Autobiographical Process Research Articles

The internet will not remember you: curation of autobiographical online materials in Russia in Spring 2022

Abstract This paper is based on research conducted in February–April 2022. It describes and illuminates what was happening with tech-savvy educated people between 20 and 40 years old in Russia, while their usual digital tools and places for the autobiographical process were changing in the spring of 2022. Facing censorship of platforms, surveillance, and the inability to pay for services, people who were keeping important memories of their lives online were deleting their profiles, migrating to other platforms, censoring themselves, and creating archives of autobiographically meaningful materials. The paper examines these disruptions as a case that illuminates the role of online platforms in autobiographical memory and expands some concepts within autobiographical memory studies, such as evocative objects and autotopography.

Urban vernacular landscapes: toward a visual pedagogy of the ordinary

ABSTRACT Although many social scientists employ visual media in their research and teaching, the connection between the ‘visual’ and the ‘social science’ is often tenuous. Photographs often are reserved for illustrating textual concepts, or making standard findings more interesting to readers than the normal textual exposition in tables, pie charts, graphs, or other methods of data visualization. In my research about urban lives and cultures, I have extensively photographed what John Brinckerhoff Jackson called ‘vernacular landscapes.’ Although photojournalists, as well as documentary and street photographers, have also engaged in similar image capturing practices, as opposed to their more aesthetic and artistic accomplishments, I have tried to firmly connect my images to normal social science theories and methods. This visually enhanced essay will describe, discuss, and give examples from my own photographic studies of urban vernacular landscapes over several decades and across the globe. It is hoped that in this autobiographical process, the difference between artistic and scientific photography as to theories of class, globalization, race, and other social issues will be made clearer.

Death and collective autobiography in Silverlake Life: The View from Here

ABSTRACT This article presents a study of the creative process of Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993), from the perspective of its authorial multiplicity. Silverlake Life is regarded as one of the main representatives of autobiographical documentary in the 1990s. The specificity of the film is found in the circumstances of the death of the filmmaker-autobiographer, Tom Joslin. By recognizing a tripartite process of creative autonomy among Tom Joslin, Mark Massi and Peter Friedman, this article outlines both how each individual contributed to the achievement of the film and how Silverlake Life preserves its status as autobiographical documentary despite the tragic deaths of both Joslin and Massi before the film’s completion. This work of comprehending the film’s collaborative autobiographical process was made possible through the analysis of three extratextual sources: the original proposal for the film, written by Tom Joslin and which appears at the beginning of the narrative; the written diary of Mark Massi, Joslin’s widower; and extensive interviews with Peter Friedman on the subject.

The Tiger Skin on the Bannister (and Other Stories): Internal Dialogues and Parallel Autobiographical Process in a Reading of Wilfred Bion’s The Long Weekend, 1897–1919: Part of a Life

ABSTRACT This essay presents excerpts from a reading of the section ‘England’ in Wilfred Bion’s autobiography The Long Weekend, 1897–1919: Part of a Life. Findings are now presented alongside a series of the reader’s own memories that were evoked, at varied speeds, both during and after the reading process. Drawing on the fields of infant observation and child psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the essay demonstrates how exercising an observational stance to the reader's own subjective material and subsequent, reflexive internal dialogues contributed to penetrating layers of meaning of the book. Furthermore, it aims to show how a reading of an autobiography unexpectedly enabled a powerful, parallel creative process within the reader.

Teacher Positioning in Rural Spaces

In this qualitative study, we ask how 40 rural educators of English learners (ELs) culturally position themselves and their students. We obtained data through a cultural autobiography assignment that prompted teachers to describe their interactions and relationships with others. Drawing on both rural and non-rural experiences, teachers established their ability to exercise agency, mediated by individual histories and beliefs and the context of their rural settings. Teachers developed their capacity to reflect on the ways they position themselves toward their ELs, a crucial first step in creating culturally sustaining pedagogy. Implications point to the potential of cultural autobiography as a means to heighten rural teachers’ awareness of how their experiences and interactions nuance their cultural identity. Such reflections can expand notions of culture beyond common social identifiers and enable teachers to forge links with their students that would otherwise not be apparent. We suggest this autobiographical process is particularly important for rural teachers who are new to teaching ELs in their classrooms.

Contesting Lewd Banter at Work: Ottilie Baader and Heinrich Holek’s Autobiographies

This article argues that working-class life writings can be analyzed, not merely from a class perspective, but also as unique documentation of the particular purposes for which a worker constructs his or her autobiographical self. It then explores the autobiographies of two working-class authors who grew up in the late nineteenth century: Ottilie Baader, a leader of the German socialist women’s movement, and Heinrich Holek, an Austrian journalist and prominent Arbeiterdichter. In particular, this study focuses on the embodied self constructed in the two autobiographies, especially as these selves remember and reflect on erotic talk in the workplace. The article aims to answer two questions: 1) Which practical purpose do these narratives serve when they conjure up or condemn sexual conversations among proletarians, and 2) how are bodies implicated in the autobiographical process of self-identification?

Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process—Explorations in Narrative Psychology by Jens Brockmeier

Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process—Explorations in Narrative Psychology by Jens Brockmeier

Teachers’ cultural autobiography as means of civic professional engagement

This article will present my autobiographical journey: from communism to capitalism, from the banking system and the pedagogy of the oppressed to problem-posing education. My personal experiences are seen as a way of emigrating internally and as part of the struggle through the process of self-actualisation and self-understanding. In effect, the practice of intellectual freedom shifts from a personal to a civic perspective. My wish for social justice, especially for children from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds living in a global society, will be considered, with reference to the voluntary work in the Romanian community. Thus, from a postmodern perspective, the autobiographical process is not just about self, but also about the Other.

Book Review: Beyond the archive: Memory, narrative, and the autobiographical process

Book Review: <i>Beyond the archive: Memory, narrative, and the autobiographical process</i>

Book review: Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process

Book review: Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process

The Boxing Ring: Embodying Knowledge through Being Hit in the Face

The Boxing Ring: Embodying Knowledge through Being Hit in the Face

On Failed Understanding

On Failed Understanding Jens Brockmeier (bio) The further we go back into our past, the less we can be sure that our memories are really ours. We all know this uncertainty. Is there anything I know about the first two or three years of my life that I was not told later by others? Is there anything I know about the world at large into which I was born that I did not later learn from others? I remember a quarrel between Grandma and Uncle Fred about who had the right story about me when I got lost in a park after I just learned to ride a bike and escaped along the busy road. The escape stories followed me for a long time. There was a photograph of me on my bike, perhaps when I was four, on the wall of my room. It hung there for years and eternalized this early vision of mine. Only much later, I figured out that what I remembered were not some autobiographical primal scenes—Urszenen, as Freud dubbed them—unveiling some early escapism but rather a blend of Grandma’s stories, the photo on the wall, and the short film clips taken by Uncle Fred with his vintage camera. The flickering of the film sequences bestowed on these “memories” the feel of a distant but original and indubitable past. [End Page 77] Visuality looms large in our sense of memories. It attributes to many scenes that we identify as past experiences the air of immediacy and authenticity. Even verbally told autobiographical stories typically are replete with metaphors, images, and other visual language—as in Grandma’s versions of my escapes (“On your little bike you were gone as fast as lightning”), which have allowed me to evoke my flight adventures as a child “as if they happened yesterday.” On the photograph and in the film of Uncle Fred I did not even have to remember myself but had an independent representation before my eyes. I just could see it there as it really was, or so I believed. Today we are more mistrustful of the assumption that our memory is able to “encode” and “store” primary events that, over the passing of time, can be eventually “retrieved” in their original shape and meaning. We have come to know that many of our much-loved autobiographical memories are composites that conflate various elements—visual, affective, imagined—with their interpretations and reinterpretations. This is even more striking if the putative primal scene turns out to be a palimpsest woven together by stories, photographs, and film clips provided by others. Moreover, there are forms and strategies of understanding the past that emerge from the awareness of this complex mixture, an awareness that exists not only in hindsight but in the very present of remembering. At times these strategies even consciously capitalize on the blend of recall, imagination, investigation, and interpretation inherent in the autobiographical process in order to extend the understanding of the past. Such extending can go beyond the individual scope of this process. This is what the French novelist Patrick Modiano has tried in a number of books. Writing these books seems to have been a way for him to imagine the memories of other people and stretch his own memories to times and places that connect to the lives of those individuals. Viewed in this way, the idea of the composite nature of memories widens to encompass the mingling of one’s own memories with the memories of others. Many of Modiano’s novels are hermeneutical investigations into the extended range of real and imagined autobiographical memories. At the same time, they inquire into the limits of the subjunctive and the hypothetical as a form of human understanding or, as I suggest in this essay, [End Page 78] as interpretive practices between understanding and nonunderstanding. For these two reasons, I take a closer look at Modiano’s books, especially Dora Bruder. My goal is to gain a better sense of the hermeneutical quality of narrative, on the one hand, and of the narrative fabric of complex forms of understanding and nonunderstanding, on the other.1 Searching for Dora Bruder How can one...

Autobiographical turning points: Remembering and forgetting

The autobiographical process involves not just reporting on past events, reconstructing one’s life history, but replaying events in different voices and modes. It may be that the autobiographer is motivated by the desire to impose one version of her or his life and to scotch the others. Even then, however, other versions, the ones under erasure, often show through the fabric – the fabrication – and we detect their traces in the turns of the rhetoric. Thus, in autobiography, the real agenda is often underneath, either because a less official motive lurks behind the manifest ones or because what really drives the project of selfscrutiny is something only progressively revealed in the process of writing. This issue takes into consideration the structuring implications of turning points in the account of a life and the roles of the converse forces of forgetting and subjective destabilisation. There are two ways of looking at turning points: either as causative agents of order and coherence or as metaphors – as provisional, semi-fictional, forensic, cognitive instruments. In the latter case, they belong to an active, performative, conjectural, self-revising process, and they complement a version of autobiographical memory that involves a constant interplay of remembering and forgetting.

Autobiography, autofiction, representation, interrogation, remembering and forgetting

Introduction to the Autobiography edition articles.

De la Révélation de Soi à L’auto-Compréhension : Assia Djebar , L’amour , la Fantasia et Nulle Part dans la Maison de Mon Père

A writer of fiction since the late 1950s, Assia Djebar began introducing autobiographical elements into her texts with her fifth novel, L’amour, la fantasia , (1985) published in English as Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade (1985). Fully aware that subjectivity in life and fiction are often considered transgressions in Algerian culture, the novelist responds to by implementing narrative strategies in the text that signal an original approach to autobiography -- fragmented autobiography, polyphonic discourse, and autofiction. Two decades later, Djebar offers her readers, Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere (2007), a personal history that sheds further light on a life story that is both exemplary and unique. This text is crucial to our understanding of the novelist’s autobiographical project for several reasons. First, we can now view Djebar’s narrative unveiling as a two-stage process that began as a collective project but has resulted in the production of a singular life, a singular voice. Second, her previous focus upon unearthing occulted colonial history is now a personal quest, as she recovers, through memory, hidden personal history. Third, we see more clearly the ambiguous relationship between the young girl and the father who is alternately liberator and censor, a conflict that reflects, in part, the tension between the writer and the French language. Fourth, as we witness the unfolding of the autobiographical project, we become aware that Djebar, trained as a historian, is first and foremost a novelist, someone for whom the construction of a literary persona is a cornerstone of her craft, the blending of fact and fiction an important component of her writing. Finally, her approach to self-representation forces readers to consider two related questions that concern the Algerian writer’s work in particular and the realm of women’s autobiography in general: Does the autobiographical process heal the fragmented narrating self? Does it effectively challenge patriarchal structures and ideology or merely create nostalgia for a lost Eden in which women are jealous guardians of tradition?

Autobiography as Tool to Improve Lifestyle, Well Being, and Self-Narrative in Patients With Mental Disorders

The aims of the present study were to explore how the autobiographical process can lead to a transformation in psychiatric patients' lifestyle, well-being, and self-narrative. Nine participants, aged between 20 and 42 years and affected by axis I psychiatric disorders (DSM IV) were selected to participate in an autobiographical laboratory. Eight to 10 meetings took place, each lasting about an hour, during which autobiographical accounts were collected. At the beginning and end of the autobiographical laboratory, the medical staff completed the Social Functioning Scale to evaluate each patient across 6 dimensions: social engagement, interpersonal ability, prosocial activities, recreation, independence-competence, and independence-performance. The Language Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker and Francis, 1996) was used to analyze patients' autobiographical accounts. A comparison between the first and second compilation of the Social Functioning Scale showed significant positive changes across the 6 social dimensions. The analysis of language in the narratives collected in the first and seventh meeting showed how inpatients passed from a narrative that was more centered on the memory of the past to a narrative that was more similar to a conversation and enriched with "insight" terms and the use of verbs in the conjunctive form. The authors interpret these outcomes as being consistent with the improvement that was observed in inpatients' social functioning.

Unpacking stored and storied knowledge: Elicited biographies of activism in mental health

In this paper we consider the potential of autobiographical narratives for accessing ‘storied knowledge’ in research around geographies of health voluntarism. We firstly consider what is meant by elicited autobiography and how the narrative approach has been used in research more broadly. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in Manchester, UK and Auckland, New Zealand we then demonstrate how this approach has helped us to map out and unpack the career journeys of mental health activists working within and across the voluntary and statutory sectors. Through our autobiographical narratives we illustrate how this approach has enabled us to elicit important insights into the triggers and trajectories underpinning mental health activism and how events and moments in time have provided critical junctures in these trajectories. We consider places as sites of significance in activist career paths; and as central to the researcher-participant gestalt within which the autobiography is elicited and recounted. The autobiographical process, we suggest, offers reflective insights into mental health activism that might not otherwise be gained using more conventional methodologies.

Le Monument Poétique de J.-J. Rousseau:L’ile de St. Pierre

The unstable genre of Rousseau’s Reverie set in motion a movement between biography and narration, testimony and poetic fiction in the wake of Montaigne. In his Reverie , Rousseau builds up a space where he is composed by refraction and displacement. The autobiographical process of writing is a kind of dialectical process between the subject writing about himself and the grammatical person that pertains to language.

Autobiography as a Tool for Self-Construction

The aim of the present study was to explore how the autobiographical process can lead to a transformation in the quality of psychiatric patients' self-narrative. Fifteen participants, with ages ranging from 25 to 40 years and affected by axis I psychiatric disorders (DSM IV), were selected to participate. A 10-question interview referring to 10 autobiographical cruxes was used to collect autobiographical data; the interview was readministered 2 weeks later. A coding system (the N.O.I.S.) was used to analyze each participant's 2 autobiographical productions. Results from the second interviews showed significant and positive transformations in the quality of patients' autobiographical representation.

Austerlitz's Memory

The article explores the weave of memory, time, and narrative as it unfolds in the autobiographical process. It offers a reading of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz as a book that outlines a new narrative vision of memory and autobiographical time. In this book Sebald, in a break with the traditional model of memory as an archive, describes remembering as an uncertain and speculative search movement which defies chronology, sequentiality, and linearity. What emerges instead is an idea of time as a mode of simultaneously co-existing moments and episodes from very different periods of clock and calendar time. This reading of Austerlitz leads, on a more general plane, to reflections about the autobiographical process as a way of narrative meaning-making that constitutes what Ricoeur has called human time.