7/6-9/2017) Utrecht–ACLA
4. 10th-11th July 2017 The Mass Observation 80th Anniversary Conference
5. M4BL and the Critical Matter of Black Lives (11/1/2016) A Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
6. Oxford Centre for Life Writing: This term’s events
7. CNR’s events forthcoming in autumn and winter 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 Trace: ME Pringle’s Diary
The diary of Mark Elliott Pringle spans more than 50 years. Many matters can be discussed in connection with it. First, this Trace is concerned with what, when considering 50 years of diary-writing by someone, is the trace for discussion, and so relatedly it considers whether a trace can be mammoth (50 years of a diary) or whether it needs to be focused and specific (an entry for one day at a time). Second, it is also concerned with what produces ‘social change’ and whether this lies in epiphanous occurrences that act as turning points at which life and the zeitgeist judder and halt and then resume in a changed way, and how this claim might be proven. Thirdly, the Trace is concerned with the relationship between the small events of the fabric of everyday life and the major events of the public realm. These three interwoven things are the key topics for discussion. To read more, please visit the Trace: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/adiary1960/
New HowTo…: Selecting an Archive
In a sense, asking the question of how to select an archive is a bit of a non-starter, for the main factor in decisions about where to do a piece of research is the research problem – a topic or issue that the researcher wants to find out about – together with some research questions that can help focus the investigation. However, standing back in time terms and thinking about the point before a clear interest or set of research questions have been decided on, in the earlier stages of a research project it is important to cast the net wide and to trawl in the academic literatures for topics – and also archives – of interest. To read more about matters of selecting an archive, please visit the How To… webpage: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/how-to/how-to-select-an-archive-to-research-in/
New! Google Analytics Report January-June 2016
We are pleased to announce that our most recent Google Analytics Data Report is now available for browsing on the Whites Writing Whiteness website. The report details new developments in our readership, and much more! If you’d like to have a look at the new report or earlier ones, please visit the Analytics report webpage:
http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/thehub/google-analytics/google-analytics-january-june-2016/
From the Blog: Familiar Names & Network Connections
Many people who research and write on letters are concerned with specific letter-writers or correspondences or perhaps particular collections, such as of a family. Doing so inadvertently places boundaries around the network of exchanges, and so of persons, represented in the letters concerned. However, one of the joys of working with letters and related documents of life on an industrial scale within the WWW project is that, while similar boundaries obviously exist regarding specific sets of letters or collections, because so many of them come under the purview of project research, overall it is a case of busting the frontiers. The threshold for inclusion is simply that the letters should be by people who were white and have been written in or about South Africa. The net as a consequence is cast very wide and hauls in many and varied epistolary stuff. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/familiar-names-in-unfamiliar-places/
From the Blog: Screen Writing
Is screen writing in some fundamentals different from writing with pen or pencil on paper? If so in what ways, to what extent, and are the differences inconsequential or significant? By ‘screen writing’ is meant using a computer of some kind, whether a desktop, laptop, tablet or similar facilities on a mobile phone, to write communications of different kinds. The idea loosely draws on and also departs from two essays by Freud about the character of memory. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/screen-writing/
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2. Edinburgh Gender History seminars 2016-17
The full seminar programme for the Edinburgh Gender History Network for 2016-17 is now available.
Seminars for semester one:
Wed 28 September – 3.30-5.30
Double seminar: Gender and Sexuality in Post-war Europe
Maud Bracke (University of Glasgow). ‘Will legal abortion bring us liberation?’: Feminism and reproductive rights in postwar Europe’
Nikolaos Papadogiannis (University of St Andrews). ‘Sun, sea and sex? The ‘sexual revolution’ and young West German and Greek tourists, 1960s-1970s’
Location: G16 (University of Edinburgh), Old Medical School, Teviot Place Quad, Doorway 4.
Wed 19 October, 5.15-7.00pm
With Centre for the Study of Modern Conflict
Julie Gottlieb (University of Sheffield) will discuss her new book Guilty Women: Foreign Policy and Appeasement.
Location: Teviot Lecture Theatre (University of Edinburgh), Old Medical School, Teviot Place Quad, Doorway 5.
Wed 26 October 4.00-5.30pm
With Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Sue Johns (Bangor University). ‘Lady Godiva: Gender, myth-making and urban identity in the twelfth century’
Location: G16 (University of Edinburgh), Old Medical School, Teviot Place Quad, Doorway 4.
Wed 16 November 4.00-5.30pm
Work in progress seminar
Rian Sutton (University of Edinburgh). ‘”I bought the knife, hit him, but I did not know I was killing him”‘: Understanding the murderess and her agency in New York City and London 1880-1914’
Debi Burnett (University of Glasgow). TBC
Location: G16 (University of Edinburgh), Old Medical School, Teviot Place Quad, Doorway 4.
Wed 23 November 5.30 – 7.00pm
With Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies
Diana Paton (University of Edinburgh). ‘Maternity and Atlantic slavery: Reproduction in the history of slavery and capitalism’
Location: G13 (University of Edinburgh), Old Medical School, Teviot Place Quad, Doorway 4.
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3. Autobiographical Narratives and the Uprisings of the Global South (9/23/201; 7/6-9/2017) Utrecht—ACLA
ACLA 2017-Utrecht (July 6-9, 2017)
Autobiographical Narratives and the Uprisings of the Global South:
the Private, the Collective, and the Global
Chair: Hager Ben Driss (University of Tunis)
Co-Chair: Rania Said (Binghamton University, NY)
This panel focuses on the autobiographical narratives of the Global South with a particular attention to those produced during popular revolts and regime-changing uprisings, like the fall of the dictatorships in Latin America, the demise of Apartheid in South Africa, and, more recently, the Arab Uprisings. The first axis that guides our panel is the relationship between “the subject” and “the collective” (understood as the tribal, the sectarian, or the national).
These texts, which are generally written by activists, public intellectuals, journalists, or established literary figures, are mostly appreciated as counter-narratives or as the petits récits of national memory. The different roles of the subject of the autobiographical text are often eclipsed by the role of the activist and the historical witness. Considering the autobiographical narrative as a historical document definitely enriches collective memory, but it also has the counter-productive effect of effacing the other figurations of the “I.” We invite papers that study the different conceptualizations of the “I” in the autobiographical texts of the uprisings of the Global South as well as papers that examine the relationship between “subject” and “collectivity” or challenge the dichotomy altogether. Essays that highlight the generic, linguistic, and aesthetic creativity involved in the production of the subject are particularly welcome.
The second axis attends to the global circulation of the autobiographical narratives of the uprisings. The increased rate at which these narratives are being translated calls for an examination of the ethics and politics of their translation and their consecration in the market of world literature. This panel seeks to unpack the notions of cultural and political imperialism that accompany the global circulation of the autobiographical narratives in question.
The autobiographical texts can be memoirs, testimonios, diaries, auto-fiction or any other written or visual form of self-referential narratives.
The questions that we seek to examine include but are not limited to the following:
- How does the body figure in these autobiographical narratives?
- How do the autobiographers of the Global South produce themselves as subjects beyond activism?
- How do they challenge the traditional assumption that the genre is dependent on the notion of the individualized self?
- How do these texts, written in a time of crisis, engage notions of liminality, rites of passage, and border crossing?
- What are the implications of writing one’s life narrative in the language of the colonial other?
- What kind of solidarity is produced by these autobiographical narratives?
- What is beyond the demand for recognition?
Individuals interested in participating in this seminar are encouraged to be in touch with the organizers; paper submissions through the portal will open Sept. 1 and close Sept. 23. (http://www.acla.org/)
Please email your queries to: Hager Ben Driss (bendrisshager@gmail.com) and Rania Said (Rania.said.tn@gmail.com)
Contact Info:
bendrisshager@gmail.com
Rania.said.tn@gmail.com
Contact Email: bendrisshager@gmail.com
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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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4. 10th-11th July 2017 The Mass Observation 80th Anniversary Conference
Save the date!
The Mass Observation 80th Anniversary Conference
Celebrating 80 years of the Mass Observation movement
10th-11th July 2017,
Jubilee building, University of Sussex
Call for Papers:
In 1937, a letter signed by Tom Harrisson (anthropologist), Humphrey Jennings (film maker) and Charles Madge (poet and journalist) was published in the pages of the New Statesman. It invited volunteers, from all walks of life, to participate in a new research project, which would be “anthropology at home . . . a science of ourselves”. This letter announced the founding of Mass Observation which, over the last 80 years, has developed a unique interdisciplinary people-centred approach to social research.
From its rapid rise to the status of national institution in the Popular-Front culture of the late 1930s, it has passed through a number of incarnations. These include (but are not limited to): observing the everyday in late 1930s Bolton on a shoestring budget; amassing a collection of diaries by over 500 home front civilians ; collecting ‘home intelligence’ for the Ministry of Information for a short period during the early 1940s; working as a commercial market-research company during the 1950s/1960s; becoming an archive at the University of Sussex in the 1970s (now at The Keep) and being relaunched in the 1980s as the Mass Observation Project, a longitudinal life writing project, which captures the experiences, thoughts and opinions of ‘everyday’ people in 21st century Britain.
This conference seeks to reflect all aspects of Mass Observation and beyond. Call for papers and registration details to follow.
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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5. M4BL and the Critical Matter of Black Lives (11/1/2016) A Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
CALL FOR PAPERS
M4BL and the Critical Matter of Black Lives: A Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
Guest Editors: Brittney Cooper (Rutgers University) and Treva Lindsey (Ohio State University)
Submit: Abstracts of 300-500 words in length by November 1, 2016 to biograph@hawaii.edu
In July 2016, the Movement for Black Lives, a collective of over fifty organizations “representing Black people” from across the United States formally released its vision and agenda. The comprehensive platform articulated demands for economic justice, political power, community control, reparations, investment/divestment, and ending the war on Black people. Detailed and pointed, the platform implicitly “clapped back” at detractors who mischaracterized M4BL as a moment or as leaderless movement with no tangible goals. The release of the platform also occurred in the middle of one of the most explosive, racially violent summers in recent history. The Movement continues to grow not only because of its consistent and visually compelling use of protest, but also because of something more intangible: the way that we are drawn into the lives of Black people slain by police and feel like these are people we “know.” Most of us don’t know those who have been killed, but often in the aftermath of another person being memorialized by a hashtag, Black people take to social media to say, “it could have been me. I could have been Michael Brown, or Trayvon Martin, or Sandra Bland.” In 2013, President Barack Obama famously declared that “Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago.”
Employing the lens of life-writing and the particular way that the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) has represented Black lives singularly and collectively, this special issue will explore the history, current state, and future of the Movement for Black Lives. What is it about the stories of people slain by police and vigilantes since 2012 that has compelled a new movement? What does “life” mean in the context of M4BL? What is the fundamental meaning of “lives” when centering those on the margins? What does it mean to politicize and narrate the life stories of people whom we’ve never met but feel like we know? What happens when the desires and needs of families push back against the political demands and inclinations of a broader movement? Who controls the life stories and dictates the political utility of those no longer here? Why has this form of empathy and connection to slain Black people become the affective context for the Movement for Black Lives? Which Black lives have become most compelling in this context of the Movement and why? How are the stories of Black lives slain by police or otherwise racially subjugated being told? Which stories haven’t been told? And how has technology shaped the way we tell the stories of individual and collective Black lives?
As the most recent iteration of Black freedom struggles in the United States, what is the story of #blacklivesmatter? How have the individual life stories of Black people harmed or slain by police shaped the biography of a movement? This special issue is interested both in the political life of the M4BL and in the stories of those who made this movement possible. We are interested in the critical moment of encounter, when because someone’s life was taken, a community’s life, an activist’s life, or our collective lives changed.
How do representations of maternal or familial grief serve to engender empathy or identification and what are the pitfalls and possibilities of utilizing such a strategy to forward MB4L objectives? What are the sexual and gender politics that attend which individual Black lives are represented in the insistence that Black lives matter? What are the class politics embedded in how we engage the lives of those killed by police? How does a focus on the goodness or innocence or intelligence of those executed by the police impede or complicate the push for structural change? How do celebrity calls for BLM (i.e., Jesse Williams) or endorsements by politicians or at elections rallies and conventions energize and/or curtail the M4BL? How do we understand and interrogate the politics of Black life and Black living, in a moment where liberal humanist conceptions of “the human” fail to compel broad empathy and structural protection for the value of Black people? How do we articulate the relationship between the lack of structural empathy and care for Black lives and the radical forms of empathy and identity with those killed that animate the Movement for Black Lives? How does M4BL work to create broad empathy and identification with individuals victimized by state violence? What can the proliferation of Black death at the hands of the state and the necropolitics which inhere in the accretion of Black bodies offer to us in the mode of understanding Black lives? How does the Movement’s insistence on acknowledging trauma and prioritizing a healing justice framework challenge the death-grip our current system has on the quality of Black lives? What tools does the Movement for Black Lives offer up to us, not only for reconceptualizing the social structures which shape Black living, but also for reconceptualizing our current understandings of Black life in the first place?
In asking these questions, we seek to understand the life contexts and livelihoods of Black people living at the beginning of the 21st century. Although contemporary realities are deeply rooted in historical lived experiences, we have entered a unique era in anti-Black racial terror. These living stories must be told. Understanding the stories as simultaneously about violence, resistance, (in)justice, and freedom, we seek by way of centering interrogations and representations of individual and collective Black lives to unearth both the possibilities and potential challenges for the Movement for Black Lives. Additionally, we seek to understand what it means to inhabit and embody a free Black life at the dawn of the 21st century. We propose to understand this question using the lens of M4BL together with life-writing criticism and theory.
Beyond a hashtag or minor and significant misconceptions, how do we understand the Movement for Black Lives, its purpose, its goals, and the people who comprise the Movement? How do we account for fissures, differences, and tensions within the movement and the way these differences affect both individual Black lives and Black life as a collectivity? To cover both the breadth and depth of M4BL, we seek contributions that bring a life-writing focus—one that carries with it some of the questions and approaches outlined in the previous paragraphs—to bear on topics including (but not limited to):
- #SayHerName, the gender and sexual politics of the Movement for Black Lives
- Uprisings, Rebellions, Riots?- How do we chronicle violent resistance to anti-Black state violence?
- Whose Black Lives Matter?
- Cross-racial, cross-gender and transnational solidarities
- Conceptualizing and Actualizing a “LeaderFull” Movement
- Global Perspectives on M4BL (#FergusontoPalestine, #BLMToronto, #BLMLondon)
- Understanding the complicated role of social media in M4BL
- The role of mass media in documenting and shaping M4BL
- How the Movement Changed Your Life (Politically, Culturally, Spiritually, Communally)
- Conceptualizing the life of a leader in a leaderfull movement?
- Intergenerational Collaboration and Tensions within M4BL
- How Trauma Shapes Black Lives
- How Healing Justice Reshapes Black Lives
- Anti-M4BL Organizing and Mobilization
- Interrogating the role of faith, spirituality, religion, and the sacred in M4BL
- What is state-sanctioned anti-Black violence?
- Black Life Matters or Black Lives Matter?
- The Biopolitics/Necropolitics of Black Lives
We invite potential contributors to submit abstracts of 300-500 words in length by November 1, 2016. First drafts of articles will be submitted in June 2016. Biography will arrange for contributors to present drafts of their final papers at the University of Hawai‘i in Honolulu at the end of August 2017, and the issue will be published in summer 2018. Articles should be between 6000-8000 words including bibliography and notes.
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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. Oxford Centre for Life Writing: This term’s events
Dear all,
We hope you’ll join us for another great line-up of events at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, at Wolfson College. All events are free unless otherwise stated.
Don’t forget you can follow any events you miss as podcasts on our website, and do have a look at our blog, which is host to guest biographers as well as a source of discussion about the talks and conferences here: www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/oclw
Very best wishes,
The OCLW team
Friday 14 October, 5:30pm Florey Room
Michèle Roberts and Caroline Isgar
The Secret Staircase: talk to launch an exhibition of artefacts from the Foundling Museum
Tuesday 25 October, 5:30-7pm Haldane Room
Stephanie Bishop
The Truth in Fiction
Saturday 5 November, all day, LWA
Colloquium: Biography Beyond Borders: American and European biography
Organized by Biographers International Organisation
Registration and further details: www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventId=1848873
Tuesday 8 November 1-2pm Haldane Room
Life-writing lunch: Sally Bayley
The Private Life of the Diary
Register via www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk (browse ‘Products’ for ‘Oxford Centre for Life-Writing’). A free buffet sandwich lunch will be provided.
Tuesday 8 November, 5:30-7pm, LWA
Gary Sheffield
The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army
Saturday 19 November, 9-5pm, LWA
Colloquium: Celebiography: Celebrity and Life-Writing in Dialogue
Register via: www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk
29 November, 5:30-7pm, LWA
ODNB Discussion panel: Constructing Lives (including biographer Alexander Masters)
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7. CNR’s events forthcoming in autumn and winter 2016
Dear All,
Please see the list of CNR’s events forthcoming in autumn and winter 2016. Further details will be circulated closer to the dates. Everyone is welcome!
Looking forward to seeing/meeting you in some of these events!
With our best wishes,
Cigdem, on behalf of CNR
One-off Research Events:
19th October 2016, 2- 4pm
University of East London (UEL), Docklands Campus, Room EB1.03
As part of the UEL’s School of Social Sciences’ Seminar Series
Ethical considerations when working with narratives in Social Sciences
Bethany Morgan-Brett, title TBA
Helen Kim Telling Stories of ‘Other’ Koreans: Ethical Dilemmas in Racing Research
Georgie Wemyss ‘I can’t use that’: reflecting on ethics when your everyday work and political life become your PhD research site
30th November 2016, 1 – 2pm
UEL, Docklands Campus, Room EB1.40
This is a collaborative event with CMRB.
Taking Our Country Back: ‘Racism, Xenophobia and Donald Trump’s Place in Context’
With Charles A. Gallagher, La Salle University, Yale University, University of Birmingham
12th December 2016, 5 – 7pm
UEL, USS Campus, Room US2.30
CNR with CMRB present, on behalf of the Academy of Social Sciences Study Group on Refugee Issues the AcSS Refugee Issues Special Interest Group Inaugural Event:
Refugees, Belonging and Society
A panel discussion on contemporary issues around refugees in the UK and European contexts, open to AcSS Fellows and to the wider public.
Panel speakers: AcSS Fellows Professors Heaven Crawley (Coventry University), Nando Seguro (Birmingham University), Jenny Phillimore (Birmingham University) and Nira Yuval-Davis (University of East London).
Discussant: Professor Avtar Brah (Birkbeck College, FAcSS)
Chair: Professor Corinne Squire (University of East London, FAcSS).
7 – 8pm Inaugural meeting of the Academy of Social Sciences Study Group on Refugee Issues
National Centre for Research Methods International Visiting Scholars at CNR
A programme coordinated by Molly Andrews, Cigdem Esin, Ann Phoenix and Corinne Squire, with Visiting Scholars Jill Bradbury and Michelle Fine.
4th November 2016, 2 – 5pm
UEL, Docklands Campus, Room EB1.41
Workshop: Using narrative and participatory methods for social transformation With Michelle Fine (City University of New York) and Jill Bradbury (Witwatersrand University)
5 – 6pm Reception
9th & 10th November 2016, 10am – 4pm
UEL, USS Campus, Room US2.02 (9th) and US3.08 (10th)
Colloquium: Interdisciplinary perspectives on narrative methodologies, participation, and social transformation
16th November 2016, 10.30am – 3.30pm, Thomas Coram Research Unit, 27-28 Woburn Square, Room TBA
NCRM Day School: Bringing together narrative and participatory methods
With Jill Bradbury and Michelle Fine.
Chair: Ann Phoenix.
18th November 2016, 10am – 4pm, Venue TBA
Centre for Narrative and Auto/ Biographical Studies, Edinburgh University
10am – 1pm Jill Bradbury and Michelle Fine, presenting current work
2 – 4pm Workshop on narrative and participatory methods for social transformation
Chair: Professor Liz Stanley
CNR–TCRU Postgraduate Narrative Research Seminars, 2015-2016
All seminars take place from 5 – 6.30pm at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, 27-28 Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AA.
8th November 2016
Noelle McCormack, Centre for Narrative Research, University of East London: Making memory sites: Extending opportunites for people with profound learning disabilities to participate in life story work
13th December 2016
Susy Ridout, Birmingham University: Narrating experience: the advantage of using mixed expressive media to bring autistic voices to the fore in discourse around their support requirements
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Last updated: 3 October 2016
