How can life-stories from the Global South enhance our understanding of southern histories, cultures, and lives? In this workshop we will explore the ethical challenges researchers have encountered in writing Southern lives, as well as the question of how to write a biography in a postcolonial or decolonial context.

We will think through how various theories of the self, of storytelling, and ways of understanding history can be brought to bear on these important questions, to provoke a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of working with individual lives as a way to study the Global South.

Contributors include: Supriya Chaudhuri, Jadavpur University; Marcio Goldman, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; Eduardo Lalo, University of Puerto Rico; Joy Owen, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein; Premilla Nadasen, Barnard College; and Jonny Steinburg, Santanu Das, and Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford.