Thursday, September 18, 2014 1:30 PM to 2:45 PM EDT
The Hub, Front Ballroom
The classical heroic narratives seem to fail us in the contemporary world and instead, more often, people acclaimed for their heroism refuse the label. In some cases, emerging from a traumatic, violent situation as a hero simply doesn’t seem possible, and in others people feel that their responses to danger or trauma are ordinary human, rather than heroic, acts. Based on her work with people applying for political asylum in the U.S. and the U.K, Shuman, author of Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy, will discuss how the study of folklore can provide significant understandings of the political asylum experience. Sponsored by Mason’s Women and Gender Studies.
Amy Shuman is Professor of Folklore, English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Anthropology at the Ohio State University. She is the author of three books:Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts Among Urban Adolescents, Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy, and, with Carol Bohmer, Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century. Her current projects include the life history narratives told by artisan stonecarvers in Pietrasanta, Italy, narratives told by the parents of children with disabilities, political asylum, and community narrative projects at the intersection of collective memory and public policy. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hebrew University Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship, and NEA Summer Fellowship, a Wenner Gren Fellowship, and the Katherine Briggs Prize. She publishes and teaches in the areas of folklore, qualitative narrative theory, refugee culture, and ethnographic research.
Please join us for coffee and conversation with Dr. Shuman in Robinson Hall A 447 following the presentation.
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