‘I Hope You and Your Loved Ones Remain Safe’: Dispatch from a Teacher-Scholar-Life Writer in Wartime

This essay asks what role a teacher-scholar-practitioner of life writing can play when she is enmeshed within a highly volatile, violent conflict along with her students who occupy multiple subject positions within the conflict. I suggest that such conditions put the scholar in a unique position first, to offer testimony to her fellow scholars. Such testimony can best take the form of a highly particularised and affectively-attentive narration of the conflict that refuses the binary of victim and oppressor that characterises much abstract theorising endemic to academic environments. Second, the teacher-scholar-practitioner of life writing may also find herself in a position uniquely suited to assist her students to find emotional comfort, meaningful knowledge of the world in which they live, and a reservoir of genuine hope within their trauma, when she turns them back upon their experiences of shared life writing and reading in the university.