How do we care for life stories and the people who live/d them? This collection explores the relational challenges of telling, stewarding, and receiving true stories of lived experience, inviting readers to engage with life stories through ethics of care, refusal, and repair. In Search of Right Relations brings together nine scholars, writers, artists, and practitioners, weaving lived experience with creative practices and academic research, expanding debates on ownership, sovereignty, responsibility, and agency of autobiographical subjects, their communities, and audiences. The chapters examine community-engaged storytelling; the right to tell a story and your relation to it; how to contend with archival silences and erasures; and how to engage with life stories while refusing extractive consumption of trauma and pain. Bringing together conversations in autobiography, ethnography, cultural memory, history, archival, diasporic, queer, and disability studies, the collection will speak to researchers, educators, creatives, and practitioners alike. Offering a range of approaches (from ethical non-reading to multi-modal fragmentations, a turn to collaging and abstraction when words are inaccessible or not enough, and principles for collaborative storytelling), the manuscript expands the possibilities of relational storytelling and encourages readers to become more ethical witnesses to storied lives.
