Mr Russell Christie
PhD Student
Research area(s)
I am researching methods of autobiography through practice and critical reflection. This consists of writing my own biography and reflecting upon it from a variety of practical, political and psychological angles to reveal the large scale processes of history as they work themselves out in me and in my text. As a queer, autoethnographic researcher, I locate my life as itself a historical product of LGBTQ and working class experience in the latter part of the 20th century.
Research Interests
Life Writing. Autobiography. Autoethnography. Queer and LGBT History.
As an autoethnographer, I borrow my world view from the social sciences and their critical theories. I contextualise my own life narrative with the aid of queer, post colonial, feminist and gender critiques, foregrounding these critiques as interpretative lenses on my personal narrative. In practice, this method presents core scenes of my life and then locates each particular experience in its historical context, to show how history reaches deeply into each of one us, forming our experience of ourselves in continual interaction with the social world we are born into and develop within.
I am interested in, and always researching and living in, LGBTQ and working class history, from the 1960s to the present. My narrative and its analysis hopes to make a contribution to broadening methods of life writing practice, and to researching personal development and process within social exclusion and trauma studies.