CCFI 508E "'Researching the Roaming Subject': Studies in Life Writing, Post Critical and Digital Methodologies"
July 20 – July 31, 2009
Monday through Friday, 10:00am - 1:00pm
Dr. Paula Salvio, Professor, University of New Hampshire

The purpose of this course is to situate life writing, digital storytelling and personal documentary forms within a broader life-writing discourse that explores the experience of displacement and migration. While recognizing the highly contested place that is occupied by the personal narrative, we will draw on psychoanalytic theories to explore what might be the significant impact of personal narration as a means through which to represent and to work through the experience of displacement. In addition to studying a range of documentaries created by artists such as Jean Carlomusto, Lisa Kron and Carmelita Tropicana, we will carefully consider the rhetorical and aesthetic tactics used by life writers such as Junot Diaz (The Brief, Wonderous Life Oscar Wau), Edwidge Danticat (Brother, I am Dying and Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Resistance), and Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger).

Paula M. Salvio is Professor of Education at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire. Her current scholarship draws on psychoanalysis to study the normative production of personhood through educational practices, in particular, formal and informal conceptions of citizenship and norms of social belonging. She is particularly concerned with the affective investments and practices that bind strangers together in the name of apparently stable ideas of national, gendered, class and racial identities. Professor Salvio is the author of Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance (2007, SUNY Press) and co-editor with Gail M. Boldt of Love’s Return: Psychoanalytic Essays on Childhood, Teaching and Learning (Routledge, 2006). She has published extensively in the areas of psychoanalysis, auto/biographical theory and education. She is currently working on a study of the World War II surrealist photojournalism of Lee Miller as well as a study of the Italian anti-mafia movement (legalita`) as it is represented in cinema, agricultural copperatives and the official school curriculum.