Recordings

Narrative Agency, Life Writing, and the Experience of Illness, 15 June 2020

This talk explores the concept of narrative agency, which refers to our ability to navigate our narrative environments, to use, interpret and reinterpret narratives that are culturally available to us, and to make choices over how we narrate our lives and our relationships.

I propose a model that articulates three central dimensions of narrative agency: narrative awareness, narrative imagination, and narrative dialogicality. I will then discuss how the experience of serious illness can challenge one’s sense of agency and the ability to narrate one’s life.

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Astrid Swan & Hanna Meretoja: “D/other”, 11 October 2021

Performance and discussion at the ABOAGORA “Fire” Symposium on 18 August 2021. Organised in collaboration with SELMA, Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory.

Astrid Swan’s performance consisted of music from her album D/other. The songs weave together themes of sleep, dream and dying, positioning them in the relationships between mothers and children. The second half of the evening was a dialogue between Swan and Hanna Meretoja around a fire. Campfires have long been places where stories are told. Traditionally they have a beginning, a middle and an end, but cancer is unruly and doesn’t easily follow these narrative rules. The experience of cancer is often characterised by a continued positioning in in-the-middle, in permanent uncertainty. Swan and Meretoja read excerpts from their literary works and discuss what life with acute insecurity caused by an illness is like and how it relates to mothering as well as being a researcher and an artist. Instead of complete narratives, they present fragments, exploring different cultural narrative models, their possibilities and limitations.

ABOAGORA “Fire” was organised at the Sibelius Museum in Turku, Finland and online on 18–20 August, 2021.

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Inaugural Lecture: “Literature and the Sense of the Possible”, 11 January 2017 (in Finnish)

“Kirjallisuus ja mahdollisen taju” (Professoriluento), Turun yliopisto 11.1.2017.

• The Auto / Bio / Fiction Series: Hanna Meretoja’s talk “Metanarrative Life-Writing: Intersections of Life and Narrative in Autofiction and Biofiction” (17 November 2022, Centre for Comparative Literature, Goldsmits, University of London)
• Mediated Memories of Responsibility Seminar (School of Advanced Studies, University of London 24 November 2020)
• The Psychology of Global Crises keynote lecture (The American University of Paris, May 2020)
• Roundtable Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory (Academy of Finland 2018-2022)
• Keskusteluja kryptasta: suru (2021, podcast in Finnish)
• Art Matters: Narratiivisuus Radio Fiskars 2021 (podcast in Finnish)
• “Ethics of Storytelling” book launch 2018 (in Finnish)
• Change roundtable, 26 September 2017 (in Finnish)