Autobiographical Identity Research Articles

(Post)pamięć konstruowana cyfrowo

(POST)MEMORY DIGITALLY CONSTRUCTED: SURVIVORS’ INTERACTIVE BIOGRAPHY – OPPORTUNITIES AND THREATS
 The purpose of the article is to provide a critical discussion of the USC Shoah Dimensions in Testimony project initiated and implemented by the USC Shoah Foundation. The article specifically focuses on the opportunities and threats presented by the ongoing dynamic development of the foundation’s project. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, which explores the spatial and temporal distance that separates successive generations from traumatic events, the article examines whether interactive biographies of survivors can be regarded as objects of postmemory that “preserve” (?) witnesses and their stories for future generations. In addition, the article analyzes how such virtual autobiographical identity narratives allow survivor to externalize their experience and transfer memory to the recipients of their testimonies. Ethical considerations regarding the “use” of near-holographic recordings of survivors are also discussed. Based on the collected research material, the article further explores how memory mediated by these objects affects the perception of past events.

Sparking the imagination: creative language pedagogies as intersemiotic translation

ABSTRACT In this paper, we use the lens of embodied language cognition and intersemiosis to argue for the importance of developing creative approaches to language work in classroom settings and we cite as an example some activities from a workshop that was developed for modern foreign languages (MFL) trainee teachers in London (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9hR-LQ0xOE). The workshop resulted from a collaboration between an applied linguist (Coffey) and an artist-educator (Patel), and combined their shared understanding of language use as an emotional, embodied enterprise etched into our autobiographical identities. We suggest that working with intersemiotic approaches to language has the potential to reinvigorate language pedagogy by challenging dominant metaphors both of ‘language’ and of ‘learning’. The paper intends both to make a practical contribution in its reporting of activities, which we hope will inspire teachers and teacher educators to develop intersemiotic approaches for their own settings, and also to contribute to the broader scholarship that calls for ‘reframing teacher cognition’ (e.g. Coffey [2015]. Reframing teachers’ language knowledge through metaphor analysis of language portraits. The Modern Language Journal 99, no. 3: 500–14), even ‘liberating language education’ (e.g. Lytra et al. [2022]. Liberating Language Education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters), to imagine new orientations for how we engage with languages in our lives and our classrooms.

Au nom de la mère. Reconfigurations du modèle spiegelmanien du témoignage dans deux récits graphiques sur la guerre civile espagnole

This paper examines two French graphic novels which reconstruct the Transpyrenean memory of the Spanish civil war: Le Convoi by D. Lapière and E. Torrents (2013), Dolorès by B. Loth (2016). Both works reshape the narrative model of war testimony created by A. Spiegelman in Maus, where the memory of a traumatic past is transmitted between generations within the family circle (postmemory), combining both personal life story and collective History. Focusing on the narratological device of the voice, three major changes are highlighted: the non-actorialization of the author-narrator (unmaking of the autobiographical identity), the feminization of the recipient of the testimony (not a son but a daughter who listens on behalf of a silent mother), and the extension of the family circle beyond a particular family through condensation or displacement. The paper discusses these points studying the stories as well as the paratexts and argues that the specific combination of the three major changes in each graphic novel produces different ways of disjunction between the subjective and the political dimensions of trauma, in other words, between the intimate and the collective sides of History.

“I Believe that Women have No Country:” Portrayal of the Displaced Self inTaslima Nasreen’s Exilic Autobiography My Girlhood

The aim of this paper is to analyse Taslima Nasreen’s first autobiography, My Girlhood as an author–in–exile. The analysis focuses on the way in which she recapitulates her memories as a girl who questioned the dominant discourse on religious and gendered lines. While the narration centres around her family members, the choice that the autobiographer makes to speak out against all and the impact it generated aid in the sculpting of her individual autobiographical identity.

The Metaphysics of the Narrative Self

AbstractThis essay develops a theory of identities, selves, and ‘the self’ that both explains the sense in which selves are narratively constituted and also explains how the self relates to a person's individual autobiographical identity and to their various social identities. I argue that identities are the contents of narratively structured representations, some of which are hosted individually and are autobiographical in form, and others of which are hosted collectively and are biographical in form. These identities, in turn, give rise to selves of various sorts—true selves, autobiographical selves, public and private selves, merely possible selves, and so on—which are the characters (or presupposed subjects) that appear in our various identities. Although the theory I develop bears some obvious affinities with the view that selves are fictional characters, the two views are in fact distinct, for reasons explained at the end.

Positioning Shifts From Told Self to Performative Self in Psychotherapy.

According to Positioning Theory, participants in narrative interaction can position themselves on a representational level concerning the autobiographical, told self, and a performative level concerning the interactive and emotional self of the tellers. The performative self is usually much harder to pin down, because it is a non-propositional, enacted self. In contrast to everyday interaction, psychotherapists regularly topicalize the performative self explicitly. In our paper, we study how therapists respond to clients' narratives by interpretations of the client's conduct, shifting from the autobiographical identity of the told self, which is the focus of the client's story, to the present performative self of the client. Drawing on video recordings from three psychodynamic therapies (tiefenpsychologisch fundierte Psychotherapie) with 25 sessions each, we will analyze in detail five extracts of therapists' shifts from the representational to the performative self. We highlight four findings:• Whereas, clients' narratives often serve to support identity claims in terms of personal psychological and moral characteristics, therapists rather tend to focus on clients' feelings, motives, current behavior, and ways of interacting.• In response to clients' stories, therapists first show empathy and confirm clients' accounts, before shifting to clients' performative self.• Therapists ground the shift to clients' performative self by references to clients' observable behavior.• Therapists do not simply expect affiliation with their views on clients' performative self. Rather, they use such shifts to promote the clients' self-exploration. Yet, if clients resist to explore their selves in more detail, therapists more explicitly ascribe motives and feelings that clients do not seem to be aware of. The shift in positioning levels thus seems to have a preparatory function for engendering therapeutic insights.

Specyfika rozwojowa struktury pamięci dzieciństwa w biegu dorosłego życia – wyniki badań narracyjnych

Developmental Specificity of Childhood Memory Structure across the Adult Lifespan – Results of Narrative Research Theories of autobiographical memory and narrative identity allow us to assume that childhood memory is represented in the mind of an adult person as a comprehensive period with its own unique characteristics that is subjected to changes during the lifespan. Based on the concept of the global coherence of life history, it was assumed that in later periods of life, childhood memories will be more elaborate and thus cognitively more accessible as well as organized temporally and logically in a more coherent story. The use of narrative interview revealed differences between early, middle and late adulthood in the way the childhood memories are organized, as well as in the age-independent characteristics of the perceived childhood. The obtained results suggest that in late adulthood, childhood is recalled more extensively and more memories are logically organized, which is attributed to greater attention to the past resulting from the task of life summary. Regardless of the age of the respondents, less than half of the memories related logically to each other, with most of the text consisting of separate scenes not located in time. These findings raised the issue of the specificity of childhood memory and the universality of global coherence of life stories.

Connecting the dots: toward a networked framework to conceptualizing identity in mathematics education

The construct of identity is increasingly recognized as a dominant and determining aspect in learning mathematics. While researchers—collectively—theorize identity as situated and negotiated, they also draw attention to the unwieldy nature of the concept that makes it difficult to define and operationalize. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the conversation on identity in mathematics education by providing a literature review through the lens of a four-part networked identity model configured by Ivanič (1998) in the field of academic writing. Following a short introduction of the meaning of identity as a research construct, the paper discusses Ivanič’s four identity-related aspects that include autobiographical identity, discoursal identity, authorial identity, and socioculturally available identities. It then examines research in K-12 mathematics education that focuses on learners’ identity through the perspective of Ivanič’s model to suggest an instrumental, yet tentative, multi-dimensional framework for exploring identity in mathematics education. The paper concludes with potential trajectories for future research.

Polish Women in Exile to Siberia in the 19th Century – Autobiographical Reflection in Women’s Narratives

[full article and abstract in English]
 The paper discusses the issues related to the biographical research perspective and the role of ego-documents in modern humanities. These considerations focus on autobiographical narratives of women exiled to Siberia in the 19th century, both those who were sentenced or went there voluntarily. Different forms of women’s narratives were analysed, namely a memoir of Helena Skirmuntowa (1827–1874), written in the years 1863–1867, and a diary of Maria Obuchowska-Morzycka (1841–1911?), who wrote it 40 years after her life in exile. The autobiographical research model adopted in the paper focuses not only on the questions regarding the autobiographical context of ego-documents but also on biographical and autobiographical identity of the authors, connected with the description of their life, experiences, emotions as well as their attitude to the outside world and relations with other people.

Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their by Leigh Gilmore

Reviewed by: Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their by Leigh Gilmore Sarah Brophy (bio) Leigh Gilmore. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives Columbia UP 2017, 240 pp. ISBN 978-0231177146, $30 hard-cover; $22 paperback. As the #MeToo hashtag began to go viral in October 2017, prompting an overdue reckoning with endemic sexual harassment and assault, memoirist Dorothy Allison's epigram resurfaced in my thoughts: "Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I' d rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me" (71, emphasis in original). In its bold refusal to accept the weight of the world's judgment, Allison's telling of family sexual violence and class shame crystallizes the necessity—but also the riskiness—of survivors going public with their stories. While leaders of the #MeToo movement, including Black feminist organizer Tarana Burke, who coined the phrase for use by survivors in 2006, have been acknowledged by Time as "Person of the Year" for 2017, and while some cases of longstanding injustice are being addressed in the courts and within institutions, the deck remains stacked against testimony by women and people of color. Even as some of the most predatory figures, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Larry Nassar, are beginning to be held to account, countless others, including men in the highest offices of the land, continue to "float" in what Leigh Gilmore in her 2017 book Tainted Witness aptly calls "bubbles of impunity" (31), and the speech of those testifying against them struggles to find purchase. What is the nature of this impasse, and how might we imagine breaking through it? As Gilmore makes clear, "testimonial truth is indexed not to facts but to power," and "when witnesses testify they elicit different standards of judgment" (14). The "blank" in our knowledge that Gilmore fills in is "that norms of justice and personhood do not fully include women, and their agency, value, and even existence are often denied through this exclusion" (25). As a result, sympathy, credibility, and indeed objectivity remain stubbornly lodged as the perquisites of the powerful and the institutions that support them (14–15). In Gilmore's prescient and incisive study, we have at hand vital resources for historicizing the present sea change as well as for grappling with our roles as scholars, teachers, artists, and activists in working toward a more just future. This conceptually and analytically rich book carries forward the ground-breaking insights of Gilmore's earlier work on women's life writing. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation, published in 1994, put pressure on how we understand autobiographical identity, repositioning it as multitextual, discontinuous, and embedded in stories and their interpretation and linking "resistance" in women's life writing to "eruptions and interruptions" that challenge normative notions of self-coherence (42). The [End Page 691] Limits of Autobiography, published in 2001, went on to develop the idea of literary witness as an "alternative jurisdiction," highlighting "the productivity of the limit" in the work of queer and diasporic writers, such as Allison and Jamaica Kincaid, who resist the centrality of the confessional in Western autobiography, and who find "other ways to bear this burden" of intimate truth-telling (14–16). Tainted Witness continues and deepens Gilmore's feminist intervention into how women's auto/biographical production is understood by attending to the discrediting and ultimately the violence meted out at the juncture of public and private spheres, where women's testimonies struggle to be articulated and to find an "adequate witness" (5). Theoretical emphases in Tainted Witness appropriate to its focus on "testimonial networks" (3) include the workings of the "intimate public sphere" (from Lauren Berlant), "affective economies" (from Sara Ahmed), and the idea of "testimonial transactions," as survivor speech moves transnationally through multiply mediated public spheres (from Gillian Whitlock). In Gilmore's pithy formulation, "Testimony moves, but judgment sticks" (5). A key insight here is that those sticky judgments are hard to get rid of once your speech and embodiment are targeted for tainting. Scandal "takes parasitic life from the body of testimony, and old, illegitimate stories have...

Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Culture, written by Valerie Anishchenkova

Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Culture, written by Valerie Anishchenkova

Induced forgetting and reduced confidence in our personal past? The consequences of selectively retrieving emotional autobiographical memories

People build their sense of self, in part, through their memories of their personal past. What is striking about these personal memories is that, in many instances, they are inaccurate, yet confidently held. Most researchers assume that confidence ratings are based, in large part, on the memory's mnemonic features. That is, the more vivid or detailed the memory, the higher the confidence people have in its accuracy. However, we explore a heretofore underappreciated source on which confidence ratings may be based: the accessibility of memories as a result of selective retrieval. To explore this possibility, we use Anderson, Bjork, and Bjork's retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) paradigm with emotional (positive and negative) autobiographical memories. We found the standard RIF effect for memory recall across emotional valence. That is, selective retrieval of emotional autobiographical memories induced forgetting of related, but not retrieved emotional autobiographical memories compared to the baseline. More interestingly, we found that the confidence ratings for positive memories mirrored the RIF pattern: decreased confidence for related, unpracticed autobiographical memories relative to the baseline. For negative memories, we found the opposite pattern: increased confidence for both practiced autobiographical memories and related, unpracticed autobiographical memories. We discuss these results in terms of accessibility, the diverging mnemonic consequences of selectively retrieving positive and negative autobiographical memories and personal identity.

Psychological Diffusions: The Cognitive Turn in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

Graphic artist Alison Bechdel has enjoyed widespread success since the publication of her first long form autobiographical comic Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). Already, there is a substantial body of criticism on Bechdel that addresses her cerebral writing style, her personal archive, and her contributions to the graphic narrative form. Lauded for her realistic reproduction of ephemera such as letters, maps, photographs, and marginalia, critics have overlooked moments in which these documents—and her readings of events in her family—fail to produce meaning. In her second graphic narrative, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012), Bechdel relies upon modernist texts and psychoanalysis in order to represent her complicated relationship with her mother, Helen. Yet, as in Fun Home when the archive fails to explain the circumstances that culminated in her father’s death, psychoanalysis in Are You My Mother? impedes Alison in her quest to understand how her relationship with her mother has affected her adult life:in particular, her craft and her romantic relationships. This paper argues that Bechdel’s reliance on psychoanalysis to shape her narrative overshadows a stronger and more telling presence of precepts commonly associated with cognitive science and neuroscience. In the narrative, Alison articulates a number of cognitive theories, such as pattern making and theory of mind, as well as neurological concepts such as memory consolidation and reconsolidation that better account for the events of the text — and the impulse to tell life narrative — than psychoanalysis. Part of a growing number of texts that are preoccupied with how the mind/brain give rise to autobiographical identity and narrative form, Are You My Mother? challenges the referential certainty of the life narrative genre in conceptually novel and aesthetically complex ways.

Ante-Autobiography and the Archive of Childhood

This essay examines the concept of children's autobiography via several autobiographical extracts written by the author as a child. Although only a small proportion of people will compose and publish a full-length autobiography, almost everyone will, inadvertently, produce an archive of the self, made from public records and private documents. Here, such works are seen as providing access to writing both about and by children. The essay explores the ethics and poetics of children's writing via the key debates in life writing; in particular, the dynamic relationship between adults and children, both as distinct stages of life and dual parts of one autobiographical identity. The term “ante-autobiography” is coined to refer to these texts which come before or instead of a full-length narrative. They are not read as less than or inadequate versions of autobiography, but rather as transgressive and challenging to chronological notions of the genre.

Autobiographical Memory, Identity Re/Construction, and Stylistic Creativity in Tayo Olafioye's

This essay attempts a deconstructive reading of Tayo Olafioye's by stylistically analysing the autobiographer's linguistic inventiveness in evoking memories that revolve around the culture of naming in Africa vis-à-vis the protagonist's identity, which inexorably raises socio-cultural and philosophical issues about the fe/male figure in a typical African society. Further, the essay interrogates the autobiographer's invocation of the archetypal maternal figure in Africa as epitomized by his grand/mother's apprehensions about his well-being and prospects, on the one hand, and his mother's struggles in a patriarchal African world, on the other. Given the motif of identity-construction that underlies the autobiographer's narrative imagination, the article considers autobiographical fiction as a rich literary resource for the African writer not just to project individuality but also to locate it in a universal realm in a bid to probe and appreciate communal experiences as well.

Pupil mortification: digital photography and identity construction in classroom assessment

Cultural theorists have illuminated how photographic images contribute to autobiographical remembering and identity formation. This has new significance given that digital photography now allows personal images to circulate rapidly amongst peer groups. Taking these insights into classroom contexts, this paper draws on recent case-study data to explore a teacher’s use of digital photography to provide ‘feedback’ to pupils. Critiquing dominant psychological understandings of classroom assessment for their lack of recognition of power relations, it takes up post-structuralist theories of discourse, embodiment and affect to consider how these digital photographs became ‘sticky’ with memories of peer derision, ‘mortifying’ pupils and marking them as ‘other’ in ways that were intensified through later display to the class. Thus, rather than providing benign support for learning, the circulation of these images as part of feedback processes in this classroom context seems to have functioned as a powerful technology of individualization and normalization.

What shall it profit, if I write a spanking good story but lose my soul?

The gaps between the writing self and the written self are smoothed over with language. In their close analysis of autobiographies, my students learn how language works to constitute the appearance of a coherent self, and how it fails. Is teaching the craft of autobiography a matter of teaching students to be aware of the selves they are creating, not to emanate or project selfhood naively, but to consider the autobiographical identity that will materialise somewhere between the text and the reader? Is it to ask them to assume authority over the voice they are constructing, to recognise that they are as present and exposed in that voice as they are in the events that they relate? Is it to teach them to anticipate the repercussions of what and how they write? If this is so then we should assess not what and how they write, but how self aware they are in their writing.

Narrative, life story and manager identity: A case study in autobiographical identity work

To study and better understand people's working lives and organizational involvement in the context of their whole lives and in the context of the societal culture in which they have grown up and now live, it is helpful to bring together three key concepts of narrative, identity work and the social construction of reality. Such a move can be connected to the abandonment of widely used but limiting concepts, such as that of`managerial identity'. The essentially sociological nature of this move also provides an antidote to the equally limiting tendency towards the `narrative imperialism' which is associated with the idea of the `narrative self'. The value of the suggested theoretical framing and its linking of narrative, identity work and social construction is demonstrated by the close analysis of a large private autobiography of a former manager. This individual's identity work simultaneously uses discursively available narratives and creates new narratives (many small stories being embedded in one large life story), all within the framework of history, social structure and culture.

Transformation of the Identities of Nonnative English-Speaking Scientists as a Consequence of the Social Construction of Revision

When nonnative English-speaking scientists submit manuscripts for consideration to English-language journals, they sometimes receive comments from the reviewers that are critical of their English language skills. The impact on scientists' identity when making revisions that satisfy reviewer expectations has not been examined carefully. Therefore, this study explores the phenomenon of manuscript revision and its effect on autobiographical identity through a qualitative investigation of Mexican scientists. Analysis revealed the emergence of six factors that consistently affect the nonnative English-speaking scientist, in some cases positively and in others negatively, depending on the writer's life story. Based on these findings, a model of social construction of revision is proposed. The model of revision accounts for the scientists' changing autobiographical identities.

Awareness of memory functioning, autobiographical memory and identity in early-stage dementia

Sense of identity is thought to be closely related to autobiographical memory. Theoretical models of awareness suggest that both may also be related to level of awareness of memory functioning among people with early-stage dementia. This study explores the relationships between autobiographical memory, identity and awareness in early-stage dementia. Thirty participants with Alzheimer's disease, or vascular or mixed dementia were assessed using the Autobiographical Memory Interview, with an additional section eliciting recall for the mid-life period, the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, and the Memory Awareness Rating Scale. Lower levels of awareness of memory functioning were associated with poorer autobiographical recall for the mid-life period and with a more positive and definite sense of identity. Reduced awareness may serve a protective function against the threats to self posed by the onset and progression of dementia.