Gathering Stories for Community Action

Abstract

In October 2021, the International Autobiography Association Chapter of the Americas (IABAA) presented an online conference “Stories of Change, Stories for Change,” co-hosted by IABAA and the Faculty of Arts Signature Area “Stories of Change” at the University of Alberta (Canada). The conference featured speakers from across the Americas on autobiographical storytelling. The plenary panel for the conference featured four scholars in North America and the Caribbean engaged in different projects of mass listening, scholars doing critical work engaging with people and stories in order to create change in their communities. In order to continue the impact of that wonderful session, we invited the panelists from that session to reflect a bit more on that discussion to be included in this special issue cluster. Three of the panelists were able to join Laura Beard to pick up that discussion of their projects and the crucial ways in which stories help move us, as Marcy Schwartz points out, “from the micro to the macro, from the personal and intimate scene to the social and political expanse of human experience in the world.”

Keywords:

• Stories
• community
• action

Additional information

Funding

Modern Language Association.

Notes on contributors

Laura J. Beard

Laura J. Beard is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, where she has also served as Associate Vice President Research. She has held research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Fulbright, for work in Mexico, Canada, and the US. Her books include Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women’s Autobiographical Writings in the Americas (University of Virginia Press), The Divided States: Unraveling National Identities in the Twenty-First Century (University of Wisconsin Press, co-edited with Ricia Chansky), and, currently in progress, Wanted: A Life Narrative in Deadwood. She is an original member of the Stories of Change Signature Area of Research and Creative Collaboration in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta and a member of the Steering Committee for the International Autobiography Association Chapter of the Americas.

Ricia Anne Chansky

Ricia Anne Chansky is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and Director of the new Oral History Lab @UPRM where she leads projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is an Assembling Voices Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) at Columbia University, the Senior Climate Justice Fellow at the Humanities Action Lab at Rutgers University, and a partner in the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico. Her most recent book, co-edited with Laura J. Beard, is The Divided States: Unraveling National Identity in the Twenty-First Century (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023).

Amy Kaler

Amy Kaler is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. She is one of the founders of the Stories of Change Signature Areas of Research and Creative Collaboration in the Faculty of Arts. She is the author of five books, most recently Half-Light: Westbound on a Hot Planet (University of Alberta Press, forthcoming 2024). She has years of research experience in southern and eastern Africa, and is currently working on a social history of Protestant missionaries in West China in the first half of the twentieth century.

Marcy Schwartz

Marcy Schwartz is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, USA. She teaches Latin American literature and culture, with a focus on public culture and reading practices. She has also been active for over twenty-five years in the organization People and Stories/Gente y Cuentos, a nonprofit that leads short-story reading and discussion groups (peopleandstories.org) with participants in marginalized settings (prisons, substance abuse rehabilitation programs, adult education centers, new immigrant cultural centers, etc.).