Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies ed. by Kate Douglas and Ashley Barnwell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies ed. by Kate Douglas and Ashley Barnwell Desirée Henderson (bio) Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies Edited by Kate Douglas and Ashley Barnwell Routledge 2019, xvii + 258 pp. ISBN 9780367255688, $170.00 hardcover; ISBN 9781032092119, $48.95 paperback. Auto/biography studies has often taken pride in its status as an upstart disciplinary field that developed relatively recently and despite skepticism about the legitimacy of its subject matter. Yet, it is clear that auto/biography studies has now moved into a more mature phase with many establishment markers including subject-specific journals, conferences, organizations, listservs, and so forth. Among such indicators of a field's cohesion are anthologies and essay collections that define the field, highlight its most influential voices, establish a canon of scholarly materials, and lay a foundation for future developments or trends. To such field-defining works, we can now add Kate Douglas and Ashley Barnwell's marvelous collection of essays, Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies. This volume takes method as its central focus, with the promise that the question of how to do lifewriting research encompasses numerous other pressing questions within auto/biography studies such as those regarding the digital turn, praxis, and ethics. The thirty essays are divided into two sections, "Forms" and "Frameworks," but a more salient distinction could be drawn between essays that show (offering brief samples of auto/biographical research or writing) and essays that tell (describing auto/biographical research or writing projects previously completed). The good news is that the volume offers a rich selection of each. Whether showing or telling, certain recurring themes cut across the collection, the most prominent of which is interdisciplinarity. Douglas and Barnwell state in their introduction that although auto/biography studies grew out of English literary studies, the field now embraces a much more diverse and cross-disciplinary set of methods (1). However, there are instructive differences in how the call to interdisciplinarity gets represented within the essays themselves. Some essayists contend that auto/biography studies must embrace interdisciplinarity because literary analysis methods are simply inadequate, particularly when working with unconventional or "unliterary" texts. Julie Rak is the contributor who makes this argument most vehemently in her discussion of the place of big data within auto/biography scholarship, stating that "the study of big data poses [End Page 91] special problems that most life writing methods cannot yet address" (116). Sarah Brophy shares Rak's concern regarding the challenges that digital life content presents to conventional reading methods, recognizing that access to and facility with specialized software for computational analysis may not be possible for literary studies scholars. These essays ask vital questions about whether auto/biography studies is capable of diversifying its methods fast enough to keep up with the proliferation of digital or other life narrative forms that resist being read as literary texts. Other essays in the collection show what is possible when specialists with alternate backgrounds take up life narrative, such as Signe Ravn's description of using creative visuals such as life charts or maps to organize the results of qualitative sociological interviews, or Meg Jensen and Siobhan Campbell's account of their impressive Expressive Life Writing Project, which studies the real-life benefits of storytelling for women who are refugees from conflict zones. Most essays in the volume advocate for a hybrid approach, employing research methods that derive from other disciplines but which pair well with literary criticism. Aimée Morrison describes this as a "mixed methods process" that, in the case of her work on social media, combines genre theory from literary studies, descriptive methods from anthropology and ethnography, and software and hardware analysis methods from new media studies (43). Another notable example of the productive mixing of literary studies and cross-disciplinary methods can be found in Ally Day's account of organizing reading groups to discuss HIV memoirs, a text-focused approach that takes on new significance when the reading groups are composed of women living with HIV, or of AIDS service providers. From these essays, it would appear that the literary studies methods that characterize auto/ biography studies still have merit, but particularly when they are...