Deadline Extended - Call for Speakers: Narratives of the Third Generation (4/14/2017; 6/7-9/2017) IABA London Roundtable

deadline for submissions: 
April 14, 2017
full name / name of organization: 
The International Auto/Biography Association, Chapter of the Americas Conference
contact email: 

Call for Speakers
“Narratives of the Third Generation”
Roundtable within the framework of IABA Europe 2017: Life Writing, Europe and New Media

June 7-9, 2017, King's College London, Strand Campus in Central London
Organizer: Marta Lysik

This roundtable seeks to convene the practitioners: representatives of the third generation (i.e. grandchildren) tracing their grandparents’ past (e.g. WW II experience), documenting the search and publishing its results in the new media, blogs, vlogs or other social media. It is the third generation which investigates, reads, talks, interviews, travels, and enlists the help of available technologies in an attempt to learn and to know where they come from. Their search is often intuitive and also attracts like-minded sleuths, who very often find each other online. It is not only a historical and genealogical research, but also an autobiographical venture for them (autoBLOGraphical for this roundtable organizer) – in the process they recreate their grandparents’ lives while also discovering and determining the facets of their own identity and piecing together their own life stories. The biographical and autobiographical intermingle in these projects.

How does technology facilitate and/or hamper that kind of research? How are identities online created and maintained? How is memory preserved in the digital form? What would have happened if Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated had been an online project first, not a book?

The roundtable (120 minutes) will ideally consist of 6 or 7 presenters, including the moderator, who will each speak for 10 minutes, leaving sufficient time for exchanges with the audience.

Please send a short abstract (100 words) for a 10-minute presentation together with a short bio note by March 31, 2017 to the roundtable organizer and moderator Marta Lysik at marta.lysik@uwr.edu.pl

Notifications of acceptance will be sent shortly after the deadline.

I look forward to receiving your submissions and seeing you in London!

Sincerely,

Marta Lysik

 Dr. Marta LysikCommunication Management Program CoordinatorAssistant ProfessorInstitute for Literature and FilmDepartment of Journalism and Social CommunicationThe University of Wroclaw http://dziennikarstwo.uni.wroc.pl/instytut/wykladowcy/marta-lysik/