Free access
Tuesday, 11 May 2021, 17:00-19:00
Zoom meeting: https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/86976157463?pwd=bE9ObSthNS95V0lOTXl3emtOU3RYUT09
Meeting ID: 869 7615 7463
Password: 469950
Title: Life Writing to Better Understand Oneself and Others
Summary:
In her recent book, New Forms of Self-Narration: Young Women, Life Writing and Human Rights, Spanish author Ana Belén Martínez García explores how life writing can be studied as a form of self-construction, whereby victims may reframe their story as that of an empowered survivor. In this talk, the author will provide some reading clues, as well as give insight into new methodologies when approaching auto/biographical narratives, vulnerability, and social justice. Drawing from six case studies, namely Malala Yousafzai, Hyeonseo Lee, Yeonmi Park, Bana Alabed, Nujeen Mustafa, and Nadia Murad, the author will explain how they claim a testimonial collective voice, deploy rights discourse, excite humanitarian emotions, link up their context-bound plight with bigger social justice causes, and use English as their vehicle of self-expression and self-construction.
For more on the book, visit: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030464196
For more on the author, visit: https://unav.academia.edu/AnaBelenMartinezGarcia
The Speaker:
Ana Belén Martínez García, PhD, is Associate Professor of English at ISSA – Applied Management, at the University of Navarra, Spain. Her research focuses on life writing and emotions, with special interest in young women activists for human rights. Her interest in migration and digital media has led her to join organizations such as IABA (International Auto/Biography Association), ISSN (International Society for the Study of Narrative), SELMA – Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, and Culture and Its Uses as Testimony, writing related conference papers and publications. In her book, New Forms of Self-Narration: Young Women, Life Writing and Human Rights, she insists on the need to read life-writing texts across a multiplicity of media, online and offline, looking at them as a single, though multifaceted, life-writing project. In the case of migrants and refugees, said project has as its aim generating awareness and potentially effecting social change.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7494-6670
Twitter: @AnaBMartinezG