Seventeen minutes and thirty-one seconds: an auto/biographical account of witnessing and representing an untold life story

Auto/Biography carries with it elements of privilege as certain kinds of lives are narrated while other lives remain untold. As Frank (The renewal of generosity: Illness, medicine, and how to live. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004) has observed, those lives that are storied are rendered worthy of notice, while untold lives are implicitly rendered absent or insignificant. In our research, we have seen how these processes can conspire to further marginalize individuals and populations whose lives are already marginal. This is the sharp edge of social exclusion. In this chapter, we explore creative and collaborative processes we have used to avoid perpetuating exclusion and marginalization in our auto/biographical research. Ours is a story about how, through artistic and creative collaboration, we may begin to reanimate our own and others’ lives through including the types of life stories that are typically omitted in social research. Our focus is on responding the questions of how to creatively access, witness and represent elements of an otherwise untold—and potentially untellable—life.