Keynote speakers

Mark Freeman

is Professor of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, where he also serves as the W. Arthur Garrity, Sr. Professor in Human Nature, Ethics and Society.

http://www.holycross.edu/departments/psychology/
website/faculty/marks_page/mark.htm

THE CREATIVE PROCESS OF NARRATING THE SELF

Professor Freeman's teaching and research interests include history and philosophy of psychology, the psychology of the self, and the psychology of art and creativity. His first book, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (Routledge, 1993), inquires into the process by which people reconstruct the meaning and significance of past experience. In order to answer the question, who am I?, a person turns to the past and, from the vantage point of the present, seeks to make sense of the movement of her/his life. The self created in the process of narrating is thus to be regarded not as some substantial "thing" but rather as a series of continuous tellings and re-tellings, issuing from the work of the narrative imagination. A second book, Finding the Muse: A Sociopsychological Inquiry into the Conditions of Artistic Creativity (Cambridge, 1993), explores the lives of a group of aspiring American artists, focusing especially on problems of creativity as they relate to such issues as the mystique of the modern artist, the fashioning of artistic identity, and the limits and possibilities of modern art itself.

While Freeman acknowledges the potential value of considering persons as socially constructed, much of his work focuses on the imaginative labor entailed in the process of narrating the self. In his article Culture, Narrative, and the Poetic Construction of Selfhood (Journal of Constructivist Psychology 1999:12;99-116), Freeman suggests that while the linguistic "tools" employed in the construction of selfhood are eminently social, the constructive process itself is a poetic act that narrativizes, makes meaningful, and fills with passion what would otherwise be a mere string of disconnected events and meaningless words. Additional articles that address the poetic dimension of self-narration include Freeman's The Burden of Truth: Psychoanalytic Poiesis and Narrative Understanding (In W. Patterson [Ed.], Strategic Narrative: New Perspectives on the Power of Personal and Cultural Stories [Lexington, 2002]) and Worded Images, Imaged Words: Helen Keller and the Poetics of Self-Representation (Interfaces 2000:18;135-146).

Related themes are also addressed in Mythical Time, Historical Time, and the Narrative Fabric of the Self (Narrative Inquiry 1998:8;27-50) and Death, Narrative Integrity, and the Radical Challenge of Self-Understanding: A Reading of Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych (Ageing and Society 1997:17;373-398), both of which explore the continuity between "living" and "telling," as well as Freeman's recent article, Charting the Narrative Unconscious: Cultural Memory and the Challenge of Autobiography (Narrative Inquiry 2002:12;193-211), which explores "those culturally-rooted aspects of one's history that have not yet become part of one's story."

In much of his recent work, Professor Freeman has sought to complement his longstanding interest in the self with an in-depth exploration of the category, and place, of the Other in psychological life. In part, his aim in this work is to shift psychology's center of attention from self to Other, which in this context refers not only to other people but to whatever it is beyond the self - for instance, nature or art - that draws one outward. In addition, by pursuing what he has called a "poetics of the Other" (see Theory Beyond Theory [Theory & Psychology 2000:10;71-77]), he seeks to make possible a movement beyond theory in psychological thinking, one that would enliven psychology's humanistic commitments and open up dimensions of thought and feeling that theoretical discourse, in its customary forms, cannot readily accommodate.

David S. Gutterman

is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Politics, College of Liberal Arts, Willamette University.

http://www.willamette.edu/~dgutterm/index.htm

PROPHETIC NARRATIVES AND POLITICAL THEORY

Professor Gutterman's academic interests include the history of Western political theory, Modern and contemporary political theory, American political thought, Politics and ethics, Religion and politics in the United States, and Feminist theory and gender politics. He has published work on the conversion narrative of George W. Bush, narrative theory, religious social movements in the United States, and gender and politics. He is currently working on a book examining the "prophetic politics" of American social movements. Other publications include:

"An American Conversion: The Presidential Politics of Being Born-Again." Bolletino -- Comitato di Coordinamento per gli Studu di Storica Americana (Journal of American Studies in Italy), Forthcoming Fall 2002.

"Presidential Testimony: Listening to the Heart of George W. Bush." Theory & Event, Issue 5:2, July 2001. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.2gutterman.html

"Exodus and the Chosen Men of God: Promise Keepers and the Theology of Masculinity," in The Promise Keepers: Essays on Masculinity and Christianity. Ed. Dane S. Claussen. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1999, 133-152.

"A Woman for Every Wild Man: Robert Bly and his Reaffirmation of Masculinity," in The Politics of Manhood. Ed. Michael Kimmel. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995, 164-172.

"Postmodernism and the Interrogation of Masculinity," in Theorizing Masculinity. Ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994, 219- 238; Reprinted in The Masculinities Reader. Ed. Stephen Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett. London: Polity Press, 2001, 56-71.

The forthcoming book Prophetic Politics in a Pluralist Land: Christian Social Movements and the Challenge of Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, In Press, Forthcoming 2003) examines the challenge posed by prophetic politics to democracy in the United States. The study is guided by three questions: What is the relationship between religion and politics? What is the relationship between narratives and politics? And what makes prophetic political narratives congenial or hostile to democratic political life? As he has in the prospectus:

"Accordingly, this project achieves two things: 1) it develops and implements a theory of narratives that invigorates the study of religion and politics in America; and 2) it illuminates the challenging questions concerning the relation between religion and participatory democracy in a pluralist nation through a critical examination of religious social movements. In pursuing these goals, this project also addresses the work of three pivotal theorists of storytelling (Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Paul Ricoeur), situates Promise Keepers and Call to Renewal historically by examining the prophetic politics of Billy Sunday and Martin Luther King, Jr., and explores the themes of class, race, sex, and gender that sit at the heart of the political agendas of both Promise Keepers and Call to Renewal."

"My analysis of narratives and politics thus begins from the premise that the exchange of stories is central to the public life of a pluralistic democratic order. This premise, steeped in an Arendtian conception of politics, suggests that the willingness to hear others' stories enhances one's capacity for "representative thinking" and, accordingly, one's ability to make political judgments. I develop this argument by first examining Arendt's notion of "visiting" and then contrasting this theory with the desire for "unitary" narratives found in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Linking "visiting" to democratic discourse, I stress the connection between pluralism and the capacity of narratives to be open to multiple interpretations. This step in the argument is supported by my discussion of the other principal contemporary theorist of politics and narratives, Paul Ricoeur. Where Arendt emphasizes the role of narratives in situating and negotiating political space, Ricoeur enriches our understanding of the capacity of narratives to mediate time. (To be sure, Arendt's concerns with "promising" and "forgiving" are all vital elements in my analysis of narratives, politics, and temporality.) I adapt Ricoeur's conception of foundational narratives providing a "dialectic between sedimentation and innovation" in order to illuminate the use of stories in the creation of a stable but fluid political order."

Please, read the full prospectus of the book on the website http://www.willamette.edu/~dgutterm/rprospectus.htm

Liz Stanley

Professor, Director of Women's Studies, University of Manchester, UK

http://les1.man.ac.uk/sociology/staff/LSTANLEY.HTM
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/lizstanley/

THE THREAD OF EPISTEMOLOGY

Liz Stanley is probably best known for her publications concerning feminism, epistemology, methodology and theory. Her overall position has been described as that of 'critical feminism'. She has written about the epistemological questions as considered from a feminist as well as a sociological viewpoint: what is seen as 'knowledge', who is seen to have it, how competing knowledge-claims are dealt with, who are gatekeepers. She poses these questions in grounded contexts, looking at the local knowledges of for example 'academy', 'sociology' and 'academic feminism'.

Related to the epistemological thread runs the twine of 'auto/biography'. To Stanley, 'auto/biography' is a technical and theoretical term which indicates an analytical recognition that the supposed binaries of self and other, fact and fiction, past and present, reality and representation, autobiography and biography are actually multiply traversed in stories, narratives and other accounts, including those produced by 'method' through surveying, interviewing etc. In 'auto/biography', the epistemological, methodological, and feminist interests meet. A feminist biographical method sees biography as composed by textually-located ideological practices that come into being in the grounded contexts of writing. A feminist biography is concerned with explication of these contexts, with its own production and labour process. The 'intellectual autobiography' of the researcher is interwoven with the construction of knowledge. Besides theoretical and methodological aspects of 'auto/biography', Liz Stanley has recently worked on the auto/biography and the intellectual autobiography of the Victorian feminist Olive Schreiner.

Another main interest has been radical sociology and Mass-Observation, where Stanley's work has been called a variant on critical sociology.

Books include:

'The Auto/Biographical I: Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography', Published by Manchester University Press (1992);
'Debates in sociology', edited with David Morgan, and published by MUP (1993);
'Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology' (with Sue Wise), published by Routledge (1993)
'Sex Surveyed, 1949-1994', published by Taylor and Francis (1995);
'Knowing Feminisms: On Academic Borders, Territories and Tribes' published by Sage Publications (1997);
'Olive Schreiner: Feminism, Theory and Writing' Sage publications (2001);
'Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman', (2002)

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