Prison stories and what they mean

The paper I proposed for this conference developed the theme of how we might derive knowledge from sources which are inherently unreliable. I set out not to reach conclusions but to challenge assumptions. I presented myself as the maker of primary texts both in fiction and journalism and suggested some of the forces at work to shape original material before it becomes apart of the public domain. I illustrated this point by telling two prison stories and commenting on the way(s) they were made public. My relationship with the Captivity Narratives community has in the past been that of a relative outsider. As a writer of stories about contemporary imprisonment I was not working in the tradition as it existed. Mark Allen was interested to push the boundaries of the genre and so made a space for me. At this conference I found myself reading my paper alongside Anne Babson of The University of Mississippi who made a presentation about a contemporary prison poet, Jimmy Santiago Baca. Our papers are to be published in Feb 2012 in a book The Captivity Narrative edited by Mark Allen. Writing about contemporary incarceration is becoming an established part of the CN genre. This was a conference with 4000+ attendees. I focussed on panels which were concerned with biography and fictionalised biography. I am still interested in the ways in which the techniques of fiction are used to produce versions of truth-telling

Fat People Exist

A couple weeks ago, I closed the stall door behind me in a Patrick Hall bathroom and was greeted by this sign. I quickly scanned the text, smiled at the picture, and had one of those warm, fuzzy, faith-in-humanity-has-been-restored kinds of moments

Fabricating methods: untold connections in story net work

This paper responds to current interest in the ‘untold’ in organizational storytelling research. In particular the research presented here contributes to studies that consider storytelling in relational terms. In this context, untold is constructed as both a provocation and a pointer to multiplicity: innumerable relationships of story. To develop and illustrate the argument of the paper, the discussion adopts interference as a deliberate methodological device. To illustrate the significance of composition and fabrication in storytelling the study consider fragments from an extensive period of multi-site ethnographic fieldwork with a professional, established and award winning author involved in literary, television drama and other story projects. The developing field of relational storytelling studies is discussed and attention drawn to key research foci: specifically current concerns for intertextuality, heteroglossia, materiality and flux. A fieldwork vignette is used to examine and extend a relational sense of ‘untold stories’. Further vignettes and a selective focus on science and technology studies relational ethnographies extends this discussion by focusing on performance, fabrication and fiction. The paper concludes that a fabrication sensibility that notices and attends to story on the move necessitates a shift in both methodological and representational strategy. In terms of method the paper demonstrates the potential value of extended, multi locational and deep field ethnography. In terms of representation, if stories are innumerable than we require a number of monograph ethnographies that can reveal and attend to varieties of limitless material, mobile and heterogeneous stories. In other words, if stories are lived, we require methods that attend to social life as lived if we are to surface and reframe hitherto untold, unseen and unheard agency at work in organizations

The ballads of <i>Tam Lin</i> and <i>Thomas the Rhymer</i>: transformations and transcriptions

Fantasy, in the shape of folk and fairy tale is the oldest and the first literary genre in Scotland, as in almost any society. (Manlove, 2003) Such stories would originally have been told orally. Two of these fairy tales appear in the fifteenth century border ballads of “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer”, and seem unique to Scotland, not least because of their debt to native fairy lore. Novelistic retelling of such traditional material became more common in the twentieth century and this, arguably, could be considered the twentieth century’s unique contribution to the telling of traditional tales. This paper explores the question of why these particular ballads should exert such a strong appeal for modern children’s writers, and how such transformations and translations might be considered modern–day variations, upholding the ballad tradition. The exemplar texts include Liz Lochhead’s Tam Lin’s Lady as well as a selection of novels for young adults which use one or both of these ballads as their source material. The paper considers how the material in both its original and transformed aspects serves important cultural functions by initiating children into facets of a social heritage and by transmitting many of a culture’s central values and assumptions as well as a body of shared allusions and experiences, ensuring that ballads can still have a significant impact on today’s young readers

Prejudice, Humor and Alief: Comments on Robin Tapley’s “Humour, Beliefs, and Prejudice”

In her “Humor, Belief and Prejudice”, Robin Tapley concludes: "Racist/racial, sexist/gender humor is funny because we think it’s true. We know the beliefs exist in the laugher, there’s no way to philosophically maneuver around that." In what follows I’ll be trying to do some philosophical maneuvering of the sort she thinks hopeless in the quote above

Motivation and Performance, Blog 7

Student blog posts from the Great VCU Bike Race Book

Masking Femininity: Women and Power in Shakespeare\u27s Macbeth, As You Like It, and Titus Andronicus

This paper analyzes the power that Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, Rosalind from As You Like It, and Tamora from Titus Andronicus assert and answers the questions of how women assert power in Shakespeare and the role gender plays in power