2026-09-22T17:29:23Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/132790 2026-03-24 col_2142_5131 col_2142_14848 col_2142_14853 com_2142_5130 com_2142_9408 com_2142_8903 com_2142_14852

application/pdf en text Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2027-12-01 The student, Emily Swisher, accepted the attached license on 2025-12-01 at 16:35. The student, Emily Swisher, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-12-01 at 16:40. This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-12-02 at 16:23. DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #23012 on 2026-02-19 at 20:09:50 Writing the self with others: collaborative photobiography in the 21st century Swisher, Emily Rene 2025-12-02 Gaillard, Julie Gaillard, Julie Mall, Laurence Reynolds, Felisa Rushing, Robert photography, autobiography, collaborative life-writing eng Etymologically speaking, the term autobiography has specific limits: hailing from the Greek words autos, bios, and graphein, the word designates, by its very construction, a self-written account of one’s own life. By this definition then, autobiography is a genre that categorically excludes plurivocal narration. What then, should we make of life stories recounted by multiple authors? How do we account for self-written narratives that are the product of collaboration? How can the photograph complicate the notion of self-writing – how does it graph, anchor, and form the center of life stories told by more than one voice? In testing the limits that autobiography conventionally imposes, these three questions will form the basis of inquiry for my dissertation. As I will argue, the place of the photograph in collaborative life stories of the 21st century cannot be understated – the photo is the very sticking point for collaborative self-expression across print, installation art, film, and social media sites in the works under investigation in my corpus. Collaborative photobiography, then, is arguably becoming a nearly omnipresent feature of our daily lives: how we shape and react to these self-narratives, relayed through image and text, has broader implications for how the genre develops in the future. While seeming to contradict the very definition of autobiography, the collaborative photobiographies in my corpus herald a new age of self-writing – one that proves that stories of self are increasingly cooperative, multivocal, and, importantly, predicated on photographs as the catalyst for connection and narration. 2025-12 Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132790 Copyright 2025 Emily Swisher French and Italian French University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Ph.D. Dissertation