Diary Studies

Welches subjektivierte pädagogische Wissen nutzen LehrerInnen um über ihr Unterrichten nachzudenken? Wie nutzen LehrerInnen dieses pädagogische Wissen um professionell zu unterrichten? Eine professionelle LehrerIn weiß Situationen im Unterricht professionell zu meistern weil sie subjektiviertes pädagogisches Wissen mit pädagogischem Können koppelt um im Unterricht pädagogisch sinnvolle Zukünfte gemeinsamen Arbeitens zu eröffnen („in order to free possible futures“, Geerinck, Masschelein & Simons 2010, 388). Eine solche Koppelung entsteht, wenn subjektiviertes Wissen für situatives Interpretieren im Unterricht genutzt wird um anschließende Praktiken zu gestalten. Das geplante Projekt untersucht, durch welche professionellen Orientierungen LehrerInnen ihre Praxis rahmen, um eine Koppelung zwischen subjektiviertem Wissen und Können herzustellen.

Karsonya Wise Whitehead Awarded The 2014 Letitia Woods Brown Book Award for Best Edited Volume in African American History by the Association of Black Women Historians for her book: "Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis"
From Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "This book is a brilliant contribution to African American history" and Whitehead's "expert eye" and "scholarly annotations not only set the scene but reveal how this 'everyday' domestic-dressmaker's decision to record her thoughts at the critical hours of the African American journey was itself an emancipatory act."

Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead Awarded The 2014 Letitia Woods Brown Book Award for Best Edited Volume in African American History by the Association of Black Women Historians for her new book: "Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis"

From Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "This book is a brilliant contribution to African American history" and Whitehead's "expert eye" and "scholarly annotations not only set the scene but reveal how this 'everyday' domestic-dressmaker's decision to record her thoughts at the critical hours of the African American journey was itself an emancipatory act."

Drawing on unpublished diaries from the period 1943–46, this article shows how the “Robinson” trope of shipwreck and survival provided German civilians with a language to describe the transition from National Socialism to a radically open and anxiety-producing future. The identification with Robinson and his story makes the writers into agentic protagonists, at the same time that the metaphor of the “island” reflects an ambiguous position of isolation. Excerpts from diaries show how the “Robinson” trope combines dichotomies crucial to this period of turmoil: civilization and the primitive, individual and society, victimhood and agency, and how diarists rework this language to explore their place in a changing world.

Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices have become important ways in which we understand ourselves. Jill Walker Rettberg analyses these and related genres as three intertwined modes of self-representation: visual, written and quantitative. Rettberg explores topics like the meaning of Instagram filters, smartphone apps that write your diary for you, and the ways in which governments and commercial entities create their own representations of us from the digital traces we leave behind as we go through our lives.

Vaclav Nijinsky’s drawings, which were created during the years 1918-1919 constitute the artistic expression of the illness of the dancing genius, they tell us the story of the psychotic experience of the Russian-Polish ballet master. The fear is merged in them with suspicion and the feeling of insecurity, derived from hallucinations and paranoid perception of the reality. The strangeness and gloom of the drawings is tiring for the viewer as well as the repetitious use of certain demoniac figures and patterns. The artistic, kinetic and literary record of Nijinsky’s psychosis give unlimited opportunities of scientific penetration of his emotions and experiences, which accompanied the years spent in the USA, London and the period of internment in Budapest. The aforementioned sources motive also to consider the question concerning the relationship between the total engagement in the dance and the artist’s illness.

This dissertation explores narrative strategies of self-identity in autobiographies by six pioneering women writers, each of whom lost what has traditionally been woman’s place: her home. The accounts of emigration, expatriation, and exile by Anna Brownwell Jameson, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Ada Cambridge, Isak Dinesen, and Alyse Simpson illustrate the implications of this loss, as each woman struggled to recover a sense both of home and of grounded identity. The writings span more than a hundred years, from the 1830s to the 1950s, and tell of lives lived in locations as different as Canada, Australia, and British East Africa (now Kenya), places that variously proved to be confining and/or liberating. By narrating the ways in which identity adapts to and is transformed by a new environment, these texts provide access to the construction and alteration of the self in relation to place. This study probes this process by using the concept of place, rather than the more conventional one of time, as the dominant category of analysis.
My readings are both intertextual and interdisciplinary: they rely on theorizing by sociologists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between place and identity, studies on the same subject by literary scholars, and formulations by women’s autobiography theorists. My investigation reveals, among other discoveries, that the gender-specific aspects of the process of adaptation persistently centre on the notion of homecoming and that they are articulated with reference to the figure of the mother.

“AND I DID NOT WORRY MUCH ABOUT THE BOMBINGS EITHER… AT LEAST WE HAVE SOME VARIETY.” CHILDREN’S DIARIES IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
The paper makes an attempt to show the significance of children’s diaries, written during the Second World War, from a psychological point of view. Most of these children were born between 1928 and 1931 and started their diaries in different years. What is common among them is that all of them were adolescents when they decided to do so. So the inner problems common in this period of life are very strong and analyzable in the diaries. The influence of the War and the resulting stress and trauma also appear in them – and the an-swers the children themselves gave to these problems are interesting for us. The expression of their mental, psychical and empirical world in the diaries show that they used a kind of psychological preventive mechanism as a self-defense technique. On the whole, we can say that they primarily tried to protect their mental world and their self-confidence – with more or less success. It was typical that in their inner world they imagined something worth living for and in most cases this “something” was some kind of a profession. That was one of the most important part of their identity and they stuck to it to survive. In con-nection to that, they tried to take refuge in those kind of activities which diverted their at-tention from the outside world. For example, keeping a diary was such in some cases, just like the games played in the cellars during the siege of Budapest.