Auto/Biography Review

Auto/Biographical Practices, Conventions and Silences

2022-11-12T03:22:21-08:00

Proceeding from remembrance of a friend who has died, ideas about friendship and acquaintanceship are explored, in particular around the conventions and grounded practices of biography. Biographical conventions are strong, but there are subterranean changes in these. At the same time, some of the conventions remain protean and impact on biographical practices. The result is a gap between remembrance of a loved person and biographical accounts - both spoken and written – of what they were like. This is explored around the idea of biographical silences and an unreliable narrator who breaks such silences and is based up a keynote address given at the Auto/Biography Study Group Annual Conference, December 2021.

Lockdown Diaries

2022-08-30T00:29:40-07:00

From January to March 2021, the UK experienced its third Covid-19 lockdown. By this time, ten months after the first UK lockdown started, the scenario of staying at home, working from home, and home schooling had become familiar. Towards the end of, so far, the final complete lockdown in England, and on the day of the budget announcements, people from across the UK were asked to complete one-day diaries for this project. The diaries, along with media accounts and other publicly accessible data, have been used to create a series of short, fictionalised narratives of one day during the pandemic. Based on the autobiographical accounts the participants produced, the stories explore how people from different backgrounds, life stages and geographical areas spent their time during the lockdown, highlighting both shared and very different experiences across and between places and age groups. The stories draw attention to mundane everyday lives during this time. The relatively experimental method of creating composite characters taken from real life also provides material for exploring how the use of fiction (here, biographical fiction) in research can help bring social science research into the public realm.

A Spiritual Journey of Trust During Multiple Childbirth by Caesarean Section

2022-10-17T01:59:21-07:00

This autoethnographic study explores the author’s caesarean section experience to evidence spirituality and trust associated with a multiple childbirth through a caesarean section. The reflective account also indicates how spirituality can influence trust during and post childbirth. By appreciating and further understanding the broader notions of spiritual health surrounding childbirth practice, connected healthcare and trusted relationships between midwives and other healthcare providers could further promote woman-centred care and reciprocal relationships. Together with the narratives of women’s spiritual experiences of childbirth in health research and training programmes, a synergy between spirituality and trust can be integrated to support meaning-making about childbirth.

English Life and Leisure and its Auto/Biographical Significance

2022-10-17T02:38:27-07:00

One of the very few important works systematically utilising auto/biographical accounts that has figured little in the auto/biographical literature is Seebohm Rowntree’s and G. R. Lavers’ English Life and Leisure of 1951. This unique study, employing some 220 extracts of auto/biographical case-studies, provided descriptions of the attitudes of a significant section of the general public towards their free-time and leisure activities. The accounts covered a wide range of varied pursuits and interests including: gambling, drinking, smoking, sexual promiscuity, visiting cinemas, attending theatres, listening to the wireless, dancing, reading, attending adult education classes and religious observance. On its publication the work aroused immense interest not only among social commentators and academics but also among an informed general readership. As well as notable admirers the work had severe critics, not least concerning its methodology. The authorial perspective of English Life and Leisure was one of broadly welfarist, Christian-accented, social concern. The work regretted people wasting worthwhile opportunities, of them relying on short-term hedonistic pleasures and of them showing little desire for self-examination. As a perceptive reviewer in the American Sociological Review remarked in relation to the leisure activities of the respondents, “In reality, these are some of the ways of killing time, of overcoming the tedium vitae, of escaping from fear and anxieties, and compensating for the austerities and frustrations of life”.

Writing Descendant Generation Memoirs as a Collaborative and Self-Reflexive Process

2023-01-29T08:34:20-08:00

This paper illustrates the varied and often helpful ways in which memoir-writing, generally thought to be a sole-authorship enterprise, can be enhanced through some form of collaborative process. Over the last two decades, articles in Second Generation Voices, the magazine published by the Second Generation Network in the UK, reported on the ‘roots’ journeys undertaken by children of Holocaust survivors and refugees to places connected with family history. This led David Clark to embark on a book project, resulting in The Journey Home: Emerging out of the shadow of the past (2021), jointly edited with Teresa von Sommaruga Howard. After a brief was drawn up about the kind of issues each writer should address, David met with the authors and suggested they work together as a group to enable them to discuss their initial ideas and support each other in the writing process. They rejected this idea, and so it fell on the editors to provide guidance and support. Alternative ways in which the editorial process could have been handled are explored by referring to the literature on Memory Work, as outlined by Haug (1987), Crawford et al (1992) and Postmemory (Hirsch 2012). Other approaches that encourage self-reflexivity are examined, including the use of creative writing workshops.