Public Reading and Workshops on Creative Non/Fictions in Social Sciences
Public Reading: “Accomplice to Memory”
Professor Chang (pen name Q.M. Zhang) will read from her forthcoming book, Accomplice to Memory (Kaya Press, 2016) and share some of her research and writing process in crafting this experimental memoir about her father’s exodus from China to the US via Hong Kong just after the revolution. Like many stories of diaspora told across generations and geographies, Zhang’s efforts are thwarted by her father’s growing dementia and a lifetime of secrets, lies, and tall tales spun for his fellow Americans—including his daughter. Combining memoir, fiction, and documentary photographs, this hybrid text explores the questions the second generation asks of the first, the silences and subterfuges of the immigrant parent, and the necessary fictions and narrative truths that emerge in between.
Date: February 15, 2016 (Monday)
Time: 2:30 – 4:30 pm
Venue: D3-LP-01
Workshop #1: “Critical Social Inquiry and the Search for Form”
In this workshop, we will consider the possibilities and limits of our research tools: the interview, the archive, ethnography. While discipline has traditionally bound method to form in the social sciences, we will ask: What kinds of knowledge might different forms give us access to? Participants will be prompted to experiment with creative forms of writing about their own on-going research projects.
Date: February 17, 2016 (Wednesday)
Time: 2:30 – 4:30 pm
Venue: D3-LP-13
Workshop #2: “Research and Imagination: Crafting Creative Non/Fictions”
In this workshop, we will take up the question: What forms are necessary for conveying what kinds of truths? We will look at examples of hybrid literary forms such as ethnographic fiction, documentary theatre, and the lyric essay, considering the ways that each works the borders between fact and fiction, research and imagination, in pursuit of truth. Participants will be prompted to experiment with writing the truths of their own research through alternative creative forms.
Date: February 19, 2016 (Friday)
Time: 2:30 – 4:30 pm
Venue: D3-LP-13
Speaker:
Dr. Kimberly Chang
Visiting Associate Professor,
Department of Social Sciences, EdUHK (Feb. 13-20, 2016)
Kimberly Chang, Associate Professor of Cultural Psychology at Hampshire College, is an international educator with 25 years’ experience teaching and writing at the intersections of anthropology and psychology, China and the U.S. She is a teacher-scholar whose research on immigrant subjectivities feeds directly into her community-engaged approach to teaching. She has received grants from Mellon and Luce foundations for her innovative interdisciplinary courses that combine critical ethnography with creative forms of writing about “Chinese” and “American” identities and communities across the Pacific. Her current work focuses on creative non/fiction as the quintessential hybrid literary form for writing about migration and diaspora.
During her week at EdUHK, Professor Chang will give a public reading from her forthcoming book, Accomplice to Memory (Kaya Press, 2016), followed by a series of hands-on workshops on creative non/fiction as a powerful mode of inquiry and form of writing in the social sciences. She will also be available for consultation with students and faculty about their own research and writing projects.
