The Routledge AutoBiography Studies Reader collects together key theoretical essays in the field, creating a solid base for any critical study of autobiography, biography, or life writing. Beginning with a foreword by Sidonie Smith and a general introduction to the collection, the book is then divided into three sections-Foundations, Transformations, and Futures-each with its own introduction. Significant themes weave throughout the sections, including canonicity; genre, modality, and interdisciplinarity; reclamation of texts; disability and the contested body; trauma; agency, silence, and voicing; celebrity culture; digital lives; subjects in the margins; postcolonialism; posthumanism; and, ecocriticism. Attention has also been given to a variety of methodological approaches, such as archival research, genealogical study, DNA testing, autoethnography, testimonio, and oral history, among others.

The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader presents a central source of scholarly approaches arranged around fundamental questions about how adoption, as a complex practice of family-making, is represented in art, philosophy, the law, history, literature, political science, and other humanities. Divided into three major parts, this volume traces the history of adoption and its analogues, identifies major movements in the practice, and illuminates comprehensive disciplinary frameworks that underpin the field’s approaches. This key scholarly and pedagogical tool includes excerpts from scholars such as Judith Butler, Dorothy Roberts, Margaret Homans, Margaret D. Jacobs, Arissa Oh, Marianne Novy, and Kori Graves. It explores a variety of representations of adoption and embraces interdisciplinary discussions of reproduction as it intersects race, ethnicity, power relations, the concept of nation, history, the idea of childhood, and many other contemporary concerns. The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader provides a single-volume resource for instructors or students who want a convenient collection of foundational materials for teaching or reference, and for researchers newly discovering the field. This volume’s humanities perspective makes it the first of its kind to collect secondary materials in Critical Adoption Studies for researchers, who, in taking up cultural representations of adoption, examine cultural contexts not for their impact on the practice over time but for their richness of engagement with the human experience of belonging, kinship, and identity.

"Auto/Biography in the Americas: Relational Lives brings together scholars from disparate geographic regions, cultural perspectives, linguistic frameworks, and disciplinary backgrounds to explore what connects narrated lives in the Americas. By interweaving scholarship on Afro-diasporic subjectivities, gendered narratives, lives in translation, celebrity auto/biographies, and pedagogical approaches to teaching auto/biographical narratives, this volume argues that connections between the contrasting locations of the Americas may be found in a shared history of diasporic movement that causes a heightened awareness of the need to belong and to thereby define the self in relation to others. Read together, the essays in this collection suggest that identities across the Americas are constructed with an emphasis on intersubjectivity and relationality. This transnational approach to reading life writing beyond the borders of the Americas—pertinent to comparative American studies and hemispheric studies as well as life writing and auto/biography studies—also demonstrates an interdisciplinary, international, and multilingual model for collaborative research in the humanities and social sciences. The scholars included in this volume work in the fields of anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and education, and furthermore, this book marks the first time that many of these scholars have had their work translated into and published in English. This book was originally published as a special issue of a|b: Auto|Biography Studies."--Provided by publisher.

Auto/biographical narratives of the Americas are marked by the underlying themes of movement and belonging. This collection proposes that the impact of the historic or contemporary movement of peoples to, in, and from the Americas—whether chosen or forced—motivates the ways in which identities are constructed in this contested space. Such movement results in a cyclical quest to belong, and to understand belonging, that reverberates through narratives of the Americas. The volume brings together essays written from diverse national, cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary perspectives to trace these transnational motifs in life writing across the Americas. Drawing on international scholars from the seemingly disparate regions of the Americas—North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America—this book extends critical theories of life writing beyond limiting national boundaries. The scholarship included approaches narrative inquiry from the fields of literature, linguistics, history, art history, sociology, anthropology, political science, pedagogy, gender studies, critical race studies, and indigenous studies. As a whole, this volume advances discourse in auto/biography studies, life writing, and identity studies by locating transnational themes in narratives of the Americas and placing them in international and interdisciplinary conversations.

Over recent years biographical studies have gained an increasingly important place in academic study. The two are inextricably linked. Education uses biography in teaching, and in biography, education features strongly as a formative stage in personal development. This book elaborates on the analytical work that has drawn attention to biography and education, and seeks to expand the understanding of lives in educational contexts. Mainstream sociology has been quick to embrace this treatment of individuals as biographical appearances, but it is even more relevant in the field of education.

This collection of short essays provides a rigorous, rich, collaborative space in which scholars and practitioners debate the value of different methodological approaches to the study of life narratives and explore a diverse range of interdisciplinary methods. Auto/biography studies has been one of the most vibrant sub-disciplines to emerge in the humanities and social sciences in the past decade, providing significant links between disciplines including literary studies, languages, linguistics, digital humanities, medical humanities, creative writing, history, gender studies, education, sociology, and anthropology. The essays in this collection position auto/biography as a key discipline for modelling interdisciplinary approaches to methodology and ask: what original and important thinking can auto/biography studies bring to discussions of methodology for literary studies and beyond? And how does the diversity of methodological interventions in auto/biography studies build a strong and diverse research discipline? In including some of auto/biography’s leading international scholars alongside emerging scholars, and exploring key subgenres and practices, this collection showcases knowledge about what we do when engaging in auto/biographical research. Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies offers a series of case studies that explore the research practices, reflective behaviours, and ethical considerations that inform auto/biographical research.

Transgender studies is the latest area of academic inquiry to grow out of the exciting nexus of queer theory, feminist studies, and the history of sexuality. Because transpeople challenge our most fundamental assumptions about the relationship between bodies, desire, and identity, the field is both fascinating and contentious. The Transgender Studies Reader puts between two covers fifty influential texts with new introductions by the editors that, taken together, document the evolution of transgender studies in the English-speaking world. By bringing together the voices and experience of transgender individuals, doctors, psychologists and academically-based theorists, this volume will be a foundational text for the transgender community, transgender studies, and related queer theory.