Adan Jerreat-Poole

Abstract

This presentation calls for an ethical digital set of pedagogies that centres the experiences and wisdom of Mad/crip/disabled bodyminds and resists narratives of speed and efficiency often applied to digital platforms and processes. As we turn to digital media to teach life writing, we can reimagine our relationships with our students and technology through an ethics of care, intimacy, and interdependency. Inspired by Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch’s concept of “crip technoscience,” alongside Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s theory of “cripping the apocalypse,” I call for online teaching practices based on flexibility, access, slowness, rest, glitches, failure, and collective care.

Bio

Adan Jerreat-Poole is a Mad/crip settler scholar working at the intersections of digital media, disability, and life writing. Their work has appeared in a/b:Autobiography Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Game Studies. They are a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University.

Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

Abstract

In spite of the challenges, remote learning communities of the 2020 Covid19 pandemic allowed many faculty to teach from the literal spaces of their personal lives rather than from an impersonal, institutional space. Some received training and were taught to understand, accept, and support a variety of ways for people of all abilities to be present for teaching/learning. This presentation argues that the teaching of life writing can be as effective, if not more so, in raising awareness of ableism and more accommodating of people with conditions that are actually triggered by f2f teaching than any training in online teaching.

Bio

Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle is an Inter-Americanist whose specializations include autobiography of dictatorship, immigration memoir, and autoethnography. Her book, Américanas, Autocracy and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator, is out with Routledge Press. Her current project is a monograph about academic women’s career narratives.

Luciana Erregue-Sacchi

Abstract

The present autoethnographic contribution consists of a two-part essay on navigating professional life in the literary and museum field as a fifty-something Latina immigrant in Canada with a graduate degree. I will address the Early Modern self- presentation of female artist Artemisia Gentileschi in her work Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting. The second part of the presentation will connect traditional self-portraiture to digital self-portraiture (selfie). Through a blog post as SpectatorCurator, I will engage with the production, and reproduction, of the performative self in the museum environment.

Bio

Luciana Erregue-Sacchi is an Argentinian Canadian writer, editor, and Art Historian, and blogger (Spectator Curator). She is a Banff Centre Literary Arts Alumna (2019). She is the founder of Laberinto Press.

Marina Deller

Abstract

This year I led a module titled ‘objects and documents’ within the topic ‘Life Writing’ at Flinders University, South Australia. I set out to teach ‘objects and documents’ (photographs, trinkets, letters, clothing, and other personal effects) as forms of life narrative, and as intertextual elements within life narrative. When planning, I did not anticipate teaching this very ‘material’ topic entirely online. This paper explores how teaching materiality and intertextuality in life narratives acted as a ‘grounding’ element during an ‘virtual’ study experience, reconnecting students with their physical surrounds. I reflect on student feedback and experience alongside my own.

Bio

Marina Deller is an academic and PhD candidate in Life Writing at Flinders University, South Australia. Her research investigates fragmented life narratives centred on grief and loss. Her writing interests include grief, identity, relationships, the body, and experimental literary form. She is affiliated with the Flinders Life Narrative Research Group.