Collecting, Narrating, Transmitting: Life Stories and the Technologies of the Biographical, from Trace to Algorithm

Biographical sociology has long regarded lives as the site where biography, history, and social structure bind. Yet, a life never existed apart from the techniques giving it form: its coherence is an artifice (Bourdieu) and every memory is socially framed (Halbwachs).

This session invites contributions reconsidering biographical methods through the relationship between collection, narration, and transmission, understood as interdependent functions of a single socio-technical configuration. The interview and the recorder, the camera and the album, and today generative AI systems, simultaneously collect traces, narrate lives, and promise permanence, shaping what is preserved, forgotten, or transformed.

Hosted in Gwangju, a city whose memory of 1980 is itself an archive, the session tests biographical methods against the premise that emerging technologies constitute their connective tissue. We ask whether biographical knowledge can still restore epistemic dignity to lived experience, now that a life's archive is no longer kept by the one who lived it, and how biographical methods must evolve within an algomorphic sociology.

How does the emergence of algoagents alter collection, narration, and transmission? What forms of authorship and authority arise when a life is recomposed from its traces alone? If the archive is an apparatus that shapes memory and consigns lives to time or oblivion, how should we rethink its ethical and political stakes in the age of GenAI?