The Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London and the European Research Council-funded ‘Ego-Media’ project are delighted to be hosting the International AutoBiography Association (IABA) Europe Conference in London from 7th to 9th June 2017. The conference will highlight digital and new media. Changes in technologies of information and communication affect our everyday lives, research and teaching: key questions for the conference will be how new media have transformed both lives and life writing. We hope scholars working on other topics and earlier times will find it interesting to explore the transformations the digital is effecting in their fields. We also welcome contributions where the emphasis falls on other concerns of particular urgency for the IABA community – for example conflict, displacement, migration and refugees; women’s lives; LGBT+ lives; issues of national and European identities.
Confirmed speakers include:
- Laurie McNeill, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
- John Zuern, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
- Sidonie Smith, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities and Director, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan
- Julia Watson, Professor, Dept. of Comparative Studies, Emerita, The Ohio State University
Topics covered in keynotes, roundtables, workshops and papers include, but are not limited to:
- Diaries, blogs, vlogs
- The digital everyday
- Digital and literary forms
- Digital arts and life writing
- Social Media platforms
- Migrants’ and refugees’ stories
- Citizenship and the digital
- Life (writing) after Brexit
- Space, place and virtuality/the local and the global
- Digital identities
- European identities
- Archives
- Multimedia lives
- Digital natures
- Health, well-being and the digital self
- The networked self
- Sharing, Liking, and digital agency
- Digitised lives
- Future lives
- Digital violence
- Online abuse/trolling
- Women’s writing
- Trauma
- Crossings
- Digital activism and advocacy
- Methodologies and histories
- Audiences and reading practices
- Digital language and languages
- Online sociolinguistics
- Digital aesthetics and affects
- Technology and metaphor: digital metaphors we live by
- Performing lives
- Virtual creativity
- Online (dis)embodiment and (im)materiality
- Pedagogy
- Pre-digital media — cinema, television, print or manuscript
- Economy, austerity, and the digital
- Big data /the quantified self
- Forms of play
We are also planning to include workshops in which life writing projects or groups will present their work.
Additional information about the conference can be found here on the Centre for Life Writing Research website.