Auto/biography and Mobilities in the Time of Climate Emergency

Pearce, Lynne and Spurling, Nicola (2024) Auto/biography and Mobilities in the Time of Climate Emergency. Mobilities, 19 (5). pp. 807-822. ISSN 1745-0101

Text (Autobiography SI Introduction_submission)
Autobiography_SI_Introduction_submission.docx - Submitted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (38kB)

Text (Autobiography_SI_Introduction_submission_minor_revision (1))
Autobiography_SI_Introduction_submission_minor_revision_1_.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (297kB)

Abstract

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.