Storying the Self

Autoethnographic and autobiographical explorations of social identities and relationships, (un)belonging, and how practitioners and academics do their work. They show the ongoing need to rethink and re-examine how to do critical and engaging scholarly work. Life stories are necessarily, messy, complex and personal experiences. 34 b/w illus.

The chapters in this collection explore the constellation of points where stories of individual experience and experiences are in dialogue with political, cultural and social narratives.

Encompassing themes of individual and social identities and relationships, (un)belonging, motherhood, academic lives and what it means to be an arts practitioner, these stories and accounts continue and expand the ongoing conversations of how practitioners and academics do their work. They show the ongoing need to rethink and re-examine how to do critical and engaging scholarly work. Life stories are necessarily, messy, complex, personal and often deal with experiences that have been challenging for the author in some way.

Contributions from Ross Adamson, Suzy Bamblett, Emily Bell, Jenni Cresswell, Hannah Davita Ludikhuijze, Sandra Lyndon, Vanessa Marr, Jess Moriarty, Éva Mikuska, Holly Stewart, Deirdre Russell, Louise Spiers, Lucianna Whittle.

This is the first book in a new series. The Performance and Communities Book Series celebrates, challenges and researches performance in the real world. The series will consider how contemporary performance can engage, build and learn from previous, existing, evolving and new communities of people – practitioners, academics, students, audiences.

Introduction - Jess Moriarty and Ross Adamson - Introduction 

Chapter One - Jenni Cresswell - Timeframes of Love: Perceptions of Memory and Nostalgia Explored through Creative Practice  

Chapter Two - Hannah Davita Ludikhuijze - Storying the Self as an Outsider within the Community – the Self-transformative Performance of Voluntourists in Rural Malawi  

Chapter Three - Sandra Lyndon and Éva Mikuska - Narratives, co-constructions, co-performances and co-reflections:  the production of ‘self’ in research and the importance of intersectionality 

Chapter Four - Suzy Bamblett - ‘The child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows.’:  How to grow an autoethnographer.   

Chapter Five - Deirdre Russell – Narrativity vs Network: Competing models of identity in the autobiographical film Shock of the Muse 

Chapter Six - Vanessa Marr - Domestic Academic – A Self-Portrait 

Chapter Seven - Lucianna Whittle and Jess Moriarty - Woman must write her self – a collaborative autoethnography on two women’s experiences with a community research project  

Chapter Eight - Emily Bell – What I Left in Haworth. 

Chapter Nine - Ross Adamson - The ‘ghost teacher’: Writing stories of first-time documentary filmmakers 

Chapter Ten - Louise Spiers - An autoethnographic Salon des Refusés of spiritual experiences of epilepsy 

Chapter Eleven - Holly Stewart - Writing to ‘Take Back Control’: Using Autoethnography to Examine Narratives Within a Post-Brexit Society