International Conference "A Journey through Autobiography, Autoethnography, and Linguistic Autobiography"

Autobiography, autoethnography, and linguistic autobiography are understood here as narrative practices and research methodologies that interweave personal experience, memory, language, and cultural contexts. Through the narration of lived experience, these approaches offer a lens through which to examine the relationship between the subject and the
world, illuminating processes of identity construction, belonging, individual and collective memory, and the linguistic and cultural transformations that accompany movement and encounter. In this framework, journey is conceived not merely as physical displacement but as a symbolic, cognitive, and existential experience. It constitutes a space of encounter and tension—between distance and proximity, departure and arrival, loss and discovery. Every passage entails change, negotiation, and redefinition: to travel is to enter into relation with places, people, languages, images, and narratives that reshape one’s perception of self and other.

The autobiographical approach may itself be regarded as a form of journey: an exploratory path through memory, experience, and the interpretive forms through which individuals confer meaning upon their lives. Narrative practices thus assume a central role. They provide tools for interpreting and reworking the experience of journey, while journey, in turn, becomes an occasion to interrogate narrative forms, their limits, their affordances, and their transformations. The conference also considers journey as a method of inquiry—a movement across places, languages, memories, and forms of knowledge. It welcomes scholars from literature, narratology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, language education, sociology, cultural studies, and the arts. Contributions are invited that examine journey as a narrative, linguistic, and anthropological experience, with particular attention to how individuals recount, remember, and
transform their crossings.

Contributions in English and Italian are accepted.

The deadline for submitting proposals is 1 February. Please send your proposals to angelapr@tlu.ee.

Possible topics include:

• Openings and closures: continuity, discontinuity, and thresholds Ruptures, transitions, liminal states; waiting, suspension, blockage; experiences of the “not yet” and the “no longer.”
• Experience and narration: How narration organizes, selects, and transforms lived experience; fragmentary narratives, incomplete memories, silences, omissions, and interrupted forms.
• Mobility, immobility, and inequality: Desired, valued, forced, or denied journeys: migration, exile, diaspora, tourism, mobile labor, confinement, and immobility as dimensions of contemporary travel.
• Transformations of identity: and perceptions of the self Partial, ambiguous, or reversible changes linked to movement and intercultural encounter; redefinitions of belonging, social roles, and personal perspectives.
• Languages, semiotics, and the construction of experience: Linguistic autobiography, plurilingualism, translation, misunderstanding, silence, and communicative practices as elements shaping the experience of travel.
• Anthropology, ethnography, and self-writing: Journey as a practice of knowledge production; researcher positionality, ethnographic relations, and the presence of body and subjectivity in fieldwork.
• Narrative forms and methodological experimentation: Intersections among autobiography, autoethnography, literature, philosophy, sociology, semiotics, and the visual and performing arts; new modes of representing experiences, memories, and crossings.