Auto/biography in Transit

May 29-June 1, 2014 at the Banff Centre, Canada

The IABA Canada conference team welcomes submissions for the ninth IABA conference, to be held at the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. This conference will focus on the themes of transit and transition as a way to think about how lives, narratives and other forms of self representation are constantly in motion. What does it mean for texts and identities to be in transit across national borders, genres, media and languages? The study of auto/biography and life writing is also in transit: where have we been, and where should we be going as a field?

In Alberta, Canada, a place that has often been conceptualized as the “frontier,” we invite proposals from a wide range of disciplines about what it means when identities and representations of many kinds push at political and conceptual boundaries.

Topics can include but are not limited to the following:

·       The state of the field—past trajectories, new directions

·       Genre, social action and auto/biography

·       Public transit: famous, infamous, ordinary lives

·       Transitory stories: making identity across and through borders

·       Auto/biographical frontiers

·       Travelling as identity and as work

·       Indigenous stories in transition

·       Transnational lives and the idea of place

·       Get outside (the human): ecocriticism, the biosphere, animal life

·       Networked selves: new media in transit

·       Life History and anthropology

·       Updates: diaries, letters, blogs, Pinterest, tumblr, and more

·       Literary movements and life writing

·       Being moved: affect and narrative

·       Trans/it: queering life stories

·       Life Studies: pedagogical issues and approaches

Keynotes

Rocío Davis, City University of Hong Kong, China

Marlene Kadar, York University, Canada

Carolyn Miller, North Carolina State University, USA

Please send 300-word abstracts as email attachments to iaba2014@ualberta.ca by September 10, 2013. Decisions will be made by September 30.