Contemporary Perspectives on Epistolarity

Cardell, Kylie; Haggis, Jane

doi:10.1080/14484528.2011.559731

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Cardell and Haggis ask; and, "If so, how do we deal with the epistolary presences of the 'not there'?" 14 Later yet, I will read Margaretta Jolly describing Liz Stanley's work as focused on "the unsaid and lost as well as the saved and said," and I will be reminded, again, of the irony of using a letter archive this full of holes in a project aimed at restoring and re-storying my mother and me. 15 But that is not until later.…”

Section: Gaps Absence Lapses Lacunaementioning

confidence: 99%

“I wrote letters? To you?”: Letters as Memory Prompts in Dementia Care

Venema¹

2022

JES

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This paper explores a collection of letters that brought my mother and me together when physical distance separated us and, twenty years later, brought us some measure of togetherness in the face of dementia’s erosions. I worked as a volunteer teacher in post-war Uganda from 1986 to 1989, communicating with family and friends almost exclusively by handwritten letters. My mother promised to be my most faithful correspondent and she was. When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2005, I knew that the more than two hundred letters we had exchanged in the 1980s would offer a version of her life before dementia’s processes began. This paper examines how reciprocity, relationality, interrupted presence, space-time, identity, gift, and voice resonated throughout 2007–8, when I used the letters as memory prompts during my weekly visits with my mother. The memory project extended the letters’ already complex temporality by juxtaposing two worlds: the cross-cultural world my mother and I were navigating in the late 1980s, and the unpredictable world of dementia care, where the letters sometimes elicited profound engagement, and sometimes—by their very epistolary nature—failed to bridge the unfamiliar distances opening up between my mother and me.

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Section: Gaps Absence Lapses Lacunaementioning

confidence: 99%

“I wrote letters? To you?”: Letters as Memory Prompts in Dementia Care

Venema¹

2022

JES

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“…Social scientists interested in the epistolarity have focused on the letter as a central medium for theorizing social relations: how might the letter produce rather than simply reflect or intensify aspects of sociality such as friendship or intimacy? (Cardell and Haggis 2011). In other words, letter writing is fundamentally a social practice and is produced by subjects situated in particular social relations and historical discourses (Cosslett, Lury, and Summerfield 2000, 2).…”

Section: Epistolary Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminist Refugee Epistemology: Reading Displacement in Vietnamese and Syrian Refugee Art

Espiritu¹,

Duong²

2018

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

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“…Considering letters as expressions of governmental practice is partly inspired by an increasing focus on the study of letters, or epistolary, within the social sciences (see Barton and Hall, 1999;Cardell and Haggis, 2011;Nevela and Palander-Collin, 2005). Within such work, letters have been examined as dialogical 'documents of life', which offer an insight into the relations formed between letter writers and their addressees (Plummer, 2001;Stanley, 2004).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Another Letter from the Home Office: Reading the Material Politics of Asylum

Darling

2014

Environ Plan D

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Abstract. In an era of technologically mediated modes of border enforcement, this paper focuses upon a seemingly more anachronistic mode of governmental intervention: that of the letter. Exploring the use of letters by the UK Border Agency to communicate decisions on asylum claims I argue that taking the materiality of the letter seriously demands a reworking of the politics of asylum. Drawing on ethnographic research within a UK asylum drop-in centre, the paper opens by offering a governmental reading of letters as things which define the limits of present and future actions, whilst fixing individuals to specific locations. The paper then destabilises such a reading by considering how letters are understood through material-discursive entanglements of things, discourses, and spaces, such that letters are understood through, and help to constitute, different atmospheres, spaces, and subjectivities of asylum. Thus I argue that it is by taking seriously the connections between materials, discourses, and affective states that we might critically interrogate framings of the state as an oppressive force shaping the lives of those seeking asylum.

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Contemporary Perspectives on Epistolarity

Cited by 7 publications

References 1 publication

“I wrote letters? To you?”: Letters as Memory Prompts in Dementia Care

“I wrote letters? To you?”: Letters as Memory Prompts in Dementia Care

Feminist Refugee Epistemology: Reading Displacement in Vietnamese and Syrian Refugee Art

Another Letter from the Home Office: Reading the Material Politics of Asylum

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