Reflections on Professor Karen Ferreira-Meyers’s Visit to The Open University
From 1 to 4 September 2026, The Open University had the pleasure of hosting Professor Karen Ferreira-Meyers, a leading scholar of autofiction, life writing, autobiographical research and open education. The visit was organised through the Visiting Professor Programme and gave Professor Ferreira-Meyers the opportunity to hold a series of rich discussions with colleagues from across STEM and Equality & Inclusion.
Over three seminars (Digital Storytelling and Identity, Autofiction as Digital Storytelling, and Narrative Beyond the Page) Professor Ferreira-Meyers led us through a single, unfolding argument: that narrating one’s own life, whether on a page, a blog, a screen or a lab bench, is never a neutral act of recording. It is a creative, selective and often political act of construction. What follows is our attempt to capture the central themes of that argument, and why we think it matters well beyond the literature seminar room.
Who Gets to Tell the Story?
The opening seminar set the terms for everything that followed with a deceptively simple question: who gets to tell the story? For decades, small or under-represented communities, including many in the Global South, have more often been described by outside journalists, researchers and institutions than narrated by themselves. Digital tools have lowered the barrier to self-representation, but access, connectivity, language and platform visibility remain deeply uneven.
Drawing on Stuart Hall’s work on cultural identity, Professor Ferreira-Meyers argued that representation does not simply mirror an identity that already exists; it actively participates in producing meaning. The position from which a story is told (whose voice, whose language, whose vantage point) shapes what is included, what is left out and ultimately how a life or a community comes to be understood. This is why authorship and voice are not incidental features of digital storytelling but its ethical core.
The seminar was equally attentive to practice: the four dimensions of digital literacy (access, functional skill, creation and critical literacy), the participatory pedagogy of the story circle, and an ethics of representation built on ongoing consent, shared ownership, non-extractive process and the right to withdraw. These are not abstractions. They are the working conditions under which any of us (students, researchers, communities) can safely tell our own stories in public.
The Fluid Line Between Fact and Fiction
The second seminar turned to autofiction itself. This is a literary genre, but one that speaks well beyond literature, to any discipline concerned with how the self is represented in narrative. Coined in 1977 by the French novelist Serge Doubrovsky to describe his own novel Fils, autofiction names writing in which the narrator shares the author’s own name and biography, in which real material is deliberately shaped into the form and language of fiction, and in which the blur between author and narrator is left genuinely ambiguous on purpose. As Professor Ferreira-Meyers was careful to stress, this is not deception. It is a transparent contract: this story is grounded in my life, but I am using the techniques of fiction to shape it.
Two ideas from the seminar stayed with us long after the slides had closed:
Reconstructing memory. Self-storytelling is rarely a passive retrieval of neutral fact. Memory is selective and dynamic, and autofiction gives writers a way to capture the emotional truth of an event even when strict literal accuracy is out of reach.
Literary freedom. The fictional frame offers a kind of protective distance. It gives authors the creative space to explore complex, vulnerable or traumatic personal histories without being bound by the evidentiary demands of a historical record.
Ten writers, different languages, ten very different lives illustrated the point: Annie Ernaux fusing her own life with the collective history of postwar France in The Years; Édouard Louis reconstructing a working-class, rural childhood in The End of Eddy; Karl Ove Knausgård naming his own family across six volumes of My Struggle; Riad Sattouf filtering his father’s political idealism through a child’s uncomprehending eye in The Arab of the Future; Alison Bechdel entwining her own coming-out with her father’s death in Fun Home; Lynda Barry coining the term “autobifictionalography” for her serialised strips. What connects them is not a shared style but a shared method: real names and real consequences, an “I” that is constructed live rather than simply reported, a form shaped by its platform, i.e. a letter, a six-volume epic, a serialised web comic, and, again and again, writers speaking from identities not already being told from the inside.
Self-Storytelling as Reclamation and Agency
This last point became the heart of the seminar’s analysis of life writing through marginalised lenses. Professor Ferreira-Meyers emphasised that narrating one’s own story is an act of reclaiming power:
“Autofiction serves as a form of self-reclamation and resistance, giving individuals the freedom to present vulnerabilities and challenge traditional societal expectations.”
By taking control of the narrative arc, writers and speakers move from being passive subjects shaped by external narratives to active agents defining their own identity and choices. Louis’s account of leaving behind the name Eddy Bellegueule, Bechdel’s staging of three versions of herself on Broadway, Barry’s blunt question to her readers: “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts of it are?”, are all, in their different ways, exercises of that same agency. And every one of these works reopens the unresolved question the first seminar had already raised: what do we owe the real people who become characters in the story of our own lives?
Beyond Literature: When Scientists Tell Their Own Stories
The final seminar carried this argument into territory that STEM colleagues in the room found immediately recognisable. The research paper, Professor Ferreira-Meyers observed, is perhaps the most rigorously de-personalised genre we have: passive voice, no narrator, no body — even though, as science communication research shows, the journal article already relies on narrative machinery such as the constraint arc and the discovery narrative to make its findings legible at all. What the formal paper cannot say is who struggled, who nearly quit, or who was the only woman in the room.
Five real platforms, spanning the UK, Germany, South Africa, Kenya and India, showed what happens when scientists reclaim that missing first person. Dame Athene Donald has blogged “in a purely personal capacity” since 2010, narrating the parts of a Cambridge physics career that never appear in a CV. Sabine Hossenfelder’s twenty-year arc from the blog Backreaction to video essays traces how a platform itself can reshape a public scientific persona. The SAYAS Blog turns this into structured practice, with South Africa’s Young Academy of Science funding four PhD students each year to narrate doctoral life in their own voice — now on camera as well as on the page. Anita Makori’s My Science Journey answers the exact problem the first seminar opened with — representation produced about a region rather than by it — by turning first-person career narrative into mentorship infrastructure across Africa. And The Life of Science, in which journalists Nandita Jayaraj and Aashima Dogra have profiled over a hundred women in Indian STEM, was offered as a deliberate contrast case: mediated biography rather than autofiction, useful precisely because it helps mark where that boundary sits.
Read together, these platforms make the same case in a scientific register that the literary seminar had made in a literary one: narrative is not decoration bolted onto data. For early-career researchers who need a path walked rather than just a result reported, it is mentorship at scale.
An Invitation to Reflect
Professor Ferreira-Meyers closed the series not with answers but with questions, and we would like to leave readers with a few of them, lightly adapted:
- If narrative is a form of lossy compression — trading some rigour for legibility — where in your own discipline is that loss unacceptable?
- Think of the last article, report or introduction you wrote. Did you manufacture a clean “however, it remained unclear whether…” turn? Was the gap really that tidy in reality?
- If you had to publish one honest account of your own research or working life this month, written or filmed, what would it have to admit that a formal report never could?
We are grateful to Professor Ferreira-Meyers for four days of generous, rigorous and genuinely cross-disciplinary conversation, and to the Visiting Professor Programme for making the exchange possible. Narrative, it turns out, does not stay on the page. It runs through the lab, the classroom, the blog post and the CV alike, and deciding how honestly we tell our own part in it is a choice every one of us makes, whether we notice it or not.
Dr. Lisa Bowers
Prof. Karen Ferreira-Meyers
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