Research symposium: 20th 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, a steering committee member for the International Auto/Biography Association Asia-Pacific, and digital content co-editor for A/b: Auto/biography Studies. 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 co-editing 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.
