Call for papers

XIV Global IABA Conference 2026

International Auto/Biography Association

RESIST TO EXIST:

Life writing, democracy, and conceivable futures

State University of Bahia (UNEB)

Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

July 21-24, 2026

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS--January 30, 2026

The XIV Global Conference of the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) will take place from July 21 to 24, 2026, in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, in partnership with the State University of Bahia (UNEB). Under the theme “RESIST TO EXIST: life writing, democracy, and conceivable futures”,the event invites researchers to problematize the presence of bodies—racialized, epistemological, political bodies—in contexts of survival and resistance, especially in settings marked by structural oppression, persistent inequalities, exclusionary regimes, crises of democracy, and global reconfigurations. By examining auto/biographical production as a field of dispute and symbolic engagement, the Conference highlights its potential in constituting subjects who, in narrating themselves, develop forms of insurgency  against historical processes of silencing and disengagement.

Historically, life writing narratives—in their multiple forms, including diaries, memoirs, correspondence, testimonies, oral histories, and, more recently, digital expressions and performances—have mobilized discursive hegemonies, affirmed subalternized presences, and demanded social and political recognition. In contexts where democracies grow increasingly fragile, these narratives take on the character of insurgent political acts, capable of challenging epistemic violence, rebuilding community ties, and expanding the bounds of visibility and existence.

In this regard, this IABA meeting proposes a debate attentive to insurgent voices that refuse marginalization and mobilize narrative practices—written, oral, digital, corporeal—to rewrite democratic horizons. In other words, it seeks to examine the ways in which auto/biographical materials operate as technologies of resistance against social inequalities; how memories and dissident voices can reopen, displace, or reinvent democracies; and how new expressive ecologies—digital, multimodal, performative—drive expanded forms of political participation and democratic imagination.

The Conference will welcome individual paper proposals, panel proposals consisting of three to four papers, and roundtable suggestions that engage with its thematic focus and align with the specific axes that structure the program. It is expected, therefore, to foster a space for critical reflection—transdisciplinary and internationally connected—capable of deepening the debate on the political, epistemological, and aesthetic potentials of life writing.

Thematic Axes

1.   Life writing as technologies of resistance

Explores intimate writings—such as diaries, memoirs, letters, testimonies—as technologies of subjectivation and political resistance in contexts of surveillance, repression, and state or epistemic violence, as well as struggles for survival, disobedience, and repositioning of the subject in relation to practices of appeasement. Includes reflections on the body as a sensitive archive: inscriptions of pain, desire, precariousness, and struggle.

2.   Life writing, citizenship, and the right to speak

Explores the relationship between autobiography, citizenship, and the right to narrate, considering inequalities of enunciation and disputes over ethical-political recognition. Examines the ways in which life narratives expand public space, challenge the limits of liberal citizenship, and introduce alternative regimes of listening. Addresses collective memories, community testimonies, and the inclusion of subjects historically silenced in public debate.

3.   Insurgent memories and emancipatory auto/biographical practices

Investigates narratives produced by subjects situated in contexts of coloniality—women, Black populations, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities—discussing cultures and geopolitics of decolonial storytelling. Proposes discussions of materials and new practices (notebooks, agendas, letters, blogs, digital networks) and practices of narrative disobedience capable of reconfiguring what can be remembered, said, or forgotten.

4.   Between fiction, testimony, and truth: poetics of auto-insurgency

Examines the boundaries between autobiography, autofiction, biofiction, and testimony, problematizing the statutes of truth, verisimilitude, and invention in life writing. Explores the fictionalization of the self and resistance as aesthetic and political forms, enabling the narration of the unspeakable, the protection of the vulnerable, or the reinvention of modes of existence. Discusses the role of imagination as  claim and resistance.

5.   Technopolitics of resistance: digital writings and networks

Examines digital writing—posts, videos, podcasts, threads, platforms, collaborative environments—as new auto/biographical ecologies and fields of dispute over visibility, memory, and affective mobilization. Analyzes new narratives, critiques of testimony, and forms of collective action mediated by technologies. Considers the ambivalences of digital environments: surveillance, algorithms, colonialities, and the opening of counter-hegemonic spaces.

6.   Archives, memory, and the politics of forgetting

Discusses the construction of control, legitimacy, and silencing around life-writing archives, interrogating preservation, destruction, and curation as political acts. Examines struggles over Truth Commissions, transitional justice, community archives, domestic collections, and digital repositories. Analyzes institutional erasure, structural invisibility, and the insurgent power of re-membering as a form of rewriting the past.

7.   Innovative aesthetics: poetics, performativities, and modes of existence

Addresses experimental, hybrid, multimodal, corporeal, or otherwise innovative aesthetics that challenge traditional forms of life writing. Analyzes diaries, letters, performances, videos, and other genres and the forms of objection that displace norms of gender, race, and subjectivity. Reflects on the performative nature of life writing and its political potentials in creating habitable worlds.

8.   Life writing, health, and vulnerability: narrating the body as political act

Explores poetics of illness, pain, aging, clinical contexts, mental health, and institutional care as forms of trauma elaboration, confrontation with suffering, and reclamation of subjective and collective agency as acts of resistance to pathologization and dehumanization. Discusses the lived body as territory of memory, pain, healing, and identity.

9.   Insurgent methodologies of auto/biographical research

Discusses interdisciplinary approaches that articulate literature, cinema, history, anthropology, psychology, arts, and cultural studies in life writing research. Addresses these issues through methodological considerations: challenges of working with diaries, letters, testimonies, and sensitive archives. Highlights creative and shared methodologies—workshops, collective writing practices, performative devices, autoethnography, and collaborative approaches that blur boundaries between researcher and narrator.

10.               Ancestrality, territorialities, and climate crises: insubordinate auto/biographies

Analyzes oral and written life narratives as practices of decolonizing knowledge, articulating politics of affirmation of knowledges situated in territories of origin, traditional communities, migrant populations, and subjects in transit, relating climate crises, territorialities, ancestralities, and the defense of life. Investigates relationships between autobiography, race, gender, ethnicity, and coloniality, emphasizing the emergence of peripheral and counter-hegemonic epistemologies.

Schedule

Submission period: 12/15/2025 to 01/30/2026
Evaluation: 02/04/2026 to 02/24/2026
Results announcement: 02/26/2026
Registration and payment: 03/01/2026 to 04/15/2026

Abstracts will be submitted through the Even3 platform - https://www.even3.com.br/iaba-global-667562 - starting on 12/15/2025.

In a follow up Conference Information Notice, we will provide information about the program, keynote speakers, registration fees, and guidelines on submission standards and access to the Registration System (Even3).

Information and further questions via email:

iababrasil2026@gmail.com