In her book, New Forms of Self-Narration: Young Women, Life Writing and Human Rights, Spanish author Ana Belén Martínez García explores how life narratives can be empowering as victims of violence raise their voices to give testimony to injustice suffered and witnessed. Thus, by reframing their story they become not only agents of their life stories and survivors, but even activists. In this talk, the author will provide some reading clues, as well as give insight into new methodologies when approaching auto/biographical narratives, vulnerability, narrative empathy and ethical witnessing. The author will explain how young women can claim a testimonial collective voice, deploy human rights templates, excite humanitarian emotions, link up their context-bound plight with bigger social justice causes, and translate their narratives across borders by using English as their chosen vehicle of self-expression and self-constructional. The examples discussed in this presentation may provide insights on how to approach migrant texts and identities, how to interpret them, and how other vulnerable collectives may fight against prejudice both online and offline.

For more on the book, visit: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030464196
For more on the author, visit: https://unav.academia.edu/AnaBelenMartinezGarcia
You may follow her on Twitter at @AnaBMartinezG