Auto/Biography Review

A Collector’s Item

Mich Page — 2024-05-06

Miss Hildred Bigwood (1921-2000), when I first knew her in the 1970s, was the botany technician in the biological sciences department at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. She was also a plant collector. Her life’s work was the creation of a remarkable herbarium that proved controversial when its final ‘home’ had to be settled. This paper problematises two methodological difficulties: writing an incomplete and yet justifiable biography when data are missing, and the ethical dilemmas posed by writing about a dead friend who is unable to give consent. Lives are entangled with other people and other things. Glimpses of a life, collected from other people’s memories offer insights but fail to provide descriptions free from distorting otherness. Tangible, supporting evidence: documents, photographs, and artefacts provide more definite biographic details. Such entanglements are messy but need to be exposed and analysed for what they are. There is one more social complication that threads its way through this biography, and that is the position of women within the university, complicated by notions of academic and hegemonic claims to scientific worthiness.

Raves and Close Shaves

Louise Owusu-Kwarteng — 2024-06-10

In this article, I reflect on my experiences in 1990s Rave culture as a young Black woman. This article incorporates Wright-Mills’ (1959) ‘Sociological Imagination’ to explore how the socio-historical events of the time shaped my involvement in the rave scene. Further, it explores how raving served as a form of intergenerational resistance against familial and community expectations. I was often a minority in certain rave scenes, considered predominantly White spaces. At the same time, I was regarded as a ‘misfit’ among my Black peers for ‘transgressing’ what they perceived as norms of Blackness, such as engaging in popular culture and music genres like Hip Hop and R’n’B. Through my experience, I consider debates concerning relationships between popular culture consumption and the construction of our ethnic and racial identities. Specifically, I explore how these elements are used to determine our ‘authenticity’ and identities as Black people. I also suggest that our experiences reflect the importance of recognising and celebrating the differences within and between Black people, including our life choices, such as music preferences.

‘If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution(s)’

Tracey Collett — 2024-12-19

We have both, independently and with others, long been interested in collaboration within an institution that publicly supports such work whilst often working against it. Thus, in our daily working practices, we challenge (alone, with others and together) traditional definitions and myths of working, learning and being in higher education. In this article, through a focus on our relationship both in and outside of the academy, we critique and respond to the socio-political challenges of academic work. Through auto/biographical stories, we first show the general expectation on us (and others) to dance to ‘the dominant societal tune’ and second, focus on our experiences of working in a UK university. With reference to writers who have discussed spaces of slow scholarship and, in particular, care-full working and love, our central argument hinges on the significance of our friendship to our work in the neoliberal world. Our point is that practising platonic loving relationships, that comprise caring, creative and collaborative practices, offers a form of resistance. Such practices, we suggest, can enable alternative and powerful ways to dance (i.e. to work) that are positive and just as productive, if not more so.

Dancing and Romancing with Infantry

John Hockey — 2024-11-22

The literature on ethnographers doing research in dangerous and violent situations has not much to say on the complexity of motives, which propel the latter into such contexts. This paper examines the motives which propelled the author into doing research with the UK infantry including in an operational context. It links these motives to the author's biographical development over decades and examines practices and perceptions which helped sustain those motives when fieldwork became problematic. The paper combines auto-biographical memories (in italics) with field notes made during participant observation with infantry.

Braided Stories of Ghostly Disappointments and Dissonances Encountered in Formations of Gender, Class and Age

Jackie Goode — 2024-12-19

This article, based on a joint presentation to the 2024 BSA Auto/biography Study Group summer conference, is a response to the invitation to address the themes of ‘disappointment’ and dissonance’. In exploring our experiences of these in discussion with each other and in the initial writings we exchanged, the concepts of gender, class and ageing began to emerge – the last of these perhaps due to the fact that although we range in ages from our fifties to our seventies, we have each reached a stage in life when it is not uncommon to engage in evaluation of what has gone before and reflection on what might still be to come. In this interwoven text, our three voices are braided together as we explore, examine and confront the disappointments inherent in that powerful and pervasive notion of a grand narrative. A narrative often positioned as an ever-onward and upward trajectory, devoid of diversions, en route to the pinnacle we stand on, as the hero of our own story. A ‘masculinist’ narrative that doesn’t fit any of us. In this braiding, we juxtapose our voices and our narratives, rippling across each others’ identities, experiences, disappointments and dissonances, reaching back into the past, examining the present and speculating about the future in order to explore formations and representations of class, gender and age. Our voices are presented both individually and collectively.