Guided Autobiography: Writing and Telling the Stories of Life

Inspire Research Series @ FSAS
Guided Autobiography: Writing and Telling the Stories of Life

Chair: Lisa E. Cox, PhD, LCSW, MSW
Faculty of Social Work Stockton University, USA

📅 Tuesday, June 2
🕙 12:00–13:30
📍 Room: Spatele Amfiteatrului, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work (FSAS), UBB

Presentation Overview

Developed by pioneering gerontologist James Birren, Guided Autobiography is an evidence-based life-story method widely used in gerontology, social work, education, and community programs. While rooted in autobiographical writing, the method also opens broader questions related to narrative identity, autobiographical memory, resilience, ageing, and the ways people make sense of their lives across the life course.

The lecture will explore the potential of autobiographical and narrative approaches not only as reflective practices, but also as valuable methodological tools for research, teaching, and community engagement. The session may also include an experiential component, offering participants the opportunity to engage directly with brief autobiographical writing prompts and discussions.

Who Is This Lecture For?

The event will be particularly relevant for those interested in narrative gerontology, qualitative and narrative methodologies, ageing studies, social work, education, memory studies, and life-course research.

Author Bio

Lisa Cox is a professor of Social Work and Gerontology at Stockton University in southern New Jersey, near the Atlantic City coastline. She is a Certified Guided Autobiography Instructor through the Birren Center for Autobiographical Studies and has extensive experience facilitating life-story writing groups in educational and community settings. As a Fulbright Teaching Specialist, she is visiting Babes-Bolyai University to teach Guided Autobiography methodology to students and faculty in 2026.

Inspire Research Series @ FSAS

At FSAS, we believe that research becomes stronger when ideas and people meet. Inspire Research Series @ FSAS was created as a space for dialogue, reflection, and inspiration, at the intersection of departments, study lines, and generations of researchers, but also as a framework in which research is understood not only as a final performance, but as a living practice that concerns each of us in our identity as academic staff.

Through lectures, discussions, and workshops delivered by distinguished invited speakers – from Romania and from abroad – this series aims to make us more aware of the ways in which we think, write, and share knowledge. It invites us to take a step back – or perhaps sideways – in order to set ourselves in motion within a space of critically examining our own ways of doing research, of deconstructing expectations related to performance, productivity, and “outcomes,” and of reactivating the seeker within us (of data, of meaning), the resilient form of the active researcher. It is an invitation to allow ourselves to be inspired and transformed by the diversity of ways of doing, imagining, and living research – with all its challenges, uncertainties, and satisfactions.

Whether it is about publishing in international journals, about academic writing as a process of thinking, about the ethics and politics of knowledge production, about creative and interdisciplinary methods, about slow research, deep work, social impact and public sociology, about research projects that are desired, ongoing, or only just imaginable, about diverse and pressing themes, or about the ways in which artificial intelligence is transforming academic work, Inspire Research Series aims to create connections and to activate thought. Beyond disciplines, beyond borders, beyond different ways of relating to research, and beyond our own academic trajectories.