Cirrus@Austlit

'It was no surprise that Angela Williams went to jail. A traumatic, violent upbringing saw to that. But after serving a short sentence for theft as a teenager, she worked hard to break the cycle. Thirteen years later Angela was studying, teaching, providing a stable home for her son, and finally feeling like she’d got her life together. Then she got hit by a postie bike. Police realised that Angela still had ten months to go on the prison sentence she’d thought was in her distant past.

'However, Angela was a different prisoner the second time around: no longer a scared, damaged nineteen-year-old, she knew how to speak up for herself and her fellow prisoners against a system of power, privilege and cruelty that controls the lives of Australia’s most vulnerable women and offers little hope for redemption.

'With unwavering courage, intelligence and humour, Snakes and Ladders reveals an astonishing true story of falling through the cracks, and what it takes to climb back out again.' (Publication summary)

'The body holds trauma far beyond the brain’s ability to remember. Telling the story of trauma involves negotiating the conflicting needs to craft the story and live within the reawakened pain. This article will examine the impacts of critically engaging with one’s own memoir of survival while living in a body forged by early childhood trauma. The external outcomes of trauma, the bodily reactions, will be linked to the processes of research, with this analysis demonstrating the potential for complex responses to trauma to be understood emotionally, critically and creatively.

'Autobiographical Higher Degree Research sits on the intersection of practice and research and questions of self-care and rehabilitation are core to understanding how future researchers in this field do so while remaining emotionally safe. The research to be discussed explores memoir as a form of self-surveillance, positing that similar disciplinary forces are in place when surveilling one’s self as is demonstrated by contemporary surveillance theory.

'The role of the self-writer who examines trauma will be resituated beyond the concept of ‘victim’, showing how by examining and questioning our own narratives it is possible to find the seeds of self-realisation that are inherent in surviving and creating with the traumatic response.'  (Publication abstract)