The European Journal of Life Writing最新文献

Afterword: The Refugee Tales Walking Inquiry into Immigration Detention 后记:对移民拘留的难民故事步行调查

The European Journal of Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-12 DOI: 10.21827/ejlw.12.41236

David Herd

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Flyktpodden: Migrant and Minority Voices that Matter? Flyktpodden:移民和少数族裔的声音重要吗?

The European Journal of Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-12 DOI: 10.21827/ejlw.12.41232

Jessica Gustafsson

{"title":"Flyktpodden: Migrant and Minority Voices that Matter?","authors":"Jessica Gustafsson","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.41232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.41232","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, podcasting has frequently functioned as a tool ‘to tell stories emanating from routinely marginalized lived experiences’ (Vrikki and Malik, 274). Flyktpodden is a podcast aiming to facilitate intergenerational dialogue about escape, persecution, and migration, thereby challenging mainstream stereotypes and generating understanding of different people’s lives. This article examines the podcast through the theoretical concepts of voice (Couldry) and listening (Bassel), addressing how the podcast uses life stories to broaden the cultural awareness of escape, persecution, and migration. This article further asks whether migrant and minority voices are ascribed agency and allowed to matter. Based on a qualitative content analysis, this article concludes that the podcast offers an eclectic collection of life stories on migration and persecution through which migrants and minorities are allowed to be both vulnerable and agentive. The podcast’s intergenerational and dialogic format gives their voices legitimacy and recognition, thus challenging the hierarchy of value and attention. Moreover, it enables marginalized groups to formulate counter-narratives (Vrikki and Malik) on the historic and present-day situation in Sweden rarely heard in the public sphere.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135878435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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In_Visibilizing Stress: Refugee Tales as a Counter-Apparatus 无形的压力:难民故事作为一种对抗手段

The European Journal of Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-12 DOI: 10.21827/ejlw.12.41231

Sylvia Mieszkowski

{"title":"In_Visibilizing Stress: Refugee Tales as a Counter-Apparatus","authors":"Sylvia Mieszkowski","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.41231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.41231","url":null,"abstract":"This article claims that the UK immigration complex is best understood as an apparatus (in the sense of Foucault and Agamben) that uses stress as a tool. It further argues that the Refugee Tales project acts as a counter-apparatus, and that the project’s life writing branch makes visible the many roles which stress plays in the context of immigration legislation. Stress researchers in the humanities maintain that poverty is one of the greatest stressors (Baker), that cutting people off from their material and mental resources is the most effective way to produce stress (Hobfoll), and that disturbing established rhythms of stress and relaxation can lead to ‘zombification’ (Korovkin/Stephenson). Selected pieces of life writing by women and men in the four volumes of Refugee Tales published to date, shed light on how stress manifests for people caught up in the immigration apparatus. They do so by demonstrating how narrative can i) be a source of stress, ii) trigger stress originally caused by something else, iii) represent stress, iv) perform, v) communicate, but also vi) alleviate it. By visibilizing what the immigration apparatus keeps from view, the analysed pieces of life writing contribute to Refugee Tales’ overall goal of putting an end to indefinite detention in the UK.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135879240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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The Refugee’s Tale: The Story of the Story 《难民的故事:故事的故事

The European Journal of Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-12 DOI: 10.21827/ejlw.12.41235

Patience Agbabi

{"title":"The Refugee’s Tale: The Story of the Story","authors":"Patience Agbabi","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.41235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.41235","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the collaborative process of creating the poem ‘The Refugee’s Tale’, which was initially read at a live event and subsequently published in the first Refugee Tales anthology (Comma Press, 2016). It presents the metatextual process of interviewing the refugee to obtain their story, ‘The Refugee’s Tale’ itself, and the multifaceted aspects of the creative composition of the long poem. It examines a variety of literary and ethical challenges from the perspective of a participating writer: the imperative to do justice to the politics of the Refugee Tales movement as a whole and the individual tale in particular whilst concurrently attending to the aesthetics in creating a literary work; the intersections and differences between creating life writing and fiction; the decision to utilize the mnemonic properties of a particular European poetic form, the heroic crown, to tell the tale of a North African woman; the avoidance of pornography of pain; and, fundamentally, questions of voice – generating it, giving it, lending it, and silencing it. The author concludes that the merits of this collaborative process, the pairing of refugees with literary writers to craft and recite their life story, is the most effective way to capture the public imagination and enable those silenced voices to be heard.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135827415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Fast and Slow Thinking in Narrative Recovery: Pluralistic Trauma Processing during Covid-19 叙事恢复中的快与慢思维:新冠肺炎期间的多元创伤处理

The European Journal of Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-12 DOI: 10.21827/ejlw.12.40837

Elayne Smith

{"title":"Fast and Slow Thinking in Narrative Recovery: Pluralistic Trauma Processing during Covid-19","authors":"Elayne Smith","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.40837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.40837","url":null,"abstract":"How can writing about the collective cultural trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic help in an autobiographical illness narrative about coming to terms with pre-existing Dissociative Identity Disorder? This disorder is characterised by inner plurality, autobiographical amnesia, and difficulties in discerning past from present times. Thinking about how to recall let alone organise such a life story might appear, at first, to be an impossible challenge. Might slow-thinking (coined by Kahneman 2011) through critical reading of comparisons between personal experiences and collective cultural experiences of trauma be a resolution? This lived experience account shares how the pandemic triggered fast-thinking dissociative symptoms but in so doing, gave me the story pieces to start forming a narrative about my earlier childhood trauma. Through slow, comparative readings of this personal experience with classic literary and collective cultural experiences of historical traumas, a co-produced narrative emerges. As a result, instead of the therapeutic creative writing modes that are gaining much traction in third sector mental health programmes and wellbeing forums (such as therapy journals, expressive writing or drama role play, see for instance Sampson 2007), the focus here is on how auto-ethnographic self-therapy can also provide new directions for narrative recovery in pluralistic trauma processing.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135877929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Narrating Paradox Affects: Unaccompanied Minor Asylum-Seekers in Austria 叙事悖论影响:奥地利无人陪伴的未成年寻求庇护者

The European Journal of Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-12 DOI: 10.21827/ejlw.12.41230

Ayşe Dursun, Birgit Sauer

{"title":"Narrating Paradox Affects: Unaccompanied Minor Asylum-Seekers in Austria","authors":"Ayşe Dursun, Birgit Sauer","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.41230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.41230","url":null,"abstract":"Asylum-seeking unaccompanied children and youngsters are situated at the crossroads between exclusionary and repressive asylum policies, on the one hand, and relatively inclusive and caring child welfare policies, on the other. This is the ‘asylum-child welfare paradox’ (Dursun and Sauer 2021). In this article, we explore the role of affect, feelings, and emotions in how unaccompanied minors respond to and process but also co-construct and resist this structural paradox through their ‘affective narratives’ (Bargetz and Eggers 2022). Based on qualitative interviews conducted with (former) unaccompanied minors in Austria in 2015, we observe that minors mobilize a set of feelings of fear, disappointment, frustration, and uncertainty due to experiences of rejection or loss of control; but unaccompanied minors also express feelings of confidence, joy, hope, and solidarity vis-à-vis their new environment and their future. Furthermore, the highly affective issues of belonging and non-belonging to their host country, of proximity and distance to other human beings hold an important place in their narratives as well as the ordering of time. We conclude that, rather than merely reacting to paradoxes that structure their social positions, minors actively shape such paradoxes and render them tangible and workable by means of narrating contradictory feelings and emotions and by mobilizing affectivity.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135878583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Introduction: Life Writing through Refugee Tales 简介:通过难民故事书写人生

The European Journal of Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-12 DOI: 10.21827/ejlw.12.41228

Sandra Mayer, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Kevin Potter

{"title":"Introduction: Life Writing through Refugee Tales","authors":"Sandra Mayer, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Kevin Potter","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.41228","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.41228","url":null,"abstract":"This cluster took off from an interdisciplinary and international workshop hosted at the University of Vienna in May 2022. Some of the original contributors turned their presentations into articles for this cluster; other articles were recruited later on. The original idea for both the workshop and cluster was inspired by the UK’s Refugee Tales project, founded and organized by David Herd and Anna Pincus. Some of the articles collected here discuss the life writing aspect of this project from different angles and positions: Patience Agbabi as contributing author to the first Refugee Tales volume, Sandra Mayer as a scholar of literary celebrity, and Sylvia Mieszkowski as cultural analyst. Other articles take a look at other projects in which displaced persons work on life narratives alongside citizens of the host countries: Jessica Gustafsson writes about the Swedish Flyktpodden podcast and Helga Ramsey-Kurz about the Austrian ARENA initiative. Two articles provide the collection with an opening frame, as they focus on the paradoxes that are perpetually produced by immigration law and the cultural conceptions of ‘the refugee’ in the European context (Judith Kohlenberger) and in Austria, specifically for minors (Ayşe Dursun and Birgit Sauer). An Afterword by one of the founders and organizers of Refugee Tales (David Herd) closes the cluster, offering an assessment of the project’s role in the context of the UK’s political situation in the summer of 2023, just after both Houses of Parliament passed the Illegal Migration Bill, which the UN has publicly denounced as contrary to international law.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135827193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Decentring the Author: Refugee Tales and Collaborative Life Narrative as Activism 分散作者:难民故事和作为行动主义的协作生活叙事

The European Journal of Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-12 DOI: 10.21827/ejlw.12.41233

Sandra Mayer

{"title":"Decentring the Author: Refugee Tales and Collaborative Life Narrative as Activism","authors":"Sandra Mayer","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.41233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.41233","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on collaborative life-storytelling as a tool of socio-political literary activism in the context of the Refugee Tales project. It argues that Refugee Tales is unique: on the one hand, it capitalizes on the cultural authority and ‘attention capital’ (Van Krieken) of well-known writers who offer a scathing critique of the UK asylum system; on the other hand, the project deconstructs this authority through collaboratively-authored life narrative, polyphony, and diversity. Adding value as a marketable name, public face, and articulate voice, the celebrity author nevertheless experiences a decentring, as the focus shifts towards more dialectic and inclusive negotiations of authorship. In this process, the myth of the white, male author genius is dismantled and replaced by an emphasis on the collaborative and the collective. What takes centre stage instead is the powerful process of storytelling as an act of remembrance, recording, and bearing witness, emerging as a collective endeavour through exchange, repetition, and circulation within the public sphere. This storytelling project thus has the potential to disrupt, and ultimately change, dominant discourses around migration, displacement, and asylum. Furthermore, Refugee Tales problematizes the ideology of individualism that underlies the cult of the genius author, autobiographical narrative, and celebrity construction.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135827317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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The Refugee (Tale) Paradox: Narratives of Vulnerability and Aspirationality 难民(故事)悖论:脆弱性和抱负的叙述

The European Journal of Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-12 DOI: 10.21827/ejlw.12.41229

Judith Kohlenberger

{"title":"The Refugee (Tale) Paradox: Narratives of Vulnerability and Aspirationality","authors":"Judith Kohlenberger","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.41229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.41229","url":null,"abstract":"The global refugee regime can be characterized by central paradoxes, similarly to how our societal narratives around displacement and refuge are fundamentally contradictory, yet immanent to the system they help to maintain. Following Hannah Arendt’s notion of the ‘aporia of human rights’, I discuss one particular salient set of contradictions as the ‘refugee paradox’. It describes a set of policy expectations and narratives around the figure of the refugee as vulnerable and hence deserving of protection, yet self-sufficient and self-reliant; one who must be happy to have survived and not aspire to much more, but, once the asylum status is approved, must display agency and aspirations for upward mobility; a victim of their circumstances, yet a role model of integration and economic success in the host society. I analyse the discursive charging and real-life consequences of the refugee paradox with a particular view to discourses of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’, or ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ refugees in the present geopolitical landscape. Existing interventions, be they local aid, humanitarian intervention or political activism, necessarily move within the narrow confines of this paradox and therefore seldom accomplish more than symptom control. Thus, at its core, the refugee paradox is naturalized and serves to legitimate the status quo.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135827416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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A Difficult Passage to Navigate: From Asylum Story to Refugee Tale 艰难的道路:从庇护故事到难民故事

The European Journal of Life Writing Pub Date : 2023-09-12 DOI: 10.21827/ejlw.12.41234

Helga Ramsey-Kurz

{"title":"A Difficult Passage to Navigate: From Asylum Story to Refugee Tale","authors":"Helga Ramsey-Kurz","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.12.41234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.12.41234","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws on the results of a life writing initiative, ARENA (Archive of Refugee Encounter Narratives), developed at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. It involves students of English collaborating with refugees over periods of three months to write down the latter’s stories. Like other storytelling ventures spawned by the perceived European refugee crisis of 2015, ARENA aims to enable a better understanding of the situation of refugees in Europe than the dominant asylum discourse allows. To this end, students arrange regular encounters with participating refugees and encourage them to tell whatever they consider to be their stories. The texts the students craft from these exchanges capture not only the refugees’ stories but also their own experience of hearing them. I will examine the embodied act of narration thus recorded in the ARENA corpus and contest critical claims that, too indebted to the rigid veracity standards defining official refugee testimonials, refugee life writing is unable to augment new ways of thinking about refugee experience and forced migration at large. My argument is that such criticism does not apply where the dialogic nature of live telling is consciously experienced and given due expression in the life writing it eventually becomes.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135878422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0