a/b Auto/Biography Study Group

This was an environment in which being a ‘clever bookish girl’ and seeking a life of the mind was equated to hubris and asexuality and was routinely met with hostility, bullying and physical and psychosocial aggression. [...] I will locate this discussion within the contested frame of ‘community’, a word used often as a heuristic device for all that is good and valued in civil society, a space where “the process of communication is in fact the process of community: the sharing of common meanings, and thence common activities and purposes; the offering, reception and comparison of new meanings, leading to the tensions a. [...] Namely, 9 translation is a ‘site’ of power and thus constitutive to the research process and situated knowledge production about the Self and the Other in biographies. [...] The project revealed the challenges and tensions of using auto/biographical methods when contending with low attendance, differing expectations of the assignment and power dynamics in the classroom. [...] In this paper we will be exploring the implications of choosing to never ‘live with’ family members again, in terms of the act of becoming estranged or the processes and cycles of estrangement.