Storying the Self

Description

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 1

Jess Moriarty and Ross Adamson

1. Timeframes of Love: Perceptions of Memory and Nostalgia 7

Explored through Creative Practice

Jenni Cresswell

2. Storying the Self as an Outsider within the Community: The 18

Self-transformative Performance of Voluntourists in

Rural Malawi

Hannah Davita Ludikhuijze

3. Narratives, Co-constructions, Co-performances and Co-reflections: 36

The Production of ‘Self’ in Research and the Importance of

Intersectionality

Sandra Lyndon and Éva Mikuska

4. ‘The Child Destined to Be a Writer Is Vulnerable to Every Wind That 56

Blows’: How to Grow an Autoethnographer

Suzy Bamblett

5. Narrativity vs Network: Competing Models of Identity in the 69

Autobiographical Film Shock of the Muse

Deirdre Russell and Inga Burrows

6. The Domestic Academic: A Self-portrait Knowing Myself 89

Vanessa Marr

7. Woman Must Write Her Self: A Collaborative Autoethnography 106

on Two Women’s Experiences with a Community Research

Project

Lucianna Whittle and Jess Moriarty

8. What I Left in Haworth 122

Emily Bell

9. The ‘Ghost Teacher’: Writing Stories of First-time Documentary 139

Filmmakers

Ross Adamson

10. An Autoethnographic Salon des Refusés of Spiritual Experiences 154

of Epilepsy

Louise Spiers

11. Writing to ‘Take Back Control’: Using Autoethnography to 175

Examine Narratives within a Post-Brexit Society

Holly Stewart

Notes on Contributors 201

 

Sujets

• Authorship
• Writting
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Theater
• Performing Arts
• Theatre
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• Writing
• Author
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 25 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781789387308
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Storying the Self

Performance and Communities
Print ISSN: 2755-9440
Online ISSN: 2755-9459
Series editors: Jessica Moriarty and Kate Aughterson
The Performance and Communities book series celebrates, challenges and researches performance in the real world. We are committed to publishing diverse texts that explore various modes of performance using voice, body, space, movement, language, sound, texture, shape in work in a variety of spaces and places (from traditional theatres to site specific playgrounds). We look to publish work that responds to social, cultural, academic and physical communities.
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.
Storying the Self
Performance and Communities
EDITED BY
Ross Adamson and Jess Moriarty
First published in the UK in 2023 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2023 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2023 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS Limited
Cover designer: Aleksander Szumlas
Cover image: Louise Spiers 2022.
Frontispiece image: Jenni Cresswell, The Daughter's Dresses (Dress 1, detail), 2019. Textile Jenni Cresswell.
Production manager: Laura Christopher
Typesetter: MPS Limited
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-728-5
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-729-2
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-730-8
Series: Performance and Communities
ISSN 2755-9440 / Online ISSN 2755-9459
To find out about all our publications, please visit our website. There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue and buy any titles that are in print.
www.intellectbooks.com
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Introduction
Ross Adamson and Jess Moriarty
1. Timeframes of Love: Perceptions of Memory and Nostalgia Explored through Creative Practice
Jenni Cresswell
2. Storying the Self as an Outsider within the Community: The Self-transformative Performance of Voluntourists in Rural Malawi
Hannah Davita Ludikhuijze
3. Narratives, Co-constructions, Co-performances and Co-reflections: The Production of Self in Research and the Importance of Intersectionality
Sandra Lyndon and va Mikuska
4. The Child Destined to Be a Writer Is Vulnerable to Every Wind That Blows : How to Grow an Autoethnographer
Suzi Bamblett
5. Narrativity vs Network: Competing Models of Identity in the Autobiographical Film Shock of the Muse
Deirdre Russell and Inga Burrows
6. The Domestic Academic: A Self-portrait Knowing Myself
Vanessa Marr
7. Woman Must Write Her Self: A Collaborative Autoethnography on Two Women's Experiences with a Community Research Project
Lucianna Whittle and Jess Moriarty
8. What I Left in Haworth
Emily Bell
9. The Ghost Teacher : Writing Stories of First-time Documentary Filmmakers
Ross Adamson
10. An Autoethnographic Salon des Refus s of Spiritual Experiences of Epilepsy
Louise Spiers
11. Writing to Take Back Control : Using Autoethnography to Examine Narratives within a Post-Brexit Society
Holly Stewart
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Ross Adamson and Jess Moriarty
We seem to live in the age of the self , of memoir and autobiography, confession and intense scrutiny of individual and individualized lives. We use the phrase Storying the Self provocatively to encapsulate the idea that any work on and with the self through writing, art and film (amongst other modes of expression) is always work in progress and necessarily questions notions of a unitary isolated self. Using storying indicates our understanding of the ways in which cultural narratives enter into dialogue with the materialities and politics of actual lives and helps resist the simplistic notion that doing work with the self is a straightforward matter. As the chapters that follow show, storying the self complicates any notion that selves are easily definable or even knowable in any direct way. Criticism is sometimes levelled at auto work for its narcissistic tendencies. What is the good of me telling you about me? Indeed, why should we be interested in unknown individuals lives? Josselson (2011: 44 ) engages with this criticism directly and notes the narcissistic tensions aroused in all of us by this kind of work . There is no way to avoid these tendencies, but instead to talk about them, write about them and acknowledge them. When carried out powerfully and openly autobiographical and autoethnographic work can not only reveal the myriad of connections that selves have to others, but engage with the complex politics of those interconnected selves. We resist the charge of narcissism by showing the ways lives are bound up together and that any investigation of the other is in turn most politically powerful when the thinking, acting and writing self is revealed and explored alongside this other. Increasingly, we look to questions of social justice in such work by recognizing who and what has become easily silenced by dominant narratives and narrative making.
Where has our interest in autobiographical processes come from? We both teach on humanities courses in a UK Higher Education Institution. In a previous collection (Moriarty and Adamson 2019 ), we discussed the way we developed new undergraduate creative writing degrees with a core first year component in Storying the Self . Our ethos then and now remains the same. We believe that autobiographical and autoethnographic work in a range of modes, including writing and digital media has powerful pedagogic potential. Seen as a particular kind of creative practice this is the potential for such a practice to facilitate the development of particular kinds of knowledge in the practitioner. This is something more than knowledge and technical skill (Kemmis 2012 : 148) and is the practical understandings that allow us to not only go on writing, painting, stitching or filming, but to understand more fully the way through our practices we connect with others with the potential at least to challenge injustices when we do so.
I (Ross) was first drawn to storying the self through the practice of digital storytelling (Lambert and Hessler 2018 ). This is a media arts practice that through a series of facilitated workshop exercises encourages anyone who wants to, to create a short autobiographical film in digital media. I was introduced to the process in 2014 when I attended a digital storytelling workshop and created my first film Leaving . This digital story explored my relationship with the ten-pound pom immigration scheme as my family moved to and returned from Australia in the 1970s. It was the opportunity to reflect on that experience of immigration in the supported space of a digital storytelling workshop that led me to see the potential value of such story work. I was a media studies teacher and had to that point principally taught media theory. I realized that digital storytelling would not be just an opportunity to deepen understanding of media storytelling processes, but for students coming to university for the first time to understand each other's lives a little more through both the process and outcome of digital media creativity. The UK Higher Education context is increasingly one of marketization to get bums on seats and a consumerist ethos which is risk averse. It positions the student as a number who necessarily asks What is it am I buying? . Against this risk reducing pattern of pre-packaged learning outcomes , creating and sharing stories of the self through digital storytelling where at its best the end is unknown at the start seems to me some kind of bulwark against such new-liberal tendencies. Over to Jess
In 2008, I (Jess) saw Andrew Sparkes ( 2021 ) speak at a conference promoting how it was possible to do research differently and resist dominant narratives in traditional academic work that favoured omnipotent, hierarchical, male heteronormative voices in published, REF-able articles, monographs and books. Instead, Andrew detailed a methodology that celebrated and valued personal and evocative storytelling and for the first time in my (then, very early) career, I could envisage a way of doing academic work that mattered. That instead of pretending to be god-like and expert, I could use creative writing to give voice to the researcher and the researched in my writing. Autoethnography challenges neoliberal management structures in higher education and also offers a way of democratizing academic work by celebrating underrepresented communities and people. I have been lucky enough to co-author texts with artists, activists, survivors, students, colleagues, friends, in the spirit of social justice and in order to promote change and this constantly reminds me why what we do matters. Research and practice that draws on storytelling - images and evocative texts - and informs pedagogy nourishes me as a writer, academic, person. It has developed my understanding and sense of the craft of writing and, perhaps most importantly, it has brought me closer to the people I work with and teach in academia. In a recent conversation, I was able to tell Andrew the power of his story in 2008, of how it changed and transformed. That is what the stories in this book also have the potential to do.
In their different ways, 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. These stories and accounts are continuing and expandin