This collection of short essays provides a rigorous, rich, collaborative space in which scholars and practitioners debate the value of different methodological approaches to the study of life narratives and explore a diverse range of interdisciplinary methods. Auto/biography studies has been one of the most vibrant sub-disciplines to emerge in the humanities and social sciences in the past decade, providing significant links between disciplines including literary studies, languages, linguistics, digital humanities, medical humanities, creative writing, history, gender studies, education, sociology, and anthropology.
The essays in this collection position auto/biography as a key discipline for modelling interdisciplinary approaches to methodology and ask: what original and important thinking can auto/biography studies bring to discussions of methodology for literary studies and beyond? And how does the diversity of methodological interventions in auto/biography studies build a strong and diverse research discipline? In including some of auto/biography’s leading international scholars alongside emerging scholars, and exploring key subgenres and practices, this collection showcases knowledge about what we do when engaging in auto/biographical research. Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies offers a series of case studies that explore the research practices, reflective behaviours, and ethical considerations that inform auto/biographical research.
Table of Contents:
Ashley Barnwell and Kate Douglas "What we do when we do life writing: Methodologies for auto/biography now."
Forms
Writing Memoir
Claire Lynch
Archival Methods for Auto/biographical Research
Maria Tamboukou
Zines
Anna Poletti
Objects and Things
Gillian Whitlock
Social, media, life writing: online lives at scale, up close, and in context
Aimee Morrison
Studying Visual Autobiographies in the Post-Digital Era
Sarah Brophy
Biography
W. Craig Howes
Research Methods for Studying Graphic Biography
Candida Rifkind
Working with Family Histories
Ashley Barnwell
Tracing Emotional Bonds in Family Letters/ A Pursuit of an Epistolary Melody
Leena Kurvet-Kaossar
Life Narrative Methods for Working with Diaries
Kylie Cardell
Autoethnographic Life Writing: Reaching Beyond, Crossing Over
Sally Ann Murray
Telling life stories using creative methods in qualitative interviews
Signe Ravn
Performing and broadcasting lives: Auto/biographical testimonies in theatre and radio
Gunn Gudmundsdottir
Big Data and Self-Tracking: Research Trajectories
Julie Rak
Frameworks
Another Story
Jeanine Leane
Reading Digital Lives Generously
Laurie McNeill and John Zuern
Reading the Life Narratives of Children and Youth
Kate Douglas
Negotiated Truths and Iterative Practice in Action: The Women In Conflict Expressive Life Writing Project
Meg Jensen and Siobhan Campbell
Researching Online Biographical Media and Death Narratives After the Digital Turn
Pamela Graham
An Epistemological Approach to Trans* Autobiography
Sarah Ray Rondat
Genetics and Auto/biography
Pramod K. Nayar
Doing Disability Autobiography: Introducing Reading Group Methodology as Feminist Disability Praxis
Ally Day
Sanctioning Subjectivity: Navigating low-risk human ethics approval
Phillip Kavanagh and Kate Douglas
Girls’ Auto/Biographical Media: The Importance of Audience Reception in Studying Undervalued Life Narrative
Emma Maguire
Locating Diasporic Lives: Beyond Textual Boundaries
Ricia A. Chansky
The diary as a life story: Working with documents of family and migration
Anne Heimo
Between Forced Confession and Ethnic Autobiography
Y-Dang Truong
Autobiographical Research with Children
Maria da Conceição Passeggi and Ecleide Cunico Furlanetto
Ecocriticism and Life Narrative
Alfred Hornung
Afterword
The Box in the Attic: Memoir, Methodology and Family Archives
G. Thomas Couser
About the Author :
Kate Douglas is Professor in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Flinders University. She is the author of Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (Rutgers, 2010) and the co-author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (Palgrave, 2016; with Anna Poletti). She is the co-editor (with Laurie McNeill) of Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives (Routledge 2017); (with Kylie Cardell) of Trauma Tales: Auto/biographies of Childhood and Youth (Routledge 2014); and (with Gillian Whitlock) Trauma Texts (Routledge, 2009).
Ashley Barnwell is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on memory, emotion, and family storytelling. Her work has been published in journals such as Life Writing, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Memory Studies, Cultural Sociology, and Emotion, Space & Society. Her co-authored book (with Joseph Cummins), Reckoning with the Past: Family Historiographies in Postcolonial Australian Literature (2019), is published in Routledge’s Memory Studies series.
Review :
"By far the best feature of Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies is the brevity and accessibility of its essays. They promise to make useful teaching tools, particularly as introductory reading that might organize units within a semester or as models for innovative research methods that students might try out themselves. As I read through the volume, I found myself bubbling over with new ideas about how to teach auto/biography, which is one of the strongest endorsements I can offer regarding this book’s contribution to the now established but still dynamic field of auto/biography studies."
- Desirée Henderson, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
