Telling Our Lives: Conversations on Solidarity and Difference / Edition 1

by Frida Kerner Furman, Elizabeth A. Kelly, Linda Williamson Nelson

Overview

Telling Our Lives explores how three working-class women—from Jewish, African-American, and Irish-American backgrounds—connect across their differences through storytelling and conversation. Three distinct voices intertwine in this book as the authors, now college professors, discuss family legacies of diaspora and dislocation, analyzing how these have shaped their personal and professional lives. Social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and spirituality intersect and diverge in these pages, as the authors reflect on how they have been enriched and transformed by the relationships forged in the process of storytelling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780742541740
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	06/09/2005
Series:	Feminist Constructions
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	7.02(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

Frida Kerner Furman is professor of religious studies at DePaul University. Elizabeth A. Kelly is associate professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at DePaul University. Linda Williamson Nelson is associate professor of anthropology and writing at Richard Stockton College.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Acknowledgments Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 Daughters of Diaspora: Negotiating Family and Cultural Heritage Chapter 4 A Friend of My Mind: Co-Construction and Cooperation in Extended Conversations Chapter 5 The House that Words Built: Education and Dissidence Chapter 6 For Every Border, a Bridge: Identity, Hybridity, and Moral Selves Chapter 7 Work As Prayer: The Spiritual Dynamics of Professional Lives Within and Against the Academy Chapter 8 Interwoven Lives, Cosmopolitan Visions Chapter 9 Bibliography Chapter 10 Index

Editorial Reviews

The discussion of differences between women: class, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, has been posed as a competitive exercise in 'political correctness.' In their dialogical telling of their lives, Frida Furman, Elizabeth Kelly, and Linda Williamson Nelson craft a refreshingly new approach. Instead, their histories meet and mingle as mutual enrichment that is a 'hearing of one another into speech.'

Rosemary Radford Ruether

These candid, eloquent, engaging, and thoughtful narratives about three different lives interweave with each other to offer multiple portraits of the ways in which socioeconomic class, ethnicity, sexual identity, gender, and family history have shaped the entry of the authors into the spaces of academic life and textured their experiences within it. A must-read for all of us interested in thinking about the forces that shape knowledge production, academic success, and our prospects for genuinely inclusive academic institutions.

Uma Narayan