Presentation cancelled, Vienna July 2010

»Workers write their Lives. Three Autobiographies by Balkan Migrants in the Iron Range Mining Regions of Minnesota«

Panel ›Migration in/and Ego Documents‹ at the Symposium ›Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives‹, Interdisziplinäres Dialogforum der Wittgenstein-PreisträgerInnen an der Universität Wien Vienna,  July 1–3, 2010.

Unfortunately, the presentation had to be cancelled due to sickness.

Abstract: Narratives of the self are always more than simply chronicles of life stages. They re/construct a self-image and negotiate it to imagined or real interlocutors. History projects undertaken on the North Minnesotan Iron Range mining region in the 1970s have yielded fascinating examples of workers’ and migrants’ autobiographies that not only tell us of the hardships of South Slavic immigrant laborers during, before and after the Great Depression, the pressure of Americanization and the interaction of individuals with ethnic and class identity politics, but also about the ways workers wanted to see themselves, how they wanted to be seen and how this is about agency and pride.