Auto/biography and mobilities in the time of climate emergency

The auto/biographical genre offers theoretical and methodological starting points that are key to a just and ecological mobilities transformation. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic response and its impacts made diverse lifecourse visible, climate change and its contingencies will have similar effects. S...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Mobilities 2024-09, Vol.19 (5), p.807-822
Main Authors: Pearce, Lynne, Spurling, Nicola Jane
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Autobiography
Biographies
Climate change
COVID-19
Ecological effects
Emergency response
Feminism
generations
Human performance
lifecourse
Literature reviews
mobilities
more-than-human
Pandemics
Performativity
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Summary:The auto/biographical genre offers theoretical and methodological starting points that are key to a just and ecological mobilities transformation. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic response and its impacts made diverse lifecourse visible, climate change and its contingencies will have similar effects. Simultaneously, digital cultures provide new scope for practising auto/biography and telling about diverse life stories. Through a critical review of the literature and drawing on the new insights of this Special Issue, the paper argues that a research agenda grounded in the auto/biographical is a priority. In contrast to some of the anti-biographical positions that have been influential in mobilities scholarship, the paper argues that: i) the feminist auto/biographical genre accommodates a human subject that is social and historical before being individual, with its performativity being a crucial form for unheard voices to be heard; 2) that it plays a significant role in contesting the frameworks of lifecourse that inform institutional and policy contexts; and, 3) that there is scope for a re-engagement of the non-human and the more-than-human within auto/biographical studies, which though contentious, provides a way to radically re-think how diverse life stories are (im)mobile, and the ways that human and non-human lives are valued.
ISSN:1745-0101
1745-011X
DOI:10.1080/17450101.2024.2393320