CFP! Symposium and Special Issue of Life Writing on “Affective Ambush and Life Narrative: Engaging with and Interrogating Emotional Responses During Research“

Research symposium: 20^th June 2025 

James Cook University, Townsville 

Papers are invited with a view to development into articles for a confirmed special issue of Life Writing journal (scheduled for mid-2026). 

Full final articles of 6000-9000 words are due 4 August 2025. 

Abstract submissions are due 25 March 2025. 

Call for Papers 

Life writing about trauma and grief is a significant area of study. However, researching such areas takes a mental toll on researchers who must monitor and support their own wellbeing and mental health while investigating topics that can be triggering, depressing, and weigh heavily on their minds. Importantly, embodied emotions which arise in the research process can also be fruitful or useful to research and writing. There is limited research from a literary studies perspective that acknowledges and theorises this dual reality of conducting such research. 

Our essay on this topic, “Affective Ambush: An Autotheoretical Approach to Understanding Emotions as Useful to the Research Process” has appeared recently in Life Writing. In this work we identify and articulate a phenomenology we call “affective ambush”, the experience of encountering emotional or traumatic life narratives in otherwise (traditionally) academic reading. In this work we investigate our own affective responses as researchers illuminating how involuntary psychological triggering during the research process might not only be managed, but might be productively acknowledged and used as a constructive or generative part of research methods. 

We are interested in parallel experiences of other researchers encountering this phenomenon and aim to open up new avenues of relating to, understanding, and producing human-focused research.  

We are seeking a diverse range of expert considerations of how researchers are impacted by affective responses to troubling, triggering, and challenging literary and cultural texts through the research process. We seek responses that move beyond a position of problematising the phenomenon and instead reflect on the utility and potential for emotions to enhance or engage us in deeper research. We highly encourage submissions that use an autotheoretical method.  

We recommend potential contributors first read the essay on which this special issue will build, available open access here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14484528.2024.2344002  

Our suggestions for engaging with this theme include (but are not limited to): 

• Researcher self-care while researching troubling texts and material 
• Trauma-informed approaches to methodology and life writing scholarship 
• The ethics of ambushing readers with traumatic life narration with or without explicit warning in academic texts 
• Exploration of an unexpected emotional/embodied response to an academic text you did not anticipate would elicit such a response (with an analytical eye to any life narrative approaches employed in the work) 
• What you have learned from and about working with trauma/triggering life narrative texts particularly in terms of affect, researcher identity and/or bringing research “back to life” (Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, p. 10) 
• Reflective and analytical responses to non-life narrative texts which employ unexpected life writing approaches related to traumatic or grief-related experiences (for example, academic articles from other disciplines, autofiction, documentaries or films) 
• Developing affective literacies in the research context and the classroom 
• Autotheoretical engagements with life writing texts that employ affective strategies to explore trauma, grief etc. 
• The productive use of emotions in research, or emotions as a tool in the research process 
• Feminist approaches to embodied research and the blurring of academic/personal identity 
• Exploration of trigger/content warnings and their usefulness (or not) in the context of traumatic life narratives and life narrative research 
• Refusal of the body/intellect and emotion/reason dichotomies in academic works which employ life narrative approaches (regardless of discipline) 
• Balancing risk and safety in approaches to reading and writing life narrative texts related to grief and trauma 
• Institutional duty of care: what is the responsibility of institutions in this context? What can universities do to support researchers working on these topics? 

Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words by 25 March 2025 here: https://forms.office.com/r/9ti6K78ws2 

Contact Emma Maguire (emma.maguire@jcu.edu.au) and Marina Deller (marina.deller@flinders.edu.au) with questions. 

Editors
Dr Emma Maguire is a Lecturer in English and Writing at James Cook University. She researches gender, life narrative, media, and sexual trauma narratives. She is a member of the Life Narrative Lab, and a steering committee member for the International Auto/Biography Association Asia-Pacific. Emma has edited two journal special issues for M/C: Media/Culture journal, one for a/b: Autobiography Studies (forthcoming 2025), a forum for a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and has published life narrative research in Biography, Prose Studies, Life Writing, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and the European Journal of Life Writing.  

Dr Marina Deller is a creative and pedagogical researcher at Flinders University, South Australia. Their research investigates grief and trauma narratives, materiality, and object-based learning. Their work in these areas has been published in Life Writing and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and is forthcoming in The Journal of Literature, Language & Culture. They are currently editorial assistant on a special issue on #MeToo in life narratives for a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. They recently co-organised the IABA Asia-Pacific 2023 virtual conference ‘Life Narrative in Unprecedented Times: writing the unexpected, narrating the future’. They are the creative events curator and coordinator for the Life Narrative Lab. 

Supported by the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing

CFP! Special Issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies on Lives, Selves, Media and #MeToo: Anticipating Futures, Tracing Histories and Articulating the Present

250-300 word abstracts due 3 March, 2024 (instructions below)

This issue explores #MeToo not as an isolated media flare, but as part of a wider social, cultural and historical matrix wherein auto/biographical modes and practices collide and connect with feminist resistance—as well as negotiate and impel its backlash. #MeToo crosses media borders, inviting scholars to consider how media shape and are shaped by political movements, and how transmedia forms a part of this story.

Testimony is the dominant form of engagement with the #MeToo hashtag. Millions of tweets have offered testimony and asked for the public to bear witness as people who have long been silent about their experiences of sexual violence, most of them women, speak out on social media. That a feminist phenomenon occurring in the age of the selfie has been propelled by auto/biographical statements, is extremely online, and has “Me” at its centre is possibly unsurprising and legitimately—to scholars of life narrative, at least—fascinating.

Me Too began in 2006 as a Black, feminist grassroots movement founded by activist Tarana Burke. The focus was local support for Black girls and women who had survived sexual violence, and Burke used Myspace to spread her message. The Twitter hashtag exploded in 2017 in social media ecosystem different from the 2006 Myspace era. The flood of mass digital testimony drew attention from news media, inspiring books, and breaking a long-held silence by exposing perpetrators of sexual violence, chiefly in the entertainment and media industry.

Likewise, #MeToo spills over historical and national borders, and is embedded within broader discourses and histories of feminist activism and sexual violence. We want to explore what has alternately been called the ‘moment’ and the ‘movement’ of #MeToo/Me Too beyond the temporal location of the hashtag and phrase. What conditions, movements, stories, and texts came before #MeToo that benefit from re-examination (or refresh) in light of #MeToo? What conditions, movements, stories, and texts are emerging after #MeToo and might productively be linked to this significant phenomenon? And where might we imagine the future leads now? Have futures been opened up or closed off by #MeToo? What have we learned from the past that would benefit future feminist activism addressing sexual violence?

This issue welcomes broad interpretations of “media” to think beyond the social media context and into print media, ephemera, sound and screen media, with a view to examining the significance of mediation (and media contexts) in testimony, auto/biographical practices, and feminist activism.

Our suggestions for engaging with this theme include:

• How media forms and networks (digital, print and beyond) have played a part in feminist resistance
• Stories, reportage, memoir, and media before and/or after #MeToo
• The violent rhythms of ‘progress’ and backlash, and how this pattern shapes the stories we tell about gender and violence
• Backlash politics and social media
• Hashtag activism
• Testimony and media(tion)
• The embeddedness of media in social and political life, relevant to gendered violence and feminist protest
• Forms of protest and the evolution of protest in relation to gender and violence
• Addressing the problems of #MeToo
• Racism, sexism and other forms of ideological violence within activist movements
• Testimony and feminist media history/feminist activism
• Posthuman feminist pasts, presents and futures
• Health humanities approaches to #MeToo
• Mediating sexual trauma in the past and present
• Mass testimony and collective trauma
• Digital activism, policy, and structural change
• Parallel phenomena (what is occurring parallel to #MeToo and how would we benefit from seeing ‘across’ media and political contexts?)
• Memoir and other narratives of childhood trauma
• Feminist resistance, gendered violence and celebrity culture
• Teaching #MeToo
• #MeToo futures
• Memoir of the movement including Tarana Burke’s Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

Submission Instructions

We are seeking 250-300 word abstracts for articles of up to 6000 words, and shorter creative or critical contributions of up to 1000 words. Please make clear in your abstract which format your proposal pertains to.

Abstracts are due on 4 March 2024, and full papers will be due on 2 September 2024.

Please submit abstracts via email to: kylie.cardell@flinders.edu.au and emma.maguire@jcu.edu.au

We are also planning a collaborative workshop for potential contributors in July 2024, and details will follow for those whose full papers are requested.

The editorial team for this special issue is led by Kylie Cardell (Flinders University) and Emma Maguire (James Cook University).

International Auto/Biography Association Asia-Pacific Conference 2023   

26^th-28^th Sept 2023 (online conference)  

“Life Narrative in Unprecedented Times: Writing the Unexpected, Narrating the Future”.   

The pandemic has functioned as a reminder of the importance of life storying and testimony as records of experience, as information sharing, or as creative engagement. This conference explores the ways momentous events shape life narration in the past, now, and for the future, for instance, the role of journalism in circulating personal stories, understanding of the impacts of mental health, and a renewed engagement in family and community histories. Each of these themes has been particularly notable during COVID-19. We invite proposals that address life narratives at unprecedented times, but also how life narrative is located by recent histories in diverse contexts and temporality.   

The conference welcomes critical and creative responses including, but not limited to, the themes outlined below:   

• narrating ‘the new normal’  
• disrupted/stalled futures  
• national/ regional/ local life narratives   
• narrating isolation/ lockdown   
• non-human and post-human lives, particularly connections during COVID/isolation  
• illness narratives   
• stories of grief and loss   
• ageing and storytelling   
• life narrative as record-keeping   
• memorabilia, materials and objects   
• social media / the rise of TikTok   
• children and youth as life narrators   
• Reality television, trends and shifts   
• non-fiction podcasts   
• travel narratives/post-COVID   
• genre shifts (journalism, the essay)   
• narratives of work and employment   

Papers will be 10-15 minutes in length.   

Proposals of 300 words + bios of 50 words should be sent to iaba.asiapacific@flinders.edu.au by 7^th July 2023.  

 Life Narrative Lab / “Lives in Motion” Creative Readings Event

17th May 2023, The Wheatsheaf Hotel, Thebarton

The Life Narrative Lab is excited to host our first creative event of 2023!

Life stories, like the lives they’re based on, are often in motion, moving, changing.  “Lives in Motion” is an ode to the shifting demands of life writing projects-in-progress. This will be an evening of creative readings; presenters will introduce their project and then read an excerpt (or several shorter excerpts) for 6-8 minutes. 

Readings will: 

• Be presented by Adelaide-based Postgraduate Students and Early Career Researchers working on life writing projects. 
• Fit under the category of ‘Life Writing’ – be it autobiographical, biographical, autofictional, or hybrid. 
• Be at a stage where sections are able to be polished for presentation to an audience (including members of the public). 

As opposed to a traditional ‘work in progress’ event where feedback or discussion follows presentation, this event intends to make a space specifically to showcase the transitional stages of a project. We hope to allow fledgling work to make its first sounds, and for the presenters to test their own work through reading.