Routledge International Handbook On Narrative and Life History

THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL
HANDBOOK ON NARRATIVE AND

LIFE HISTORY
In recent decades there has been a substantial turn towards narrative and life history study. The
embrace of narrative and life history work has accompanied the move to postmodernism and
post-structuralism across a wide range of disciplines: sociological studies, gender studies, cultural
studies, social history; literary theory; and, most recently, psychology.
Written by leading international scholars from the main contributing perspectives and disciplines,
The Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History seeks to capture the range and scope
as well as the considerable complexity of the field of narrative study and life history work by situating
these fields of study within the historical and contemporary context. Topics covered include:
• The historical emergences of life history and narrative study

• Techniques for conducting life history and narrative study
• Identity and politics
• Generational history
• Social and psycho-social approaches to narrative history
With chapters from expert contributors, this volume will prove a comprehensive and author-
itative resource to students, researchers and educators interested in narrative theory, analysis and
interpretation.
Ivor Goodson is Professor of Learning Theory at the University of Brighton, UK and Inter-
national Research Professor at the University of Tallinn, Estonia. He has worked in a range of
countries and was previously Accord Research Professor at the University of Western Ontario,
Canada, and Frederica Warner Professor at the University of Rochester, USA.
Ari Antikainen is Professor Emeritus of Sociology of Education at the University of Eastern

Finland. He was President of the International Sociological Association RC04 2006-2010.
Knight, First Class, of the Order of the White Rose of Finland 2007.
Pat Sikes is Professor of Qualitative Inquiry in the School of Education at the University of
Sheffield, UK. Pat’s interests lie primarily in using auto/biographical approaches with a view to
informing practice and policy.
Molly Andrews is Professor of Political Psychology, and Co-director of the Centre for Nar-
rative Research at the University of East London, UK. Her research interests include political
narratives, psychology of activist commitment and political identity.
THE ROUTLEDGE
INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK
ON NARRATIVE AND LIFE
HISTORY
General Editor: Ivor Goodson

Part Editors: Ari Antikainen, Pat Sikes & Molly Andrews
First published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Ivor Goodson, Ari Antikainen, Pat Sikes &
Molly Andrews; individual chapters, the contributors
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Goodson, Ivor, editor.
Title: The Routledge international handbook on narrative and life history /
edited by Ivor Goodson, Ari Antikainen, Pat Sikes & Molly Andrews.
Other titles: International handbook on narrative and life history
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016011366 (print) | LCCN 2016025471 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138784291 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315768199 (ebk) |
ISBN 9781315768199 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Biography—Research—Methodology. | Biography as a literary
form—Study and teaching.
Classification: LCC CT22 .R68 2017 (print) | LCC CT22 (ebook) | DDC
809/.93592—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011366
ISBN: 978-1-138-78429-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-76819-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
PART I
Life histories and narratives 1
Introduction: Life histories and narratives 3

Ivor Goodson
1 The rise of the life narrative 11

Ivor Goodson
2 The story of life history 23

Ivor Goodson
3 How stories found a home in human personality 34

Dan P. McAdams
4 Narrative and life history research in international education:

Re-conceptualisation from the field 49
David Stephens
5 What have you got when you’ve got a life story? 60

Pat Sikes and Ivor Goodson
6 Techniques for doing life history 72

Ivor Goodson and Pat Sikes
7 The story so far: Personal knowledge and the political 89

Ivor Goodson
v
Contents
8 Always a story 102

Mike Hayler
9 On coming to narrative and life history 116

Keith Turvey
PART II
Methodological and sociological approaches 129
Introduction: In search of life history 131

Ari Antikainen
10 The quest for lived truths: Modifying methodology 144

Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
11 Analyzing novelty and pattern in institutional life narratives 156

Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein
12 Zeitgeist, identity and politics: The modern meaning of the concept

of generation 167
Semi Purhonen
13 Biography as a theoretical and methodological key concept

in transnational migration studies 179
Irini Siouti
14 Culinary border crossings in autobiographical writing:

The British Asian case 190
Jopi Nyman
15 Biographical and narrative research in Iberoamerica: Emergence,

development and state fields 202
Antonio Bolívar
16 A psycho-societal approach to life histories 214

Henning Salling Olesen
17 Working-life stories 225

Karolina J. Dudek
18 Culturally available narratives in parents’ stories about disability 237

Amy Shuman
19 Researching higher education students’ biographical learning 249

Agnieszka Bron
vi
Contents
20 The narrative interview – method, theory and ethics:

Unfolding a life 260
Marianne Horsdal
PART III
Political narratives and the study of lives 271
Introduction: Political narratives and the study of lives 273

Molly Andrews
21 Narrative power, sexual stories and the politics of story telling 280
Ken Plummer
22 Immutability blues: Stories of queer identity in an age of tolerance 293

Suzanna Danuta Walters
23 Northern Irish narratives of protest and conflict: Back and forth

across the rubicon 305
Neil Ferguson
24 Aleksandr (Sasha) Pechersky (1909–1990): In search of a life story 318

Selma Leydesdorff
25 Saffron and Orange: Religion, nation and masculinity in Canada

and India 331
Paul Nesbitt-Larking and Catarina Kinnvall
26 The experience of politics: Narratives of women MPs in the

Indian parliament 344
Shirin M. Rai
27 Making family stories political? Telling varied narratives of

serial migration 356
Ann Phoenix
28 The politics of personal HIV stories 369

Corinne Squire
29 Epistolary entanglements of love and politics: Reading Rosa

Luxemburg’s letters 381
Maria Tamboukou
30 Politics and narrative agency in the history of the Victoria

and Albert Museum 392
Linda Sandino
vii
Contents
PART IV
Ethical approaches 403
Introduction: ‘But who is Mrs Galinsky, mother?’: From Nana Sikes’

stories to studying lives and careers 405
Pat Sikes
31 Ethical considerations entailed by a relational ontology in

narrative inquiry 418
D. Jean Clandinin,Vera Caine and Janice Huber
32 Compassionate research: Interviewing and storytelling from

a relational ethics of care 431
Carolyn Ellis
33 Suspicious, suspect and vulnerable: Going beyond the call and

duty of ethics in life history research 446
Mark Vicars
34 The ethics of researching something dear to my heart with

others ‘like me’ 458
Yvonne Downs
35 How stories of illness practice moral life 470

Arthur W. Frank
36 The ethics of researching and representing dis/ability 481

Dan Goodley and Rebecca Lawthom
37 An act of remembering: Making the ‘collective memories’ my

own and confronting ethical issues 493
Janice B. Fournillier
38 ‘The path is made by walking on it’: Ethical complexities in

supervising international doctoral researchers using narrative
approaches 505
Sheila Trahar
39 Writing the (country) girl: Narratives of place, matter, relations

and memory 518
Susanne Gannon
40 Ethics and the writing of After a Fall: A Sociomedical Sojourn 531

Laurel Richardson
viii
Contents
41 Ethics and the tyranny of narrative 536

Clive Baldwin
42 The door and the dark: Trouble telling tales 550

Malcolm Reed
43 “Styles of good sense”: Ethics, filmmaking and scholarship 569

Kip Jones
44 Lingering ethical tensions in narrative inquiry 581

Will van den Hoonaard
45 Purpose built ethical considerations for narrative research: Broad

consent or process consent but not informed consent 593
Martin Tolich
46 A relational ethic for narrative inquiry, or in the forest but lost

in the trees, or a one-act play with many endings 605
Norman K. Denzin
47 Narrative ethics 618

Derek M. Bolen and Tony E. Adams
Author Index 631

Subject Index 647
ix
PART I
Life histories and narratives

Introduction
LIFE HISTORIES AND
NARRATIVES
Ivor Goodson
university of brighton
The Handbook seeks to provide a set of explanatory, exemplary and at times exhortatory texts
around the theme of life histories and narratives. The Handbook comprises four parts. The first
parts look at some of the general points about these approaches: their origins, the distinctive and
discursive nature of life narratives and life histories, the contextual parameters and finally the
multiple relationships to identity and personality.
To provide a broader gaze than is possible from a solitary editorial standpoint, I wanted to
involve some of the most thoughtful and engaged scholars in developing parts which covered
the manifold methodological and ethical questions that arise in these fields of study. Ari Anti-
kainen and Pat Sikes are friends I have known over several decades with whom I have collaborated
and co-written. Their intelligence and integrity is the key feature of their work and praxis, but
they have always provided detailed methodological and ethical guidance to the field, and their
parts therefore focus on these twin concerns.
Likewise with Molly Andrews, whom I first encountered in her seminal text Lifetimes of
Commitment (Andrews, 1991). The idea for her part was to provide substantive focus on political
lives, which illustrated and explored not only context and content but also highlighted the meth-
odological and ethical questions which emerge in these kinds of studies.
All four parts are therefore well-integrated in their concerns and ongoing focus. Each Part
Editor provides their own introduction to themselves and their parts. My intention in this intro-
duction is to foreshadow some salient themes and provide an overview of the themes that are
showcased in Chapters 1–9.
The juxtapositioning of life history and narrative celebrates the mutually constitutive nature
of these research modalities and ways of knowing. Both celebrate the culmination of a rep-
resentational crisis that moves our focus firmly and with conviction from the positivist pursuit of
objectivity to the exploration and elaboration of subjectivity. Life histories and narratives inhabit
the heartland of subjectivity and explore the multiple ways in which our subjective perceptions
and representations relate to our understandings and our actions. With the huge potential in
developing our studies, there are perils and pitfalls in the ‘narrative turn’ to subjectivity. This
handbook seeks to explore both the promise and perils of the turn to subjectivity.
The interrelatedness of life histories and narratives is close and complementary. In the most
sophisticated and complex versions of both there is close convergence from the outset – though
3
Ivor Goodson
it is important to establish the distinctive aspects of the two approaches. Narrative work focusses
primarily on the story as told by the narrative teller. This often compromises the ultimate form
of research studies employing this modality. The messianic vision of narrative work is to ‘sponsor
the voice’ of the narrative teller, unsullied by research interpretation and colonisation. In extremis
this approach foregoes any interpretation – but also any active research collaboration. The pursuit
of primary authenticity can then lead to an abdication on the part of the researcher. This is a
paradox that sits at the heart of some of the more messianic narrative work.
From the outset we must insist that the dangers of abdication are not a feature of all narrative
work, as this volume evidences – for we have deliberately chosen elaborated notions of narrative
work in this handbook. Many studies that designate themselves as ‘narrative studies’ explore the
complexity of context and the multi-faced feature of human agency in ways not dissimilar from
the approach of the full life history studies. Some then, fulfil the aspiration I have long promoted,
following Stenhouse, of developing ‘a story of action within a theory of context’. The develop-
ment of contextual understandings is vital if narratives are to be fully presented and developed.
This emphasis of contextual background is both an intellectual but also a political issue. For
whilst rich in ‘authenticity’ and resonance, narratives are also eminently capable of misdirection
and manipulation. Christian Salmon has written eloquently of the possible misuses of narratives,
especially those that are individualised and devoid of historical context. In his wonderful book
Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind, he points to enormous dangers which reside in a decon-
textualized or under-contextualised narrative:
The art of narrative – which, ever since it emerged, has recounted humanity’s experi-
ence by shedding light on it – has become, like story-telling, an instrument that allows
the state to lie and to control public opinion. Behind the brands and the TV series,
and in the shadows of victorious election campaigns from Bush to Sarkozy, as well as
in those of military campaigns in Iraq and elsewhere, there are dedicated storytelling
technicians. The empire has confiscated narrative. This book tells the incredible story
of how it has hijacked the imaginary.
(Salmon, 2010)
One issue that needs to be addressed by those of us employing narratives is the increasing rupture
between dominant narratives and contested but nevertheless apprehensible social reality. Post-
modernism has of course eroded the belief in objective truth, and it is correct that all ‘truth’ may
be subjectively experienced and partial. But there are truths: the sun rises in the morning and the
economic crisis was caused clearly and incontrovertibly by the behaviour of the banks.
Take the latter truth, which can be empirically verified. There has been a rupture between
this and the dominant narrative. Truth and narrative has ceased to co-exist. Whilst it was the
banks’ behaviour that caused the crisis, the narrative that has emerged blames over-spending on
the public services for the deficit caused by the banks’ behaviour. Since dominant interest groups
control the narratives that are constructed; they can reposition narratives and ‘truth’ and thereby
disassociate what people believe from empirical, validated reality and historical context.
These potential dangers in the misuse of narrative data are exacerbated by the uncoupling of
narratives from their social location and historical context. Let’s take an example of the collection
of narratives and stories presented without reference to social and historical transitions. In our study
of teachers’ lives funded by the Spencer Foundation in the USA we studied teachers’ stories across the
40-year period (Goodson, 2003). In the 1960s and 1970s teachers recounted stories of professional
autonomy and vocational pride. Their teaching was integral to their ‘life and work’. It expressed
these deepest ideals about social organisation and social progress. For many, teaching was their life.
4
After 2000 the more common story was ‘it’s just a job; I’ll do what I’m told’. It became a story of
technicians carrying out the instructions of others and has led to a set of stories of how teachers
sought fulfilment of their ideals and life missions by leaving teaching for more meaningful work.
Now, without historical context, these are just different stories of teachers’ work laid side by
side with equal claims to our attention and with limited potential for understanding history and
politics: life histories should seek to elucidate why during historical periods teacher narratives
change and how the restructuring of schools and society impinge on the narrative storylines that
are available and accessible for individual elaboration. Narratives then are best when fully ‘located’
in their time and place – stories of action within theories of context. It is when conducted in
this way that life histories reach the parts that other methods fail to reach. For these reasons many
scholars see life history as a more fully fledged method and a way of learning. For instance, in revis-
iting narrative and life history methods, Hitchcock and Hughes suggest the life history approach
is ‘superior’ because of its retrospective quality which ‘enable[s] one to explore social processes
over time and add historical depth to subsequent analyses’ (Hitchcock & Hughes, 1995, p. 187).
As we saw in the example above of teacher stories, this adds a quite crucial dimension to our anal-
ysis: without the contextual dimension, our narrative analysis is fatally disabled in providing social and
political purchase in our accounts. Given the danger that this disabling vortex will be occupied by oth-
ers wishing to ‘spin’ and misrepresent social reality, this is a fatal omission in methodology and ways of
knowing. Our view in this handbook is that there is no intrinsic or inherent superiority in the use of life
histories over narratives. It all depends on the contextual richness provided alongside the narrative study.
Narrative and life history research often takes a qualitative approach to data collection using
in-depth interviews. The process is collaborative and requires establishing trust and close rela-
tionships. In the first instance, the researcher often encourages a ‘flow’ in the interview, with
limited interrogation, to let the participants control the ordering and sequencing of their stories
and reduce, but not obscure or suspend, the issue of researcher power.
Building on the initial interview(s), further dialogues or follow-up interchange(s) can be
developed. When the researcher and the participant move the ‘inter-view’ towards a ‘grounded
conversation’ and away from the somewhat singular narrative of the initial life story, it can signal
the move from life story to life history. This means approaching the question of why stories are
told in particular ways at particular historical moments. The life history, together with other
sources of data, ‘triangulates’ the life story to locate its wider meaning (see Figure P1.1). In this
Life Story
Documentary Other
Resources Testimonies
Figure P1.1 The life history
5
Ivor Goodson
manner the life story is fully contextualised in time and place and is less malleable and manipu-
lable. This is what is meant by a ‘story of action within a theory of context’.
Introducing part I
In this introductory part we focus on the implications of living in an ‘age of narratives’ and
point to the particular nature of the narratives of our time – often small-scale life narratives.
As we know, storytelling has always been a distinctive feature of humankind, so the recounting
of narratives itself is nothing new but an immemorial practice. Rather the question becomes
what sort of narratives are predominantly current and how are narratives being constructed and
deployed in contemporary life. Christopher Booker has explored the theme of ‘why we tell
stories’. He argues that:
At any given moment, all over the world, hundreds of millions of people will be engaged
in what is one of the most familiar of all forms of human activity. In one way or another
they will have their attention focussed on one of those strange sequences of mental
images which we call a story.
We spend a phenomenal amount of our lives following stories: telling them; listening
to them; reading them; watching them being acted out on the television screen or in
films or on the stage. They are far and away one of the most important features of an
everyday existence.
(Booker, 2004)
In the chapter ‘The rise of the life narrative’, I focus on how life stories are taking ‘front stage’ in
our contemporary culture, but I warn that the story
provides a starting point for developing further understandings of the social construc-
tion of subjectivity; if the stories stay at the level of the personal and practical, we forego
that opportunity.
So the confinement of narratives to small scale individual personal scripts constrains our capacity
to develop links to the contextual background. I argue that the personal life story is an individual-
ising device if divorced from context. Moreover it is a profound mistake to believe that a personal
life story is entirely personally crafted for other forces also speak through the personal voice that
is adopted – ‘they also speak who are not speaking’. Hence I argue we should locate our scrutiny
of stories to show that the general forms, skeletons and ideologies we employ in structuring the
way we tell our individual tales come from a wider culture.
Without this cultural and historical analysis, a life story study can be a decontextualizing device,
or at the very least an under-contextualising device. In this chapter we develop our notions and
understandings of historical time into broad historical time, generational time, cyclical time (the
stages of the life cycle), and personal time. These historical contexts of time and period have
to be addressed as we develop our understandings of life stories and move towards life history
approaches.
The life history method has a long scholarly history that is briefly traced in Chapter 2. First
conducted by anthropologists at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was pioneered by
sociologists Thomas and Znaniecki in the 1920s, notably in their study, The Polish Peasant in
Europe and America (Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918–1920). This work established life history as a
6
bonafide research device, which was further consolidated by the traditions of life history work
in sociology, stimulated at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s by Robert Park.
Howard Becker argues that the study of The Jack Roller, Stanley (Shaw, 1930), is typical of the
virtues of life history studies. He says:
by putting ourselves in Stanley’s skin, we can feel and become aware of the deep biases
about such people that ordinarily permeate our thinking and shape the kinds of prob-
lems we investigate. By truly entering into Stanley’s life, we can begin to see what we
take for granted (and ought not to) in designing our research – what kinds of assump-
tions about delinquents, slums and Poles are embedded in the way we set the questions
we study.
(Becker, 1970, p. 71)
Conducted successfully, the life history then forces a confrontation with not only other people’s
subjective perceptions, but our own also. This confrontation can be avoided, and so often is
avoided, in many other social scientific methods: one only has to think of the common rush to
the quantitative indicator or theoretical construct, to the statistical table or the ideal type. This
sidesteps the messy confrontation with human subjectivity, whether it be that of the person being
studied or the person doing the studying.
This confrontation sits at the heart and is the central aspiration of life history work. In the
contemporary world, Munro argues:
The current focus on acknowledging the subjective, multiple and partial nature of
human experience has resulted in a revival of life history methodology. What were pre-
viously criticisms of life history, its lack of representativeness and its subjective nature,
are now its greatest strength.
(Munro, 1998, p. 8)
Dan McAdams’ work on human storytelling is of great importance to the emerging work in
narrative and life history. In his chapter he looks at the interface between stories and personality
and begins with the fruitful assertion that personal narrative identity is ‘the internalized and
evolving story the person constructs to explain how he or she came to be the person he or she
is becoming’. The shifting of tenses in this sentence points to the emergent sense of self through
story that he works with in this chapter.
Narrative and life history work has come quite late to the psychological inquiry when we
compare to its early origins in anthropology and sociology. McAdams (this volume, p. 34) notes
that it has ‘only been within the last couple of decades that psychological scientists and practi-
tioners have found credible ways of translating that insight into systematic inquiry.’ He asserts
that ‘a growing number of psychologists today conceive of narrative identity as a key feature of
a person’s basic psychological makeup’ (this volume, p. 34). In short he believes it is a key to
understanding human personality.
One of the most attractive elements of McAdams’ work is the suggestive and generative claims
he makes herein; for instance, he builds a set of claims following Joan Didion’s statement that we
‘tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ He says:
the stories we tell ourselves in order to live bring together diverse elements into an
integrated whole, organising the multiple and conflicting facets of our lives within a
7
Ivor Goodson
narrative framework which connects past, present, and an anticipated future and confers
upon our lives a sense of inner sameness and social continuity – indeed an identity. As
the story evolves and our identity takes form, we come to live the story as we write it.
(this volume, p. 37)
McAdams works with a finely detailed and differentiated analysis of life stories. For instance, he
notes that perhaps not surprisingly ‘people who adopt an especially nuanced and differentiated
perspective to understand themselves and the world tend to construct more complex life stories,
compared to narrators whose perspectives are more constrained and parochial’ (this volume,
p. 39). Working with a more sociological focus, I have been exploring the differentiation of life
stories covering a spectrum from what I call ‘scripted describers’ through to ‘focussed elabora-
tors’. This work on the differentiating bases of life narratives is part of a new wave of studies of
differentiation in life narratives (Goodson, 2013), and McAdams moves this innovative work into
the field of psychology and personality studies.
David Stephens’ work is well-known for its articulation of narrative construction set within
a broad contextual location. In his chapter he distinguishes three distinct epistemological and
theoretical levels at which narratives operate: the meta level of ‘grand’ narratives in which fields or
traditions are defined and legitimized, then the meso level in which national and regional narra-
tives are espoused and legitimated, and finally the micro or personal level in which individuals set
about providing a narrative account of their lives. This work is particularly helpful in exploring
how Western grand narratives drive out or marginalise other narratives and become, in his terms,
‘the only story in town’. Narratives of ‘development’ provide an example of this process at work.
The next two chapters emerge from an earlier book that Pat Sikes and I wrote, Life History
in Educational Settings (Goodson & Sikes, 2001). We were concerned to develop an introductory
guide to the methodology and ethics of life history work. Having said this, we were at pains to
stress that you cannot ‘proceduralise’ life history work. This is because of the intensely ‘idiosyn-
cratic personal dynamics’ of the method. We say ‘there is not a predestined way of proceeding in
life history interviews or analyses’ – they are serendipitous, emergent and even opportunistic. Inev-
itably life history work is as variable as life histories themselves and the capacity to respond vari-
ously and intuitively is the key to best practice. The chapter reviews strategies for developing one’s
research focus and reviews the crucial question of negotiating access and participation. A major
part then summarises some of the main strategies employed in the collection of life history data.
In ‘What have you got when you’ve got a life story?’ Pat and I reflect on the essential nature
of life story data. We face the issue that ‘traditionally, the goal of research has been to acquire
knowledge that leads to understanding and the truth about whatever is being investigated’ (this
volume, p. 61). But this is problematical for life history scholars because ‘their primary aim is
to explore how individuals or groups who share specific characteristics subjectively experience,
make sense of, and account for the things that happened to them’ (this volume, p. 61).
We argue that life stories are crafted in particular ways:
They tell their story in a particular way for a particular purpose, guided by their under-
standing of the particular situation they are talking about, the self/identity/impression/
image they want to present, and their assessment of how hearers will respond.
(this volume, p. 62)
The life history interview is a very specific opportunity to present and refine identity. In the book
Narrative Pedagogy (Goodson & Gill, 2011) we have further reflected on the life history interview as a
learning opportunity and a pedagogic possibility. In the life history interview it is therefore possible
8
to learn and teach ‘on the job.’ Many life history tellers reflect afterwards on how much they have
learnt in the telling and in the collaboration of moving between life story and life history modalities.
Life history research provides then a milieu for telling, one with possibilities but also param-
eters: ‘People have particular notions of what it means to be involved in research. These notions
influence what they tell and how they tell it, and their ideas about the information that they
consider they should make available to the researcher’ (this volume, pp. 63–64). The life history
interview is a joint creation; however, conducted, it is an act of collaboration.
This, of course, does not mean that the life history interview acts as a kind of carte blanche for
so much ‘preactive’ work has already been done. Moreover ‘we tell our stories using the narra-
tive forms available to us within our cultures’ (this volume, p. 64). In ‘The story so far: Personal
knowledge and the political’, I investigate some of the cultural patterns of storytelling and narrative
activity. Writing originally in 1995 I argue that ‘a good deal of evidence points to an increasingly
aggrandising centre or state acting to sponsor “voices” at the level of interest groups, localities and
peripheries. From the perspective of these groups this may look like empowerment . . . but . . .
specific empowerment can go hand in hand with overall social control’ (this volume, p. 89).
Hence I warn ‘Economic restructuring is being closely allied to cultural redefinition – a reduction
of contextual discourses . . . and an overall sponsorship of personal and practical forms of discourse
and cultural production’ (this volume, pp. 89–90). This health warning returns us again I think to
the importance of linking our work on narratives and life stories to a systematic investigation of
changing historical contexts for these contexts re-work and re-position our life narratives.
Narratives and life history studies represent ways of knowing which do privilege and
re-prioritise in sometimes progressive and at other times regressive ways. I would suggest it is
worth looking at these methods not just as alternative ‘ways of knowing’ but as different routes
in the process of ‘coming to know’. For this reason above all in the last two chapters in the intro-
duction two scholars from different schools of thought explore this process of ‘coming to know’.
Mike Hayler’s chapter is a splendidly reflective piece. He employs the work of Tony Adams,
and as he says: ‘I come to understand my own experience in a new, if somewhat uncomfortable,
way’ (this volume, p. 110). He states: ‘I respond to Adams, who draws attention to the complex-
ities of taken-for-granted assumptions, by considering the complexities of taken-for-granted
assumptions in my own life’ (this volume, p. 110). This has great similarities to the claims Howard
Becker makes about Shaw’s study of The Jack Roller (Shaw, 1930).
Hayler shows how ‘considering Adams’s story and my own brings me to reflect in a new way
upon connected cultural phenomena’ (this volume, p. 110). He means in particular the direction
of government education policy in England since 2010. He sees how ‘education is a critical site
of imposed, implemented ideology where taken-for-granted assumptions need to be examined,
questioned and challenged’ (this volume, p. 110) and he finds himself ‘positioned uncomfortably
as the institution I work for pursues strategies that bring much of this policy into practice’ (this
volume, p. 110). A later part illustrates how he develops a narrative pedagogy that encourages
‘an environment that places reflexivity at the centre’ for his students (this volume, p. 113). His
work shows how our developing self-narratives, when linked to a developing ‘cognitive map’ of
context, feed through into our ‘courses of action’ in our working lives.
The link between ‘our narrative construction and our contextual understanding is central to
understanding the process of “coming to know”’ (Goodson, 2013). But the further link between
‘coming to know’ and developing ‘courses of action’ is of enormous importance. In the book
Developing Narrative Theory (Goodson, 2013) I have been examining this process and scrutinising
how different kinds of narratives have different ‘action potential’. This area of work is vitally
important in the future of work in narratives and life history and some of the contributors to
this volume are playing key roles in these explorations.
9
Ivor Goodson
In the final chapter of this first part, Keith Turvey looks at the process of ‘coming to
narrative’ and the wider process of ‘coming to know’. He asserts that his process of ‘coming
to know and becoming is effortful, on-going and capricious, but significantly rooted in the here
and now’ (this volume, p. 116). He therefore judges that ‘although narrative is both a significant
and optimal medium for personal, social, cultural and political renewal, it is not without risk
from parochialism and dislocation’ (this volume, p. 116). By exploring issues of temporality and
concepts of ‘threshold experiences’ which cover transitions and transformations, he sets out to
make sure ‘questions about the past or future must not become dislocated from the present’ (this
volume, p. 126). He argues similarly that life stories must not become dislocated from these wider
life histories. He concludes that it is through periodisation and conceptualising narratives within
an ecology that we can gain insight into the wider socio-cultural and political movements of our
time. Such insights build narrative capital and provide an important culture of resistance against
individual dislocation and parochialism.’
This introductory part therefore highlights some of the main themes appertaining to narra-
tive and life history work. The methodological turn to subjectivity has once again prioritised this
method and led to a widespread rehabilitation of life history studies. But, as we have argued, the turn
to subjectivity comes both with promises and perils. The perils focus on the misuse and manipula-
tion of storytelling. This was recognised early on by Edward Bernays in his 1924 study Propaganda
(Bernays, 1924). He saw how stories could be developed that would shape our desires and our
patterns of consumption. The manipulation and promotion of stories has been further refined in
the Neoliberal age, and digitalisation aids that process greatly. As the Internet provides access to
our storied reality, the possibility for infinite fine-tuning of manipulative storytelling is opened up.
We have seen how providing cognitive maps of historical and social context can ‘act back’
against the promotion of unsensitised narrative construction. In the future our work should
develop further our theories of context. In developing these cognitive maps of context, so we
develop what I have called ‘narrative capital’ (Goodson, 2013). This will explore the action poten-
tial, the learning potential and the pedagogic potential of narrative and life history work. It should
enable the process of ‘coming to tell’ to also be a process of ‘coming to know’.
References
Andrews, M. (1991) Lifetimes of Commitment: Ageing, Politics and Psychology. Cambridge, New York and
Melbourne: Cambridge Press.
Becker, H. (1970) Sociological Work: Method and Substance. Chicago: Aldine.
Bernays, E. (1924) Propaganda. New York: Liveright.
Booker, C. (2004) The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. London and New York: Continuum.
Goodson, I. F. (2003) Professional Knowledge, Professional Lives: Studies in Education and Change. Open Maiden-
head and Philadelphia: University Press.
Goodson, I. F. (2013) Developing Narrative Theory: Life Histories and Personal Representation. London and New
York: Routledge.
Goodson, I. F. & Gill, S. (2011) Narrative Pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang.
Goodson, I. F. & Sikes, P. (2001) Life History Research in Educational Settings: Learning from Lives. Buckingham
and Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Hitchcock, G. & Hughes, D. (1995) Research and the Teacher: A Qualitative Introduction to School-Based Research.
London and New York: Routledge.
Munro, P. (1998) Subject to Fiction: Women Teachers’ Life History Narratives and the Cultural Politics of Resistance.
Buckingham, England: Open University Press.
Salmon, C. (2010) Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind. London and New York: Verso.
Shaw, C. (1930) The Jackroller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Thomas, W. & Znaniecki, F. (1918–1920) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (2nd edn.). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
10
1
THE RISE OF THE LIFE
NARRATIVE
Ivor Goodson
There is a kind of popular consensus at the moment that we live in ‘an age of narrative’. The
truth is rather more complex, for although it is true that narratives and stories are part of the
common currency of the day, the scale of those narratives, their scope and aspiration, has dramat-
ically changed. In fact we are entering a period of particular kinds of narratives: life narratives
and small-scale narratives.
In past periods there have been ‘grand narratives’ of human intention and progress. Hywell
Williams, in his recent chronological history of the world, argues that the link between human
history and progress in grand narrative grew exponentially in the mid nineteenth century. He says
that the progress narratives that emerged at this time were often ‘brash and naïve’:
It was certainly founded on the fact of material advance – the sudden and greater ease
of travel, improvements in sanitation and the reduction in disease, which so impressed
contemporaries in the advanced West. These victories also seemed to signify a real
moral progress.
Nobody supposed that humanity was getting better at producing saints and geni-
uses but there was a new confidence in the possibility of a well-ordered society. The
intellectual advances that were once the preserve of an educated elite had spread
further.
( Williams, 2005, p. 18)
Commenting on the public life associated with these changes, he says:
Once, the sceptical courtiers of the eighteenth century had sneered at superstition in
gossipy little groups – a century later greater masses of people debated great issues of
religion and science, political reform and freedom of trade in public meetings.
( Williams, 2005, p. 18)
In the last sentence we can see how far public engagement has fallen – the idea of great masses
of people debating great issues is inconceivable in the present world. In part, this is closely related
to the decline of narrative scope and aspiration.
11
Ivor Goodson
In the twentieth century, we have witnessed the collapse of grand narratives. Again Williams
provides a valuable summary:
The idea of the grand narrative in the human sciences has fallen out of fashion. Christian
providence, Freudian psychology, positivist sciences, Marxist class consciousness, nationalist
autonomy, fascist will: all have attempted to supply narratives that shape the past. When it
comes to practical politics, some of these narratives proved to involve repression and death.
The history of the twentieth century dissolved the connection between material and
scientific progress and a better moral order. Technological advance was twice turned to
the business of mass slaughter in global war, as well as genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Material progress was seen to mingle with moral regress. The model T Ford and the gas
chamber were the inventions that defined the century.
( Williams, 2005, p. 18)
We can then begin to see how grand narratives fell from grace, losing not only scope and aspira-
tion but also our underpinning faith in their general capacity to guide or shape our destiny. From
the vortex left after the collapse of the grand narratives, we see the emergence of another kind
of narrative, infinitely smaller in scope, often individualised – the personal life story. It reflects a
dramatic change in the scale of human belief and aspiration. Alongside these small narratives we
also see a return to older, more fundamentalist precepts.
How has this transformation of the role and scope of narrative been worked? How is the new
genre socially constructed?
Writing in 1996, I argued that literature and art are normally ahead of other cultural carriers
of ideology in providing us with new scripts and in defining our personal narratives and ‘life
politics’. I said we should locate ‘our scrutiny of stories to show that the general forms, skeletons,
and ideologies that we employ in structuring the way we tell our individual tales come from a
wider culture’ (Goodson, 2005, p. 215; 2013).
Following this scrutiny, I think we can see in contemporary cultural activity how the move
to smaller, more individual life narratives is emerging. Interestingly, this is often referred to as
the ‘age of narrative’: of narrative politics, of narrative storytelling, of narrative identity. Put in
historical perspective against the last centuries following the Age of Enlightenment, we should
see this as the beginning, not of the ‘age of narratives,’ but of the ‘age of small narratives’. In our
current individualised society, our art, culture and politics increasingly reflect a move to highly
individualised or special-interest narratives, which often draw on the literature of therapy and
personal and self-development.
Perhaps a few examples from the work of some of our cultural icons will illustrate the point.
Bruce Springsteen, the American rock star, has I think always been one of the best and most
perceptive storytellers. He writes his songs very carefully and works on quite large canvases of
human aspiration at times, such as his album The River. In this album he reflects, in line with Bob
Dylan, who recently wrote that he ‘hadn’t got a dream that hadn’t been repossessed’, on the limit-
ing of human dreams. Springsteen wrote, ‘Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something
worse?’ These reflections on the capacity of larger human aspirations to direct our life narratives
have recently driven him in a more specific, individual direction. His album The Ghost of Tom Joad
profoundly reflects in its title, as well as in its substance, an awareness of a massive shift in narrative
scope. Tom Joad, of course, the figure in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, carries a storyline linked to
mass movements, which aimed to provide social justice at a time of global business depression.
Once this link between individual storylines and collective aspirations is broken, we enter the
epoch of small narratives, the world of individualised ‘life politics’.
12
The rise of the life narrative
In a sense, Springsteen’s latest work, such as Devils and Dust, reflects the move we are describing:
the move from grand narratives linked to political engagement towards individual life narratives
and, more specifically, focused on life politics. We can see how this seismic shift in narrative capac-
ity is explored and scripted in the work of our creative artists. Returning to the focus of Spring-
steen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, we see a retrospective look at narrative linked to social and political
purpose, but his new album moves off into an individual life-narrative focus. Sean O’Hagan writes
that: ‘Unlike “The Ghost of Tom Joad” it possesses none of that album’s pointed social aware-
ness. Instead we get a set of intimate and often fragmentary glimpses of ordinary people’s lives in
trouble’ (O’Hagan, 2005, p. 7). ‘What I have done on this record,’ elaborates Springsteen on the
DVD, ‘is to write specific narrative stories about people whose souls are in danger or are at risk
from where they are in the world or what the world is bringing to them’ (O’Hagan, 2005, p. 7).
Once again, then, Springsteen tries to link his narratives to a broader tradition, but this
time the link is largely rhetorical, for the stories now are fragmentary and individualised, and
without reference to broader social movements (beyond the nebulous ‘folk tradition’). As he
says, he now writes ‘specific narrative stories’ about people and the passivity of the response is
reflected in his phrase that these people are ‘at risk from where they are in the world or what
the world is bringing to them’. The scope and aspiration of narratives is finely elaborated
in this quote, and it illustrates the seismic shift in the narrative capacity that has happened over
the past two centuries.
The same redefinition of narrative capacity can be seen in film-making. Many film-
makers articulate their use of specific life narratives in contemporary film-making. Jorge
Semprun, for example, who has made some of the most resonant political films, said recently
in an interview that:
the atmosphere in May ’68 and its aftermath created an appetite for political films . . . But
today the mood is different. If you are to make a political film now you have to approach
it not from the point of a nation or national struggle, but one of individual choice.
(Interview with Jorge Semprun, 2004, p. 4)
Gil Troy, a history professor writing in The New York Times, put it the same way when contemplat-
ing the possibilities of action in the contemporary world: ‘Our challenge today is to find meaning
not in a national crisis, but in an individual’s daily life’ (Troy, 1999, p. A27).
Reviewing new books on Derrida and Marx, Dolon Cummings recently reflected on these
changes in the reach of theoretical narrative in looking at the differences between the two writers:
For theory to ‘grip the masses,’ as Marx puts it, there has to be at least the foundation of a
mass movement for it to address. Without such a movement, theory lacks direction, dis-
cipline even. Consequently the obscurity of contemporary philosophy as exemplified
by Derrida and his followers is not a purely intellectual phenomenon. Disconnected
from political engagement reading lacks urgency and how we read and what becomes
almost arbitrary.
(Cummings, 2006, p. 39)
Cummings adds a very significant last sentence: ‘But the question of how to read any author
cannot be entirely separated from the question of how to live, and that is a question that never
really goes away’ (Cummings, 2006, p. 39).
We see here the changing canvas for narrative construction and the dramatic change in scope
and aspiration, and we can see this reflected in our social and political life. The change can be seen
13
Ivor Goodson
in the political adviser on network TV who recently put it this way: ‘No it’s not that we see the
need to change the policy in response to public opposition . . . no not at all . . . our conclusion
is that we need to change the story we tell about the policy.’
This is a perfect redefinition of the new genre of ‘narrative politics’. New in one sense, but
in fact dating back some way in time – most significantly to the public relations guru, Edward
Bernays. Bernays believed we could manipulate people’s unconscious desires and by appealing to
them, we could sell anything – from soap powder to political policies. It was a matter of crafting
the right kind of story. Hence:
You didn’t vote for a political party out of duty, or because you believed it had the best
policies to advance the common good; you did so because of a secret feeling that it
offered you the most likely opportunity to promote yourself.
(Adams, 2002, p. 5)
As Christopher Cauldwell has noted as a result of the triumph of narrative politics: ‘Politics has
gone from largely being about capital and labour to being largely about identity and sovereignty’
(Cauldwell, 2005). Politicians appear to understand this need for narrative fine-tuning as they
hone their policies. The narrative matters more than the substance, as this quote from the late
lamented Charles Kennedy makes clear: ‘Whilst we had good and quite popular policies [pause]
we have got to find and fashion a narrative’ (quoted in Branigan, 2005, p. 8).
Nothing illustrates the shift from old hierarchies of cultural and symbolic capital towards
something we might call ‘narrative capital’ better than the case of David Cameron, the new leader
of the Tory Party in Britain (see Goodson, 2005). In previous generations, his Old Etonian and
Oxford connections would have provided an authoritative narrative through which to promote
his political ambitions. The cultural and symbolic capital of such an education would then have
come with an implicit and very powerful storyline. These places traditionally produced those
who govern us, whilst the symbolic and social capital are still largely intact. Cameron has pre-
dictably worried about constructing an acceptable life narrative.
The dilemma is outlined in this interview with Martin Bentham (2005), undertaken before
Cameron became leader:
But as Cameron insists, it is not just his preference for racy television programmes that
calls into question the stereotyped image that others have placed upon him. He cites
his liking for the ‘gloomy left-wing’ music of bands such as the Smiths, Radiohead,
and Snow Patrol, which brings ribbing from his friends, as a further example of his
divergence from the traditional Tory image, and also, perhaps rather rashly for a newly
appointed shadow Education Secretary, admits to regularly misbehaving ‘in all sorts of
ways’ while at school.
Most importantly, however, he says that what keeps him connected very firmly in
ordinary life is the job of representing his constituents in Witney, Oxfordshire, and life at
home with his wife, Samantha, and their two children, three-year-old Ivan, who suffers
from cerebral palsy and epilepsy, and Nancy, who is aged 14 months.
‘Am I too posh to push?’ he quips, before determinedly explaining why he rejects
the criticism of his background. ‘In the sort of politics I believe in it shouldn’t matter
what you’ve had in the past, it’s what you are going to contribute in the future, and I
think that should be true of everybody, from all parts of society, all colours and ages and
races, and I hope that goes for Old Etonians too.’
(Bentham, 2005, p. 10)
14
What I think Cameron has noted is that if he re-crafts his life narrative ‘it shouldn’t matter what
you’ve had in the past’. In other words, he is worried that his life experience of sustained system-
atic privilege will interfere with the narrative he is trying to create for himself and his party, where
there is a ‘genuine care and compassion for those who fall behind’ and where what ‘people really
want (is) a practical down-to-earth alternative to Labour’. He ends, ‘Am I too posh? It shouldn’t
really matter where you come from – even if it’s Eton.’ Whilst Eton may have massive historical
claims to cultural and symbolic capital, the narrative capital it provides is clearly a little more dif-
ficult to present and cash in. Cameron’s honest appraisal of the dilemma elegantly illustrates the
seismic shift towards narrative politics and how this is likely to feed through into new educational
modes for acquiring narrative capital (see Goodson, 2004).
The same importance of narrative capital can be seen working its way into the literature on
business management and leadership. Peter Senge’s (1990) work on the discipline of business
leaders points to the salience of what he calls the ‘principle story’ in the motivation and direction
of business leaders.
To forge the link between the multinational and the personal, we need to grasp each person’s
life-theme. Senge says this about purpose stories:
The interviews that I conducted as background for this chapter led to what was, for me,
a surprising discovery. Although the three leaders with whom I talked operate in com-
pletely different industries – a traditional service business, a traditional manufacturing
business, and a high-tech manufacturing business – and although the specifics of their
views differed substantially, they each appeared to draw their own inspiration from the
same source. Each perceived a deep story and a sense of purpose that lay behind his vision,
what we have come to call the purpose story – a larger pattern of becoming that gives
meaning to his personal aspirations and his hopes for their organization. For O’Brien the
story has to do with ‘the ascent of man.’ For Simon, it has to do with ‘living in a more
creative orientation’. For Ray Stat, it has to do ‘with integrating thinking and doing’.
This realization came late one evening, after a very long day with the tape and tran-
script of one of the interviews. I began to see that these leaders were doing something
different from just ‘storytelling,’ in the sense of using stories to teach lessons or transmit
bits of wisdom. They were relating the story – the overarching explanation of why they
do what they do, how their organizations need to evolve, and how this evolution is part
of something larger. As I reflected back on gifted leaders whom I have known, I realised
that this ‘larger story’ was common to them all, and conversely that many otherwise
competent managers in leadership positions were not leaders of the same ilk precisely
because they saw no larger story.
The leader’s purpose story is both personal and universal. It defines her or his life’s
work. It ennobles his efforts, yet leaves an abiding humility that keeps him from taking
his own successes and failures too seriously. It brings a unique depth to meaning to his
vision, a larger landscape upon which his personal dreams and goals stand out as land-
marks on a longer journey. But what is important, this story is central to his ability to
lead. It places his organization’s purpose, its reason for being within a context of ‘where
we’ve come from and where we’re headed,’ where the ‘we’ goes beyond the organization
itself to humankind more broadly. In this sense, they naturally see their organization as a
vehicle for bringing learning and change into society. This is the power of the purpose
story – it provides a single integrating set of ideas that give meaning to all aspects of a
leader’s work.
(Senge, 1990, p. 346)
15
Ivor Goodson
The pattern of narrative construction can now be discerned at work in the advertising industry.
In previous times advertising was a mass movement, which meant it targeted large segments of the
population and addressed them through the mass media of television, radio and the press. Whilst
this was not a process free of narrative construction, and was indeed deeply impregnated in this
way, it was the narrative construction of collective identities and collective desires that could be
reached through the mass media. These were not grand narratives, but they were certainly large
narratives aimed at significant sections of the population. This collective narrative advertising
is beginning to break down in the face of the rise of the small narrative and the individualised
society. The evidence is everywhere. To give one piece of evidence: In the last year, advertising
revenues were down 3.5 per cent for the national press, 4.5 per cent for commercial radio and
3.3 per cent for one of the main commercial television stations (ITV1). These are very significant
reductions over a one-year period, and they indicate the beginnings of a sharp decline of mass
narrative advertising. In its place, according to the National Consumer Council, is a wholly dif-
ferent pattern of advertising. In contrast to the figures above, advertising on the Internet rose by
70 per cent last year. This is a seismic shift in the size and aspiration of advertising. A spokesman
for the National Consumer Council said:
The point about the Internet is that people can be told individually tailored stories
which fit their own prejudices and predilections. The advertiser can access all this niche
information and can tailor individual and personalised narratives for each individual
taste. This is likely to be much more successful than the hit and miss mass advertising
of the past.
(Interview on BBC News, 23rd March 2006)
We can see then how the ‘age of small narratives’, of life narratives, has been expressed in emerg-
ing patterns of art, politics and business. In this sense the problematics of studying people’s lives
are part of a wider context of social relations, proprieties and provisions. Lasch, for instance, has
scrutinised the historical trajectory of private lives in Haven in a Heartless World (Lasch, 1977). In
his history of modern society, he discerns two distinct phases. In the first phase, he argues that the
division of labour that accompanied the development of individual capitalism deprived ordinary
people of control over their work, making that work alienating and unfulfilling. In the second
phase, Lasch argues that liberalism promoted a view that, while work might be alienated under
capitalism, all could be restored in the private domain. ‘It was agreed that people would be freed
to pursue happiness and virtue in their private lives in whatever manner they chose.’ The work-
place was this severed form; the home and the family became the ‘haven in the heartless world’
(Menaud, 1991). No sooner was this equation established, Lasch argues, than liberalism reneged:
Private life was opening up to the ‘helping’ professions: doctors, teachers, psychologists,
child guidance experts, juvenile court officers, and the like. The private domain was
immediately made prey to these quasi-official ‘forces of organised virtue’ and ‘the hope
that private transactions could make up for the collapse of communal traditions and
civic order’ was smothered by the helping professions.
(Lasch, 1977, p. 168)
Interestingly, Denzin has recently argued that ethnographers and biographers represent the latest
wave in this ‘penetration’ of private lives, and that this is to be expected at a time when we see
‘the emergence of a new conservative politics of health and morality, centering on sexuality, the
family and the individual’ (Denzin, 1991, p. 2).
16
Hence he argues:
The biography and the autobiography are among Reagan’s legacy to American society.
In these writing forms the liberal and left American academic scholarly community
reasserts a commitment to the value of individual lives and their accurate representation
in the life story document. The story thus becomes the left’s answer to the repressive
conservative politics of the last two decades of American history. With this method
the sorrowful tales of America’s underclass can be told. In such tellings a romantic and
political identification with the downtrodden will be produced. From this identifica-
tion will come a new politics of protest; a politics grounded in the harsh and raw eco-
nomic, racial, and sexual edges of contemporary life. This method will reveal how large
social groupings are unable to either live out their ideological versions of the American
dream, or to experience personal happiness.
(Denzin, 1991, p. 2)
And further:
In re-inscribing the real life, with all its nuances, innuendoes and terrors, in the life
story, researchers perpetuate a commitment to the production of realist, melodramatic
social problems texts which create an identification with the downtrodden in American
society. These works of realism reproduce and mirror the social structures that need
to be changed. They valorise the subjectivity of the powerless individual. They make
a hero of the interactionist-ethnographer voyeur who comes back from the field with
moving tales of the dispossessed. They work from an ideological bias that emphasises
the situational, adjustive, and normative approach to social problems and their resolu-
tions, whether this be in the classroom, the street, or the home.
(Denzin, 1991, pp. 2–3)
The rise of the life narrative clearly comes with a range of problems, and also possibilities, for the
social scientist. By scrutinising the wider social context of life narratives, we can begin to appre-
ciate the dilemmas of qualitative work, which focuses on personal narratives and life stories.
The version of ‘personal’ that has been constructed and worked for in some Western countries
is a particular version, an individualistic version, of being a person. It is unrecognisable to much of
the rest of the world. But so many of the stories and narratives we have of teachers work unprob-
lematically and without comment with this version of personal being and personal knowledge.
Masking the limits of individualism, such accounts often present ‘isolation, estrangement, and
loneliness . . . as autonomy, independence and self-reliance’ (Andrews, 1991, p. 13). Andrews
concludes that if we ignore social context, we deprive ourselves and our collaborators of mean-
ing and understanding. She says, ‘It would seem apparent that the context in which human lives
are lived is central to the core of meaning in those lives’ and argues that ‘researchers should not,
therefore, feel at liberty to discuss or analyse how individuals perceive meaning in their lives and
in the world around them, while ignoring the content and context of that meaning’ (Andrews,
1991, p. 13).
The truth is that, many times, a life storyteller will neglect the structural context of their lives
or interpret such contextual forces from a biased point of view. As Denzin says, ‘Many times a
person will act as if he or she made his or her own history when, in fact, he or she was forced
to make the history he or she lived’ (Denzin, 1989, p. 74). He gives an example from the 1986
study of alcoholics: ‘You know I made the last four months, by myself. I haven’t used or drank.
17
Ivor Goodson
I’m really proud of myself. I did it’ (Denzin, 1989, pp. 74–5). A friend, listening to this account,
commented:
You know you were under a court order all last year. You know you didn’t do this on
your own. You were forced to, whether you want to accept this fact or not. You also
went to AA and NA. Listen Buster you did what you did because you had help and
because you were afraid, and thought you had no other choice. Don’t give me this, ‘I
did it on my own’ crap.
(Denzin, 1989, pp. 74–5)
The speaker replies, ‘I know. I just don’t like to admit it.’ Denzin concludes:
This listener invokes two structural forces, the state and AA, which accounted in part
for this speaker’s experience. To have secured only the speaker’s account, without a
knowledge of his biography and personal history, would have produced a biased inter-
pretation of his situation.
(Denzin, 1989, pp. 74–5)
The story, then, provides a starting point for developing further understandings of the social
construction of subjectivity; if the stories stay at the level of the personal and practical, we forego
that opportunity. Speaking of the narrative method focusing on personal and practical teachers’
knowledge, Willinsky writes: ‘I am concerned that a research process [that] intends to recover the
personal and experiential would pave over this construction site in its search for an overarching
unity in the individual’s narrative’ (Willinsky, 1989, p. 259).
These are the issues that begin to confront us as the age of the life narrative gathers pace. Let
us therefore review some of the problems that we face when working with individual life narra-
tives. First, the personal life story is an individualising device if divorced from context. It focuses
on the uniqueness of individual personality and circumstance and in doing so may well obscure
or ignore collective circumstances and historical movements. Life stories are only constructed
in a specific historical circumstance and cultural conditions – these have to be brought into our
methodological grasp.
Second, the individual life story, far from being personally constructed, is itself ‘scripted’. The
social scripts that people employ in telling their life stories are derived from a small number of
acceptable archetypes available in the wider society. The life story script, far from being auton-
omous, is highly dependent on wider social scripts. In a sense, what we get when we listen to a
life story is a combination of archetypal stories derived from wider social forces and the personal
characterisations invoked by the life storyteller. The life story, therefore, has to be culturally
located as we pursue our understandings.
In general, life stories themselves do not acknowledge this cultural location explicitly; nei-
ther do they reflect explicitly on their historical location in a particular time and place. The
life story as data, therefore, faces a third dilemma in that it can be a ‘de-contextualising’ device,
or at the very least an under-contextualising device. This means that the historical context
of life stories needs to be further elucidated and they need to be understood in relationship
to time and periodisation. We can think of time, as the French Annalistes do, as existing at a
number of levels.
First, there is broad historical time – the large sweeps and periods of human history – what
the Annalistes called the longue durée. Then there is generational or cohort time – the specific
experiences of particular generations, say the ‘baby boomers’ born after the Second World War.
18
Then there is cyclical time – the stages of the life cycle from birth through to work and chil-
drearing (for some) through to retirement and death. Finally, there is the personal time – the way
each person develops phases and patterns according to personal dreams, objectives or imperatives
across the life-course.
These historical factors associated with time and period have to be addressed as we develop
our understandings of life story data. This scrutiny of historical context, more broadly conceived,
will also allow us to interrogate the issue of individualising and scripting mentioned earlier. The
aim is to provide a story of individual action within a theory of context. This aim is served when
we make the transition from life story studies to life histories.
Learning Lives: An example

The Learning Lives project took place between 2004 and 2008 and was funded by the Economic
Social Research Council in Britain.
From initial analysis of the texts, a number of broad themes have emerged. In this case
the theme was around the importance placed on early childhood experiences to explain
later life events and choices. The respondent, whose stories we use in this chapter, is one of
the respondents who fit into this themed group. The stories have been selected to provide
an overview of the range of experiences in childhood and adolescence that may be seen as
important for identity formation in later life, and for the quests that have developed from
these experiences.
What makes the project relatively unique is not only its length (a data-collection period of
almost three years) and size (about 750 in-depth interviews with 150 adults aged 25 and older,
plus a longitudinal questionnaire study with 1,200 participants), but also the fact that it combines
two distinct research approaches – life history research and life-course research – and that, within
the latter approach, it utilises a combination of interpretative longitudinal research and quantita-
tive survey research (see Figure 1.1).
In the Learning Lives project, we have the chance to see how life history can elucidate learn-
ing responses. What we do in the project is to deal with learning as one of the strategies people
employ as the response to events in their lives. The great virtue of this situation, regarding our
understanding of learning within the whole life context, is that we get some sense of the issue
of engagement in learning as it relates to people living their lives. When we see learning as a
response to actual events, then the issue of engagement can be taken for granted. So much of
the literature on learning fails to address this crucial question of ‘engagement’ and, as a result,
learning is seen as some formal task that is unrelated to the needs and interests of the learner.
Figure 1.1 Learning lives
19
Ivor Goodson
Hence so much of curriculum planning is based on prescriptive definitions of what is to be learnt

without any understanding of the situation within the learners’ lives. As a result, a vast amount
of curriculum planning is abortive because the learner simply does not engage. To see learning
as located within a life history is to understand that learning is contextually situated and that it
also has a history, in terms of (1) the individual’s life story, (2) the history and trajectories of the
institutions that offer formal learning opportunities and (3) the histories of the communities
and locations in which informal learning takes place. In terms of transitional spaces, we can see
learning as a response to incidental transitions, such as events related to illness, unemployment
and domestic dysfunction, as well as the more structured transitions related to credentialing or
retirement. Hence, these transitional events create encounters with formal, informal and primal
learning opportunities.
How then do we organise our work to make sure that our collection of life narratives and learning
narratives does not fall into the traps of individualisation, scripting and de-contextualisation? The
answer is we try to build in an ongoing concern with time and historical period, and context and
historical location. In studying learning, like any social practice, we need to build in an under-
standing of the context – historical and social – in which that learning takes place. This means
that our initial collection of life stories, as narrated, moves on to become a collaboration with our
life storytellers about the historical and social context of their life. By the end, we hope the life
story becomes the life history because it is located in historical time and context. Our sequence
then moves as shown in Figure 1.2.
Let me give one concrete example of how location might work in studying teachers’ lives.
In the life stories of teachers, nowadays, the normal storyline is one of technicians who follow
government guidelines and teach a curriculum that is prescribed by governments or departments
of education. The storyline therefore reflects a particular historical moment where the teacher’s
work is constructed in a particular way. If, however, one compares current teacher storylines in
England with the storylines collected 30 or 40 years ago, those stories would be of professionals
who have autonomy and the capacity to decide what curriculum to teach and what content is
Narration Initial Life Story
Collaboration Subsequent Interview
Location Full Life History
Figure 1.2 Developing life history interviews
20
organised to carry that curriculum. In seeking to locate the life story of current teachers, we
would have to talk about the ongoing construction of the teachers’ work in a particular way. In
coming to understand how contemporary teachers’ work provides a particular work context,
we would get some sense of the historical context of teachers’ work and how this is subject to
change and transition as the historical circumstances of schooling change. Hence, in moving from
narration through to location, a historical understanding of the teachers’ work might emerge.
So this is how time and context might emerge within life history research. To make sure that
this temporal aspect is fully engaged within the project, we have divided our research between
life history research and life-course research. In this way, the historical context of learning can be
examined either retrospectively or in contemporary ‘real time’. The retrospective understanding
of the learning biography can be explored in life history research, while the real time understand-
ing of the ways in which learning biographies are lived can be understood through longitudinal
life-course research. In this way, we set retrospective life history research against contemporary
longitudinal life-course research.
We have summarised the rationale for combining these two approaches in this way:
The reason for combining the two approaches is not only that it increases the time span
available for investigation (albeit that the retrospective study of the learning biography
can only be done through the accounts and recollections of participants).
It is also because we believe that the combination of the two approaches allows us
to see more and gain a better understanding than if we would only use one of them.
To put it simply: life-history research can add depth to the interpretation of the
outcomes of longitudinal life-course research, while life-course research can help to
unravel the complexities of life-history research. Each, in other words, is a potential
source for contextualizing and interpreting the findings of the other.
(Biesta et al., 2004)
By moving from life stories towards full life histories, and by building in life-course analysis, we
maximise the potential for understanding how time and context impinge on people’s ‘learning
lives’. Such work then tries to put the individual life narrative back together with the collective
context. In doing so, it seeks to heal the rupture between the individual life narrative and the
collective and historical experience.
References
Adams, T. (2002) How Freud got under our skin. The Observer Review. 10 March.
Andrews, M. (1991) Lifetimes of Commitment: Ageing, Politics and Psychology. London: Routledge.
Bentham, M. (2005) Tories’ young pretender insists on a fair chance for all. The Observer. 15 May.
Biesta, G. J. J., Hodkinson, P. & Goodson, I. F. (2004) Combining life history and life-course approaches in
researching lifelong learning: Some methodological observations from the learning lives project. Mimeo.
Learning Lives Project.
Branigan, T. (2005) Kennedy prepares for the next step. The Guardian. 20 May.
Cauldwell, C. (2005) The final round for party politics. The Financial Times. November. pp. 19–20.
Cummings, D. (2006) Thinking outside the text. New Statesman. 9 January.
Denzin, N. (1989) Interpretative Biography. London: Sage.
Denzin, N. (1991) Deconstructing the biographical method. Paper Presented at American Educational
Research Association Conference. Chicago. 9 April.
Goodson, I. F. (2004) Narrative capital and narrative learning. Paper given to a workshop at the University
of Viborg. November. This paper was considerably extended in doctoral classes given at the Univer-
sity of Barcelona in a course on life stories, during the period January to July 2005.
21
Ivor Goodson
Goodson, I. F. (2005) Learning, Curriculum and Life Politics. London: Routledge.

York: Routledge.
Lasch, C. (1977) Haven in a Heartless World. New York: Basic Books.
Menaud, L. (1991) Man of the people: A review of The True and Only Heaven by C. Lasch. New York Review
of Books. 48. (7). 11 April.
National Consumer Council. (2006) Interview with spokesman on BBC News. Thursday 23 March.
O’Hagan, S. (2005) Boss class. The Observer Magazine. 24 April.
Semprun, J. (2004) Interview. Financial Times Weekend. November. pp. 27–8.
Senge, P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday.
Troy, G. (1999) Prosperity doesn’t age well. The New York Times. 24 September.
Williams, H. (2005) Extract from Chronology of World History. London: Cassells.
Willinsky, J. (1989) Getting personal and practical with personal practical knowledge. Curriculum Inquiry.
19. (3). pp. 247–64.
22
2
THE STORY OF LIFE HISTORY
Ivor Goodson
Searching for the origins of the life history method, we found that the first life histories, in the
form of autobiographies of Native American chiefs, were collected by anthropologists at the
beginning of the century (e.g. Barrett, 1906; Radin, 1920). Since then, sociologists and other
scholars working in the humanities have increasingly adopted the approach, although its popu-
larity and acceptance as a research strategy has tended to wax and wane. Life history and other
biographical and narrative approaches are now widely seen as having a great deal to offer, and
we argue that they should be employed in identity research. In examining their scholarly fate,
however, it is necessary to scrutinize their use to date within sociology, which has been a major
battleground in their evolution.
For sociologists, the main landmark in the development of life history methods came in the
1920s, following the publication of Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1918–1920) mammoth study, The
Polish Peasant in Europe and America. In exploring the experience of Polish peasants migrating to
the United States, Thomas and Znaniecki relied mainly on migrants’ autobiographical accounts,
alongside extant diaries and letters. For these authors, life histories were the data par excellence
of the social scientist, and they presented a strident case for using life histories above all other
methods:
In analyzing the experiences and attitudes of an individual, we always reach data and
elementary facts which are exclusively limited to this individual’s personality, but can be
treated as mere incidences of more or less general classes of data or facts, and can thus
be used for the determination of laws of social becoming. Whether we draw our mate-
rials for sociological analysis from detailed life records of concrete individuals or from
the observation of mass phenomena, the problems of sociological analysis are the same.
But even when we are searching for abstract laws, life records, as complete as possible,
constitute the perfect type of sociological material, and if social science has to use other
materials at all it is only because of the practical difficulty of obtaining at the moment
a sufficient number of such records to cover the totality of sociological problems, and
of the enormous amount of work demanded for an adequate analysis of all the personal
materials necessary to characterise the life of a social group. If we are forced to use mass
phenomena as material, or any kind of happenings taken without regard to the life
23
Ivor Goodson
histories of the individuals who participated, it is a defect, not an advantage, of our

present sociological method.
( Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918–1920, pp. 1831–3)
Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1918–1920) pioneering work established the life history as a bona fide
research device. (Although as Miller, 2000, pointed out, its foundations can be seen in the notion
of historicism as expressed by Wilhelm Dilthey.) The prominent position of the life history was
further consolidated by the flourishing tradition of sociological research stimulated at Chicago,
particularly by Robert Park.
In the range of studies of city life completed under Park, the life history method was strongly
in evidence: The Gang (Thrasher, 1928), The Gold Coast and the Slum (Zorbaugh, 1929), The Hobo
(Anderson, 1923), and The Ghetto (Wirth, 1928). However, perhaps the zenith was reached in the
1930s with publications such as Shaw’s (1930) account of a mugger, The Jack-Roller, and Suther-
land’s The Professional Thief (Cornwell & Sutherland, 1937). Becker’s (1970) comments on Shaw’s
study underline one of the major strengths of the life history method:
By providing this kind of voice from a culture and situation that are ordinarily not
known to intellectuals generally and to sociologists in particular, The Jack Roller ena-
bles us to improve our theories at the most profound level: by putting ourselves in
Stanley’s skin, we can feel and become aware of the deep biases about such people that
ordinarily permeate our thinking and shape the kinds of problems we investigate. By
truly entering into Stanley’s life, we can begin to see what we take for granted (and
ought not to) in designing our research – what kinds of assumptions about delinquents,
slums and Poles are embedded in the way we set the questions we study.
(Becker, 1970, p. 71)
Becker’s (1970) argument went to the heart of the appeal of life history methods at their best,
for life history data disrupt the normal assumptions of what is known by intellectuals in general
and sociologists in particular. Conducted successfully, the life history forces a confrontation
with other people’s subjective perceptions. This confrontation can be avoided, and so often is
avoided in many other social scientific methods: One only has to think of the common rush to
the quantitative indicator or theoretical construct, to the statistical table or the ideal type. This
sidesteps the messy confrontation with human subjectivity, which we believe should comprise
the heartland of the sociological enterprise. Behind or coterminous with this methodological
sidestep, there is often a profound substantive and political sidestep. In the avoidance of human
subjectivity, quantitative assessment and theoretical commentaries can so easily service powerful
constituencies within the social and economic order. This tendency to favour and support exist-
ing power structures is always a potential problem in social science.
From the statement about “putting ourselves in Stanley’s skin,” Becker (1970) went on to assert
that Stanley’s story offered the possibility “to begin to ask questions about delinquency from the
point of view of the delinquent” (p. 71). From this it followed that questions will be asked, not from
the point of view of the powerful actors but rather from the perspective of those who are acted on
in professional transactions. These are some important reasons why, beyond the issues of methodo-
logical debate, life history methods might be unpopular in some quarters. Life history, by its nature,
asserts and insists that power should listen to the people it claims to serve, as Becker (1970) noted:
If we take Stanley seriously, as his story must impel us to do, we might well raise a series
of questions that have been relatively little studied – questions about the people who
24
The story of life history
deal with delinquents, the tactics they use, their suppositions about the world, and the
constraints and pressures they are subject to.
(Becker, 1970, p. 71)
However, this contention should be read in the light of Shaw’s (1930) own “early warning” in
his preface, where he cautioned the reader against drawing conclusions about general causes of
delinquency on the basis of a single case record. One of the best early attempts to analyze the
methodological base of the life history method was Dollard’s (1949) Criteria for the Life History.
Foreshadowing Becker, he argued that “detailed studies of the lives of individuals will reveal new
perspectives on the culture as a whole which are not accessible when one remains on the formal
cross sectional plane of observation” (p. 4). Dollard’s arguments have a somewhat familiar ring,
perhaps reflecting the influence of George Herbert Mead. He noted that
as soon as we take the post of observer on the cultural level the individual is lost in
the crowd and our concepts never lead us back to him. After we have ‘gone cultural’
we experience the person as a fragment of a (derived) culture pattern, as a marionette
dancing on the strings of (reified) culture forms.
(Dollard, 1949, p. 5)
In contrast to this, the life historian “can see his [sic] life history subject as a link in a chain of
social transmission” (Dollard, 1949, p. 5). This linkage should ensure that life history methods will
ameliorate the ‘presentism’ that exists in so much sociological theory and a good deal of symbolic
inter-actionism. Dollard described this linkage between historical past, present, and future:
There were links before him from which he acquired his present culture. Other links
will follow him to which he will pass on the current of tradition. The life history
attempts to describe a unit in that process: it is a study of one of the strands of a com-
plicated collective life which has historical continuity.
(Dollard, 1949, p. 15)
Dollard (1949) was especially good, although perhaps unfashionably polemical, in his discussion
of the tension between what might be called the cultural legacy, the weight of collective tradition
and expectation, and the individual’s unique history and capacity for interpretation and action.
By focusing on this tension, Dollard argued, the life history offers a way of exploring the rela-
tionship between the culture, the social structure, and individual lives. Thus, Dollard believed that
in the best life history work:
we must constantly keep in mind the situation both as defined by others and by the
subject; such a history will not only define both versions but let us see clearly the pres-
sure of the formal situation and the force of the inner private definition of the situation.
(Dollard, 1949, p. 32)
Dollard (1949) saw this resolution, or the attempt to address a common tension, as valuable
because “whenever we encounter difference between our official or average or cultural expecta-
tion of action in a ‘situation’ and the actual conduct of the person this indicates the presence of
a private interpretation” (p. 32).
In fact, Dollard (1949) was writing sometime after a decline set in for life history methods
(an unfortunate side effect of which is that Dollard’s work is not as well known as it should be).
25
Ivor Goodson
After reaching its peak in the 1930s, the life history approach fell from grace and was largely
abandoned by social scientists. At first this was because the increasingly powerful advocacy of
statistical methods gained a growing number of adherents among sociologists, but it was perhaps
also because, among ethnographically inclined sociologists, more emphasis came to be placed on
situation than on biography as the basis for understanding human behavior.
In the 1970s, something of a ‘minor resurgence’ (Plummer, 1990) was observed, particularly
and significantly, at first, among deviancy sociologists. Thus, there were studies of a transsexual
(Bogdan, 1974), a professional fence (Klockars, 1975), and once again, with a fine sense of history
following Shaw’s (1930) study, a professional thief (Chambliss, 1972).
Although life history methods have long been popular with journalists-cum-sociologists like
Studs Terkel in the United States, Jeremy Seabrook and Ronald Blythe in the United Kingdom,
and a growing band of “oral historians” (Thompson, 1978, 1988), Bertaux’s (1981) collection,
Biography and Society, marked a significant step in the academic rehabilitation of the approach.
This book was closely followed by Plummer’s (1983, revised in 2000) important Documents of Life.
Tierney’s (1998) special issue of Qualitative Inquiry is also of interest.
Feminist researchers have been particularly vocal in their support of the approach, mainly
because of the way in which it can be used to give expression to, and in celebration of, hidden
or ‘silenced’ lives (cf. McLaughlin & Tierney, 1993) – lives lived privately and without public
accomplishment, the sorts of lives most women (and, it has to be said, most men) live (cf. Gluck &
Patai, 1991; Middleton, 1992, 1997; Munro, 1998; Personal Narratives Group, 1989; Sorrell & Mont-
gomery, 2001; Stanley, 1990, 1992; Weiler & Middleton, 1999). Similarly, those who research
issues and aspects of sexuality, notably Plummer (1995) and Sparkes (1994), also have made con-
siderable use of the approach.
Within the field of educational studies, working with teachers and pupils who are, again,
arguably marginal in terms of social power, life history has been seen as particularly useful and
appropriate because, as Bullough (1998) pointed out, “public and private cannot be separated in
teaching. The person comes through when teaching” (pp. 20–1). Life history does not ask for
such separation; indeed, it demands holism. The growing number of life history studies dealing
with educational topics is testimony to this (e.g., Ball & Goodson, 1985; Casey, 1993; Erben, 1998;
Goodson, 1992; Goodson & Hargreaves, 1996; Kridel, 1998; Middleton, 1993; Osler, 1997; Sikes,
1997; Sikes et al., 1985).
Among these scholars, albeit in marginal or fragmented groups, a debate is underway that
promises a thorough re-examination of the potential of life history methods. Before considering
the contemporary appeal of the life history method, however, it is important to discover why
it was eclipsed for so long by social theory, social survey, and participant observation. In this
examination, we distinguish fundamental methodological stumbling blocks from professional,
micro-political, and personal reasons for the decline of life history work. Often the latter are far
more important than participants in the methodological ‘paradigm wars’ acknowledge.
Reasons for the decline of the life history in early sociological study
By 1966, Becker (1970) was able to summarize the fate of the life history method among
American sociologists, stating that “given the variety of scientific uses to which the life his-
tory may be put, one must wonder at the relative neglect into which it has fallen” (Becker,
1970, pp. 71–2).
Becker (1970) noted that sociologists have never given up life histories altogether, but they
have not made it one of their standard research tools. The general pattern was, and by and large
continues to be, that “they know of life history studies and assign them for their students to read.
26
But they do not ordinarily think of gathering life history documents or of making the technique
part of their research approach” (pp. 71–2).
The reasons for the decline of life history methods are partly specific to the Chicago School.
From the late 1920s, life histories came increasingly under fire as the debate within the depart-
ment between the virtues of case study (and life histories) and statistical techniques intensified.
Faris (1967), in his study of the Chicago School, recorded a landmark within this debate:
To test this issue, Stouffer had hundreds of students write autobiographies instructing
them to include everything in their life experiences relating to school usage and the
prohibition law. Each of these autobiographies was read by a panel of persons presumed
to be qualified in life history research, and for each subject the reader indicated on
a scaled line the position of the subject’s attitude regarding prohibition. Inter reader
agreement was found to be satisfactory. Each of the same subjects had also filled out a
questionnaire that formed a scale of the Thurstone type. The close agreement of the
scale measurement of each subject’s attitude with the reader’s estimate of the life history
indicated that, as far as the scale score was concerned, nothing was gained by the far
more lengthy and laborious process of writing and judging a life history.
(Faris, 1967, pp. 114–15)1
Even within Chicago School case study work, use of the life history declined against other eth-
nographic devices, notably participant observation. One element of the explanation of this may
lie in the orientations of Blumer and Hughes. These two sociologists provide a bridge between
the Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s and those Matza has termed the neo-Chicagoans,
such as Becker (1970).
Blumer’s symbolic inter-actionism placed primary emphasis on process and situation, whereas
explanations in terms of biography, like those in terms of social structural forces, were regarded
with considerable suspicion. Hughes’s comparative approach to the study of occupations may
have tended to limit interest in biography in favor of a concern with the typical problems faced
by occupational practitioners and the strategies they adopt for dealing with them. An additional
factor that hastened the decline of the methodological eclecticism of Chicago sociology in which
the life history played a central role was the decline of Chicago itself as a dominant centre for
sociological studies.
The fate of life history methods has been inextricably linked to the historical emergence of
sociology as a discipline. Hence, the methodological weaknesses of the approach were set against
the need to develop abstract theory. When sociology was highly concerned with providing
detailed accounts of specific communities, institutions, or organizations, such weaknesses were
clearly of less account. However, in the life history of sociology, the pervasive drift of academic
disciplines toward abstract theory has been irresistible; in this evolutionary imperative it is not
difficult to discern the desire of sociologists to gain parity of esteem with other academic dis-
ciplines. The resulting pattern of mainstream sociology meant that sociologists came to pursue
“data formulated in the abstract categories of their own theories rather than in the categories that
seemed most relevant to the people they studied” (Becker, 1970, p. 72).
Along with the move toward abstract academic theory, sociological method became more
professional. Essentially, this led toward a model of single study research, defined by Becker (1970)
in this way:
I use the term to refer to research projects that are conceived of as self-sufficient
and self-contained, which provide all the evidence one needs to accept or reject the
27
Ivor Goodson
conclusions they proffer. The single study is integrated with the main body of knowl-
edge in the following way: it derives its hypotheses from an inspection of what is already
known: then, after the research is completed, if those hypotheses have been demon-
strated, they are added to the wall of what is already scientifically known and used as
the basis for further studies. The important point is that the researcher’s hypothesis is
either proved or disproved on the basis of what he has discovered in doing that one
piece of research.
(Becker, 1970, p. 72)
The imperative toward this pattern of sociological research can be clearly evidenced in the
traditions and organizational format of emergent professional sociology. The PhD student
must define and test a hypothesis; the journal article must test the author’s own or other aca-
demics’ hypotheses; the research project or programme must state the generalizable aims and
locate the burden of what has to be proved. However, this dominant experimental model, so
fruitful in analogies with other sciences and, hence, so crucial in legitimating sociology as a
full-fledged academic discipline, led to the neglect of sociology’s full range of methodology
and data sources.
It has led people to ignore the other functions of research and particularly to ignore the con-
tribution made by one study to an overall research enterprise even when the study, considered in
isolation, produced no definitive results of its own. Because, by these criteria, the life history did
not produce definitive results, people have been at a loss to make anything of it and by and large
have declined to invest the time and effort necessary to acquire life history documents (Becker,
1970, p. 73).
Becker (1970) ended by holding out the hope that sociologists would, in the future, develop a
“further understanding of the complexity of the scientific enterprise” (p. 73) and that this would
rehabilitate the life history method and lead to a new range of life history documents as genera-
tive as those produced by the Chicago sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s.
In the period following Becker’s strictures in 1970, sociology was subject to a number of new
directions that sought to re-embrace some of the elements lost in the positivist, theory-testing
models (Cuff & Payne, 1979; Morris, 1977). One new direction that clearly stressed biography,
the phenomenological sociology of Berger and Luckmann (Berger, 1963; Berger & Luckmann,
1967), actually resulted in little empirical work.
Hence, research in interpretive sociology has displayed a heavy emphasis on situation under
the influence of inter-actionism and ethno-methodology. The paradox is that these new direc-
tions in sociology moved away from the positivist model directly to situation and occasion; as a
result, life history and biography have tended to remain at the sidelines of the sociological enter-
prise. For instance, inter-actionist studies have focused on the perspectives and definitions emerg-
ing among groups of actors in particular situations, the backdrop to this presented as a somewhat
monolithic structural or cultural legacy that constrains, in a rather disconnected manner, the
actors’ potentialities. In overreacting to more deterministic models, this situational emphasis most
commonly fails to make any connection with historical process. Thus, inter-actionists retained
their interest in the meaning objects had for actors, but these meanings increasingly came to be
seen as collectively generated to deal with specific situations, rather than as the product of indi-
vidual or even collective biography.
Viewing sociology’s evolution over half a century or so provides a number of insights into
the life history method. First, as sociologists began to take seriously their social scientific pursuit
of generalizable facts and the development of abstract theory, life history work came to be seen
as having serious methodological flaws. In addition, because life history studies often appeared
28
to be only ‘telling tales,’ these methodological reservations were enhanced by the generally
low status of this as an academic or scientific exercise. Paradoxically, even when antidotes to
the experimental model of sociology developed, these took the form of inter-actionism and
ethno-methodology, both of which stressed situation and occasion rather than biography and
background. Moreover, because these new directions had status problems of their own, life
history work was unattractive on this count as well. At the conference where Goodson’s (1983)
early work on life history was originally delivered as a seminar paper, a classroom inter-actionist
rejected the exhortation to consider life history work by saying “we should not suggest new
methodologies of this sort because of the problem of our academic careers. Christ! Ethnography
is low status enough as it is.”
Set against the life history of the aspirant academic, keen to make a career in the academy as
it is or as it has been shaped and ordered, we clearly see the unattractiveness of the life history
method at particular stages in the evolution of sociology. However, by the 1980s, matters were
beginning to change markedly in ways that have led to a re-embracing of life history methods.
From modernism to postmodernism

Under modernism, life history languished because it persistently failed the ‘objectivity
tests’: Numbers were not collected and statistical aggregation was not produced and because
studies were not judged to be representative or exemplary, contributions to theory remained
parsimonious. In the historical aspiration to be a social science, life history failed its mem-
bership test.
However, as Harvey (1989) and others documented, the “condition of post-modernity”
provides both new dilemmas and new directions. In some ways, the new possibilities invert
the previous deficits that were perceived in life history work. In moving from objectivities to
subjectivities, the way is open for new prospects for life history work and, as a result, a range
of new studies have begun to appear (cf. Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, 2000). As is often the case,
educational studies have been slow to follow new directions, but recently new work has begun
to emerge.
Life history work has accompanied the turn to post-modernism and post-structuralism, par-
ticularly as evidenced in sociological studies, gender studies, cultural studies, literacy theory, and
even psychology. Such work facilitates the move away from modernist master narratives, which
are viewed as social productions of the Enlightenment Project. Alongside this move, the notion
of a singular, knowable, essential self is judged as part of the social production of individualism,
linked to argentic selves in pursuit of progress, knowingness, and emancipation. Assumptions of
linearity of chronological time lines and story lines are challenged in favour of more multiple,
disrupted notions of subjectivity.
Foucault’s work, for instance, focused sociological attention on the way in which institutions
such as hospitals and prisons regulate and constitute our subjectivities. Likewise, discourse studies
have focused on the role of language in constructing identities in producing textual representa-
tions that purport to capture the essential selves of others (Shotter & Gergen, 1989).
These new syntagmas in sociological work have led to a revival in the use of life history work:
The current focus on acknowledging the subjective, multiple and partial nature of
human experience has resulted in a revival of life history methodology. What were pre-
viously criticisms of life history, its lack of representativeness and its subjective nature,
are now its greatest strength.
(Munro, 1998, p. 8)
29
Ivor Goodson
Yet, the post-modern concern with disrupting constructed selves and stories is itself not without
difficulty, as Munro (1998) reflectively noted:
In collecting the life histories of women teachers I find myself situated in a paradoxical
position. I know that I cannot ‘collect’ a life. Narrative does not provide a better way
to locate truth, but in fact reminds us that all good stories are predicated on the quality
of the fiction. We live many lives. Consequently, the life histories in this book do not
present neat, chronological accounts of women’s lives. This would be an act of betrayal,
a distortion, a continued form of “fitting” women’s lives into the fictions, categories
and cultural norms of patriarchy. Instead, my understanding of a life history suggests
that we need to attend to the silences as well as what is said, that we need to attend to
how the story is told as well as what is told or not told, and to attend to the tensions
and contradictions rather than succumb to the temptations to gloss over these in our
desire for ‘the’ story.
(Munro, 1998, pp. 12–13)
Here, Munro (1998) began to confront the methodological and, indeed, ethical minefield that
potentially confronts, confuses, and confounds the researcher and the researched. Fine (1994)
wrote of some issues to be confronted:
Self and Other are knottily entangled. This relationship, as lived between researchers and
informants, is typically obscured in social science texts, protecting privilege, securing dis-
tance, and laminating the contradictions. Slipping into a contradictory discourse of indi-
vidualism, persona-logic theorizing, and de-contextualization, we inscribe the ‘Other’,
strain to white out ‘Self ’, and refuse to engage the contradictions that litter our texts.
(Fine 1994, p. 72)
Fine’s (1994) warnings are of inestimable value in approaching life history work. However, in
the end we do face the inevitable closure of the text that is produced, or are forever caught in
the politics of infinite regress where every closure must be re-opened. For Fine warned that the
search for the complete and coherent is a delusion; we produce a snapshot of transgressions in
process when we write up life history work. Furthermore, the relationship of the researcher and
informant is much concerned in the postmodern predilection for “rejection of the unitary sub-
ject for a more complex, multiple and contradictory notion of subjectivity” (Munro, 1998, p. 35).
What does such researcher rejection mean in the face of an informant who narrates his or
her life as a search for coherence? For it remains the case that many people narrate their lives
according to an aspiration for coherence, for a unitary self. Should we, in Munro’s (1998) word,
“reject” this social construction of self ? Rejection is not the issue here, for life history work
should, where possible, refuse to play post-modern God. Life history work is interested in the
way people actually do narrate their lives, not in the way they should. Here it seeks to avoid the
fate of some post-modern fundamentalists.
Life stories then are the starting point for our work. Such stories are, in their nature, already
removed from life experiences – they are lives interpreted and made textual. They represent a
partial, selective commentary on lived experience. Freeman (1993) explored some of the issues
that are raised here:
For what we will have before us are not lives themselves, but rather texts of lives, literary
artifacts that generally seek to recount in some fashion what these lives were like. In
30
this respect, we will be – we must be – at least one step removed from the lives that
we will be exploring: we can only proceed with our interpretive efforts on the basis of
what has been written, [or related] by those whose lives they are. The basic situation, I
hasten to emphasize, obtains not only in the case of literary texts of the sort we will be
examining here, but in the case of interviews and the like along with the observation of
human action more generally. Interviews, of the sort that social scientists often gather,
are themselves texts, and while they may not have quite as much literary flourish as
those we buy in bookstores, they are in their own right literary artifacts, taking the form
of words, designed to give shape to some feature of experience. As for the observation
of human action, the story is actually much the same: human action, which occurs in
time and yields consequences the significance of which frequently extend beyond the
immediate situation in which it takes place, is itself a kind of text; it is a constellation
of meanings which, not unlike literary texts or interviews, calls forth the process of
interpretation (see especially Ricoeur, 1981). In any case, the long and short of this brief
excursion into ‘textuality’ is that our primary interpretive takeoff point will not be lives
as such but the words used to speak them.
(Freeman, 1993, p. 7)
The rendering of lived experience into a life story is one interpretive layer, but the move to life
history adds a second layer and a further interpretation. Goodson (1992) wrote about the distinc-
tion between Stage 1, in which the informant relates her or his life story, and Stage 2, in which a
life history is constructed employing a new range of interviews and documentary data. The move
from life story to life history involves the range of methodologies and ethical issues noted earlier.
Moving from personal life stories to life histories involves issues of process and power. As Bertaux
(1981) noted, “What is really at stake is the relationship between the sociologist and the people
who make his [sic] work possible by accepting to be interviewed on their life experiences” (p. 9).
Moving from life story to life history involves a move to account for historical context – a
dangerous move, for it offers the researcher considerable colonizing power to locate the life story,
with all its inevitable selections, shifts, and silences. Nonetheless, we hold to the need for provid-
ing historical contexts for reading life stories.
Dannefer (1992) wrote of the various meanings of context in studying developmental dis-
course. Here, the concern is to provide communications that cover the social histories and,
indeed, social geographies in which life stories are embedded; without contextual commentary
on issues of time and space, life stories remain uncoupled from the conditions of their social
construction. This, above all, is the argument for life histories rather than life stories.
Although rightly concerned about the colonizing dangers of contextual commentary, even
post-structuralist accounts often end up moving from life stories to life histories, and they con-
front issues surrounding the changing contexts of time and space. For instance, Middleton’s early
work (1992) on women teachers’ lives related a substantive account of one feminist teacher’s
pedagogy within the specific socio-cultural setting of post-World War II New Zealand. Likewise,
Munro (1998), an avowed feminist post-structuralist, argued that:
Since this study is concerned with placing the lives of women teachers within a broader
historical context, historical data regarding the communities and the time period in
which they taught were also collected. Although I am not an educational historian an
attempt was made to understand both the local history and broader historical context
in which these women lived.
(Munro, 1998, p. 11)
31
Ivor Goodson
The distinction between life stories or narratives and life histories is then a crucial one. By pro-
viding contextual data, the life stories can be seen in the light of changing patterns of time and
space in testimony and action as social constructions.
Conclusions
The move from modernism to postmodernism presages a concern with objectivity moving
toward a primary concern with the way subjectivities are constructed. Echoing this move, life
history, whose methods failed the objectivity tests under modernism, has once again come into its
own. The way is open for exploring new prospects for life history work. Already this exploration
is under way in a range of fields from cultural studies to sociology and education, but it is hoped
that the rehabilitation will broaden into the major arenas of the humanities, such as history itself
and psychology.
Note
1 Although the experiment does raise the question of why one would use the life history method simply
to measure attitude. No doubt the autobiographies did contain explanations of why the informants’
attitudes were of a particular degree. Such information could be valuable for other purposes than attitude
measurement and would, moreover, not be accessible by means of a questionnaire.
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3
HOW STORIES FOUND A HOME
IN HUMAN PERSONALITY
Dan P. McAdams
northwestern university
A person’s narrative identity is the internalized and evolving story the person constructs to explain
how he or she came to be the person that he or she is becoming (McAdams & McLean, 2013).
Complete with setting, scenes, characters, plot, and themes, narrative identity reconstructs the past
and imagines the future in such a way as to give a person’s life a coherent narrative form. Psy-
chological research suggests that many people begin to conceive of their lives as ongoing stories
in their adolescent years (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) and that these narrative understandings of
self ultimately serve to provide life itself with some semblance of meaning, unity, and purpose. A
person’s internalized and evolving story of the self reflects personal experience for sure, but it is
also decisively shaped by culture (Hammack, 2008). People draw upon their culture’s favored nar-
ratives regarding how a human life should unfold and who they may aspire to be in constructing
their own personal stories about who they were in the past, who they are today, and who they
eventually hope to become in the future.
Human beings have long believed that stories hold psychological truth (Bruner, 1990; Good-
son, 2013). But it has only been within the last couple of decades that psychological scientists
and practitioners have found credible ways of translating that insight into systematic inquiry.
A growing number of psychologists today conceive of narrative identity as a key feature of a
person’s basic psychological makeup. In the same sense that each person may hold and express
characteristic traits, goals, and values, so too do people carry with them their own stories about
how they came to be the persons they are becoming. As such, narrative identity has recently
found a home within the gamut of psychological characteristics that are commonly attributed to
human personality (McAdams & Manczak, 2015). In this chapter, I will tell the story of how the
concept of narrative identity got there and what its arrival signals regarding scientific research on
the psychological nature of persons.
Personality
In both lay and professional conceptions, personality refers to those broad features of a person’s
psychosocial makeup that reliably differentiate that person from others. When we say that Jen-
nifer is an especially “friendly” person, therefore, we are making an attribution about her person-
ality. We are informally suggesting that Jennifer tends to be friendly in many different situations
and that she is probably friendlier than many other people. Of course, the attribution is imprecise
34
Stories found a home in human personality
and carries with it a great deal of inferential wiggle room. We do not expect Jennifer to act in
a friendly manner in every single situation she encounters in life. But we do expect that she will
display a more-or-less friendly demeanor often, or at least more often than those individuals whom
we describe as “less friendly than Jennifer.” We do not assume that Jennifer has been a relatively
friendly person her entire life. But we do assume that her friendliness has some staying power
in her psychological makeup; otherwise, we might be referring simply to a momentary state of
friendliness or a passing mood. The same kind of broad logic applies to most any personality
attribution that might be made: Ben is a conscientious person; Sandy is lazy; Roberta is frequently
overwhelmed by anxiety; Sarah holds deep religious convictions; Ayisha is very open-minded,
except when it comes to politics; Juan hates women who remind him of his mother; Ginger is
strongly motivated by power; Conrad wants to be a martyr.
The grand theories of personality that rose to prominence in the first half of the twentieth
century made bold pronouncements about human nature, ascribing to all human beings core
psychological features and functions such as the Freudian id, the Jungian collective unconscious,
the self-actualizing and organismic tendencies set forth by humanistic theories, and the behavio-
rist principles of reinforcement and punishment. The famous theories of personality articulated
by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, George Kelly, and
others stimulated debate in the early years of personality psychology and continue to spark
interesting discussions today. More often than not, however, personality researchers have ignored
or sidestepped the untestable proclamations at the heart of the theories and settled instead on
describing and explaining individual differences between people. Their empirical work survived
a strong critique in the 1970s, when skeptics asserted that assessments of individual differences
in personality, such as friendliness and conscientiousness, were poor predictors of behavior. The
situationist critique argued that personality attributions were essentially common errors in stere-
otyping, figments in the minds of observers (and personality psychologists), and that behavior is
best predicted instead by the exigencies of concrete situations (Mischel, 1968).
While offering a useful corrective, assertions regarding the limitations of personality attributions
have been swamped over the past three decades by a veritable tsunami of research documenting
the powerful effects of personality on behavior (Roberts et al., 2007). It is clear today that basic
dimensions of personality describe important and socially consequential differences in the psycho-
social functioning of persons. For example, research conclusively reveals that individual differences
in fundamental personality traits (1) are highly stable across the adult life span; (2) are shaped by
genetic differences between people and complex gene X environment interactions; (3) account for a
sizeable amount of variance in human behavior and emotional expression; and (4) predict important
life outcomes such as mental health, happiness, marital stability, occupational success, and mortality.
Moreover, the ostensibly countless trait attributions that might be assigned to individual differences
in psychosocial functioning, many of which were described or implied in the grand theories of per-
sonality, may be neatly arranged into five superordinate categories, often called the Big Five: (1) extra-
version, (2) neuroticism, (3) conscientiousness, (4) agreeableness, and (5) openness to experience.
Contemporary scientific research reflects what most laypeople know: Personality is a force to
be reckoned with. Individual differences in psychosocial functioning are highly visible, relatively
stable, and socially consequential. When it comes to personality, then, where do stories fit in?
The problem of identity

Up until the late 1980s, stories did not fit in. Personality researchers had their hands full
trying to defend the concept of the dispositional trait against the situationists. To the extent
that stories were relevant in this effort, they might be invoked as a method for indirectly
35
Dan P. McAdams
measuring underlying personality traits, motives, and conflicts. For example, David McClel-
land (1961) and his colleagues coded short imaginative stories told by people in response
to picture cues (the Thematic Apperception Test, or TAT) to assess individual differences in
achievement motivation and related tendencies. It must also be acknowledged that many of
the grand theories of personality made indirect references to the power of narrative. Freud
analyzed dream stories; Jung spoke of universal narrative forms or archetypes; Adler explored
the content of earliest memories, storied autobiographical accounts that gave clues to a
person’s overall style of life. But none of these approaches expressly conceived of persons as
storytelling animals who make meaning out of their lives through narrative. And nobody
considered life stories themselves – people’s idiosyncratic narratives about how they came to
be and where their lives may be going – to be anything beyond, say, reflections or refractions
of underlying personality dynamics.
Life stories eventually made their way into personality through the portal of identity. Begin-
ning in the 1950s, Erik Erikson argued that a central challenge of adolescence and young
adulthood is to arrive at a unifying conception of self. “Who am I?” “How do I fit into the
adult world?” These are the central questions of identity, Erikson (1963) argued, and young
people must address these questions in serious ways if they are to live lives of purpose and
meaning. The process of identity development often involves re-examining the past with a
critical eye, questioning the accepted truths of childhood, and taking issue with the societal
conventions that have heretofore structured the young person’s life. According to Erikson,
adolescents may come to reject their religious upbringing, question their parents’ political and
social attitudes, and explore alternative systems for understanding truth, goodness, and beauty.
They may jettison childhood dreams regarding the kind of persons they hope to be when they
grow up and entertain instead new conceptions of work, profession, and vocation. Erikson
(1959) wrote that identity formation begins:
where the usefulness of (childhood) identification ends. It arises from the selective
repudiation and mutual assimilation of childhood identifications, and their absorption
into a new configuration, which in turn, is dependent on the process by which a society
(often through subsocieties) identifies the young individual, recognizing him as somebody
who had to become the way he is, and who, being the way he is, is taken for granted.
(Erikson, 1959, p. 113, emphasis in original)
As Erikson conceived it, identity formation involves two parallel moves. The first is inter-
nal, in that the young person must create psychological distance from authority and from
the past (what Erikson refers to as “childhood identifications”) in order to explore new
possibilities in life. Eventually, exploration should lead to commitment in the realms of per-
sonal ideology, vocation, and interpersonal relationships (Marcia, 1980). The young person
eventually arrives at a new “configuration” – a new arrangement of the self – that provides
life with some degree of unity, purpose, and meaning. The second move is external. The
identity configuration must be affirmed by society, who collectively “identifies the young
individual, recognizing him (or her) as somebody who had to become the way he (or she)
is.” Identity, then, is both in the head and in the world. The young person articulates a new
conception of the self, through exploration and commitment, and the new conception finds
a meaningful way to become manifest in the adult world. Ultimately, identity comes to
occupy a psychosocial niche – a place in the mind and in society where the individual can
essentially assert: Here I stand. This is who I am, and who I am becoming. This is how I am
to be identified and known.
36
In Erikson’s developmental scheme, the formation of identity marks the transition to adult-
hood. To be an adult is to know who I am and to understand what my place in the world is to
be. In order to do so, I must construct or discover some kind of configuration that integrates
disparate elements in my life and explains how I came to be the person I am becoming. The
configuration should affirm what Erikson repeatedly described as a sense of “inner sameness
and social continuity” (Erikson, 1959, p. 111). What might the nature of that configuration
be? If one could see an identity, what would it look like? Beyond referring again and again to
an integrating “configuration” or patterning of selfhood, Erikson never specified a canonical
form for the concept of identity. However, the proposition that identity’s inherent form might
indeed resemble a story can be read into a rich but often overlooked passage from Erikson’s
(1958) study of identity formation in the life of Martin Luther. After the once-obedient
monk broke with the pope and famously nailed the 95 theses on the church door in Witten-
berg, Luther consolidated his own identity, Erikson contended, and established himself as a
bona fide “adult.” But what does it mean to be an adult? Erikson writes:
To be adult means among other things to see one’s own life in continuous perspective,
both in retrospect and in prospect. By accepting some definition as to who he is, usually
on the basis of a function in an economy, a place in the sequence of generations, and
a status in the structure of society, the adult is able to selectively reconstruct his past in such
a way that, step for step, it seems to have planned him, or better, he seems to have planned it. In
this sense, psychologically we do choose our parents, our family history, and the history
of our kings, heroes, and gods. By making them our own, we maneuver ourselves into
the inner position of properietors, of creators.
(Erikson, 1958, pp. 111–12, emphasis added)
In other words, becoming an adult means, in part, conceiving of one’s own life as a coherent
narrative, both in “retrospect and prospect,” and thus “selectively reconstructing (the) past in
such a way that, step for step, it (the past) seems to have planned” the person, or better, the person
seems to have planned it. The past is reconstructed (in retrospect), and the future is imagined (in
prospect) as something that is to follow meaningfully from the past. Constructing an identity,
therefore, centrally involves composing an integrative story for life – past, present, and future.
Erikson analogized the identity-making adult to a “proprietor” or “creator.” But the overall spirit
of the passage suggests that a better image may be that of the author.
Authoring a life: A life story model of identity

In Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story, I first presented a conceptual model and a research program
articulated around the idea that identity is an evolving and internalized life narrative (McAdams,
1985). The book responded to the essayist Joan Didion’s (1979, p. 11) statement: “We tell our-
selves stories in order to live.” So that we may understand who we are and how we fit into a com-
plex world, we begin in late adolescence and early adulthood to construct a dynamic narrative of
self, a mythological saga of identity complete with gods and goddesses, heroes and villains, tales
of power and love, dramatic scenes of growth and suffering, victories and setbacks, epiphanies,
plot twists, and the adventures of the developing self. The stories we tell ourselves in order to live
bring together diverse elements into an integrated whole, organizing the multiple and conflicting
facets of our lives within a narrative framework which connects past, present, and an anticipated
future and confers upon our lives a sense of inner sameness and social continuity – indeed an
identity. As the story evolves and our identity takes form, we come to live the story as we write it,
37
Dan P. McAdams
assimilating our daily experience to a schema of self that is a product of that experience. Thus,
in identity, life gives birth to art and then imitates it. We create stories, and we live according to
narrative assumptions.
The original life story model of identity (McAdams, 1985) focused almost exclusively on the
structural components of life stories – the anatomy of a life narrative. I argued that life stories
could be decomposed into at least four different parts or features.
First, there are nuclear episodes, which are particular scenes in the story – circumscribed in time
and place – that stand out for their dramatic qualities or psychological importance. Examples
might be high points, low points, or turning points in the story – more concretely, events like
one’s wedding day, the birth of a first child, the day of a sudden epiphany, a particular moment
of ecstasy or despair.
Second, there are central characters in the story, or what I called imagoes. An imago is a
personified representation of the self that captures a distinct set of self-defining psychological
or social characteristics. Imagoes often reflect social roles. For example, a 30-year-old man’s life
story might feature two central imagoes: the self as “the good son,” who aims to please his father,
who married his high school sweetheart, who involves himself in civic activities and strives to
exemplify the religious values he grew up with; and the self as “the rebel,” who pursues artistic
avocations on weekends, who chafes at his mother’s overbearing advice, who is deeply ambiv-
alent about becoming a father himself, and who is having an affair with a colleague at work.
Each imago functions as a semi-autonomous protagonist in the life story. The development of
imagoes, their entrances and exits on the stage, and their interactions over time help to push
the plot forward.
The third component of the life story is an ideological setting, or backdrop of beliefs and values
that situates the story in a particular epistemological, ethical, and socio-religious context. Indeed,
Erikson (1959) viewed personal ideology to be inherently tied up with identity, two sides of the
same developmental coin. Following Erikson’s lead, I argued that people’s fundamental beliefs and
values, often rooted in religion or politics, provide an ideological backdrop for the story, upon
which the plot unfolds.
Finally, life stories often contain what I called a generativity script. Borrowing again from
Erikson, I defined generativity as an adult’s concern for and commitment to promoting the
development and well-being of future generations, as evidenced in parenting, teaching, men-
toring, leadership, and other activities aimed at leaving a positive legacy of the self for the
future (see also McAdams & de St. Aubin, 1992). Adults become increasingly concerned
with generativity as they move into and through midlife, Erikson argued. With respect to life
stories, many adults have developed plans for how they hope to leave a positive legacy in the
future. As such, these generativity scripts are projected into future chapters of the life story.
In a sense, generativity scripts foreshadow an ending for the story, hinting at what the nar-
rator ultimately hopes to leave behind. According to Erikson (1963) and others (e.g., Kotre,
1984), generativity functions, in part, to fulfill a need for symbolic immortality. For narrative
identity, the generativity script, therefore, can provide an envisioned ending for the story that
affirms, at the same time, new beginnings. “My story will end – but not really, because I am
leaving something behind.”
Nuclear episodes, personal imagoes, ideological settings, and generativity scripts, moreover, can
be construed in terms of their characteristic content and their structural complexity (McAdams,
1985). With respect to content, I proposed that broad thematic lines of agency (power, achieve-
ment, expansion of the self ) and communion (love, intimacy, belongingness) run through many
life stories and that the four components of the life story can each be characterized in terms of
the relative strength of agency and communion content (see also Bakan, 1966). Research has
38
subsequently demonstrated that themes of agency and communion in life narratives are signifi-
cantly associated with the personality variables of power and intimacy motivation, respectively
(McAdams et al., 1996; Woike et al., 1999).
With respect to narrative complexity, life stories vary from simple tales with straightforward
plots to elaborate narrative representations encompassing diverse characterizations, complicated
subplots, multiple conflicts, and ambiguous or ambivalent endings. Research suggests that the
relative complexity of the nuclear episodes, imagoes, ideological settings, and generativity scripts
that comprise life stories tracks the narrator’s level of ego development (McAdams, 1985; McAd-
ams et al., 1986), which itself captures a personality dimension of psychological sophistication
and cognitive maturity (Loevinger, 1976). Perhaps not surprisingly, people who adopt an espe-
cially nuanced and differentiated perspective to understand themselves and the world tend to
construct more complex life stories, compared to narrators whose perspectives are more con-
strained and parochial.
On method
In addition to laying out a theoretical model of identity as a life story, Power, Intimacy, and the Life
Story also presented methods for the empirical study of narrative identity. If we want to study life
stories, I argued, we need to hear people tell the full stories of their lives (McAdams, 1985; see
also McAdams, 1993). At the same time, if we hope to analyze those narrative accounts in ways
that may pass scientific muster, we need to standardize the interview format and develop objective
coding schemes for assessing content and structural features of life stories. The methodologies
proposed reflected my own epistemological commitment to hypothesis-testing research even as
they acknowledged and aimed to reinforce the value of more constructivist and hermeneutical
approaches to social-science inquiry.
As outlined in Table 3.1, the life story interview begins by asking the research participant
to think about his or her life as if it were a book-length novel and to summarize briefly the
major chapters in that novel. The opening section serves as something of an icebreaker in
the interview while providing a broad overview of the life as a whole. Next, the participant
focuses in on a series of key events (nuclear episodes) in the story. For each event (e.g., a life
story high point, low point, turning point, early memory), the participant recalls what hap-
pened in the event, what he or she was thinking and feeling, how the event resolved itself,
and what, if anything, the event may mean in the context of the person’s life story. For each
scene, the participant is encouraged to consider what the episode says about “Who I am” and
“How I came to be.”
Next, the interview considers the future: What might the next chapter of the life story be
about? What goals and plans for the future does the narrator set forth? Depending on the pur-
poses of the research project, a series of different questions may follow, such as inquiries into per-
sonal regrets and losses, life challenges, other characters (e.g., heroes and villains) in the story, and
so on. In order to tap into the narrator’s ideological setting, the interview incorporates questions
on religious beliefs and values, political orientation, and related issues. The interview typically
terminates by asking the participant to derive a general theme, motif, or lesson that runs through
the narrative. The entire process typically requires about two hours to complete. The interview
is typically transcribed into Word documents, which are subsequently read and analyzed.
The interview format summarized in Table 3.1 is merely a suggested protocol. Over the years,
different researchers have adapted and modified it in countless ways to meet their own research
needs. Indeed, one need not buy into the theory of narrative identity itself in order to put narrative
methods to good use. In other words, a researcher who employs some variation of the life story
39
Dan P. McAdams
Table 3.1 Outline of a standard Life Story Interview
Life Chapters Think of your life as if it were a book – a novel with chapters. What would the chapters be?
Divide your life story into its main chapters, and for each chapter provide a title and brief plot summary.
Explain what marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next.
Key Scenes Focus on a few specific moments or episodes that stand out as being especially memorable or
important in your life story. For each scene, describe in detail what happened, who was there, what you
were thinking and feeling in the scene, and what significance you believe the scene has in the context of
your entire life story. Why do you think you chose this scene? What might the scene say about who you
were or are?
High Point
Low Point
Turning Point
Positive Childhood Scene
Negative Childhood Scene
Vivid Adolescent Scene
Vivid Adult Scene
One Other Important Scene
Life Challenge Identify the most important challenge, struggle, or conflict you have faced in your life.
Describe what the challenge is, how it came to be, and how you have tried to address it or cope with it.
Future Script What does the next chapter of your life story look like? Describe where you think your life
is headed in the future. What are your main goals for the future? How do you plan to achieve those goals?
Ideological setting Consider here your most important beliefs and values about life and the world. First,
describe any religious and/or ethical values and beliefs that you consider to be important for your life. How
did you develop those values and beliefs? Next, consider beliefs and values that apply to politics and/or
social relationships.Describe those values and beliefs and how you came to hold them. Finally, what do you
consider to be the most important value in life? Why?
Religious
Political
Most Important Value
Life Theme Thinking back over what you have said in this interview, do you see a theme or motif that runs
through the story of your life? What might it be?
Variations on this general interview format have been developed for many different kinds of studies, each
tailored to the aims of the study. For more information on different versions and formats of the life story
interview, go to http://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/foley/.
interview to collect narrative data need not fully subscribe to the theoretical idea that people begin
to construct stories of how they came to be the people they are becoming in their adolescent
and young adult years, that they continue to engage in life narration across the adult life course,
and that such internalized and evolving stories provide life with some degree of unity, purpose,
and meaning. Moreover, those researchers who do find value in the theory of narrative identity
should realize that the actual narrative data obtained in the life story interview, or through any
narrative method for that matter, are not synonymous with a person’s life story. The life story
method provides the researcher with concrete narrative accounts. The accounts may be analyzed
and interpreted in many different ways. But the accounts themselves are not the same thing as the
internalized and evolving narrative of the self that a person is walking around with, in the same
manner that any concrete assessment of a psychological construct (say, a self-report measure of
extraversion) is not the construct itself. At best, the narrative accounts generated in life-narrative
research roughly reflect or estimate assumed features of the participant’s narrative identity.
40
Variations on the life narrative interview have been used to structure (1) qualitative
case studies and other exploratory, hypothesis-generating projects (e.g., McAdams & Logan,
2006) and (2) quantitative studies aimed at testing hypotheses and evaluating psychological
theories. In the first mode, investigators may adopt the approach described by Goodson
(2013, p. 40) as “bathing in the data.” In intensive, qualitative inquiry into life narratives,
researchers immerse themselves in storied accounts with the aim of articulating a broad
interpretation of the storyteller’s overall engagement with life and with the world. For
example, Andrews (1991) looked for common life narrative patterns in case studies of British
political activists, and Halbertal and Koren (2006) examined the life stories of gay and lesbian
Orthodox Jews living in Israel.
By contrast, quantitative studies on narrative identity have tended to employ objective con-
tent analysis systems for coding thematic variations in life narrative. In this regard, researchers
in personality, developmental, social, clinical, cognitive, and cultural psychology have gone well
beyond the initial coding schemes proposed in McAdams (1985) to develop a plethora of
interpretive systems for quantifying dimensions of narrative identity. In addition to the original
conceptions of agentic and communal thematic lines in life narrative, researchers have developed
systems to assess such things as narrative coherence, personal growth, themes of redemption and
contamination, intrinsic motivation, integrative complexity, and the extent to which narrators
draw lessons and insights from their experiences. Table 3.2 lists some of the most commonly
used coding schemes.
Table 3.2 Common dimensions of narrative identity, coded in life-story accounts
Agency The degree to which a protagonist is able to affect change in his or her own life or influence others
in the environment, often through demonstrations of self-mastery, empowerment, achievement, or status.
Highly agentic stories emphasize individual accomplishment and the ability to control one’s own fate.
Communion The degree to which the protagonist demonstrates or experiences interpersonal connection
through love, friendship, dialogue, or connection to a broad collective. The story emphasizes intimacy,
caring, and belongingness.
Redemption Scenes in which a demonstrably “bad” or emotionally negative event or circumstance leads
to a demonstrably “good” or positive outcome. The initial negative state is “redeemed” or salvaged by
the good that follows it. Example: The narrator describes the death of her father as reinvigorating closer
emotional ties to her other family members.
Contamination Scenes in which a good or positive event turns dramatically bad or negative, such that
the negative emotion overwhelms, destroys, or erases the effects of the preceding positivity. Example: The
protagonist of the story is excited for a promotion at work but learns that it came at the expense of his
friend’s being fired.
Coherence The extent to which a narrative demonstrates clear causal sequencing, thematic integrity, and
appropriate integration of emotional responses.
Complexity The level of structural differentiation and integration shown in the narrative. Complex
stories evince many different, and sometimes conflicting, plots and characters, and they show how the
different parts are related to each other. Simpler stories have fewer plots and characters, and they show fewer
connections.
Meaning making The degree to which the protagonist learns something or gleans a message from an
event. The dimension ranges from no meaning, to learning a concrete lesson, to gaining a more abstract
insight about life. Example of gaining insight: “It [the event] really made me go through and re-look at my
memories and see how there’s so many things behind a situation that you never see. Things are not always
as they seem.”
41
Dan P. McAdams
Context, culture, and process: Evolution of the model

In the 1990s and thereafter, the life story model of identity evolved to accommodate important
trends in the social sciences and humanities. The original conception (McAdams, 1985, 1993)
tended to emphasize the broad stability and integrative power of life stories, reflecting Erikson’s
(1963) notion of identity as something of a grand achievement in life. Strong influences from
structuralism, Piagetian stage models, and Jungian conceptions of universal narrative forms (e.g.,
Frye, 1957) were also apparent. It was as if life stories were big, reified structures that could be
neatly divided into parts and unproblematically analyzed for their prevailing characteristics, what
Goodson (2013, p. 11) describes as “grand narratives.” Life stories conformed to standard gram-
mars and structural rules, projecting order and meaning in a chaotic world. The stories remained
safely in the heads of the narrators. While McAdams (1985) acknowledged the influence of
external factors in the authoring of a life, narrators nonetheless retained a great deal of authorial
power. The author always seemed to get the last word.
As social scientists began to turn their attention to narrative in the 1980s and 1990s, the issues
of culture, context, and the contingent nature of human storytelling came into sharper relief
(Freeman, 1993; Polkinghorne, 1988; Sarbin, 1986). While certain story forms may be recog-
nized in many different cultures, the kinds of stories people tell and the way they tell them nearly
always reflect local norms and cultural expectations. Postmodern approaches to the social sciences
emphasized the extent to which narratives are incomplete, ambiguous, self-contradictory, and
ephemeral (Gergen, 1991). Stories evaporate nearly as soon as they are told. A narrator may tell
one story about life today and a completely different one tomorrow – and neither story can
claim to have any long-standing validity or legitimate claim on psychological truth. Moreover,
narrators are less free to create their own life stories than they usually think they are. Political
and economic realities, as well as prevailing ideologies, mandate what stories can be told about
life, projecting hegemonic narratives onto unsuspecting communities of storytellers (Rosenwald &
Ochberg, 1992). A life story may say just as much about a society’s prevailing stereotypes and
cultural scripts as it does about an individual person’s life.
While the social science of life narrative tended to move in one direction in the 1990s, the
field of personality psychology went the opposite way. Having finally put down the situationist
insurrection, personality psychologists in the 1990s doubled down on the concept of the dis-
positional trait. As impressive research findings piled up, many personality psychologists came
to agree that the entire panoply of human personality can be reduced to approximately five
elemental factors – basic dispositional traits, as encompassed in the Big Five framework. Bio-
logically anchored and strongly heritable, dispositional traits such as extraversion and conscien-
tiousness came to be seen as nearly immutable and universal psychological forms (McCrae &
Costa, 1997).
Assimilating trends in the social sciences and reacting to the ascendance of trait concep-
tions in personality psychology, I began to see the life story model of identity as carving out
a space between radical social constructionism on the one hand and the reductionism of
personality science on the other (McAdams, 1996). As internalized and evolving narratives of
the self, life stories are not essentialist and immutable constructs, as personality traits are often
viewed to be. But they are not like ephemeral and fragmented utterances either, as some post-
modern and deconstructionist perspectives might suggest. Moreover, authors do not enjoy
total freedom in constructing a narrative identity. But they are not slaves to their cultures
either. In constructing a life story, narrators appropriate the images, themes, expectations, and
master narratives (Hammack, 2008) from their culture to make them work, more or less, for
their own personal experience.
42
Life stories, then, are psychosocial constructions, co-authored with culture and in personal relation-
ships, constantly changing but nonetheless offering some degree of provisional integration for a
life in time. Identity may not require the kind of totalizing self-integration that Erikson (1963)
seemed to call for. But it does require a serviceable sense of inner sameness and social continu-
ity. Even in a rapidly changing world, people need narratives to integrate their lives in time, to
explain to themselves and to others how they came to be the persons they are becoming. Indeed,
the need may be especially compelling under the conditions of cultural postmodernity, wherein
young adults are no longer able to count on a broad societal consensus regarding what it means
to live a good life (Giddens, 1991; Goodson, 2013). When it comes to constructing a narrative
identity, there is rarely the kind of smooth meshing of self-conception and societal niche that
Erikson (1963) seemed to imagine. But young adults still come to terms with society through life
narrative, and continue to do so as they develop across the adult life course and as society itself
continues to evolve.
Accordingly, psychological research on life stories over the past two decades has tended to
emphasize the roles of context, culture, and process. Researchers have paid special attention to
the particular interpersonal contexts within which people tell stories about their personal expe-
riences, spelling out different functions that storytelling serves under different social conditions
(Pasupathi, 2006). Developmental psychologists have explored the origins of life storytelling in
patterns of mother-infant conversations (Fivush & Haden, 2003) and the emergence of autobio-
graphical reasoning skills in late childhood and adolescence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000). Clinical
psychologists have traced the evolution of life narrative in psychotherapy, showing that improve-
ment in mental health follows narrative transformation (Adler, 2012). Numerous studies have
also aimed to discern the process whereby everyday accounts of important life events eventually
make their way into an ongoing narrative about the self (McLean et al., 2007). Selves create sto-
ries, which in turn create new selves. Through repeated interactions with others, stories about
personal experiences are processed, edited, reinterpreted, retold, and subjected to a range of social
and discursive influences, as the storyteller gradually develops a broader and more integrative
narrative identity.
Cultural psychologists have described how society’s master narratives dictate the parameters
of individual life-story construction, for better and for worse (Hammack, 2008). My own work
in this area has focused on the life stories constructed by especially generative (productive and
caring) midlife American adults. In The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, I identify
variations on a narrative prototype that tend to differentiate the life stories told by highly gen-
erative and psychologically healthy American adults at midlife from those told by less generative
adults (McAdams, 2006/2013; see also McAdams et al., 1997; McAdams & Guo, 2015; Walker &
Frimer, 2007). In these stories, the protagonist (a) enjoys a special advantage or blessing early in
life, (b) expresses sensitivity to the suffering of others or societal injustices as a child, (c) establishes
a clear and strong value system in adolescence that remains a source of unwavering conviction
throughout the adult years, (d) repeatedly encounters setbacks and failures but turns these neg-
ative events into positive outcomes, (e) struggles to integrate competing desires for agency and
communion, and (f ) looks to achieve goals to benefit society in the future. Taken together, these
six themes, summarized in Table 3.3, articulate a general script or narrative prototype for how
to live a generative life. The story supports the generative adult’s strivings to make a positive
difference in the world, underscoring the idea that he or she has been called to do good work in
the world and sustaining the hope that the hard work of caring for others and trying to make a
positive difference in the world will eventually pay off.
The kinds of life stories that highly generative American adults tend to tell reprise quintessen-
tially American cultural themes – themes that carry a powerful moral cachet among Americans.
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Dan P. McAdams
Table 3.3 The six themes that comprise the redemptive self – a common script for the life narratives
constructed by highly generative American adults
How Does the Story Begin?

1. Early Advantage The story’s protagonist enjoys a special blessing, gift, talent, opportunity, or distinction
early in life that confers a perceived advantage.
2. Suffering of Others The protagonist witnesses pain and suffering of others early in life, shows empathy
for others, or is sensitized to social misfortune, injustice, oppression, discrimination, or the like.
3. Moral Steadfastness After some searching and questioning, often in adolescence, the protagonist
commits the self to a personal ideology. His or her values remain strong, clear, and highly relevant in
daily life for the duration of the story.
How Does the Plot Develop?
4. Redemption Sequences Bad things happen, but good things follow. Negative life events are redeemed
by positive outcomes, or else the narrator finds positive meanings for life in negative life experiences.
5. Power vs. Love The protagonist experiences strong and competing motivations for power (self-
enhancement) and love (connecting to others, communion). In some stories, the competing drives lead to
conflict and tension. In other stories, narrators resolve the tension and manage to integrate power and love.
How Does the Story End?
6. Positive Future As he or she looks to the future, the story’s narrator projects optimism and a continued
prosocial commitment to make the world a better place. The story affirms future growth and fruition.
The redemptive stories told by highly generative American adults recapture and couch in
contemporary psychological language especially cherished, as well as hotly contested, ideas in
American cultural history and heritage – ideas that appear prominently in spiritual accounts of
seventeenth century Puritans, Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated eighteenth century autobiography,
slave narratives and Horatio Alger stories from the nineteenth century, and the literature of self-
help and American entrepreneurship from more recent times (McAdams, 2006/2013). Evolving
from the Puritans to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Oprah Winfrey, the redemptive self has morphed
into many different story forms in the past 300 years as Americans have sought to author their
lives as redemptive tales of atonement, emancipation, recovery, self-fulfillment, and upward social
mobility. The stories speak of heroic individual protagonists – the chosen people – whose manifest
destiny is to make a positive difference in a dangerous world, even when the world does not wish
to be redeemed.
These stories translate a deep and abiding script of what historians call American exception-
alism into the many contemporary narratives of success, recovery, development, liberation, and
self-actualization that so pervade American talk, talk shows, therapy sessions, sermons, and com-
mencement speeches. It is as if especially generative American adults, whose lives are dedicated to
making the world a better place for future generations, are the most ardent (and sometimes unwit-
ting) proponents of a general life story format as American as apple pie and Walt Disney. The same
story may not, however, be especially effective in supporting generative lives in other societies.
Every culture has its own favored narrative forms – inspiring stories that work well within the
parameters of that given culture to give local meaning to productive and caring adult lives.
Actors, agents, and authors

In emphasizing the manner whereby human beings become authors of their own lives, research
and theory on narrative identity have broadened psychologists’ understanding of personality.
When I formulated the original life story model of identity in the early 1980s, the field of
44
personality psychology was consumed by the controversy over the existence and viability of
dispositional personality traits. If individual persons could not credibly be depicted as expressing
differences on such basic dimensions as extraversion and neuroticism, many psychologists argued,
then the very concept of personality must be cast into doubt. Today no doubt exists about the
psychological presence and the predictive power of individual differences in personality traits.
The consensus on traits has led, however, to another question: Is there more to personality than traits?
Personality psychologists of recent years have answered the question in a strongly affirmative
manner. And a main reason behind the “yes” response is the concept of the life story.
A growing number of psychologists today view personality itself as comprised of multiple
layers (Sheldon, 2004; Singer, 2005). According to my own conception (McAdams, 1995, 2013),
the dispositional traits that are contained within the Big Five framework comprise a foundational
layer of psychological individuality, capturing basic differences in the social actor’s characteristic
style of emotional and behavioral performance. Layered over dispositional traits are goals, pro-
jects, plans, values, and other features of the motivated agent’s itinerary for achieving valued ends
in life. If traits spell out how actors behave, goals and values speak to what agents want and how
they plan to get what they want in the future, and avoid what they do not want. Layered over
goals and values, then, is narrative identity – the autobiographical author’s story about how he or
she has become the person he or she is becoming. As currently construed, then, personality is
a person’s unique variation on the general design of human nature, manifested as an evolving
constellation of dispositional traits (the person as social actor), self-defining values and goals (the
person as motivated agent), and life narratives (the person as autobiographical author), complexly
situated in history and culture. Along with dispositional and motivational constructs, life stories
have finally found a home in human personality.
Each of the three layers of personality appears to follow its own developmental course
(McAdams, 2015; McAdams & Olson, 2010). Human beings are social actors from birth, and
glimmerings of what will become their distinctive performance styles are observable in their char-
acteristic displays of temperament. The origins of adult extraversion may be seen in the marked
differences that babies show in the expression of positive emotionality and social approach.
Neuroticism has its origins in behavioral inhibition, irritability, and other early manifestations of
negative emotionality. Individual differences in traits encompassed within the categories of agree-
ableness and conscientiousness stem ultimately from broad variations in self-regulatory capacities,
visible in the second and third years of life. Individual differences in the actor’s traits appear to
be strongly driven by genetic differences between people and by a complex, lifelong sequence of
gene-by-environment interactions.
The development of personality from the standpoint of the motivated agent begins with the
child’s understanding, around age four or five, that people have minds that contain desires and
beliefs within them (Apperly, 2012). The child’s theory of mind tells the child that people act
upon their own desires and beliefs. Ultimately, children apply this folk conception of human
motivation to themselves: I, too, act upon the desires and beliefs in my head; I am an agent who
can choose, decide, and plan in order to accomplish the ends that will fulfill my own desires
and beliefs. Though what psychologists call the age five to seven shift, elementary school children
develop a suite of capacities, strongly reinforced by teachers and parents, that enable them to
develop plans and projects to accomplish valued ends (Sameroff & Haith, 1996). As such, a second
line of personality development tracks the elaboration of a motivational agenda in life, comprised
of goals, values, and the vast array of social-cognitive strategies that grow up around efforts to
achieve valued goals.
For the first decade of life or so, the autobiographical author waits in the wings. Children
learn to tell stories about their own experience in the preschool and elementary school years,
45
Dan P. McAdams
but they do not conceive of their full lives as narratives until late childhood or early adolescence.
A third line of personality begins, therefore, to manifest itself when young people develop the
cognitive capacity and the socio-emotional inclination to construe their own lives in retrospect
and prospect, as stories with beginnings in the past and endings far off in the future. Whereas
the social actor’s perspective is the performative present and the motivated agent orients mainly
to the future, the autobiographical author aims to bring past, present, and future together under
the canopy of life narrative. A key step forward in this endeavor is the development of autobio-
graphical reasoning skills in adolescence and young adulthood (Habermas & Bluck, 2000). Through
autobiographical reasoning, authors are able to derive organizing themes for their lives, construct
causal chains of inference, and provide convincing explanations through narrative regarding how
they have become the particular persons they are becoming. Over the course of adult personality
development, then, the evolving life narrative layers over a motivational agenda, which itself is
layered over the person’s dispositional personality traits. All three layers of personality continue
to develop and change, as a complex and dynamic arrangement of psychological individuality,
unique to the developing person and yet deeply situated in the contexts provided by family,
ethnicity, geography, gender, social class, culture, and history.
Conclusion
In the minds of laypersons, personality is what gives a person a characteristic social presence and
quality of mind. It consists of those psychological qualities that consistently differentiate one
person from the next. In the twentieth century, social scientists struggled to develop a viable
conception of personality. Personality researchers found it difficult at first to provide convincing
evidence for the existence and efficacy of basic individual differences between people. In the
1970s and 1980s, many psychologists argued that variation in human behavior had so little to do
with basic personality differences between people that it might be reasonable to conclude that no
such differences exist. Around this time, a small number of social scientists began to turn their
attention toward narrative, not so much to address questions of personality but instead to capture
more fully the human experience of being and making a self in society. For my own purposes,
narrative helped to solve the problem of identity, as classically described in the writing of Erik
Erikson. A person’s identity might, therefore, be conceived as an internalized and evolving life
story, reconstructing the past and imagining the future in such a way as to confer upon a life that
sense of inner sameness and social continuity that Erikson deemed to be central to the experience
of identity. A person’s narrative identity integrates a life in time.
By the 1990s, the scientific community reached a consensus regarding the idea of personality.
Consistent psychological differences between people do indeed exist, the research suggested, and
the differences have a strong effect on life outcomes. Personality consists of basic, genetically shaped
differences in dispositional traits, such as extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness,
and openness. Over the past 20 years, however, the scientific conception of personality has broad-
ened dramatically, as theory and research on life narratives have infiltrated personality science. A
growing number of psychologists today conceive of personality as a multi-layered arrangement of
selfhood – consisting of the actor’s dispositional traits, the agent’s motivational agenda, and the author’s
integrative life story. Personality develops in a trinity of guises. As social actors, people are known,
to themselves and to each other, by their instantly recognizable dispositional differences, as extraverts
and introverts, for example, and as individuals who line up on a metaphorical dimension of neuro-
ticism, highest to lowest. But they are also known as motivated agents who, from middle childhood
onward, develop self-defining goals and values. And they are known, perhaps most fully and
deeply, by the stories they tell, as autobiographical authors. Life stories spell out how a developing
46
person understands his or her own development. As personal myths about how I came to be
the unique person I am becoming, life stories convey as much about an individual’s characteristic
engagement of the social world – as much about personality itself – as does any other psychological
construct that one might wish to invoke to describe and to understand a person.
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4
NARRATIVE AND LIFE HISTORY
RESEARCH IN INTERNATIONAL
EDUCATION
Re-conceptualisation from the field
David Stephens
Introduction
The aim of this chapter is two-fold: first, to take a theoretical excursion into reconceptualising
the role of narrative and life history in generating knowledge of Africa’s educational and devel-
opment landscape; second, to reflect upon the experience of using narrative and biographical
approaches to education research in two sub-Saharan African national settings.
Prepositions are important. In discussing narrative in, rather than of, education, this chapter
will argue that narrative operates in a number of ways and at a number of levels. Narrative has
been defined as ‘the relationship between what is being told i.e. its content; how it is being narrated
i.e. its form; for whom it is intended i.e. its audience; and where it is occurring i.e. its context, bear-
ing in mind the context may shift from the original location of the generation of the narrative to
a new location where it is being read or heard’ (Stephens & Trahar, 2012, pp. 59–60). Grounded in
interpretive hermeneutics and phenomenology, narrative research has been conceptualised as ‘an
umbrella term that covers a large and diverse range of approaches, the result of a rapid expansion
of the area of inquiry over the past dozen years’ (Mischler, 1999, p. 15). Broadly speaking, it is a
form of qualitative research that involves the gathering of narratives – written, verbal, oral, and
visual – focusing upon the meanings individuals ascribe to their experiences, seeking to provide
‘insight that befits the complexity of human lives’ (Josselson, 2006, p. 4). Narrative is therefore
composed of a dialectical relationship among knowledge – or possibly what Bruner (1996) calls
knowing – audience and context.
Narrative also occurs at three different epistemological and theoretical levels: first, at the meta
or ‘grand’ level in which fields or traditions of enquiry are defined and legitimated; second, at
the meso or intermediate level in which national or regional narratives are espoused and again
legitimated; and, finally, at the micro or personal level in which individuals give a narrative account
of their lives. Let us examine the three levels, first with a brief discussion of the meta hegemonic
narratives that have shaped much that has occurred in African education and development over
the past fifty years.
49
David Stephens
Western ‘grand’ narratives in African education and development

In 1979 the concept of ‘grand narrative’ was coined by the father of postmodernism, Francois
Lyotard. For Lyotard these narratives are characterised as ‘totalising’ or explanatory narratives,
purporting to embody ‘universal essential truths’. Because of their suggested universality, they
also tend to de-link or de-contextualise knowledge and knowledge production from context or
culture. These are ‘grand’ in that they seek not only to describe and explain the world but also
to legitimate it. These narratives, Lyotard argues, are not ideologically neutral, but rather, as Odora
Hoppers (2002) and Edward Said (1978) suggest, problematic and complex competing knowl-
edge systems established and constantly nourished by Western hegemony.
In his thought-provoking yet controversial Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said traces
the roots of imperialism in European culture to the popular literature of the 19th century, arguing
that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, for example,
did much to cement the idea of Africa not only as the ‘other’ in terms of Western colonial devel-
opment but also to deny it a voice in the generation and legitimation of alternative narratives
and discourses.
The twin economic and educational development narratives of Africa since the Second World
War can be characterised as ‘grand’ in that they not only reflect the ‘totalising’ explanations of
what constitutes education or development but are also legitimated as sole narratives, brooking
few if any counter-discourses. As Tiffin (1995, p. 98) notes:
Post-colonial counter-discourse strategies involve a mapping of the dominant discourse,

a reading and exposing of its underlying assumptions from the cross-cultural standpoint
of its imperially subjectified ‘local’.
Field narratives, which are ‘local’ and ‘subjective’ when analysed in relation to national and meta
narratives, can, therefore, contribute to the construction and legitimation of counter development
and educational discourses.
The economic development meta narrative was established shortly after the Second World
War as a default reflection of the powerful nations that had emerged victorious from the conflict
convinced that global reconstruction – and what would come to be called ‘development’ – would
best serve the interests of all, not least the West, who would foot the bill. By presenting ‘develop-
ment’ as a set of technical measures outside the realm of political debate – utilization of scientific
knowledge, growth of productivity, expansion of international trade – it became possible for a
liberal – and from the mid-1980s – neoliberal agenda to be advanced as the ‘only story in town’.
It articulated, in other words, a set of politically neutral, technical goals to be achieved for a
deserving poor. The discourse within the story – victims, modernity, the role of private capital, and
a sense of linearity, espoused by Walt Rostow in The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto (1960) – is a powerful account and ‘grand’ in its claims of university and neutrality,
though it can be argued that some effort was made to provide a counter narrative at the time by
African leaders such as Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah.
Vincent Tucker (1999) suggests that ‘development’ has moved from being regarded as neutral
and technical to a Western ideological meta narrative that has gained the status of myth. For him
the myth of development is a central myth of Western society.
Drawing upon the ideas of Gilbert Rist (1990), he says:
‘Development’ is not a natural process, although it has been accorded such a status in
the mythology of Western beliefs. Regarded as natural it is accepted without question
50
Research in international education
because it bears its own legitimization. It is rather, a set of practices and beliefs that has
been woven into the fabric of Western culture and is specific to it. ‘Development’ is not
a trans-cultural concept that can claim universal validity.
( Tucker, 1999, p. 2)
For Rist, despite the transfer of goods, gadgets, capital, technology, hospitals, and roads, the eco-
nomic policies and socioeconomic accomplishments of the West cannot be replicated in the
global South because whereas from the material point of view everything is set to go, the ‘sym-
bolic engine is missing’ (Rist, 1990, p. 8). Interestingly whilst researching the interplay between
Western modernity and traditional education in northern Nigeria in the late 1970s, I discovered
a significant body of nascent indigenous radical opinion (which I termed the young Turks)
arguing for a return to a ‘pure’ form of Islam as a counter-discourse to what they saw as the
‘empty materialism’ of Western development. It is no surprise to find the emergence of groups
such as boko haram, who reject dominant development discourses but can only offer alternatives
that are inarticulate and nihilistic. In many ways the education narrative is predicated upon
neo-liberal models of schooling, which in turn echo the familiar discourse and practices of a
Western-educated urban elite: instruction in a global second language, no room for indigenous
knowledge, the introduction of ‘user’ fees, increased privatisation, and a distrust of state-owned
public services. The flight from state to private in education has also been hastened by a toxic mix
of inefficient state management, government under-funding, and out-dated models of schooling
(Bloch, 2009; Harber, 2009).
Within the education narrative is nested another: the epistemological. Here it is possible to
identify two distinct ways of viewing the generation of knowledge – paradigmatic and narrative
knowing, each reflecting the larger meta narratives.
Paradigmatic knowing is rooted in scientific modes of thought, and represents the world
through abstract propositional knowledge. Narrative knowing, by contrast, is organised through
the stories that people recount about their experiences. For Bruner (1996), although both ways
of knowing are essential facets of the human capacity to make sense of the world, relatively little
is understood about the narrative mode (McLeod, 1997). This matters because educationists
and development economists in particular, in attempting to be scientific, have focussed almost
entirely on the generation of paradigmatic knowledge, and have ‘dismissed narrative knowing
as irrational, vague, irrelevant, and somehow not legitimate’ (McLeod, 1997, p. 26). In an earlier
book (Stephens, 2007) I reflected upon the fact that culture and a cultural approach to education
and development is treated in very much the same way because of the hegemony of positivist
science – and I would suggest economics – over the disciplines in question.
But an opportunity also exists for narrative – with its universal strengths and recognition as
a ‘different’ way to generate knowledge or knowing – to provide a bridge between individual
stories of experience and the social meanings and ‘spring of other worlds and cultures’.
Before looking at these micro or personal narratives drawn from two sub-Saharan research
settings, let us briefly survey narrative research in education at the meso or national level in Africa
and discuss the role context plays in the embedding of those narratives.
Narrative research in education Africa: The story so far

Considering the potential narrative research has for generating new knowledge about many
of the enduring problems facing education across the continent, it is surprising to find only
a handful of studies adopting a narrative approach. The 700-page Routledge Handbook of
51
David Stephens
Narrative Theory (2005), for example, includes just two pages on ‘African narratives’ and,
although one or two journals (Compare, Volume 38, No.3 June 2008 for example) have
devoted a special issue to narrative research in international and comparative education, it is
still very much in its infancy.
There are, however, a few examples of African narrative and biographical research in educa-
tion. Most are small-scale studies often exploring issues of teacher identity and agency. Cross
(1996) investigated the life histories of three African postgraduate students studying at her UK
university; Ostler (1997) has researched the career biographies of Kenyan teacher advisers; and
Barrett (2006) carried out research in Tanzania that used teacher narratives to re-position her
respondents as, ‘thinking, feeling and doing human beings rather than people on the receiving
end of policy or victims of a difficult environment’ (Barrett, 2006, p. 123). Baxen (2008) utilised
teacher narrative data to develop a hermeneutic understanding of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.
Teacher identity was explored in two other South African studies: Smit and Fritz (2008), taking
a symbolical interactionist perspective in their analysis of two African teacher life histories, and
Graven (2012), re-examining notions of teacher identity by asking respondents to ‘re-author’
their professional life histories to allow for greater personal empowerment and agency. An
exception to this body of work on teacher narratives is Robert Serpell’s (1993) anthropological
study of pupil ‘life journeys’, drawn from his extensive involvement in one Zambian village.
Serpell used the micro narratives of village children to critique the Western meta narratives of
Piagetian psychology and Western models of development. As he says in his conclusion:
The extent to which the project of the Enlightenment is appropriated by Africans for
the promotion of a genuinely developmental form of education (developmental both
for the individuals and for society as a whole) will depend in large part on the extent
to which the bicultural graduates of a largely alien curriculum are willing to share their
critical understanding of Western culture with those of their fellow citizens (be they
grandparents, parents, contemporaries or children) who have not had the opportunity
to sample it in depth. Out of such a sharing could arise a radical redefinition of what
constitutes a modern education, incorporating the best of both cultures, a synthesis
born of egalitarian discourse.
(Serpell, 1993, p. 278)
Serpell’s contribution was to provide an analysis that weaves together local and national stories
with a critique of ‘grand’ narratives that have shaped development, education, and, in the case of
his study, traditional explanations of child development.
The relationship between culture and context plays an important role in providing the her-
meneutic ‘glue’ that gives wider meaning to the individual life stories. Let us look for a moment
at this relationship.
To understand the important role narrative knowing can play in generating narrative knowing,
it is important initially to make a conceptual distinction between a story and a narrative.
Polkinghorne (1998) suggests that narratives are ‘stories with a plot’ whilst Goodson (2010)
further elaborates by stating that:
Narratives are stories with an organising principle by which the contextual meaning of
individual events can be displayed and articulated . . . plot is important for providing
the narrator with a criterion for the selection and organisation of life events.
Goodson (2010, p. 11)
52
When a story is told it becomes a narrative when it draws upon its context and culture for its sig-
nificance both for the narrator and listener; which is one of the reasons why the life narratives of
teachers and students discussed later in this chapter can only be meaningfully understood when
analysed in relation to both the immediate context of the teacher or student and the broader
contexts that are regional, national, and global.
In a book arguing for greater attention be paid to context (Stephens, 2009), I have argued that
despite the advances in qualitative research methodology, there is still a tendency to view ‘context’
as a backdrop or background to the research enquiry, and that this background needs to be fore-
grounded for any narratives to be meaningful.
Narrative meaning is to be found in the interpretations brought to the narrative both by
the researcher and the researched, an interpretation that is grounded in what Dilley (1998) calls
the ‘problem of context’. As he says, context is about making connections and, by implication,
dis-connections, which are construed as relevant to someone, to something, or to a particular
problem, with this process ‘yielding an explanation, a sense, an interpretation for the object so
connected’ (Dilley, 1998).
Paraphrasing the great philosopher Wittgenstein, he suggests we focus less on what context
‘means’ and more on how it is ‘used’. Context can indeed be used to help frame the research
problem. It can also be used in theory as well as in practice, connecting (or disconnecting) us to
ideas and concepts across a range of academic and professional disciplines. Perhaps we can apply
the same approach to narrative research? I would go even further and suggest that building con-
nections in a constructivist sense between the constituent parts of the narrative is actually more
useful than establishing a research question and then looking for an answer. This construction
draws heavily upon hermeneutics.
The relationship of the part to the whole – or the ‘hermeneutic circle’ – is central to an
understanding of the relationship of context, interpretation, and narrative. Or rather what
matters is that the process of interpretation occurs in context: research findings or ‘new
knowledge’ being initially interpreted in the context from which they derive; the findings
then allowing for a subsequent re-interpretation of that context in the light of the analysis
of the data. Interpretation and context are key players in the dramatic story unfolding during
the research project. They shape not only the content of the research but, I would argue, the
methodological tools used in the research process. For example, Andrews et al. (2011, p. 24),
in writing about how they ‘teach’ narrative inquiry to students from all over the world, high-
light how conventional Aristotelian notions of narrative genres, such as tragedy and comedy,
get disturbed by participants with quite different canonical story genres. Western ideas about
the centrality of self-narratives to individual lives are put in question by participants from
the global South, in particular for whom more collectively framed narratives are often much
more important in their research. We need to be careful, therefore, when we discuss narrative
or biographical research that it is not framed unreflexively within the grand narratives of
Western intellectual traditions.
Studying teacher and student lives in two African contexts:

Reflections from the field
What follows is a discussion of two extensive periods of research fieldwork carried out in Ghana
(1975–76) and South Africa (2012) in which individual micro narratives and life histories of
students and teachers were analysed in relation to the larger meta and meso narratives discussed
earlier.
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David Stephens
The two studies can be summarised thus:
1. Girls and Basic Education: A Cultural Enquiry (1994–95), published as Stephens, D. (1998)
Research Monograph No.43, Department for International Development: London.
Research was carried out in two locations in northern and southern Ghana with a view
to examining the issues and experiences of 89 women teachers, head teachers, and girls
in and out of school. The northern context can be characterised as mainly rural, eco-
nomically poor, largely Islamic, and patrilineal; the southern richer, largely Christian,
economically more prosperous, and matrilineal.
Three ‘background’ contextual domains were foregrounded: the economic, the school, and the
home, domains of enquiry establishing interrelated contexts within which the life stories of
the female teachers and students could be meaningfully be analysed. Life stories became life
histories, what Goodson calls ‘genealogies in context’ (Goodson, 2013), personal accounts
of ‘what happens to people’ embedded in local, national, and global contexts.
Of importance too was Ghana’s national development narrative, characterised by a growing
export-led economy, World Bank structural adjustment polices, political stability, and
efforts by the Government and donor partners to improve the quality of basic education,
particularly with regards to improving the access and retention rates of girls throughout
the education system. The experiences revealed by the female teachers and students were
significant in a number of ways, not least the interplay between the home, school, and
economic domains and the larger national and global narratives.
In the domain of the home, for example, the life histories of successful women teachers
and drop-out girl students revealed kinship, descent (patrilineal or matrilineal), and the
extended family to be deciding factors in whether school was worthwhile. The narrative
for many girls was framed around not only the ‘drawing of water and the hewing of
wood’ but also critical turning points, when a father offered financial or moral support
or a particular female teacher took a young girl under her wing.
The economic domain provided the strongest evidence for the impact of structural adjust-
ment and fiscal reform upon some of the poorest sectors of society. Reasons for dropping
out included ‘I needed just my exam fee of 40 pence’, ‘I was sent home for paying no school
fees, so my mother said stay and help me’, and a belief that ‘being poor’ was the fault of the
individual child or family.
In school it was the perennial issues of poor quality pedagogy, an outmoded curriculum
little changed since colonial times, and a teaching profession under-resourced and no
longer respected.
An important purpose of this research, however, was not just to present the experiences of
women teachers and students but to analyse the experiences for policy implications. We
shall return to this relationship between narrative research and policy in discussion of the
lessons to be learnt from the two research projects.
2. Life-Histories of Two Generations of Teachers in the Eastern Cape, South Africa (2012), published as
Stephens, D. (2014) International Education and Development: A Narrative Approach, Routledge:
London.
This research was conducted in the spring of 2012, whilst the researcher was a senior visiting
research fellow at Rhodes University in Grahamstown in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. The
aim of the research was different from the Ghanaian study in that rather than focus upon
an education policy issue such as girl drop outs or the quality of teaching and learning, the
54
focus was more broadly concerned with the experiences of two generations of teachers: the
older who had directly experienced teaching during the apartheid years and the younger
who had been schooling since 1994 and were about to enter the teaching profession.
Twenty-five in-depth life history narratives were collected from both generations of teach-
ers, with participants drawn from the white, black, and coloured communities. In terms
of fore-grounded contexts, it soon became clear from previous research, the local news-
paper archives, and from the participants themselves that geo-political and historical con-
texts shaped and continued to shape the experiences revealed through the life histories.
The experiences of these two groups of teachers were similar in many ways to the Ghanaian
participants in the recounting of positive and negative experiences of early family life, suc-
cesses, and setbacks at school – especially for black students – and the struggles and critical
decisions taken in pursuing a teaching career. A characteristic of many of the life histories
was the importance of a mentor, often a teacher or a colleague; a sense of determination to
succeed, which was evident across all the racial groups; and, for the white teachers work-
ing during the Apartheid years, a slow realisation of what was actually happening across
the country outside the traditional enclaves of white South African communities. For the
younger teachers, schooled since 1994, the narrative on the one hand is more optimistic,
with references to the ‘rainbow nation’ but becoming more hesitant when considering life
in post-Mandela South Africa. Disillusionment with politics in general and the ANC in
particular is also a feature of the life histories of both generations.
The two approaches to narrative analysis discussed above: a dissection of the field data re-assembled
thematically for policy purposes in the Ghana study, as opposed to a more holistic treatment
of the evidence in the South African research, remind us of the importance of audience and
purpose in the design and analysis of narrative research.
There are three major lessons to be learnt from carrying out narrative and biographical
research in education in Africa.
Narrative and life history research in international education:

Re-conceptualisation from the field
Re-conceptualising the relationship between ‘grand’ meta narratives

and individual life stories
Education is about what happens to people, how they learn, and significantly how they respond
to the large challenges we all face. What is striking about the education development story is
the continuous predominance of a ‘grand’ narrative that seems to take little account of this, pre-
occupied by a macro-economic discourse in which children can still be referred to as ‘human
resources’ and the justification for improvements in schooling are phrased in terms of cost-benefit
analysis or economic returns on investment. Recent research into the contribution of indigenous
knowledge (Breidlid, 2012) and the failure of traditional development models to solve some of
Africa’s enduring educational problems has, however, provided some liminal space for the devel-
opment of counter-discourses.
The generation of narrative knowing through individual life histories also reveals the impact of
structural forces, which are hegemonic in character, upon individuals and communities, particu-
larly the economically poorer ones.
This impact creates deeply ethical and ideological issues around researcher positioning,
interpretation and selection of evidence, power inequalities between researcher and researched
55
David Stephens
(particularly if the researcher originates from the economically richer West), and the question
of the authority and valorising of the narrator’s voice (Fox, 2008). This raise challenges not only
in the design and carrying out of narrative research in Africa but where and how the research is
funded, disseminated, and published.
Re-conceptualising culture and context in analyses of education in Africa

If education research is about ‘what’ happens to people, it is also concerned with ‘where’ that
happens in terms of place, setting, and context. The life history research reported in this chapter
is grounded in two broad sets of contexts: first, the geo-cultural intersections between home,
school, and the economy; second, the broader ideological and political contexts that shape inter-
national education and development. These historical, global and hegemonic contexts not only
impact upon the development of education policy but, in the case of apartheid in South Africa or
structural adjustment in Ghana, for example, the day to day lives of teachers and students.
In fore-grounding context and culture in the research process, we are doing more than just
asking for setting be given greater prominence; rather, we are proposing that the kind of disaggre-
gated positivistic research found in much of the grey literature of the development and govern-
ment agencies be complimented by studies that are literally grounded in African time and place.
Re-conceptualising narrative research for education policy formulation

The two pieces of research discussed in this article reflect two contrasting approaches to the
generation of narrative evidence. In the first – the Ghanaian study – the purpose of the study
was to use life history data to provide policy directions for an enduring educational problem,
namely reasons why girls did not attend or, when they did, why they dropped out of school. The
policy-driven nature of this research lent credibility to an approach which paid less attention to
the analysis of holistic life histories and more to what the individual voices said about the problems
and solutions for improving schooling. This was achieved by ‘pouring’ the narrative data into
three inter-related domains of enquiry that seemed to frame the problem under investigation.
This approach, although innovative in its use of life history as a research method, was more tradi-
tional in its focus upon generating policy useful knowledge.
In the South African study, on the other hand, a decision was taken to place the individual
life narratives rather than the research problem centre stage. Here narrative was approached from
a methodological stance with an attempt made to generate a sense of individual and community
knowing through the vehicle of individual life histories. Such knowing, I would argue, can con-
tribute fresh understandings of how education and development is experienced and lived by two
generations of people residing in a particular cultural and contextual landscape but divided by
time, race, traditions, and gender. Such evidence, rich in voice and experience, particularly of the
marginalised, offers policy makers an opportunity to engage with teachers and students in the
search for stronger connections between decision making and schooling-as-experienced.
Conclusions
In the introduction to this chapter, I suggested that my aim was to take a theoretical excursion
into reconceptualising the role of narrative and life history in generating knowledge of Africa’s
educational landscape and, in so doing, reflect upon the experience of using these approaches to
education research. Overall my conclusion is that if we act ethically and mindfully, we can create
liminal spaces in which advances in research can be deliberated and put to good use by researchers
56
not only working within the African continent but elsewhere. As Sikes and Gale (2006) say, ‘We
might begin to identify a good story by its liminal qualities, whereby the narrative in some way
takes us from the threshold of one experience to another’ (Sikes & Gale, 2006, p. 1).
There would seem to be three opportunities to create and make use of these liminal spaces.
First, we need to reconsider the liminal spaces that can be created within the grand nar-
rative of Western intellectual research traditions. To do so we must reflect upon the place of
narrative research within the Western epistemological and methodological canon. Though,
as I have showcased here, there is an emerging body of narrative research being conducted
within the African sub-continent, it is predominantly research grounded within and largely
for the West. The stress, therefore, is understandably not only upon Western concerns in terms
of research content. Methodologically, research is shaped by cultural and epistemic concerns
that privilege, for example, the individual over the group, modernity over tradition, reason
over faith. In some senses the tension is between the rigour of what is acceptable within the
academy and the narratives and life stories captured in the field. A personal example might
suffice: in the mid-1970s I travelled into the remote interior of Sierra Leone – an area now
ravaged by Ebola – to carry out field research for my master’s dissertation. Drawing upon
a previous two years of teaching in that area, I ended up spending three weeks in a remote
village – I was in fact the second ‘white man’ or pumuii to visit the settlement (the first being a
Methodist missionary who left behind his Christianity and a small wooden chapel) – with the
intention of talking with the chief and inhabitants of the village about their views of Western
education as experienced by just one of their children, a young man who accompanied me
and acted as translator. My initial plan was to conduct life history interviews with the senior
village elders, but it soon became apparent that the chief and his Speaker in fact embodied
the collective life stories of all the inhabitants. For them the concept of individuality was
foreign; what mattered was the spirit of the community, which was guarded and expressed
through the leadership of the village. ‘I’ became ‘we’. Narrative or biographical research in
these settings in needs to move beyond the centrality of the self and look towards other ways
of being within the world.
This leads me to my second opportunity, the liminal spaces that exist between Western and
indigenous knowledge systems (Breidlid, 2012; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). In a recent book my Nor-
wegian colleague, Anders Breidlid, argues that Western epistemology is hegemonic in its ‘oth-
ering’ of alternative ways of seeing and researching the world, and he makes the case for what
Geoffrey Bateson calls double or multiple descriptions (Bateson, 1979, p. 142). Such an approach,
Breidlid suggests, allows for ‘the incorporation of various epistemological discourses, both in
the classrooms and in the discussions of a sustainable future’ (Breidlid, 2012, p. 197). Linda
Tuhiwai Smith is a Maori researcher who has fought valiantly to establish indigenous research
units within New Zealand universities. In her fascinating book, Decolonizing Methodologies:
Research and Indigenous Peoples (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999) she describes the setting up of the ‘Indig-
enous Research Agenda’, a major aim being the ‘development and promotion of appropriate
methodologies for research with the Maori, including a theorized approach now referred to as
Kuappa Maori Research’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999, p. 132). For her this approach is not only about
voice and an emphasis upon alternative communal explanations for what has happened and is
happening to the indigenous people of New Zealand, but it is also a highly political act both
an at institutional and national level. Narrative and biographical research has an opportunity to
ally itself to an agenda which not only researches marginalised communities but seeks to benefit
them. As she concludes: ‘when indigenous peoples become the researchers and not merely the
researched, the activity of research is transformed. Questions are framed differently, priorities are
57
David Stephens
ranked differently, problems are defined differently, and people participate on different terms’
(Tuhiwai Smith, 1999, p. 193).
Finally there exist liminal spaces between research and policy formation. The two research
projects reported on in this chapter were different in their relation to policy formulation. The
first, the Girls and Basic Education project was funded by the UK Department for International
Development (DfID) with a specific policy aim, namely to provide evidence on why girls are not
accessing schooling and, when they do, why they are then dropping out. To use current research
parlance, a major aim of the research was policy impact. For that reason the evidence, in the form
of life histories, was presented in a way that would strengthen the hand of policy makers keen to
‘make a difference’. The South Africa research was much more policy-light in that the major aim
was to describe and analyse the narratives of teachers who lived during and after the apartheid
years. The focus, like much of narrative research, was on privileging the experiences of those
involved in schooling and education within a variety of different socio-economic and cultural
settings. In terms of opportunities to occupy liminal spaces, there seems to be an opportunity, as
others have shown, to have one’s narrative cake and eat it – in other words, to provide rich accounts
of individual and community lives whilst at the same time providing useful experiential evidence
for the policy maker. Sikes and Gale (2006), in a paper for the University of Plymouth, sum up
the potential contribution of narrative research to policy formulation: ‘Since the mid-1980s in
particular, within the social sciences there has been a massive proliferation of types of what Laurel
Richardson calls “creative analytic practices” (Richardson, 2000, pp. 929–36). These approaches to
writing and otherwise presenting social science research, thinking and theorising are produced as
academic scholarship and have extended the boundaries of understanding primarily by acknowl-
edging and, where appropriate, privileging subjectivities and the place of the affect and emotion
in all aspects of social life. Narrative forms that evoke identification and or empathy and hence
promote understanding do seem to be highly appropriate in social and particularly educational
research. Not surprisingly, narrative forms can be seen as having and can indeed have transforma-
tive and hence transgressive potential. Stories can change the world’ (Sikes & Gale, 2006).
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59
5
WHAT HAVE YOU GOT WHEN
YOU’VE GOT A LIFE STORY?
Pat Sikes
university of sheffield
Ivor Goodson
Introduction to Chapters 5 and 6 of this volume (originally from Life History Research
in Educational Settings)
In 2001 Pat and Ivor published Life History Research in Educational Settings: Learning from Lives.
This book was in an (11 title) Open University Press series – Doing Qualitative Research in Edu-
cational Settings – the idea for which was originally conceived of by Barry Troyna, just before he
became ill with the cancer which eventually killed him in 1996. Pat went ahead with the series as
a memorial to Barry. Chapters 5 and 6 of this volume, ‘What Have You Got When You’ve Got a
Life Story? Epistemological Considerations’ and ‘Techniques for Doing Life History’ are adapted
from Life History Research in Educational Settings (Goodson & Sikes, 2001) with permission from
Open University/McGrawHill.
Preamble
Returning to this chapter around 17 years after we first wrote it, we are gratified to find that it still, essen-
tially, reflects our thoughts on the nature of life stories. Obviously the references are ‘old’ but, to our mind,
they are not ‘out of date’: they still support the points we want/ed to make just as effectively as does more
recent work and iterations of the ideas they discuss.
Of course the passing years have involved changes of various kinds, in and for our personal experiences,
and at all levels of social life that may alter how we story, contextualise and locate our lives. Often-cited
examples of such changes include: new and ended personal relationships, illness, bereavement, attitudes
towards sexualities, 9/11, growing use of ever-advanced technologies, the multifarious effects of the Internet,
and what is sometimes described as an increasing valorisation/privileging of the individual at the expense of
the collective. There have, too, been changes in thinking around all aspects of social science and the nature of
knowledge, with concomitant shifts and developments in methodological understandings and practices. Many
of these changes have had implications for life story, life history and narrative. Of particular significance,
perhaps, is the increasing popularity of autoethnography (see, for example, Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Holman
Jones et al., 2013; Sikes, 2013), provoking questions that trouble the authority and the ability of the ‘I’ to
60
When you’ve got a life story
talk about experience (cf Butler, 2005; Gannon, 2006; Jackson & Mazzei, 2008), explore the problem-
atic nature of memory and ‘truth’ (e.g., Bochner, 2014; Freeman, 2010), and seek (often multi-media and
interdisciplinary) strategies by which to re-present the fractured, fragmented, discontinuous nature of self and
subjectivity. Having said this, we have made relatively few changes to the chapter written back at the turn
of the century because it did, we believe, at least begin to address the issues mentioned above. Those changes
that are there are primarily to meet word count requirements.
Introduction
What have you got when you’ve got a life story? And what happens when you turn it into a life
history? What are the connections between a life story as told, the life that it concerns as lived
‘reality’, and written accounts of life history research? These questions are in essence philosoph-
ical questions about the relationship between epistemology and methodology, between what
knowledge is considered to be and the means by which it is obtained, recognized and deemed to
relate to ‘truth’ (see Griffiths, 1998, p. 35).
Traditionally, the goal of research has been to acquire knowledge that leads to understanding
and the truth about whatever is being investigated. Such a view of research is problematical
for life historians since their primary aim is to explore how individuals or groups who share
specific characteristics subjectively experience, make sense of, and account for the things that
happen to them.
Life historians are not inevitably postmodernists, poststructuralists, feminists or relativists.
However, we would be surprised if they did not subscribe to the epistemological view that ‘the
social world is an interpreted world’ (Altheide & Johnson, 1994, p. 489), and that different life
experiences are likely to lead to different interpretations, resulting in the description of different
realities. It is hard to imagine anyone using life history who was not sympathetic to the concept
of multiple realities and did not, therefore, see participants and researchers as being each engaged
in interpreting/narrating the world from their own perspectives.
This view has obvious implications for the nature and content of the life stories that partici-
pants tell and the life histories that researchers, often in collaboration with participants, construct
and present in written format. Clearly, neither a life story nor a life history is anything other
than a representation of the life they concern. The recognition that it may never be possible to
totally capture and faithfully recreate experience is at the heart of the ‘crises of representation
and legitimation’ occasioned by the problematization of the relationship between epistemology,
methodology and the re-presentation of research (see Denzin, 1997, pp. 4–5; Denzin & Lincoln,
1994, p. 9; Goodson, 2001). Writing in 2015 there does seem to be wider acceptance that the
gap between ‘reality’ and representation is there and that that is as it is.
Here, our focus is on epistemological and methodological considerations from the perspec-
tives of: (1) the life storyteller and (2) the life historian. Since storytellers often historicize their
accounts and life historians are also telling their stories, differentiating is artificial. Nevertheless,
for purposes of organization and clarity, we will do so.
It is important to note that our concern is with life stories and histories as ‘data’ in the context
of research methodology. It is the researcher who decides what constitutes data: a point that is,
perhaps, particularly salient in the case of life stories and histories. We hold the opinion that it
is through the construction, telling and retelling of personal stories, to ourselves and to others,
that we attempt to make sense of our lives and give them meaning. In other words, personal
narratives have a status as personal, as well as research, data. As Rapport (1999, p. 4) puts it, per-
sonal ‘narrative is a means by which individuals existentially apprehend their own lives’ (see also
61
Bruner, 1990; Polkinghorne, 1988). Margaret Atwood has her character Grace make this point
eloquently when she writes:
when you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark
roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in
a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all
aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes a story at all. When you
are telling it to yourself or someone else.
(Atwood, 1996, p. 298)
We tell stories about our life and our ‘self ’, or rather our ‘selves’, as a sort of reflective
interpretative device, with a view to understanding who and what we are and the things
that happen to us. And yet, as Maroula Joannou (1995, p. 32) notes: ‘although the self may
only exist as a story that can be told about the self, what is told about the self is not always
the same story, and much will depend on how it is told and by whom’. In any case, ‘self ’
is a contested and controversial term. When we talk about our self, are we referring to our
public, or private, or personal, or professional, or spiritual, or familial, or whatever, self ? (see
Mitchell & Weber, 1999, p. 8). Whilst we may work hard to present ourselves as each having
a unified coherent identity (because failure to do this may suggest mental instability), our
view is that people are multi-self beings and it is incumbent upon life historians to be explicit
about this.
Life history from the perspective of the life storyteller

What is going on when someone tells their life story or, more usually, a part of their story, as a
participant in life history research? Ken Plummer (1995, p. 34) suggests that they are turning
themselves into ‘socially organised biographical objects’. They tell their story in a particular way
for a particular purpose, guided by their understanding of the particular situation they are talk-
ing about, the self/identity/impression/image they want to present, and their assessment of how
hearers will respond. This happens in all social situations, not just in the context of research. It is
worth noting, though, that the opportunity that being involved in life history research provides to
craft a narrative that links together events, experiences and perceptions is the explicit opportunity
to create an identity (see Ricoeur, 1980). In some ways, this is a unique experience and one that
Pat Sikes and Heather Piper (2010) were acutely conscious of when investigating the perceptions
and experiences of male secondary school teachers accused of sexual misconduct which they
said they did not commit. They were fearful of creating an opportunity for an actual offender to
construct an identity as a wronged innocent.
As social beings we constantly story our lives in different ways and use different words in order
to fit specific contexts, purposes and audiences. Consider, for example, what we might say and
how we might say it in the following scenarios when we may well be talking about more or less
the same sorts of things:
1 At the doctor’s when giving an account of our lifestyle for medical and health reasons.
2 Meeting someone for the first time at a party.
3 In a job interview.
4 When our children ask about when we were young.
5 To a lover at the start of what we hope will be a serious relationship.
62
Not only might our accounts alter depending on the context and what we judge to be appro-
priate, politic or useful, they differ from others’ stories as a result of the unique combination of
experiences we have had and the knowledges we have accrued. Life as lived is a processual matter
rather than a product: ‘social life is ongoing, developing, fluctuating, becoming. It never arrives
or ends’ (Woods, 1999, p. 4). Nor can there ever be the definitive story. Alternative interpre-
tations are always possible. When it is our own lives we are narrating, our stories may change
as we remember or forget different details and as we assume (for whatever reasons) different
perspectives and acquire new information. All stories, all biographies, can be told from various
perspectives and in a range of styles.
As an examplar, in the original version of this chapter we told stories about a child’s traumatic
first days at school from the perspective of the now adult woman, her mother, her teacher, and a
classmate. The accounts all contained the same basic story but from differing perspectives, reflecting
different concerns and priorities. Furthermore, whilst these accounts were attempts to remember
the story as it would have been told at the time, years after the event, some of the people involved
would give interpretations which were, at least, slightly different. For instance, the woman, who
described desolation and a sense of abandonment, came to see her experiences as the consequence
of her mother’s ‘failure’ to adequately prepare her for independence. She attributed this failure to
the fact that she was an only child who, quite wrongly, in her adult opinion, was the ‘be all and end
all’ of her mother’s existence. As a result of her experience, she determined to ensure that her own
children would become used to being away from her right from their earliest days.
Different interpretations over time are almost inevitable. This is because our experiences and
the professional and personal knowledge we may have gained as parents, teachers, life historians,
or whatever, inform the sense we make of the events. They may lead us to feel that we have a
more accurate and comprehensive picture than we had at the age of 5. Nevertheless, whilst the
child’s story may be partial and the adult the child has become may well wish to revise it, unless
it is consciously and deliberately a lie, it is an authentic account of an experience. We agree with
Clandinin and Connelly’s claim that:
stories are the closest we can come to experience as we and others tell of our experi-
ence. A story has a sense of being full, a sense of coming out of a personal and social
history . . . Experience . . . is the stories people live. People live stories, and in the telling
of them reaffirm them, modify them, and create new ones.
(Clandinin & Connelly, 1994, p. 415)
And then there is the question of memory. In one sense, all stories are memories as all memories
are stories. Even Proustian recollections of sensation, sparked by taste, smell, touch, emotional
feeling, whatever, are usually translated into words and the past is brought into the present
through narrative. Why we remember some things and forget others is, perhaps, always to do
with how whatever it is we are remembering fits, or has fitted, into one of our stories. As Hampl
(1996, p. 207) notes:
we only store in memory images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of
time . . . but that’s the implacable judgement of feeling: this we say somewhere deep
within us, is something I am hanging on to.
Being asked to tell one’s story as part of a life history research project brings the relationship
between the story, the life as lived, and methodology into acute focus. People have particular
63
notions of what it means to be involved in research. These notions influence what they tell and
how they tell it, and their ideas about the information that they consider they should make avail-
able to the researcher. There is no getting away from this, however much researchers may try to
ensure that they have been as open and explicit about their enterprise and their aims as they pos-
sibly can be. This point is particularly salient for life history researchers because, as Bruner notes:
the-story-of-a-life as told to a particular person is in some sense a joint product of the

teller and the told. Selves, whatever metaphysical stand one takes about the ‘reality’, can
only be revealed in a transaction between a teller and a told, and as Mishler reminds us,
whatever topic one approaches by interviewing must be evaluated in the light of that
transaction.
(Bruner, 1990, p. 124)
Life historians often emphasize that the construction of a life history from a life story is, ideally,
a joint creation. Frequently, some form of explicit researcher/participant analytical cooperation
is incorporated into the research design. It is also important to be aware of, and to acknowledge,
the extent to which the relating of the life story is itself a collaborative activity with implications
for the nature and content of the story which emerges and, in some ways, for the future lives we
live and our understandings of them. As Munro notes:
life history interviews are themselves texts designed to not only give shape to some fea-
ture of experience but ultimately to create a self. As Bakhtin (1981) suggests, there is an
intimate connection between the project of language and the project of selfhood; they
both exist in order to mean. There is no identity outside narrative. Events or selves, in
order to exist, must be encoded as story elements. Narrative, as Ricoeur (1974) reminds
us, imposes on the events of the past a form that in themselves they do not really have.
(Munro, 1998, p. 6)
Thus, when someone tells their story to a life historian, they can be seen to be actively involved in
constructing a version of their story and of their life: generally a version which is linear and rela-
tively neat and tidy in a way that real life, or rather, lived experience, never is (see Roberts, 1999).
We tell our stories using the narrative forms available to us within our cultures (see Goodson,
2013; Passerini, 1987, p. 28; Plummer 1995, p. 21). These forms act as templates, both for the
telling of the story and in the way they impose a structure on our experiences and perceptions.
As Erben (1998, p. 13) argues, lives have to be understood as lived within time and time is
experienced according to narrative. In its commonest form, narrative structure generally has a
beginning, a middle and an end, and events are usually depicted as proceeding consecutively and
logically. Sometimes this is what has happened, but often things have not been quite so straight-
forward as, for example, in stories about the progress of relatively unpredictable conditions such
as young onset dementia (see Sikes, 2015). Many of the things which happen to us result from
complex interrelationships and serendipitous occurrences. In choosing to relate one particular
storyline we may, in effect, be closing off other, alternative ones. Goodson (1995) has written
about the way in which prioritizing one story over another can be used to further political ends:
it can have a similar effect in the personal sphere, too, as people may choose to emphasize certain
experiences in order to support the representation they want to be public.
Then there is the question of gaps. What is left out can be as significant as what is included –
provided that researchers are able to discover omissions, which is by no means always possible
(see Sikes, 2000). Nor is it always the case that participants are deliberately seeking to mislead.
64
On the contrary, they are often concerned to ensure that the story they tell is relevant. They
ask, ‘I don’t know if this is the sort of thing you’re interested in’. In effect, they are seeking
confirmation that they are telling the version of their story they believe the researcher wants to
hear (and, as we discuss in the next section, the researcher is then implicated in deciding which
version to privilege).
Accepting that life is not neat and tidy, logical, consequential and consistent, perhaps, in these
post-modern days, presents researchers with less of a dilemma than was previously the case.
As Linda Wagner-Martin (1998, p. 93) notes: ‘post-modern readers reject oversimplification –
preferring an unfinished narrative or one with gaps in its construction to the deceit of the
contrived finish’. But that is post-modern readers, who perhaps belong to an esoteric minority.
Most people, in telling their lives, will try to impose some order because they are concerned to
make sense of experiences in order to avoid anoesis and anomie (‘anoesis’ refers to sensations
or emotions that we do not understand, and ‘anomie’ to hopelessness and the loss of any sense
of purpose or belief ). People also often feel that everyone else’s life is neat and tidy and logi-
cal, partly because this is how they tend to be described – which takes us back to the issue of
narrative forms, what is available to us and how such forms can end up shaping perceptions
and experiences. For example:
I always feel that everyone else has got things sussed out and that I’m the only one who
isn’t. You listen to people talking and they’ve got all their lives sorted. They’re going to
get married, and they do, then they’re going to have the requisite number of children at
the times that they want and everything’s going to be fine. I thought it would be like
that for me and it wasn’t. I got married all right but the children didn’t come. I felt a
failure. A total bloody failure. And there were my sisters and sisters-in-law producing
left, right and centre and I couldn’t even get pregnant. I was a failure as a person. It
wasn’t until after we’d adopted our daughter that I learnt that one of Brian’s sisters had
had a number of miscarriages and that one of my brothers’ wife had been taking Clo-
miphen [a ‘fertility’ drug] for a couple of years. We hadn’t been told those stories but it
would have helped me a great deal to have heard them.
(Sikes, 1997)
In a life history context, our facility with language, articulacy and the ability to dramatize and tell
a story determine how ‘good’ a participant we are. To a considerable extent they also determine
the ‘success’ of the identities we construct. Wittgenstein (1953) commented to the effect that the
limits of our language are the limits of our world, and it is certainly the case that the vocabulary
we possess enables us to present ourselves as more or less sophisticated, interesting, reflective,
intelligent (and so on) people, as it also enables us to interpret and make sense of our experiences
with more or less precision and complexity. Whilst there is a personal dimension to fluency, and
some people are simply better at telling stories and talking about themselves than are others, the
language and discourses we have access to depend upon the social contexts we experience and
how we are socially positioned. As Usher notes:
[people] can only represent themselves in language by creating a ‘literary’ rather than
a ‘literal’ figure that dis-figures or de-faces as much as it figures . . . Discourses and
positioning shape what and how we experience the world . . . we are constituted in
language and positioned differently depending on the discursive practices of gender,
race, class, ethnicity and other marks of difference.
(Usher, 1998, pp. 19–20)
65
Frequently, it is these ‘marks of difference’ that life historians are looking out for when analys-
ing life stories. They are seeking ‘common verbal patterns’ (Casey, 1993, p. 23), or patterns of
discourse, which are taken as indicators of whatever it is they are suggesting marks out, or is
characteristic of, their participants. Here, once again, the issue of the nature of the relationship
between epistemology, methodology and reported accounts of research looms large. To repeat
the questions we raised at the start of this paper: What have you got when you’ve got a life story?
And what happens when you turn it into a life history? What are the connections between a
life story as told, the life that it concerns as lived, ‘reality’, and written accounts of life history
research? Given what we have said about the ways in which people conceptualize research and
their involvement in it, about how we use pre-existing story lines or narrative forms and about
how our language has a great deal to do with where we are socially located, there are no cate-
gorical answers. When someone tells their story as part of a life history research project, they are
involved in a creative act, irrespective of how committed they are to telling the ‘truth’. Rather
than attempting to make unrealistic claims for representing ‘reality’, life historians should simply
acknowledge what they are able to do with the stories they use as data: namely, offer an interpre-
tation through their writing and spell out the influences that may have coloured both the teller’s
story and their interpretation of it.
Life history from the perspective of the life historian

If life storytellers are involved in creating and crafting a story when they take part in life
history research, then to what extent are life historians engaged in creative activity when they
design, undertake and eventually write up their research? Our basic answer is, to a considera-
ble degree – as are all researchers using any other approach. Fundamentally, research is about
furthering understanding, increasing the universal sum of knowledge, and making ‘better’
sense of whatever it is that is being studied. Thus, researchers are seeking to interpret and
then re-present an aspect of the world, whether that be of the physical, objective world or of
subjective, lived experience.
We have considerable sympathy with Clough’s (1992, p. 2) view that ‘all factual representa-
tions of reality, even statistical representations, are narratively constructed’ and, therefore, creatively
constructed. What are the implications of acknowledging that the research process in general, and
writing up in particular, is in essence creative? And, how can life historians justify their position and
differentiate themselves from straightforwardly avowed writers of fiction? This is not to suggest any
qualitative evaluation, but rather to signal that researchers and writers of fiction tend to have differ-
ent motives and agendas for their writings (see Baronne, 1995, p. 65). As Laurel Richardson notes:
claiming to write ‘fiction’ is different from claiming to write ‘science’ in terms of the
audience one seeks, the impact one might have on different publics, and how one
expects ‘truth claims’ to be evaluated. These differences should not be overlooked or
minimized.
(Richardson, 2000, p. 926)
In this section, we try to begin to answer these sorts of questions. This needs to be done because,
unfairly in our view, life historians and other qualitative researchers are criticized for ‘subjectivity’
in a way that those working within the positivist and modernist traditions are not. Whilst these
criticisms continue to be made (although it has to be admitted that creative and explicitly auto/
biographical approaches are far more acceptable than they were even when this chapter was first
written; see Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Sikes, 2012), newcomers to the field need to have some
66
‘ammunition’ with which to defend their corner. We shall concentrate on the processes by which
researchers make their interpretations and, specifically, communicate their ‘findings’ to others
through what they write: in other words, on what life historians do with the life stories they col-
lect; on how they go about using these stories to make a re-presentation of ‘reality’. Of course, if
life history is a collaborative venture, or for personal and professional development, then the key
audience is the participant. In this case, the communication between researcher and participant
is crucial but, perhaps because of the intimate and immediate relationship between both parties,
there is more space for negotiation of meaning, for discussion of the relationship between episte-
mology and methodology, and for questioning the researcher as to their meaning and intention.
Discussing the ‘crisis of representation’ beginning in the mid-1980s, Norman Denzin
argues that:
A single but complex issue defines the representational crisis. It involves the assumption
that much, if not all, qualitative and ethnographic writing is a narrative production,
structured by a logic that separates writer, text and subject matter . . . Any social text
can be analysed in terms of its treatment of four paired terms: (a) the ‘real’ and its rep-
resentation in the text, (b) the text and the author, (c) lived experience and its textual
representations, and, (d) the subject and his or her intentional meanings. The text
presumes that there is a world out there (the real) that can be captured by a ‘knowing’
author through the careful transcription (and analysis) of field materials (interviews,
notes, etc.). The author becomes the mirror to the world under analysis. This reflected
world then represents the subject’s experiences through a complex textual apparatus.
The subject is a textual construction because the real flesh and blood person is always
translated into either an analytic subject as a social type or a textual subject who speaks
from the author’s pages.
(Denzin, 1997, pp. 4–5)
(The reader and their interpretations and understandings are of great importance too, but Denzin
is himself writing from that position.) Those who acknowledge that there are problems inherent
in any attempts to offer a ‘definitive’ version of reality are acutely conscious of the ways in which
differential social positioning and life experience militate against the possibility of there being a
single, literal writing or reading of any text. Baronne quotes Witcombe who, in endorsing Barthes’
announcement that ‘the author’ is dead, chooses to redefine herself as a writer having previously
considered that she was an author and states that, ‘as a writer [unlike an author] I do not have an
agenda [in the sense of a list of things to accomplish]. But like everyone else I write from a political
position’ (quoted in Baronne, 1995, p. 65).
It is possible to take the view that this is all just so much semantic posturing. Of course,
writers have ‘an agenda’. And authors ‘create’ – but then, so do writers. Perhaps the nature of
what they claim to create is what is of paramount importance. On this view, the onus is on the
writer/author/researcher to be as explicit as possible. After all, a key ‘test’ for assessing whether
or not qualitative research writing is representational of ‘real’ life has been the extent to which it
achieves what has been called verisimilitude (Bruner, 1986): that is, how far it seems to be true,
how far people who have personal experience of the focus of the research regard it to be likely,
or the extent to which ‘experts’ in the field consider theories, conclusions etc., to be plausible.
Yet, as Todorov (1977, p. 83) has noted, there are multiple verisimilitudes. It is also possible for
accounts to have verisimilitude but be ‘untrue’ (Sikes, 2000), or to lack verisimilitude and be ‘true’
(Lincoln & Denzin, 1994, p. 578). After all, as they say, truth is stranger than fiction. And yet,
perhaps somewhat confusingly in the context of this discussion, verisimilitude is exactly what
67
most fictional writers are seeking to achieve. Consider what Virginia Woolf has to say about
successful fictional writing:
The writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which
he recognises, which, therefore, stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to
co-operate in the far more difficult business of intimacy. And it is of the highest impor-
tance that this common meeting place should be reached easily, almost instinctively, in
the dark, with one’s eyes shut.
( Woolf, 1992)
If writers/authors of ‘fiction’ or ‘fact’ are to communicate effectively with their readers, there has
to be this ‘common meeting place’. Even science fiction and fantasy writing takes account of
this. Thus, we can feel fear with Bilbo Baggins when he encounters Gollum even though we are
not Hobbits and have never been to Middle Earth because Tolkien drew on emotions and expe-
riences common to humans. Experimental writers in all genres and disciplines ignore this at
their peril, and as I write I am reminded of a couplet from Empson’s poem This Last Pain (1932):
‘What is conceivable can happen too’,

Said Wittgenstein who had not dreamt of you.
That the imaginable does tend to be possible is central to arguments supporting the use of ‘critical
fictions’ for educational and professional development purposes (see Banks & Banks, 1998; Bridges,
1999). Critical fictions frequently take the form of life and case histories and provide examples and
scenarios which people can use to consider how they would respond to and deal with such situations.
Baronne (1995, pp. 64–5) proposes ‘that inevitably associated with the act of writing is the
attitude of persuasiveness’. There is nothing inherently sinister, Machiavellian, unscientific, or
necessarily partisan about this. Thus, not only do life historians re-present the life stories they
are told, they do so within the context of their own frames of reference and the particular
stories that they wish to tell via their use of what participants say. And they have made the
decision that a life history approach, inclusive of the writing/reporting styles associated with
it, is the most appropriate one for telling their story, for making their interpretation, their
re-presentation, for getting their message across. This, yet again, highlights the relationship
between epistemology and methodology and the ways in which researchers are so often auto/
biographically implicated in the research that they undertake, not least because they are in a
position to follow C. Wright Mills’ (1959/1970) imperative to make personal troubles public
concerns (see also Sikes in this volume).
Most people’s preference among research topics is likely to be for ones which have meaning to
and interest for them, and this meaning and interest generally stems from something in their own
lives. Of course, for a variety of reasons, researchers do sometimes end up working on projects
designed by other people. Even then, even when working within specific parameters, we would
suggest that people tend to draw on their own interests and experiences. The accounts that they
write reflect this and, once again, issues of gaps and omissions, of prioritizing and politics loom
large. As before, our advice is to be as reflective and reflexive as possible and to make this explicit
to readers. Indeed, with regard to acknowledging the part that our research can play in our lives,
we go along with Coffey’s uncompromising position that:
Emotional connectedness to the processes and practices of fieldwork, to analysis and

writing, is normal and appropriate. It should be acknowledged, reflected upon and seen
68
as a fundamental feature of well executed research. Having no emotional connection

to the research endeavor, setting or people is indicative of a poorly executed project.
(Coffey, 1999, pp. 158–9)
An issue related to ‘whose story’ is being told concerns the use of participants’ words to tell their
own story. Life historians commonly do make extensive use of quotations and transcripts from
interviews. It is important to bear in mind that any decisions regarding how much or how little
editing there should be are taken with regard to the story that the researcher wishes to tell. For
example, in a paper about consensual sexual relationships between teachers and students, Pat pre-
sented life history interview data with minimal editing because she was concerned that readers
should see the issue from the perspective of her participants, rather than from the normative,
censorious position (eventually published as Sikes, 2006; see also Sikes, 2008).
Continuing with the theme of persuasion, Baronne writes:
since an important intention of the writer is indeed the intention to persuade, then
the corresponding stance of the storyreader is understandably one of vigilance against
abuse of authorial power. Writers and readers of narrative can also occasionally share a
mutual aim in their textual activity. This is the aim of securing power for the characters
whose stories they choose to craft and remake. Pursuance of this common goal can
lead to dialogue in which mistrustful, writer-versus reader antagonisms are temporarily
suspended, as all agents conspire within an emancipatory moment.
(Baronne, 1995, p. 65)
Acknowledging that research reporting tends to be persuasive does not necessarily imply that
writers do not adopt a critical approach to what they write. It is our experience that most
life historians, whilst being keen argue their particular line, are extremely concerned that their
work be take seriously. This means that they do seek to ensure that their research and writing
are undertaken with regard to ‘criteria for adequacy’. The important point is that the criteria
should be appropriate to the nature of life history work. Hatch and Wisniewski offer a review
of suggested criteria for quality life history work and note that there is a need to go ‘beyond
the standardized notions of reliability, validity and generalizability’ (Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995,
pp. 128–9; see also Rosie, 1993; Sikes, 2000). Having said that, when working from transcripts
of life stories, life historians seem in general agreement that ‘we cannot write just anything we
wish . . . interpretations, however tentative must be disciplined by data, and . . . must proceed
cautiously and carefully before proclaiming a plot’ (Bullough, 1998, p. 29) and that whilst:
imagination is the vehicle the researcher employs to aid recognition of significant

moments in the data, to relate these to each other and to the overall lives of the subjects
under study . . . at all points, however, the researcher is required to fix imagination in
empirical sources – it cannot be allowed free rein and take unwarranted liberties with
the lives of subjects. The fact that biographical research findings are imaginative con-
structions does not mean that they need to be fictitious.
(Erben, 1998, p. 10)
In conclusion
In this chapter we have considered aspects of the relationship between methodology and episte-
mology. In particular, we have focused on the relationship between (1) the stories participants tell
69
of their lives as lived and (2) the life stories as data and life historians’ re-presentations of them
research accounts. In neither case can the stories be seen as the lives themselves, but, we argue,
they are perhaps as close as it is possible to get. Social positioning influences the stories we are
able, and that we wish, to tell. This in itself is useful analytical information for life historians.
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6
TECHNIQUES FOR DOING
LIFE HISTORY
Ivor Goodson
Pat Sikes
Introduction
We believe that an awareness of the character of life history research and data will help to inform
and illustrate subsequent discussions focusing on more theoretical matters. Having said this,
we do want to emphasize a point to which we will regularly return: namely, that we see any
separation of theoretical, methodological, practical, epistemological, ethical, ontological (and so
on) aspects of research to be in essence artificial. All are, or should be, a considered part of any
researcher’s whole philosophy of, and approach to, their work. Significantly this is true regardless
of the paradigm they adopt or methods they use. Addressing each aspect individually, however,
does help to provide an organizational framework for comprehension and enables readers to refer
more easily and quickly to specific issues or areas.
Similarly, whilst at times we may adopt a sequential approach in describing the various stages
and phases involved when doing life history research, we know that research does not often
happen in a neat, linear manner, and nor is this necessarily desirable. The question of whether a
sequential or a more ‘thematic or critical event’ focus is adopted is one of the major debates within
the life history field. It is an important consideration in the conduct of life history interviews.
We are also keen to make it clear that we do not believe that there is only one ‘proper’ way
of doing life history research. There is no intention here to provide an ‘orthodoxy’ for
life history methods. Different projects will have their own features and requirements
and each researcher is likely to have their own personal style and a unique emotional
engagement with any particular project (see Coffey, 1999). Indeed, the extent to which
life history methodology is individualistic and personal, relying as it does on ‘intensely
idiosyncratic personal dynamics’ (Sikes et al., 1996, p. 43) is a defining characteristic of
the approach. This does mean, though, that it is a methodology that cannot easily be
taught ‘because . . . personal dynamics are themselves unpackagable’ (Sikes et al., 1996,
p. 44). An important implication of this is that not all researchers can or should do life
72
Techniques for doing life history
history research; not all can or should use life history to investigate particular topics at
particular points in their own lives. In any case, if they do use it when they ‘cannot’ or
‘should not’, then they are unlikely to maximise the research potential of the method.
Firstly they are unlikely to develop the sort of relationship with informants that tends to
lead to ‘suggestive’ and generative data.
Secondly they are unlikely to be sufficiently sensitive to the central tenet of the approach –
that, potentially at least, all aspects of life interact with and have implications for each
other – to be able to make insightful use of the data.
Finally and most importantly they may even have a negative effect (to a greater or lesser
degree, and in a variety of possible life areas) on their informants.
Of course it may seem somewhat contradictory to be writing this book having raised these
points because we seem to be saying: ‘if you have not got the right sort of personal characteristics
then you cannot do this type of research’. Whilst we stand by our claim that not everyone can
do life history work, we believe that people can develop and improve their practice by learning
from the experiences of others as presented here. Furthermore, one of our key aims is to alert
readers to these sensitive issues and, thereby, provide them with a basis for deciding whether or
not it is an approach they consider to be appropriate to their particular interests, personality and
life stage. It is important to realize that life history work cannot be ‘proceduralised’ – there is not
a predestined way of proceeding in life history interviews or subsequent analyses. Inevitably life
history work is as variable as life histories themselves, and the capacity to respond variously and
intuitively to life history research is the key to best practice.
Having ourselves worked in the life history field for many decades we feel, as a general rule, life
history research is more likely to appeal to the incurably curious who are interested in, and fasci-
nated by, the minutiae of others’ lives, and particularly in how people make sense of their experi-
ences and of the world around them. At the risk of stereotyping (yet on the basis of an informal
survey), life historians are likely to prefer novels such as: A Suitable Boy, The Magic Mountain and
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, to exciting, action-packed yarns. Life history is an approach best
suited to people who are able to listen attentively and hear beyond what is actually being said, and
who can ask pertinent questions in a non-threatening manner. The act and art of listening, really
listening, is perhaps the most important requirement of the life history researcher. Listening for
two or three hours is both exhausting and extracting, but it is the starting point and the launch
pad for the most generative life history studies. It demands the willingness to share one’s own
experiences, if this seems appropriate, and, of supreme importance, it requires the researcher to
be the sort of person that people want to talk to.
Selecting research approaches and methods

Moving beyond personal preferences and predilections, the key reason for using any research
method has to be that it is the most appropriate one, the one most likely to produce data which
address, answer or otherwise meet and fulfil the questions, aims and purposes of a specific enquiry.
Methods also have to be feasible in terms of time, cost, resources, and within the various param-
eters of particular research contexts. Tempting though it may be to indulge oneself, as Robson
(1993, p. 26) notes: one of the things that ‘unsuccessful research starts with . . . [is] Method or
technique. Using it as a vehicle to carry out a specific method of investigation’. Research which
is ‘method-led’ can be uneconomical, inappropriate and unjustifiably biased.
73
However, aficionados of life history would argue that the method can be used effectively to
provide useful data on practically every social issue and aspect of life; Thomas and Znaniecki
(1918–1920) suggested that personal life records do appear to constitute the perfect form of
sociological data. To take a slightly ridiculous example, the approach could be used to find out
why people buy a specific brand and type of frozen peas. For instance, life history interviews
can reveal that some people just pick the nearest package out of the freezer because they have
little time to shop, are in a hurry and, because they have a demanding and well-paid job, do
not have to worry about cost; others may choose a brand because their mother always bought
them and impressed upon her children that these were the best peas to have. Thus, buying
Bird’s Eye™ petit pois may be tied up with conceptions of what good mothers do based on
positive childhood experiences. Pragmatically, brand choice may be to do with where people
live and their access to certain shops carrying particular ranges. In ‘poorer’ areas, for example,
choice tends to be more restricted. Buying a supermarket’s own brand, as opposed to Bird’s
Eye, may be to do with economic circumstances and, thereby, occupational status. Alterna-
tively, as a result of advertising campaigns, shoppers might see a certain brand as fitting in with
their lifestyle, or their lifestyle aspirations.
Similarly associated with advertising, children may put pressure on parents to buy fash-
ionable brands, perhaps because they want to present a particular image to friends who come
to tea. We may say this is a ridiculous example, but frozen food manufacturers no doubt do
conduct biographical types of research, often using focus groups in an attempt to achieve
maximum sales.
The choice of research method responds to a variety of concerns. But the most crucial ques-
tion turns on what the researcher is trying to find out or wants to know. For instance, if you are a
shopkeeper, then your only concern may be to know what will sell best and, therefore, what you
should stock. A straightforward and simple survey to find out the most popular brand would,
therefore, meet your needs effectively and economically.
When the focus of enquiry is something more far-reaching and significant than a consumer-
preference issue, when it is something like why someone becomes a teacher, or how they cope
with imposed change, or why they adopt a particular pedagogical style, or how being a teacher fits
in with other aspects of a person’s life such as parenthood, or what it means to be a gay or lesbian
teacher, or a teacher from an ethnic minority group, the potential of life history is enormous.
There are likely to be many influences, experiences and relationships within any teacher’s life
which have led to their developing a particular philosophy of education and taking on a specific
professional identity which informs their work. Then there are the various contexts and condi-
tions within which teachers have to work, which further have an effect upon what they do and
how they do it. As Robert Bullough (1998, p. 24) has written: ‘to understand educational events,
one must confront biography’. If the researcher wants to know ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘what’s it like’ and
‘what does it mean to you’, then they may be well advised to include life history methods among
their modes of enquiry. If they want to know ‘who’, ‘where’, ‘how many’ and ‘what kind’, then
it would probably be unnecessary and uneconomical in terms of time and resources to embark
on detailed interviewing, resulting in vast quantities of data which have then to be transcribed
and analysed.
Of course, life history does not have to be an either/or approach. If circumstances allow, and
if it is appropriate, then life history can be combined with other methods to provide yet another
perspective on a topic. For instance, a study of how a particular subject – let us take religious
education – is taught may use surveys, observation, analysis of textbooks and initial and in-service
teacher education syllabi to see trends, patterns and frequencies in curriculum content and ped-
agogical style; it may also use life history interviews to explore whether and how a teacher’s own
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experiences of religion generally, and religious education specifically, might impact upon how
they perceive, experience and relate to their work.
As with all types of research, having decided on a focus and on the appropriate approach,
there are a number of practical issues which have to be considered and dealt with. It is these to
which we now turn.
Developing the research focus
Sample size
Research samples for life history research are usually quite small. Interviewing, transcription and
analysis are time consuming and expensive activities.
When there is only one researcher, working on a personal, unfunded project, the resources
to interview large numbers of people are rarely available – and this is often the case, because
one of the difficulties with life history is persuading funders of its appropriateness. As well as
the quantitative predilections that are common, this problem is related to some of the historical
battles fought over the legitimacy of life history, especially in Chicago in the 1940s. Regardless
of economic considerations, though, life historians usually, although not inevitably, use life his-
tory because they take a particular epistemological position which values the subjective, emic
and idiographic (see Goodson, 1992b, p. 9). Thus, they may well argue that large samples are
unnecessary and even inappropriate because objective, etic and nomothetic generalization is not
the ultimate aim.
The fact that life history samples tend to be small, allied with the sort of philosophical and,
therefore, epistemological stance that life historians often take, means that they will rarely talk in
terms of samples or research populations, and almost never of subjects. ‘Respondent’, ‘informant’,
‘participant’, or just pseudonyms are likely to be preferred because they do not have the same
‘othering’ and homogenizing implications that the traditional research designations do. When,
as is usually the case with our own studies, the research is collaborative, or at least has an inter-
active dimension, then ‘co-researcher’, ‘collaborator’, or ‘research partner’ may be the terms used.
Adopting this value position is not to argue that issues of power and status are easily suspended
but that life history work is always co-constructed and is not the singular product of the external
researcher.
It is impossible to say how many informants should be involved in any project. So much
depends on the aims of the research, on the topic, and on what is actually possible. Many
life histories, including most of the ‘original’, ‘foundational’ or ‘germinal’ ones, undertaken by
members of the Chicago school in the 1920s and 1930s, were of one person and aimed to give
detailed insight into a specific individual’s perception and experience of their life. A study of
one individual is rare in education, partly because of the essentially social and collective nature
of the enterprise, although the work of Bullough (1989), Bullough and Baughman (1997), Elbaz
(1983), Sparkes (1994) and Wolcott (1983), are among the notable exceptions which demonstrate
the value of such research.
If the aim is to reveal shared patterns of experience or interpretation within a group of

people who have some characteristic, attribute or experience in common, then ideally
sample size will be adequate when: sufficient data have been collected and saturation
occurs and variation is both accounted for and understood . . . In qualitative research,
the investigator samples until repetition from multiple sources is obtained.
(Morse, 1994, p. 230)
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Thus, adequacy is dependent not upon quantity but upon the richness of the data and the nature
of the aspect of life being investigated. Researchers should, however, try to ensure that they
include some negative or discrepant examples. It must always be remembered that life history
researchers, like all human beings, often look for people or at least bond with people who reflect
stories similar to their own. There is in some sense more to be learned from those who do not
share our perceptions and perspectives. Pat’s research (Sikes, 1997), which focused on teachers’
perceptions of the ways in which parenthood had influenced all aspects of their professional
lives, involved 25 informants. This was quite a large group because she wanted to include male
and female teachers of various ages from as many sectors of the educational system as possible.
However, without exception, every single one of them talked about how their feelings for their
students changed once they had their own child so, with regard to this theme, saturation could
have been considered to have been attained after five or six interviews.
Bertaux (1981) has written about the discovery of the saturation process. In his work
on bakers, he describes how they became aware of the point at which saturation had been
achieved:
while we were conducting our fieldwork, however, we came to realize that a process
was taking shape, which seemed to indicate that we had moved in another realm than
the one of traditional sample representativity.
This new process could be summarized by saying that every new life story was
confirming what the preceding ones had shown. Again and again we were collecting
the same story about poor, usually rural backgrounds, about very hard exploitation and
training during apprenticeship; about moving from village to town, from town to city,
from city to Paris (of course this last feature was to be expected). Again and again we
heard about some specific health problems – which many workers, especially the young
ones, related to their own physical constitution instead of to their working conditions.
And despite our efforts, we still could not find a single adult bakery worker born in
Paris or even in its suburbs. What was taking place was a process of saturation: on it
rests the validity of our sociological assumptions. One life story is only one life story.
Thirty life stories of thirty men or women scattered in the whole social structure are
only thirty life stories. But thirty life stories of thirty men who have lived their lives
in one and the same sector of production (here bakery workers) represent more than
thirty isolated life stories; taken together, they tell a different story, at a different level:
the history of this sector of production, at the level of its pattern of socio-structural
relationships. A single life story stands alone, and it would be hazardous to generalize
on the ground of that one alone, as a second life story could immediately contradict
those premature generalizations.
But several life stories taken from the same set of socio-structural relations support each
other and make up, all together, a strong body of evidence.
(Bertaux, 1981, p. 187, original emphasis)
Sample selection
Some research methods employ a ‘random sampling’ approach. Life history research rarely
involves a random sample of informants. This is because it is seldom the sole aim to make gener-
alizations and so, therefore, such a group is not required. More particularly, however, it is essential
that informants are prepared and able, in terms of both time and articulacy, to talk for extended
periods. In addition, the research topic is likely to be focused on a specific social situation, thus
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requiring informants to have the appropriate knowledge and experience (Erben, 1998, p. 5).
Consequently, sampling is frequently one or more of the following types:
1 Purposive. The research is concerned with specific characteristics, attributes or experiences

and informants are ‘selected’ because they meet the criteria.
2 Opportunistic. For example, by chance the researcher meets someone who volunteers or who
is willing to be an informant.
3 Convenience. The researcher has easy access to the informants.
4 Snowball. The researcher works with an informant who tells them of friends or colleagues
who might be prepared to participate.
5 Homogeneous. Everyone who has a common experience, attribute or characteristic. This is
likely to occur only when the research focuses on a small group – for example, all the black
women teachers who belong to a group within a local education authority (Rakhit, 1999).
6 Extreme case. When the informant’s characteristics, attributes or experiences are strikingly
different from or in some other way noteworthy compared with others in the potential
research population.
Life history research grants access to the intimate and personal hinterlands of the research
informants. As with all types of research, researchers need to think carefully before embarking
on a study which involves colleagues, friends, acquaintances or relatives. This is, perhaps, espe-
cially pertinent here, given that life history work is likely to involve a non-probability sample.
Doing research ‘in your own backyard’ can have unintended consequences with implications
going far beyond the data that are collected. For all sorts of reasons, informants may be cautious
about what they reveal, and this can be especially so when they are already in some sort of
relationship with the enquirer. When the research solicits information of a personal nature, the
potential ‘power’ that such knowledge gives to the researcher can be considerable. As Madelaine
Grumet (1991, p. 69) notes: ‘telling a story to a friend is a risky business; the better the friend,
the riskier the business’.
It is possible to take the view that non-probability sampling is biased but, in any case, the con-
cept of bias, and particularly of bias as being negative in a research context, is contested by many
qualitative researchers generally, and by life historians in particular (see various authors in Denzin
and Lincoln (1994), for example). We would argue that all human knowledge and experience as
expressed through verbal accounts is in essence biased. Everyone sees the world through frames
of reference which are developed as a result of their possessing particular attributes and personal
trajectories, or being situated in particular social, historical, geographical, political, religious (or
whatever) contexts which, consequently, lead to various and differing experiences. Researchers
have to be reflexive in accounting for their own biases, and reflective and enquiring in identi-
fying possible biases in their informants’ stories. Rather than seeking to pretend that any aspect
of research can ever be bias free, our recommendation is to acknowledge bias and make every
attempt to indicate where it may occur. (For further discussion on these issues, see Hammersley,
2000; Shacklock & Smyth, 1998.)
Strategies for negotiating access and participation

Having identified potential informants, the next stage is to invite them to take part. This may
seem a relatively straightforward matter but it does raise a number of questions and issues. Perhaps
the most significant of these concerns the research bargain: that is the understanding between
the researcher and the informant about what the nature of their relationship is and what each
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can expect from their mutual participation (see Goodson & Fliesser, 1994; Measor & Sikes, 1992,
p. 213). Of course, this varies from study to study but, in some cases, participation can involve a
considerable commitment on the part of the informant. In the first place, life history interviews
can take up many hours. For instance, Bascia (1996, p. 5) reports a project where informants were
interviewed 2 hours’ duration. Thus, her work with one male immigrant teacher involved twelve
sessions, each of, on average, 2 hours’ duration, followed by journal and reflection entries that
constituted further data. Sikes et al.’s (1985) life history study of art and science secondary school
teachers involved informants in two to seven interviews, each lasting, on average, 1 to 1.5 hours.
Sykes’s (1997) parent teachers talked for, on average, 4 hours each. Researchers may be reluctant
to say that so much time is involved for fear of putting people off. In any case, given that so much
depends on the relationship that is developed and on the loquacity of the informant, it is not easy
to tell with any accuracy before the interviews start how long they are going to take. Further-
more, when initial contact with potential informants is made by letter or over the telephone, it
may not seem appropriate or be possible to go into detail. Perhaps the best and most honest policy
is simply to explain the nature of the work and that it can stretch over a considerable period, and
leave it at that, giving the informant the assurance that they can quit at any time.
A similar question about how much to reveal concerns the potential consequences of reflect-
ing on and talking about one’s life to an interested yet dispassionate listener. Undoubtedly, there
are some similarities between Rogerian counselling and life history interviewing, in that inter-
viewers, like counsellors, listen, reflect back, ask questions which encourage further reflection,
and are non-judgemental. Both are also often dealing with intimate aspects of life. However,
researchers are not (usually) counsellors: they are researching, not practising therapy (see Butt
et al., 1992; Goodson, 1992a). Yet, these characteristics of the approach can have implications
for researchers and informants, and, occasionally, being involved in life history research can have
life-changing effects.
However, given that such outcomes are not common, it may be acceptable not to raise the
possibility of anything of this kind happening to any particular informant. Also, these things are
not predictable (or not predictable to researchers who initially are unlikely to be aware of events
in an informant’s life which may make them prone to radical life change) so, again, talking about
it may be unacceptably pre-empting the issue. What is important is that, before they start work,
researchers should have thought about the possibilities, should know that some informants may
take advantage of the therapeutic potential of life history interviews, and should have considered
their basic human responsibilities to other people (see Goodson, 1992c, pp. 245–8; Goodson,
2013; Measor & Sikes, 1992, p. 226). They need to be emotionally sensitive and intelligent and
should exercise caution.
When the research has an essentially collaborative nature and involves informants as
co-researchers, perhaps when a key focus of the project is professional and personal develop-
ment, then exactly what is required of them has to be spelt out. Everyone has a notion of what
research is, of what researchers want and expect, and of what research ‘subjects’ do. Often, this
notion is based on ideas associated with ‘traditional’ research within the modernist paradigm.
If informants come to a project with this notion colouring their expectations and responses,
then misunderstandings can arise. Most researchers, particularly those who use interviewing,
are used to informants saying something along the lines of, ‘I don’t know if this is relevant’, or
‘I’m not sure that this is the sort of answer you’re looking for’. Responses of this kind reveal
the influence that informants can inadvertently have on data through their eagerness to please.
Clarity is, therefore, of the essence.
It is a good idea to give informants a written document to which they can refer, setting down
expectations, ‘rules’, clauses and so on. If there is to be any deviation from this initial agreement,
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then the onus is on the researcher to negotiate the change. Such a document might cover the
following areas:
1 Confidentiality and anonymity: the researcher should be clear about who is going to listen to
tape recordings, have access to interview transcripts and other types of data and so on. They
should explain how they are going to disguise, anonymize or otherwise protect the identity
of informants. An approach which often proves popular is giving people the opportunity to
choose their own pseudonym.
2 Anything about ‘work’ the researcher would like the informant to do, such as keeping a diary
or writing accounts of particular experiences.
3 ‘Ownership’ of any tapes and transcripts.
4 The informant’s ‘rights’ to change, comment on, and contribute to analysis and the eventual
presentation of findings.
5 Where and when interviews will take place.
6 Contact numbers and addresses.
Strategies for collecting data
Interview-conversations
A one-to-one interview-conversation between informant and researcher is perhaps the most
commonly used strategy for collecting life history data. (Goodson (2001) has referred to this
as a ‘grounded conversation’.) Definitions of research interviews usually put the emphasis on
their being conversations with the purpose of eliciting the information that the researcher wants
(see, for example, Denscombe, 1984; Fontana & Frey, 1994; Powney & Watts, 1987, p. vii; Rob-
son, 1993, pp. 228–9), and various strategies and techniques are advocated for achieving this
aim. Most of these strategies and techniques are concerned with establishing and maintaining
a positive and trusting relationship between interviewer and informant, which takes us back
to what we said at the start of the paper about the importance of personal dynamics in life
history work. Thus, researchers are advised to share their own experiences and perceptions
(Oakley, 1981) and to establish common ground through the clothes they wear, the interests
they profess, the company they are seen to keep, the language they use and how they present
themselves. We consider the ethics of manipulating relationships in order to get ‘good’ data, as
well as look at epistemological issues around the ‘truth’ and validity of the accounts that people
give in a research context.
Our general preference is for relatively unstructured, informal, conversation-type encoun-
ters. Of course, much depends on the particular focus of the research in general and, specifi-
cally, on the topics to be covered in a particular session, but – and this is a key characteristic
of the approach – a researcher can never know for certain which experiences have been
influential and relevant in a particular sphere of life, for sometimes connections are apparent
only to the individual concerned. Conversely, it may be that events, experiences or personal
characteristics, which the researcher expects to have been important, are not seen in the same
way by the informant. Too tight a structure and schedule, and relevant information may be lost
or, alternatively, may be given disproportionate emphasis by the researcher. The prime focus in
an interview should be to encourage the flow of recall and reminiscence – when someone is in
the flow the information comes out naturally according to their perceptions and perspectives.
In general pre-determined questions can hamper this flow and can paradoxically interfere with
emergent understandings.
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‘On one level, perhaps, life historians have to accept that people tell the story that they, for
whatever reason, want to tell to the person who is listening’ (Sikes et al., 1996, p. 51).
Informants also respond variously to different approaches. Some prefer to be given detailed
prompts, whereas others are quite happy to take their cue from key words or phrases.
Group work
One of the dangers of life history work is that it may by its focus on individual informants
become an individuality device. Hence it is important, where possible, to develop collective set-
tings. The intensity and intimacy that is usually involved in life history research means that the
study is generally carried out by the researcher and an informant working together. On occasion,
group work can be used as an additional strand of a project, perhaps focusing on a specific area
or with a collaborative and/or developmental aim.
Much depends upon the relationships between the various individuals who constitute a spe-
cific group, and there is no way in which a researcher convening a group can know how the
dynamics will work on any particular occasion. It may be that people are more likely to be frank
and open with people that they do not know than they are with friends or colleagues. Equally,
it is possible that a group who share a common experience will take a great deal of shared
understanding for granted and will, therefore, leave out significant, or useful, explanatory details.
Researchers have to try to consider the range of eventualities as thoroughly as possible.
When the relationships and consequent dynamics are conducive, group work can be very
productive, in that accounts given by one person may jog others’ memories about similar or con-
trasting experiences or perceptions. Having a number of people from different backgrounds and
with different perceptions can mean that a wider range of questions is asked than if the researcher
had been working alone.
The work of Frika Haug and her colleagues (1999) on collective memory work is especially
important as a model for life history workers. Haug et al. have developed this memory work in
collective settings as a way of investigating feminist topics, especially female sexualization. The
use of these techniques in educational settings is long overdue, but as yet little work has been
undertaken. A valuable exception are the Australian studies undertaken by Fitzclarence (1991).
He has employed collective memory work as a strategy in involving student teachers in under-
standing the patterns of authority as they undertake the transition from the role of student to
that of fully fledged teacher.
Sikes and Troyna (1991) used a group approach in their life history work which investigated
student teachers’ experiences and perceptions of schooling. The students first worked in triads,
alternating the roles of interviewer, informant and recorder, and then came together for a full
group (containing up to 30 participants) discussion. This was a particularly productive use of the
approach because group members’ experiences of schooling were so diverse. For example, between
them, they had attended a vast range of types of school in a variety of countries. They were of dif-
ferent ages and belonged to different socioeconomic, ethnic and religious groups, and all of these
differences were reflected in their perceptions, experiences, assumptions and expectations. Not
only did the group-work have benefits for the researchers, it also contributed to the professional
development of the student teachers, broadening their awareness and challenging their taken-for-
granted understandings. Group-work may also have a part to play in ‘prosopographical’ research.
Prosopography is collective life history which aims to investigate ‘common background char-
acteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of their lives’ (Stone, 1987,
p. 45). Since prosopographical research is historical, its sources are, primarily, documentary, but
there may be occasions when oral evidence can be collected and group discussions could be useful.
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Time-lines
Although it is important not to create a ‘chronological strait jacket’ or pre-defined set of sequences
or stages, one useful way to start life history research is by inviting respondents to construct a
time-line of key events in their life with, if appropriate, an emphasis on those experiences which
relate to any focus the project may have. This can be done prior to the interview and is useful
in prompting memories and concentrating attention. The time-line can then be used as a struc-
ture for interviews, and to alert the researcher to experiences or phases of life which it might
be productive to explore. Time-lines can be developed and expanded as the research progresses:
alternatively they could be used just for their prompting value.
The sort of information that time-lines could touch on includes:
• Place and date of birth.

• Family background, birthplace and date.
• Parents’ occupations during the informant’s life; general character and interests.
• Brothers’ and sisters’ place and date of birth; occupations or school location; general charac-
ter and interests.
• Extended family; occupations and character.
• Informant’s childhood: description of home and general discussion of experiences.
• Community and context: character and general status and ‘feel’.
• Education, preschool experience, school experience: courses taken, subjects favoured, cre-
dentials achieved; general character of school experience; peer relations; teachers; ‘good’ and
‘bad’ experiences.
• Occupation, general work history, changes of job, types of school, types of positions.
• Marriage and own family: dates and locations.
• Other interests and pursuits.
• Future ambitions and aspirations.
(For a more detailed definition of life history time-lines, see Goodson, 2001, 2013.)
Journals, diaries and other personal writings

Journals or diaries kept by informants can be an extremely rich, although not unproblematical,
source of data. As Woods notes:
why should somebody keep a diary? Hardly ever, I suspect, to preserve an objective
view of facts. More likely it is to be for reasons like personal satisfaction in wishing to
remember interesting events that have brought pleasure; or as a kind of celebration of
self in annotating one’s deeds, lest one forget; or as an apologia; or a kind of therapy in
working one’s way through a series of events that have brought personal diminishment,
pain or embarrassment; or with a view to later publication and public view. So one
needs to know the basis on which the diary has been compiled.
( Woods, 1986, pp. 107–8)
Researchers using a life history approach are unlikely to be seeking an objective account but,
acutely conscious of the need to contextualize and to know ‘the basis’ on which diaries are
written, addressing the sorts of concerns Woods raises will probably be built into the research
design. Similarly, such researchers are likely to interrogate and take an analytical approach to the
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language that informants use in both their written and oral accounts. And if they are not, then
they should be.
In most cases, though, having access to diaries and journals will be a bonus, unless, that is,
the researcher uses them as a primary source of data and asks informants to keep them for the
duration of the project. In their 1991 study which focused on the socialization of new teachers,
Bullough et al. used journals as one strand of their year-long case study approach. Unfortunately,
but perhaps not surprisingly:
early on in the year a problem surfaced with the journals . . . perhaps not trusting us, the
teachers wrote the journals for us, and not for themselves . . . another problem was not all
of the teachers continued throughout the year to keep up their writing. Indeed, two of
the teachers found journal writing to be a source of increased anxiety and frustration
and by mid-year had stopped writing all together. The other teachers found in journal
writing a useful means for thinking about and making sense of their experience and
faithfully maintained them.
(Bullough et al., 1991, p. 15)
Journal writing is clearly an activity which some people take to more easily than others. Some find
it an extremely useful device for personal and professional reflection and development (cf. Holly,
1989; Weiner and Rosenwald, 1993); others quite the opposite. In their ongoing research, Judith
Everington and Pat Sikes asked religious education students to keep journals and had a similar
response to that experienced by Robert Bullough and his colleagues. In the first year of their study,
whilst their informants were taking their Post-Graduate Certificate of Education qualification,
Everington and Sikes were able to build written assignments into the course which they also used
as data. Some of these assignments were assessed and, to meet accreditation requirements, had to take
a relatively traditional academic format. The potential influence that these factors had on both the
content and style of what was written had to be taken into consideration when it came to analysis.
As well as making use of journals and diaries as data sources, researchers are well advised to
keep their own research or fieldwork diary, recording such things as who has been seen, what has
been read, trains of thought, hunches and so on. Not only is a document of this kind useful for
providing practical and factual information, it can also help with analysis and interpretation, in
that it can jog memory and indicate patterns and trends which might have been lost if confined
to the mind. By revisiting our fieldwork notes, we can often trace the origin of a theme and its
subsequent progression towards saturation.
Using documents
Documents of various kinds, including syllabi, prospectuses, school reports, agenda, memos, let-
ters, publicity material, school magazines, newspaper accounts and programmes of events, may
cast further light on the life or lives being considered. Sometimes, researchers are able to collect
relevant documents for themselves, but often they have to rely on informants to produce them.
An interesting example of the use of supplementary documentation was provided by one of
Pat’s students, who had undertaken a life history study of two ‘delinquent’ pupils. One of these
pupils had attended an expensive independent girls’ convent school. Publicity material and mag-
azines produced by the school made it clear that girls were expected to conform to particular
standards and types of lady-like behaviour.
Correspondence between the school and the pupil’s father, and her yearly reports during the
time she was at the convent, documented the increasing mismatch between what the girl did and
82
the school’s expectations. The last straw was reached when the girl got very drunk whilst on a
trip to the theatre. The final letter from the head teacher gave all the details and culminated in a
request that the girl be withdrawn immediately.
Working with life history data
Recording data
Life history interviewing requires concentration. ‘Listening beyond’, picking up on clues and
hints about what might be a productive line of enquiry, simply knowing what someone has
said, all depend on the interviewer giving their total attention to the conversation and the social
situation generally. This means that most life historians prefer to use tape recorders rather than
rely solely on note taking. Inevitably, taping is not without its problems. Machines break down
or have faults, batteries fail, power cuts happen, people speak softly and extraneous sounds make
it difficult to hear clearly. Then there is human error of various kinds. Most researchers have had
the experience of forgetting to switch the machine on to record. For this reason, and also in order
to provide an aide-memoire, it is good practice to make some brief notes as well.
Researchers also need to consider the extent to which using a tape recorder influences the
nature and content of what informants say. Some people may be inhibited by the knowledge
that their words could ‘come back to haunt them’, and there are those who find it extremely
difficult to speak fluently in the presence of a tape recorder. Often, in the course of recorded
interview-conversations, people will ask for the machine to be switched off while they talk about
a ‘sensitive’ issue or make comments about a particular person. Then there are those exchanges
which take place before or after the interview has started. Thus, researchers frequently hear
things relating to their project which are not part of their formally, or officially, collected data.
This raises the question of what one should do with such information. If an informant has said
something off the record and, what is more, has made it clear that they do not want their words
to be attributable to them, then ethically the researcher should not ignore the request.
It can be argued that using a tape recorder introduces an element of artificiality into the
situation. However, unless research, of whatever type, is undertaken covertly – an unaccept-
able approach for life history work – it is bound to be ‘artificial’. Researchers and informants
alike come into the research situation with certain expectations and preconceptions. These may
include that interviews are recorded and that researchers can be trusted to use recordings respon-
sibly. In our experience, the benefits of taping usually far outweigh any drawbacks, and most
informants are, or become, reasonably comfortable with its use.
It is important to be aware that a recording only captures what is said; it cannot be a perfect,
total and faithful representation of an interview, and even video recordings can only ever be
partial.
Although, in our view, tape recording is to be recommended, there may be times when it is not
possible. In these cases, the onus is on the researchers to make it clear that they are not working
directly from the informants’ words.
Transcribing data
After having made a recording, the next stage is usually to make a written summary or com-
plete transcript. This stage is time consuming and can be expensive in terms of transcription
costs. There is no doubt that doing your own transcribing enables you to become familiar
with the data. It can also aid analysis in that ideas and themes can emerge or be developed as
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a consequence of repetitive listening and intimate engagement with the data. However, even if
someone else does the transcription, researchers should listen to the tape and follow the script
to ensure that there are as few errors as possible. Such close listening is important because
intent and meaning are conveyed as much through how things are said as through the actual
words that are used. Annotations concerning tone of voice (and, if they can be remembered,
or if a note has been made, body language and gestures) can add considerably to subsequent
readings and interpretations.
We referred above to ‘summary transcripts’. Rather than taking down every word, summary
transcripts, as their name suggests, summarize what is said, using key words and phrases. It is
important that a note is made of whereabouts on the tape particular things are said in order to
facilitate verbatim transcription, if required, at a later date. Playback should, therefore, always be
on a machine with a counter (this is a specification to bear in mind when buying new equip-
ment). Making a summary transcript is, inevitably, analytical because it involves making decisions
about how particular utterances are classified. Researchers should ensure that they note enough
of what was said to enable them to make alternative interpretations if appropriate.
Analysis
Traditionally, following the positivistic paradigm of research, analysis of evidence took place at a
particular stage of the research process: namely, after all the evidence had been collected and pro-
cessed, in whatever form and by whatever means. This timing was to avoid the introduction of
any contaminating bias. The extent to which neutrality of this kind is possible, or even desirable,
is debatable (does/can anyone ever embark on any social research completely free of expectations
or assumptions?), and life historians tend to the view that analysis begins as soon as they start
working with an informant. Interview-conversations are not tightly structured and researchers
will take opportunities to check out ideas, themes and thoughts as they proceed.
Analysis is about making sense of, or interpreting, the information and evidence that the
researcher has decided to consider as data. This usually involves fitting the evidence and informa-
tion into a framework of some kind. This framework may take the form of classifications, cate-
gories, models, typologies or concepts. The nature and origins of the framework and the extent
to which it can be demonstrated that the evidence does actually fit and, thereby, the explanation
holds, has been the central, the defining, research task. At this point, though, we do want to note
that what constitutes a framework can be variously interpreted and, therefore, that it is up to the
researchers to be explicit about their particular positions. In itself, any story or life narrative is a
more-or-less structured and ordered framework, regardless of whether it is someone relating their
own life or a researcher retelling other people’s (albeit through their own frame). In our view, the
following observation applies to all parties involved in any narrative enterprise:
Narratives select the elements of the telling to confer meaning on prior events – events
that may not have had such meaning at the time. This is a narrative transposition of
Kierkegaard’s famous statement that we live life forwards but understand it backwards.
In understanding ourselves, we choose those facets of our experience that lead to the
present and remain our life story coherent. Only from a hermeneutic position are we
poised to study the genesis and revision of people making sense of themselves.
Narrative models of knowing are models of process in process . . . personal narratives
describe the road to the present and point the way to the future. But the as-yet-unwritten
future cannot be identified with the emerging plot and so the narrative is revised.
( Josselson, 1995, p. 35)
84
Increasing awareness of researcher reflectivity and reflexivity means that more people take the
view that interpretations/explanations/analyses are, inevitably, coloured and shaped by a range
of influences, not least of which is the background, interests – in short, the biography – of
the researcher. It is for this reason that some commentators have gone as far as suggesting that
‘research biographies’ should be compulsory because they provide readers with more evidence
by which to evaluate research accounts (see Ball, 1990, and various authors in Denzin & Lin-
coln, 1994). Indeed, since the 1980s, it has become common practice for qualitative researchers
in general to ‘write themselves into’ their research, on the grounds that personal, background
information will enhance the rigour of their work by making potential biases explicit (see, for
example, Atkinson, 1990). Whether or not it actually can do this is open to question (see Troyna,
1994). In some cases there may be an element of what Mary Maynard (1993, p. 329) describes
as ‘vanity ethnography’, that is, when a researcher tells their story in a desire for self-publicity as
much as, or more than, to support their work. It may also sometimes be true that, as Cotterill and
Letherby (1993) suggest, some researchers do it in the hope that introducing a personal element
will protect them from criticism. In life history work, where informants’ lives are revealed, per-
haps it is only ‘fair’ that researchers’ lives are too – at least, in so far as what is told is really relevant
to the project in question. Then, there is also the issue of actually and explicitly giving voice to
the researchers themselves, which is, in effect, a further acknowledgement of the ‘polyvocality of
social life’ (Coffey, 1999, p. 118; see also Ellis & Bochner, 2000). It would, perhaps, be inconsistent
to fail to acknowledge that the researcher’s voice is there among all others, especially if claims are
made for the egalitarian broadcasting properties of the approach.
Analysis using computer programs

In recent years, an increasing number of computer programs (for example Nvivo, Atlas, MAX-
QDA, NUDist, ANTHTOPAC) which analyse qualitative data have become available. We shall
do no more than refer to their existence and note that there is considerable controversy over the
extent to which they aid analysis, as distinct from their obvious capabilities when it comes to stor-
age and retrieval of data (for further discussion, see Blaxter et al., 1999, pp. 132–6; Denscombe,
1998, pp. 218–22; Miller, 2000, pp. 150–3).
Whether they use analytic induction, constant comparative grounded theory, varieties of
content or discourse analysis, thematic field analysis or some other approach, it is important that
researchers are clear about their practices and their reasons for them.
Respondent validation
Peter Woods (1996, p. 40) defines respondent validation as ‘insiders confirming the correctness of
analysis’. Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba argue that the standard for qualitative work is reached
if informants find researchers’ interpretations of their perceptions, experiences, or whatever is
being investigated, credible. However, as Norman Denzin (1970) has pointed out, it is not always
that straightforward because informants might not like the interpretation or, if it is couched in
specialist language, they may not recognize or understand it. Bev Skeggs, for example, reports that
when she passed draft chapters and articles on to informants in one project, she worked on, the
most common response was, ‘Can’t stand a bloody word it says’ (Skeggs, 1994, p. 86).
Since life history work is so often collaborative, with researcher and informant seeking mean-
ings and explanations together, respondent validation may well be built into the research design. If
it is not, it is usually a good idea to ask informants what they think about any analyses or written
accounts. However, researchers should bear in mind that, some informants do not expect or even
85
want to be involved in any way other than by being interviewed. Researchers may find that,
having passed scripts and papers on to informants for their comments, they hear nothing. On
following up, they are likely to find that lack of time or acceptance of the researcher’s ‘specialist’
position are the usual reasons given for the lack of response.
Researchers should also consider what they will do if informants disagree or ask for alterations.
In some cases, the researchers may believe changes to be appropriate, but in others they may not.
What happens then? One way forward may be publication with a note to the effect that inform-
ant(s) took a different view.
Presenting data
When all the relevant data have been analysed, the researcher is faced with the question of how
to present their findings. So much depends upon the nature, scope and focus of any particular
project, and on the type of presentation, its purpose, and the audience for whom it is intended.
If it constitutes work to be submitted for a qualification (for example, an assessed undergraduate
project, a masters thesis or a doctoral dissertation), then there are likely to be official requirements
and criteria, as well as conventional expectations to be met, and it is important for the student
researcher to be clear about these.
When using data from interviews, and when the aim is to represent and reflect as closely
as possible what an informant said, a key question tends to be how much direct quotation to
use. Any synthesis or rewording by the researcher is a step away from the original, even when
it is simply a matter of leaving out the ‘ums’ and ‘errs’. Then there is the issue of how far the
informant’s words are left to speak for themselves and how much commentary and analysis
there should be. Whatever decisions are made, the researchers need to be able to justify what
they have done. Thus, in some circumstances, it may be possible to leave a verbatim transcript
to stand entirely alone (or with a minimum of comment) and, in others, not to include any
reported speech.
Some degree of editing is usual and is generally undertaken in order to support the researcher’s
case. This raises the issue of what is left out and why it has been omitted: an issue that is pertinent
to many types of research, not just life history.
On occasion, researchers have explicitly presented their data in a fictionalized form (see
Banks & Banks, 1998). They may have amalgamated accounts given by a number of informants
(see, for example, Clough, 1999), or drawn on their knowledge of particular social situations to
create a composite character. In some ways, this device is similar to describing types and there
may be strong reasons for doing it. Andrew Sparkes (1995), for instance, created Alex, a gay
physical education teacher, because he was unable to find such an individual who was prepared
to take part in his study which focused on the sexuality of PE teachers.
In conclusion
In this chapter we have looked at some of the practicalities of doing life history research. We do
not believe that there is only one way of doing such work, and each specific project will have its
own idiosyncratic needs and aspects. For this reason we resist the temptation to over-proceduralise
or routinize life history study. It is a method that requires the constant exercise of human and
personal judgement and is therefore not amenable to prescriptive proceduralising. For this reason,
we have focused on what we see as the major concerns of widespread applicability. Above all
else, the decision to take a life history approach should not be made lightly. This is research that
can have an emotional effect on all parties involved. Life historians have to take seriously their
86
responsibilities to their informants and readers: only if this is done can the march through the
ethical and methodological minefield be completed successfully.
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7
THE STORY SO FAR
Personal knowledge and the political
Ivor Goodson
In this paper I conduct an exploration of some forms of inquiry that are becoming influential
within teacher education. In particular, I want to focus on forms of inquiry variously called ‘sto-
ries’, ‘narratives’, ‘personal knowledge’, ‘practical knowledge’ or, in one particular genre, ‘personal
practical knowledge’.
I find myself highly sympathetic to the urge to generate new ways of producing, collab-
orating, representing and knowing. They offer a serious opportunity to question many of
the in-built biases of race, class, or gender, which existing modes of inquiry mystify whilst
reproducing (see Giroux, 1991). Storying and narratology are genres which allow us to move
beyond (or to the side) of the main paradigms of inquiry – with their numbers, their variables,
their psychometrics, their psychologisms, their decontextualized theories. Potentially then, the
new genres offer the chance for a large step forward in representing the lived experience of
schooling.
Because of this substantial potential, the new genres require very close scrutiny. For whilst they
have some obvious strengths, there are, I think, some weaknesses, which may prove incapacitating.
If so, we may be sponsoring genres of inquiry in the name of empowerment, whilst at the same
time, effectively disempowering the very people and causes we seek to work with.
Personal knowledge and the cultural logic of post-modernity

Before embracing personal knowledge in the form of narratives and story it is important
to locate this genre within the emergent cultural patterns of contemporary societies and
economies. Whilst the pace of change at the moment is rapid, a good deal of evidence
points to an increasingly aggrandizing centre or state acting to sponsor ‘voices’ at the level
of interest groups, localities and peripheries. From the perspective of these groups, this may
look like empowerment for oppressed aboriginals, the physically and mentally challenged,
gays and lesbians and other deserving groups. This is all long overdue. But we need to be
aware of the overall social matrix. Specific empowerment can go hand in hand with overall
social control.
Hence, alongside these new voices a systematic attack on median or secondary associations
is underway – schools, universities, libraries, welfare agencies and the like. An attack, in fact, on
many of the existing agencies of cultural mediation and production. Economic restructuring is
89
Ivor Goodson
being closely allied to cultural redefinition – a reduction of contextual and theoretical discourses
and an overall sponsorship of personal and practical forms of discourse and cultural production.
The overall effect will be to substantially redraw existing modes of political and cultural analysis.
In its place we may end up with what Harvey (1989) calls the ‘tyranny of the local’ alongside what
we might call the specificity of the personal. General patterns, social contexts, critical theories
will be replaced by local stories and personal anecdotes.
Denzin (1991) has commented on this in his critique of the rehabilitated ‘life story movement’.
The cultural logics of late capitalism valorize the life story, autobiographical document
because they keep the myth of the autonomous, free individual alive. This logic finds
its modern roots on Rousseau’s Confessions, a text perfectly fitted to the cultural logics
of the new capitalist societies where a division between public and private had to be
maintained, and where the belief in a pure, natural self was cherished. The logic of
the confession reifies the concept of the self and turns it into a cultural commodity. The
rise to power of the social sciences in the twentieth century corresponded to the rise
of the modern surveillance state. That state required information on its citizens. Social
scientists, of both qualitative and quantitative commitments, gathered information for
this society. The recent return to the life story celebrates the importance of the indi-
vidual under the conservative politics of late postmodernism.
(Denzin, 1991, p. 2)
Hence, in the cultural logic of late capital, the life story represents a form of cultural appara-
tus to accompany a newly aggrandizing state and market system. In the situation that is being
‘worked for’, the subject/state, consumer/market confrontation will be immediate. The range
of secondary associations and bureaucracies which currently ‘buffer’ or mediate this pattern of
social relations will be progressively reduced. The cultural buffer of theory, critique and political
commentary will likewise wither. It will not be the state that withers (as in fond Marxist theory)
but the critical theory and cultural critique that stand against the state. In the ‘end of history’ we
shall indeed see the closure of cultural contestation as evidenced in theoretical and critical dis-
course. In its place will stand a learned discourse comprising stories and practices – specific local
and located but divorced from understandings of social context and social process.
In the next section I review how this cultural redefinition is emerging in some aspects of the
media.
The media context of personal knowledge

This section briefly examines the promotion of more personal stories at the level of the media.
The promotional strategies at these levels pose questions about in whose interests the move to
more personal knowledge is being undertaken. There is after all an ‘opportunity cost’ to the time
being spent on personal stories – in a finite world of time, less time is thereby spent on other
aspects, most notably on more wider ranging political and social analysis.
The move towards story-telling is becoming pronounced in the media. This can be seen
most clearly in the media of those countries which have retained until recently, a strong
tradition of political and cultural analysis. Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian working in Britain
and one of the most elegant of cultural analysts, recently wrote in The Observer, ‘Whatever
we hacks may piously profess, the media is not in the information business. It is in the
story-telling business’ (Ignatieff, 1992, p. 21). He then details a range of new developments
90
The story so far
in the British media which evidence this trend. Story-telling and personal anecdotes are the
powerful new fashion, he writes.
As if to make this plain, ITN’s News at Ten is reintroducing its ‘And finally’ end piece,
‘traditionally devoted to animals, children and royalty’. After footage from Sarajevo,
we’ll be treated, for example, to the sight of some lovable ducks on a surfboard.
The ducks are there not just to cheer us up but to reach those subliminal zones of
ourselves which long to believe that the horror of Sarajevo is just so much nasty
make-believe.
The audience’s longing for stories about ducks on surfboards is only one of the
trends which is taking the media away from even notional attention to the real world.
The other is the media’s growing fascination with itself. The last few weeks have
seen this obsession inflate to baroque extremes of narcissism. When Trevor McDonald
gets the News at Ten job and Julia Somerville does not: when Sir David English vacates
one editor’s chair and Simon Jenkins vacates another; when Andrew Neil snarls at the
‘saintly’ Andreas Whittam-Smith and the saint snarls back, I ask myself: does anybody
care but us hacks?
(Ignatieff, 1992, p. 21)
He notes that, ‘there’s a price to pay when the media systematically concentrates on itself and
ignores the world outside’. The opportunity cost of story-telling is that personal minutiae and
anecdote replace cultural analysis. Above all, the ‘story’ is the other side of a closure on broad
analysis, a failure for imagination. He writes:
In this failure and in the media’s amazing self-absorption, I see a shrinking in jour-
nalism’s social imagination. What I know about the 1980’s I owe to a journalism
which believed that the challenge was to report Britain as if it was an unknown
country: Bea Campbell’s Road to Wigan Pier, for example, or Ian Jack’s Before the Oil
Ran Out. In place of genuine social curiosity, we have the killer interview, the media
profile, the latest stale gossip. It’s so fashionable we can’t even see what a capitulation
it represents.
(Ignatieff, 1992, p. 21)
The reasons for the promotion of the anecdote and personal story are both broadly cultural and
political but also specifically economic. They relate to emerging patterns of globalization and
corporatization. Broadly speaking, the British media is following American patterns in pursuit
of American sponsorship. American capital is thereby reproducing the American pattern of
decontextualized story-telling.
We find that with the British News at Ten, the new initiative in broadcasting style
is part of a new-look bulletin, which will, in the words of one ITN executive, become
‘more formulaic with a more distinctive human interest approach’. Viewers, it seems,
like certainty both in the format of a bulletin and the person who presents it. Lessons
have been learnt from American TV news by senior ITN managers such as chief exec-
utive Bob Phillis, editor-in-chief Stewart Purvis and News at Ten producer Nigel Dacre
(brother of Paul, the new editor of the Daily Mail).
(Brooks, 1992, p. 69)
91
Ivor Goodson
The reason for the convergence with American styles of story-telling are addressed later.
By 1994, ITV companies must become minority shareholders in ITN. American TV

companies, CNN, CBS and NBC, have already cast their eyes over ITN, though only
one of them is likely to take a stake. It is no coincidence that News at Ten will have
more of an American look – the single anchor, like Dan Rather or Peter Jennings, for
example.
In short, ITN and News at Ten are being dressed up to be more attractive not just to
viewers, but also to prospective buyers.
(Brooks, 1992, p. 69)
In America it is obvious that the ‘story’ is being employed specifically to close off sustained
political and cultural analysis. John Simpson (1992) recently wrote about ‘the closing of the
American media’. In this closure, the ‘story’ took pride of place in cutting America off from
international news and political analysis. Simpson analyzed the CBS news.
After reports on drought in the western United States and the day’s domestic political
news, the rest of CBS’s news broadcast was devoted to a regular feature, ‘Eye on Amer-
ica’. This evening’s item was about a man who was cycling across America with his
son, a sufferer from cerebral palsy. It was designed to leave you with a warm feeling, and
lasted for 3 minutes, 58 seconds; longer than the time devoted that night to the whole
of the rest of the world.
It is no surprise that soon there will almost certainly be no American television
network correspondent based anywhere in the southern hemisphere. Goodbye Africa;
goodbye most of Asia; goodbye Latin America.
(Simpson, 1992, p. 9)
As you would expect from a Briton, Simpson concludes that the only repository of serious
cultural analysis is on British television which, as we have seen, is being re-structured according
to American imperatives. The circle, in short, is closed:
The sound of an Englishman being superior about America is rarely uplifting; but in
this case the complaints come most fiercely from the people who work for American
television themselves. They know how steep the decline has been, and why it has hap-
pened. All three networks have been brought up by giant corporations which appear
to regard news and current affairs as branches of the entertainment industry, and insist
they have to pay their way with advertisers just as chat-shows and sit coms do. Adver-
tisers are not good people for a news organization to rely on: during the Gulf war NBC
lost $25 million in revenue because companies which had bought space in the news
bulletins cancelled their advertisements – they were afraid their products would appear
alongside reports of American casualties.
The decline of the networks is depressing. CBS is one of the grandest names in
journalism, the high-minded organisation which broadcast Ed Murrow’s wartime des-
patches from London and Walter Cronkite’s influential verdicts on the Vietnam war
and Watergate. NBC’s record is a proud one too. Recently it announced it was back in
the news business and would stop broadcasting stories that were simply features. But
NBC News seems very close to the rocks nowadays, and it does not have the money to
send its teams abroad in the way it did until a couple of years ago. The foreign coverage
92
The story so far
will mostly be based on pictures from the British television news agency Visnews, and
from the BBC.
(Simpson, 1992, p. 9)
We have entered the period of ‘authoritarian capital’, and Simpson argues that the ‘story’ is the
indicator of this denouement. If this is so, the promoters of storying have strange bed fellows.
Earl and Irma, meanwhile, are still there in front of their television sets, serenely unaware
of what is happening around them. Decisions which affect their lives are being taken
every day in Frankfurt, Tokyo and London, but no one tells them about it. Most of the
companies which advertise on television just want them to feel good so, therefore, do
the people in charge of providing them with news. The freest society in the world has
achieved the kind of news blackout which totalitarian régimes can only dream about.
(Simpson, 1992, p. 9)
In one sense the enshrinement of the personal story as a central motif for knowledge trans-
mission links up with another theme in current restructuring. Namely: the reconstruction of
the middle ground in the social and economic system. By sponsoring voices at the periphery,
the centre may well be strengthening its hand. Hence, empowerment of personal and peripheral
voices can go hand in hand with aggrandizement and a further concentration of power at the
centre. As Alan Wolfe has pointed out in his new book, Whose Keeper?:
a debate that casts government and the marketplace as the main mechanisms of social
organization leaves out all those intermediate institutions that are, in fact, the most
important in people’s lives: family, church, neighbourhood associations, workplace ties,
unions and a variety of informal organizations.
(quoted in Dionne, 1992, p. 18)
The current appeal to personal and ‘family values’ in the US election undoubtedly is driven by a
realization of this kind of dissolution of mediating social structures.
The appeal of this vague phrase is that fundamentally it reminds people that good society
depends not only, or even primarily, on their economic well-being, but also on this web
of personal-social relationships that transcend the marketplace and transcend government.
(Rosenthal, 1992, section 4, p. 1)
This focus on storytelling emerged early in the movies. By 1914, William and Cecil DeMille
had developed a technique of storytelling that would ‘follow the old dramatic principles, but
adapt itself to a new medium’, ‘find its own compensations for its lack of words . . . to make
a train of thought visible enough to be photographed’ (Berg, 1989, p. 48). By 1916, this had
evolved to the point where a ghost-writer for Samuel Goldwyn could write, ‘by the time I started
the Goldwyn Company it was the player, not the play which was the thing’ (Berg, 1989, p. 68).
Likewise, in the world of fantasy promoted by the movies, stories are the central motif for col-
onizing and re-directing lived experience. This has been so since very early on, as the Goldwyn
quotes indicate.
A painless way to make sense of this new world was suggested by one of the modern-
izing forces itself: the movies. The movies offered many forms of guidance to confused
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Ivor Goodson
Americans, particularly to immigrant urban dwellers; they became a virtual manual

for acculturation. But one of the most important and most subtle services the movies
offered was to serve as a popular model of narrative coherence. If reality was over-
whelming, one could always carve it into a story, as the movies did. One could bend
life to the familiar and comforting formulas one saw in the theatre.
(Now playing across America: Real Life, the movie, 1991, p. 32)
From the beginning, then, movies began to explore new terrains for formularizing and
domesticating reality.
In American life, beginning in the 1920s, a number of media began to exploit the storying
theme first initiated in the movies. The tabloid press and then magazines and television began to
provide a range of real life plots from kidnappings and murder to political scandals, to crimes in
executive suites, to election campaigns, to World War II, to the Cold War, to Watergate, to the
recent Soviet coup attempt, to Operation Restore Hope.
Today, virtually all the news assumes a narrative configuration with cause and effect,
villain and hero, beginning, middle and provisional end, and frequently a moral.
Events that don’t readily conform, the savings and loan scandal, for example, seem to
drift in foggy limbo like a European art film rather than a sleek commercial Amer-
ican hit.
It might be judged that the savings and loan scandal could have been made to conform to a
very exciting storyline but it was in fact pushed off into foggy limbo. This raises the key question
of the power of storying to make vivid and realistic certain storylines whilst suppressing others;
hence, it is clear that murders and fires and kidnappings are exciting material for storylines but
that many of the things that go on in American society somehow or other do not form a rea-
sonable storyline. It is interesting, therefore, that so influential a newspaper as The New York Times
should see the savings and loan scandal as not worthy of a storyline. They are, in short, accepting
the assumptions which underpin the genre.
Let me return once more to The New York Times for one extended quote on the importance
of storying in the news:
That is why reading the news is just like watching a series of movies: a hostage crisis
is a thriller, the Milwaukee serial murders a morbidly fascinating real-life Silence of
the Lambs, the Kennedy Palm Beach case a soap opera, a fire or hurricane a disaster
picture.
One even suspects that Americans were riveted by the Clarence Thomas-Anita
Hill hearings last week not because of any sense of civic duty but because it was
a spellbinding show – part Rashomon, part Thelma and Louise, part Witness for the
Prosecution.
But as with movies, if ‘formularizing’ reality is a way of domesticating it, it is also a
means of escaping it. Michael Wood in his book America in the Movies, described our
films as a ‘rearrangement of our problems into shapes which tame them, which disperse
them to the margins of our attention’ where we can forget about them. By extending
this function to life itself, we convert everything from the kidnapping of the Lindbergh
baby to the marital misadventures of Elizabeth Taylor into distractions, cheap entertain-
ments that transport us from our problems.
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The story so far
But before disapproving too quickly, one is almost compelled to admit that turn-
ing life into escapist entertainment has both a perverse logic and a peculiar genius.
Why worry about the seemingly intractable problems of society when you can simply
declare, ‘It’s morning in America’ and have yourself a long-running Frank Capra movie
right down to an aw-shucks President? Why fret over America’s declining economic
might when you can have an honest-to-goodness war movie that proves your superi-
ority? Movies have always been a form of wish fulfilment. Why not life?
When life is a movie, it poses serious questions for those things that were not tradi-
tionally entertainment and now must accommodate themselves. Politics, for instance.
Much has already been made of the fact that Ronald Reagan came to the White House
after a lifetime as a professional actor. Lou Cannon, in his biography of Mr. Reagan, Pres-
ident Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, details just how central this was to Mr. Reagan’s con-
cept of the Presidency and what it suggests about the political landscape.
The important point to grasp about this quote and other quotes is that the storying genre is
far from socially and politically neutral. As we saw in an earlier quotation, the savings and loan
scandal was somehow not a valid storyline. Likewise, the great exploiters of storylines, the John
Waynes, the Ronald Reagans, tend to be of a particular political persuasion and of a particular
sensitivity to the dominant interest groups within American society. Storying, therefore, rapidly
becomes a form of social and political prioritizing, a particular way of telling stories which in
its way privileges some storylines and silences others. Once the focus shifts not to real events
but ‘what makes a good story’, it is a short distance to making an argument that certain political
realities ‘would not make a good story’, whilst others would. By displacing its focus from real life
events into storying potential, it is possible also to displace some unwanted social and political
realities. Even when unwanted realities do intrude in deafening ways, such as the LA riots, it is
possible to story them in ways that create a distance of sorts. In Umberto Eco’s words, it is possible
to move from a situation where realities are scrutinized and analysed to the world of American
life where ‘hyper realities’ are constructed.
Storytelling and educational study

That the media often employs stories to close off political and cultural analysis does not itself
disprove the value of storying and narrative in educational study. I would, however, urge that it
is cause for pause in two ways. Firstly, if stories are so easily used in this manner in the media it
is plainly possible that they might act in this way as educational study. Secondly, as is made clear
in some of the foregoing quotes, the way we ‘story’ our lives (and therefore the way we present
ourselves for educational study, among other things) is deeply connected to storylines derived
from elsewhere. In American life especially, but increasingly elsewhere, forms of narrative and
storying, the classic ‘storylines’, are often derived from television and newspapers. In this sense,
Ronald Reagan is not alone; he made such a representative President because of his capacity to
catch and dispatch the central storylines of American life. ‘It’s morning in America’ sounded
right and true. It was a powerful storyline and it was not seriously contested by political or cul-
tural analysis. But with the power of hindsight wasn’t it a gigantic lie which inaugurated a new
economic depression?
Stories then need to be closely interrogated and analysed in their social context. Stories in
short are most often carriers of dominant messages, themselves agencies of domination. Of
course oppositional stories can be captured, but they are very much a minority form and are
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Ivor Goodson
often themselves overlaid with or reactive to dominant storylines. As Gordon Wells (1986,
p. 196) has warned us, a previous expression of reality is largely ‘a distillation of the stories
that we have shared: not only the narratives that we have heard and told, read, or seen enacted
in drama or news on television, but also the anecdotes, explanations, and conjectures that are
drawn upon in everyday conversation’, or, as Passerini (1987, p. 28) has noted, ‘when someone
is asked for his life-story, his memory draws on pre-existing story-lines and ways of telling
stories, even if these are in part modified by the circumstances’. Put in another way, this means
that we often narrate our lives according to a ‘prior script’, a script written elsewhere, by others,
for other purposes.
Seen in this way, the use of stories in educational study needs to become part of a broader
project of re-appropriation. It is not sufficient to say we wanted ‘to listen to people’, ‘to capture
their voices’ ‘to let them tell their stories’. A far more active collaboration is required. Luisa Pas-
serini’s work on the Turin’s working class and on women’s personal narratives is exemplary in
this regard (Passerini, 1987, 1989). As Weiler (1991) has summarized:
Passerini’s emphasis on recurrent narrative forms begins to uncover the way people
reconcile contradictions, the ways they create meaning from their lives, and create a
coherent sense of themselves through available forms of discourse. At the same time, she
is concerned with the ‘bad fit’ or ‘gap’ between ‘pre-existing story lines’ and individual
constructions of the self through memory. As individuals construct their past, they leave
unresolved contradictions at precisely those points at which authoritative discourse
conflicts with collective cultural meanings.
( Weiler, 1991, pp. 6–7)
At the centre of any move to aid people, teachers in particular, to reappropriate their individual
lived experiences as stories, is the need for active collaboration. In the case of teachers, this will
sometimes be in association with educators located in the academy, especially in faculties of
education.
The relationship of studies of teachers’ stories to the academy sits, I believe, at the centre of one
of the major ethical and methodological issues involved in any move to develop collaborative use
of stories. Of course, views of the academy cover a wide spectrum, from a belief in its role in the
‘disinterested pursuit of knowledge’ through to the assertion of the Situationist International that
‘The intelligentsia is power’s hall of mirrors.’ In general, I would take a position which stresses the
interestedness rather than disinterestedness of the academy. I see a good deal of empirical evidence
that David Tripp’s (1987) contention in this matter may be correct, for he argues that: ‘When a
research method gains currency and academic legitimacy, it tends to be transformed to served the
interests of the academy’ (Tripp, 1987, p. 2).
Becker (1970) has commented on the ‘hierarchy of credibility regarding those to whom we
tend to listen’. This has general relevance to our research on schooling and school systems and
specifically to our desire to listen to the teacher’s voice.
In any system of ranked groups, participants take it as given that members of the highest
group have the right to define the way things really are. In any organization, no matter
what the rest of the organization chart shows, the arrows indicate the flow of informa-
tion point up, thus demonstrating (at least formally) that those at the top have access to a
more complete picture of what is going on than anyone else. Members of lower groups
will have incomplete information and their view of reality will be partial and distorted
in consequence. Therefore, from the point of view of a well socialized participant in
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The story so far
the system, any tale told by those at the top intrinsically deserves to be regarded as the
most credible account obtainable of the organizations’ workings.
(Becker, 1970, p. 126)
He provides a particular reason why accounts ‘from below’ may be unwelcome:
officials usually have to lie. That is a gross way of putting it, but not inaccurate. Officials
must lie because things are seldom as they ought to be. For a great variety of reasons,
well-known to sociologists, institutions are refractory. They do not perform as society
would like them to. Hospitals do not cure people; prisons do not rehabilitate prisoners;
schools do not educate students. Since they are supposed to, officials develop ways both
of denying the failure of the institution to perform as it should and explaining those
failures which cannot be hidden. An account of an institution’s operation from the
point of view of subordinates therefore casts doubt on the official line and may possibly
expose it as a lie.
(Becker, 1970, p. 128)
For these reasons the academy normally accepts the ‘hierarchy of credibility’: ‘we join officials
and the man in the street in an unthinking acceptance of the hierarchy of credibility. We do not
realize that there are sides to be taken and that we are taking one of them’. Hence Becker argues
that for the academic researcher:
The hierarchy of credibility is a feature of society whose existence we cannot deny,

even if we disagree with its injunction to believe the man at the top. When we acquire
sufficient sympathy with subordinates to see things from their perspective, we know
that we are flying in the face of what ‘everyone knows’. The knowledge gives us pause
and cause us to share, however briefly, the doubt of our colleagues.
(Becker, 1970, p. 129)
Research work, then, is seldom disinterested and prime interests at work are the powerful, Becker’s
‘man at the top’, and the academy itself. Acknowledgement of these interests becomes crucial
when we conduct studies of teachers’ stories; for the data generated and accounts rendered can
easily be misused and abused by both powerful interest groups and by the academy. Middleton
(1992) notes that ‘in schools people are constantly regulated and classified’ but this surveillance
extends to teachers themselves (1992, p. 20). Studies of teachers’ stories can be implicated in this
process unless we are deeply watchful about who ‘owns’ the data and who controls the accounts.
If Becker is right that ‘officials lie’, it is also plain that they might appropriate and misuse data
about teachers’ lives. Likewise, those in the academy might take information on teachers’ lives
and use it entirely for their own purposes.
Yet Becker reminds us that the terrain of research involves not only differentiated voices but
stratified voices. It is important to remember that the politicians and bureaucrats who control
schools are part of a stratified system where ‘those at the top have a more complete picture of
what is going on than anyone else.’ It would be unfortunate if in studying teachers’ stories, we
ignored these contextual parameters which so substantially impinge upon and constantly restrict
the teacher’s life. It is, therefore, I think a crucial part of our ethical position as researchers that
we do not ‘valorize the subjectivity of the powerless’ in the name of telling ‘their story’. This
would be to merely record constrained consciousness – a profoundly conservative posture and
one, as Denzin has noted, which no doubt explains the popularity of such work during the recent
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conservative political renaissance. In my view teachers’ stories should, where possible, provide not
only a ‘narrative of action’, but also a history or genealogy of context. I say this in full knowledge that
this opens up substantial dangers of changing the relationship between ‘story giver’ and ‘research
taker’ and of tilting the balance of the relationship further towards the academy.
I think, however, that these dangers must be faced if a genuine collaboration between the
life story giver and the research taker is to be achieved. In a real sense ‘it cannot be all give and
no take’. In what sense is the ‘research taker’ in a position to give and provide the basis for a
reasonably equitable collaboration. I have argued elsewhere that what we are searching for in
developing genuine collaboration in studying teachers’ stories is a viable ‘trading point’ between
life story giver and research taker. The key to this trading point is, I believe, the differential struc-
tural location of the research taker. The academic has the time and the resources to collaborate
with teachers in developing ‘genealogies of context’. These genealogies can provide teachers as a
group with aspects of ‘the complete picture’ which those that control their lives have (or at least
aspire to have).
Much of the work that is emerging on teachers’ lives throws up structural insights
which locate the teacher’s life within the deeply structured and embedded environ-
ment of schooling. This provides a prime ‘trading point’ for the external researcher.
For one of the valuable characteristics of a collaboration between teachers as research-
ers and external researchers is that it is a collaboration between two parties that are
differentially located in structural terms. Each see the world through a different prism
of practice and thought. This valuable difference may provide the external researcher
with a possibility to offer back goods in ‘the trade’. The teacher/researcher offers data
and insights. The terms of trade, in short, look favourable. In such conditions collab-
oration may at last begin.
(Goodson & Walker, 1990, pp. 148–9)
In arguing for the provision of histories or genealogies of context, I am reminded of V.S.

Naipaul’s comments. Naipaul has the ultimate sensitivity to the ‘stories’ that people tell about
their lives; for him subjective perceptions are priority data (Naipaul, 1987). Buruma (1991)
has judged:
What makes Naipaul one of the worlds most civilized writers is his refusal to be
engaged by the People, and his insistence on listening to people, individuals, with their
own language and their own stories. To this extent he is right when he claims to have
no view; he is impatient with abstractions. He is interested in how individual people
see themselves and the world in which they live. He has recorded their histories, their
dreams, their stories, their words.
(Buruma, 1991, p. 3)
So far then Naipaul echoes the concern of those educational researchers who have sought to
capture teachers’ stories and narratives, told in their own words and in their own terms. But I
am interested by the more recent shifts in Naipaul’s position; he has begun to provide far more
historical background, he seems to me to be moving towards providing the stories but also gene-
alogies of context. He is clear that he sees this as empowering those whose stories which he once
told more passively: ‘to awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see
oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage’
(Buruma, 1991, p. 4).
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The story so far
MacIntyre (1981) has followed a similar line in arguing that man is ‘essentially a story-telling
animal’. He argues that, ‘the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communi-
ties from which I derive my identity’.
What I am, therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some
degree in my present. I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether
I like it or not, whether I recognise it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition. It was
important when I characterised the concept of a practice to notice that practices always
have histories and that at any given moment what a practice is depends on a mode of
understanding it which has been transmitted often through many generations. And
thus, in so far as the virtues sustain the relationships required for practices, they have to
sustain relationships to the past – and to the future – as well as in the present. But the
traditions through which particular practices are transmitted and reshaped never exist
in isolation for larger social traditions.
He continues:
Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through
many generations. Hence the individual’s search for his or her good is generally and
characteristically conducted within a context defined by those traditions of which
the individual’s life is a part, and this is true both of those goods which are internal to
practices and of the goods of a single life. Once again the narrative phenomenon of
embedding is crucial: the history of a practice in our time is generally and characteris-
tically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer history of
the tradition through which the practice in its present form was conveyed to us; the
history of each of our own lives is generally and characteristically embedded in and
made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer histories of a number of traditions.
(MacIntyre, 1981, pp. 206–7)
In many ways Middleton (1992) summarises the aspirations when she says:
Teachers, as well as their students, should analyse the relationship between their individ-
ual biographies, historical events, and the constraints imposed on their personal choices
by broader power relations, such as those of class, race and gender.
(Middleton, 1992, p. 19)
In providing such inter-contextual analysis, the different methodologies highlighted in this vol-
ume all provide important avenues. They all combine a concern with telling teachers’ stories with
an equal concern to provide a broader context for the location, understanding and grounding
of those stories.
In awakening to history in our studies of teachers’ stories, I have felt for some time that life
history work is a most valuable avenue for collaborative, inter-contextual work (Goodson, 1992).
The distinction between life stories and life histories is an important one to restate. The life story
is a personal reconstruction of experience, in this case by the teacher. ‘Life story givers’ provide
data for the researcher, often in loosely structured interviews. The researcher seeks to elicit the
teacher’s perceptions and stories but is generally rather passive rather than actively interrogative.
The life history also begins with the life story that the teacher tells but seeks to build on the
information provided. Hence other people’s accounts might be elicited, documentary evidence
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Ivor Goodson
and a range of historical data amassed. The concern is to develop a wide inter-textual and
inter-contextual mode of analysis. This provision of a wider range of data allows a contextual
background to be constructed.
Crucial to the move to life history is a change in the nature of collaboration. The teacher
becomes more than a teller of stories and becomes a more general investigator; the external
researcher is more than a listener and elicitor of stories and is actively involved in textual and con-
textual construction. In terms of give and take, I would argue a more viable trading point can be
established. This trading point, by focussing on stories in context, provides a new focus to develop
our joint understandings of schooling. By providing this dialogue of a ‘story of action within a
theory of context’ a new context is provided for collaboration. In the end, the teacher researcher
can collaborate in investigating not only the stories of lives but the contexts of lives. Such collab-
oration should provide new understandings for all of us concerned with the world of schooling.
Personal knowledge and educational research

As we have seen, storytelling has been a sign in the media of a move away from cultural and polit-
ical analysis. Why then might we assume that it would be any different in educational and social
research? After all, educational research has tended to be behind mainstream cultural and political
analysis in its cogency and vitality rather than ahead of it.
Let us go back a step. Storytelling came in because the modes of cultural and political analysis
were biased, white, male and middle class. Other ways of knowing and representing grew at the
periphery to challenge the biased centre. However, these oppositional discourses, having achieved
some success in representing ‘silenced voices’, have remained ensconced in the particular and
the specific. They have, in short, not developed their own linkages to cultural, political analysis.
The assumption of so much postmodernist optimism is that by empowering new voices and
discourses, by telling you stories, in short, we will rewrite and re-inscribe the old white male
bourgeois rhetoric; so it may be. But so what?
New stories do not of themselves analyse or address the structures of power. Is it not
the commonsensical level, worthy of pause, to set the new stories and new voices against a
sense of the centre’s continuing power? The western version of high modernity is everywhere
ascendant – we have an unparalleled ‘end of history triumphalism’ with most of the histori-
cal challenges vanquished. Is this new ascendant authoritarian capital a likely vehicle for the
empowerment of the silenced and the oppressed? This seems unlikely, particularly as capital
has historically been the vehicle for the very construction and silencing of the same oppressed
groups. Is it not more likely, then, that new discourses and voices that empower the periphery
actually at one and the same time fortify, enhance and solidify the old centres of power? In
short, are we not witnessing the old game of divide and rule?
Acknowledgement
This paper was presented at two sessions at AERA, Atlanta, April 1993, Living Lives, Studying Lives,
Writing Lives: An Educational Potpourri or Pot-au-Feu? Invitational Session and Living Lives, Studying
Lives, Writing Lives, A Roundtable Discussion Session.
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Becker, H. S. (1970) Sociological Work: Method and Substance. Chicago: Aldine.
Berg, A. S. (1989) Goldwyn: A Biography. New York: Knopf.
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Brooks, R. (1992) And finally . . . News at Ten goes tabloid. The Observer. 19 July.
Buruma, I. (1991) Signs of life. New York Review of Books. 38. (4). p. 3. 14 February.
Denzin, N.K. (1991) Deconstructing the biographical method. Paper presented at the 1991 AERA Annual
Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, April.
Dionne, E. J., Jr. (1992) The disillusion with politics could be dangerous. The Guardian Weekly. 19 July.
Giroux, H. (1991) Border Crossings. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Goodson, I. F. (ed.) (1992) Studying Teachers’ Lives. London and New York: Routledge.
Goodson, I. F. & Walker, R. (1990) Biography, Identity and Schooling. London, New York and Philadelphia:
Falmer Press.
Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Ignatieff, M. (1992) The media admires itself in the mirror. The Observer. 19 July.
Macintyre, A. (1981) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth.
Middleton, S. (1992) Developing a radical pedagogy. In I. F. Goodson (ed.) Studying Teachers’ Lives (pp. 18–50).
London and New York: Routledge.
Naipaul, V. S. (1987) The Enigma of Arrival. London: Viking.
Now playing across America: Real Life, the movie (1991) The New York Times. Sunday 20 October.
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8
ALWAYS A STORY
Mike Hayler
I think it was the rain that woke me. I could suddenly hear it on the skylight and the roof just above my
head, blowing in off the English Channel onto the Sussex coast on this morning in March as the dawn began
to break. Then again, I had been waking early with something on my mind for a while now: half-formed
sentences about autobiography; ideas about memory and references to narrative; shelves and libraries full of
books unread by me that made my heart speed up as I struggled to get a grip on writing the chapter before
the deadline. Dry in the mouth and out of my depth again.
I knew straight away that something had changed. The rain had come and I had let go of something and
found a way forward. It was a story. Of course it was a story. It was always a story.
This is a story of understanding autoethnography as the enactment of narrative inquiry,
learning and pedagogy.
I want the story to be about:
• autoethnography as narrative research;

• autobiographical memory as a form of narrative construction;
• how these can inform narrative learning;
• the implications of this in developing narrative pedagogy.
The importance and significance of learning through the reflexive articulation of personal
experience is the theme that unites the sections that follow. I draw upon a number of narra-
tives from my own research, learning and teaching to illustrate the discussion. Learning from
experience about ourselves, others and the cultures that we live and work within is also the
theme that unites the various ways in which I now interact with other teachers and students
of education.
Autoethnography as narrative research

I begin by briefly tracing some of the antecedents and characteristics of autoethnography before
considering it as narrative research in the context of education. The criteria for separating one
category of autobiographical discourse from another are no more clear-cut than when Harold
Rosen, while attempting to gather written autobiographical acts into a number of categories such
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Always a story
as memoir, journals, autobiography and professional testimony, pointed out that the discursive
practices of writing about the self may overlap at the turn of every page and are themselves part
of social cultural history. They cannot be fixed in definition or meaning:
At the very moment when they are being described they are changing; some forms are
dying out and new ones are coming into being. Any taxonomy of this kind should be
partly obsolescent.
(Rosen, 1998, p. 20)
The astounding proliferation of autobiographical methods since then, which Denzin (2014)
considers as interpretive autoethnography, would now make such categorisation less-feasible still.
The myriad forms of autoethnography all draw upon ‘life narrative’ which Smith and Watson
(2001) frame as a term that includes many kinds of self-referential writing. The autobiographical
components of life narrative include memory, experience, identity, embodiment and agency: ‘Life
narrative, then might best be approached as a moving target, a set of ever-shifting self-referential
practices that engage the past in order to reflect on identity in the present’ (Smith & Watson,
2001, p. 3).
As Folkenflik (1993) notes, the act of ‘self-life writing’ long-predates the term ‘autobiogra-
phy,’ that is often attributed to Southey in the first decade of the 19th century. The term ‘auto-
biographical narrative’ appears in the preface of the working class poet Ann Yearsley’s Poems of
1786. Anderson (2001) critiques key texts which constitute a kind of autobiographical cannon
sitting at the heart of the dominant tradition of autobiographical writing described as both
drawing upon and helping to construct ‘a history of selfhood, a paradigmatic narrative through
which the subject has learned to know who s/he is’ (p. 19). In the context of this tradition,
Augustine’s Confessions (c.AD 398–400) is seen as a brilliantly successful historical landmark and
the keystone of western autobiographical writing. Gusdorf (1956) suggests that autobiography
‘asserts itself only in recent centuries and only in a small part of the map of the world . . . the
late product of a specific civilization’ (pp. 29–31). While Verene (1981) argues the case for the
works of Vico (1688–1744), most critics consider Rousseau’s Confessions (1781) as the parent
text of modern autobiography. We need to note that autobiographical discourse has a history
extending back to antiquity and beyond western culture. The oral performance of self-narrative
predates literacy in, for example, Native American cultures through song and African oral his-
tories of descent. As argued by Smith and Watson (2001) the importance of self-representation
in preliterate and literate non-Western cultures challenges a range of assumptions that frame
‘autobiography’ as a unique achievement of ‘Western culture at a moment of individuation in
the wake of the Enlightenment’ (p. 84).
The male, essentialist and romantic notion of self-hood that runs through Rousseau’s Con-
fessions permeates the ensuing tradition of auto/biographies of ‘great men’ established through-
out the 19th and 20th centuries. In the late 20th century, this canon of autobiography became
a focus of poststructuralist and feminist critiques that reframed self and self-representation as
historically, socially and culturally constructed (Barthes, 1977; Lejeune, 1989; Marcus, 1994;
Miller, 1991; Stanley, 1992). As conventions were rejected within poststructural analysis, so
the form was reconfigured by acknowledging and absorbing self-critique and reflexivity (e.g.
Barthes, 1977). Less burdened by the ego of the self (Stanley, 1992) multiple selves could be
acknowledged and ‘performed’ through interpretive interactionism and interpretive autoeth-
nography (Denzin, 2001, 2003, 2014). Bourdieu (1986) extends the reconfiguration through
the notion of ‘biographical illusion’ where any coherent narrative is seen to be structured by
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the culture which makes both individual and text. While acknowledging the centrality of
culture, Denzin sees Bourdieu’s general structural position as a gloss on the complexities of
the process:
The point to make is not whether biographical coherence is an illusion or a reality.

Rather, what must be established is how individuals give coherence to their lives when
they write or talk self-autobiographies. The sources of this coherence, the narratives
that lie behind them, and the larger ideologies that structure them must be uncovered.
(Denzin, 2014, p. 44)
Bruner argues that even if we want to, we cannot reflect upon the self without some sort of
accompanying reflection upon the nature of the world in which we exist. In recognising that
the self must be ‘treated as a construction that, so to speak, proceeds from the outside in as
from the inside out, from culture to mind as well as from mind to culture’, Bruner (1990,
p. 108) draws attention to an autobiographical process that allows one to consider the reflex-
ive nature of the story and one’s own capacity and limitations in turning round on the past
and altering the present in what Gergen (1973) described as the ‘dazzling’ human capacity to
imagine alternatives.
While the ‘intimate and inextricable’ link between autobiographical memory, culture and
identity (Goodson, 2014) has long been recognised, it remained on the edge of social science until
the 1980s. The ‘narrative turn’ encouraged inquiry that foregrounded, valued and celebrated
autobiographical memory as a site of construction and reflexivity. Auto/biographical, life-history
and narrative methodologies moved from the margins to become established, although not
unchallenged, within sociological and educational research. In education, pioneering studies
with teachers in various contexts by, for example, Ball and Goodson (1985), Elbaz (1990), Erben
(1998), Huberman (1993) and Woods (1987) form a rigorous and widely respected foundation
in demonstrating the valuable insights that are gained into teachers, students, schools and peda-
gogy through the examination of participants’ life-histories. An example of this in the study of
education and elsewhere is autoethnography, defined by Ellis and Bochner in 2000 as:
an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of con-
sciousness, connecting the personal and the cultural.
(p. 739)
One of the fundamental elements of autoethnographic research is the recognition of how

self-narrative is constructed, changed and developed in relation to grand, group and individual
narratives. Hayano (1979), used the term ‘autoethnography’ to refer to the work of ‘insider’
anthropologists, researching their ‘own people’ (p. 101), arguing that in a post-colonial era
ethnographers need to study their own social worlds and sub-cultures. It has evolved and wid-
ened from there to include a sometimes bewildering rubric of research approaches, methods
and techniques, such as ‘narratives of the self ’ (Richardson, 1994), ‘first person accounts’ (Ellis,
1998), ‘reflective ethnographies’ (Ellis & Bochner, 1996), ‘evocative narratives’ (Tillmann-Healy,
1999), ‘collaborative autobiography’ (Goldman, 1993), ‘collaborative autoethnography’ (Chang
et al., 2013), ‘analytic autoethnography’ (Anderson, 2006), ‘ethnodrama’ (Saldana, 2011),
‘autoethnodrama’ (Moriarty, 2014), to name only a few (see Denzin, 2014; Jones et al., 2013).
Within all of these approaches, the researcher is deeply self-identified through explicit and
reflexive self-observation. One of the central cornerstones of autoethnography is that the nar-
rative places the self within a social context.
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I came to autoethnography in my doctoral study of teacher education as I sought to examine

and construct my own story towards and within teacher education in collaboration with and
reference to others. I also wanted to attempt to introduce more reciprocity within the process
of the research itself. As the study developed and I continued to examine the various tributaries
which feed into the autoethnographic stream, I was drawn towards analytic autoethnography
(Anderson, 2006; Anderson & Glass-Coffin, 2013) as a framework within which to examine and
present my research for a thesis.
In her preface to the Handbook of Autoethnography, Carolyn Ellis (2013) illustrates how she and
other autoethnographers have moved from defending autoethnography as a method of enquiry
to witnessing its explosion in applied research across a range of disciplines all over the world.
Methodological definitions can be difficult when boundaries are intentionally crossed, blurred
or erased:
The goal always is to create the conditions for a critical consciousness, one that imagines
a radical politics of possibility. Autoethnography inserted itself in the picture when it
was understood that all ethnographers reflectively (or unreflectively) write themselves
into their ethnographies.
(Denzin, 2014, p. 26)
Methodological openness is one of the virtues for those drawn to autoethnography which is
seen as:
a fresh and innovative variation of ethnography – and more – where an ethnographic

perspective and analysis are brought to bear on our personal, lived experience, directly
linking the micro level with the macro cultural and structural levels in exciting ways.
(Allen-Collinson, 2013, p. 282)
This presents a challenge for those who wish to define, evaluate or apply the methods in research.
As Anderson and Glass-Coffin (2013) make clear, autoethnographic texts do not often conform
to established structures in sharing extended ‘methods’ sections. The goal is not to justify or
defend methodological criteria but to ‘reveal the self as a central character with rich emotional
evocation that serves to ground the story being told’ (Anderson & Glass-Coffin, 2013, p. 64).
Anderson and Glass-Coffin address this lack of methodological clarity, citing the often eclectic
and various mixture of methods drawn up by the autoethnographic bricoleur (2013, p. 64).
While resisting orthodoxies old or new is part of the project, some commonalities can be iden-
tified: Holman Jones, Adams and Ellis conceptualise autoethnography as the use of personal
experience and personal writing to (1) purposefully comment on/critique cultural practices;
(2) make contributions to existing research; (3) embrace vulnerability with purpose; and (4) cre-
ate a reciprocal relationship with audiences in order to compel a response (2013, pp. 22–5).
Autoethnography: An example of autobiographical memory

as a site of narrative construction
As autoethnography has blossomed in a range of hues and styles, it joins a stream of work that rec-
ognises and examines the potential of autobiographical memory as a site of narrative construction.
The stream sprang from the ‘turns’ in understanding of human inquiry driven by recognition of the
limits of scientific knowledge, related critiques of objectivity, the emerging appreciation for personal
narrative and story, and concerns about the ethics and politics of research practice and representations.
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A wave of scholarship and research on memory has reconsidered and reframed personal memory,
not as a passive, descriptive and retrospective activity, but as active, constructive and contingent (e.g.
Cixous & Calle-Gruber, 1997; Goodson, 2006; Goodson & Gill, 2011, 2014; McAdams et al., 1997;
Pillemer, 1998; Thome, 2000). Though various and different in many ways, in common:
This work stresses how autobiographical memory helps to define and locate our narra-
tives of selfhood within a continuing and coherent life-story. There the memory works
in a more improvisational, constructional and creative manner.
(Goodson, 2014, p. 124)
While questioning and reconfiguring the notion of coherence, autoethnography is also an exam-
ple of this type of memory work in action. Here the researcher performs the roles of both partic-
ipant and researcher, stepping ‘in and out’ of the story as much as this can be reflexively achieved.
In this respect, autoethnography becomes, as Reed-Danahay puts it,‘both method and text’ (1997,
p. 6), where autobiographical memory provides the lens for an examination and reframing of
understanding of the self and the cultural, past, present and future. If, as Goodson suggests, auto-
biographical memory is a ‘lynchpin for human action and agency’ (2014, p. 125), then the process
of autoethnography, which seeks to examine personal identity and culture through self-narrative
inquiry, can be seen as a central example of autobiographical memory working as a tool for the
illumination, dis-embedding and reframing of personal memory and meaning. Autoethnogra-
phy allows the researcher to engage in a form of knowledge production and learning through
a conscious examination of autobiographical memory that further allows them to ‘dis-embed’
their understanding of the world. Seen in this way, autoethnography is a key area for the reflexive
process of conscious ‘detaching and distancing’ (Kegan, 1982) that provides space for the work of
reconstruction and repositioning of narrative knowledge and understanding of the self. Giddens
describes this ‘corrective intervention’ of existing self-narrative as a way to transcend the ‘thrall of
the past’ through opening up new ways in which one can develop (1991, p. 72). As Goodson says,
such reflexive autobiographical memory work is especially important in exploring the learning
and pedagogic capacities of narrative with significant implications for those involved in teaching
and learning (2014, pp. 125–8).
I want to consider how autoethnography can provide the space, conditions and opportunity
for autobiographical memory to act as a site of narrative construction, and I need to note that,
while I am convinced of the veracity of the process myself, I do not see shining the light of
reflexivity upon one’s own life-story as the only way of learning. Furthermore, I recognise and
largely follow the poststructural approach that de-constructs the researcher as subject in order to,
as Jackson and Mazzei (2008) put it,‘confront the limits of a reliance on experience and narrative
voice’ (p. 300). Work by (for example) Denzin (2014), MacLure (2011) and Scott (1992) provides
a caveat by questioning an exclusive reliance on voice, presence and experience that can claim
an unproblematic window to the past. Deconstructive autoethnography brings this issue to the
fore in ‘de-centering’ what Denzin (2014) describes as the ‘knowing I’. A deconstructive reading
of the ‘knowing I’ in autoethnography ‘challenges the writers voice, unsettles the concept of past
experiences as a site of subjectivity, and opens the door for multiple voices and perspectives to be
heard and performed and seen’ (Denzin, 2014, p. 38). With Stake (1994, p. 240), I recognise the
‘naturalistic generalisation’ within this sort of inquiry where the narration evokes a feeling that
experience is authentic and believable, bringing as, Raymond Carver (Carver et al., 1990, p. 52)
put it, ‘news of one world to another.’
Ronald Fraser provides an example of narrative construction developed from autobiograph-
ical memory in his book In Search of a Past (1984), where he manages to combine his own
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recollections with the testimony and collected interviews of many others who knew him as a
child to produce a many-voiced autobiography as a way of becoming the historian of his own
past while gaining insight to his present self. Drawing upon sometimes competing methods
of constructing past and self through oral history and psychoanalysis, Fraser weaves a series of
encounters together to create a fragmented, reflective, reflexive narrative where no simple unified
self emerges. Contradictory meanings are not resolved as Fraser acknowledges that ‘the difficulty
of writing about the past . . . is part and parcel of the past’ (p. 104) and that the past is a collective
as well as an individual experience.
I have always been interested in stories about the past. Sudden changes and loss during my
childhood and adolescence seem to have triggered a need in me to look back, to reconstruct,
and to try to ‘get things straight’ in my head. I got to know my home town in a new way by
working with local people on their own autobiographies in a community writing and publish-
ing group. I wrote my own telling tale while working on my doctoral thesis. The aim of the
research was to achieve an understanding of how the professional identity of teacher educators
is both formed and represented by narratives of experience and I wanted to consider my own
experience of education, as I thought it was an unusual example: I had failed spectacularly at
school, I was always in trouble, permanently excluded with no qualifications and now found
myself working in higher education, having been a teacher after returning to study in my
thirties. I think the sudden and not so sudden changes in circumstance and direction left me
feeling uncertain of my own identity. I found Laurel Richardson and her work on writing as
a method of enquiry waiting for me in Denzin and Lincoln (2000) and started writing about
my experience of education.
As soon as I started writing my tale, I realised that what really mattered here was how I remem-
bered and how I constructed my memories and how this narrative shaped my belief and behav-
iour. I began to explicitly investigate what I had known tacitly for a long time: how the story I
make and remake about myself makes me who I am. Bruner (1990) identifies autobiographical
narrative as the central phenomena of what he terms as cultural psychology. A particular view of
the self is revealed through this window within a culture:
What all these (reflexive autobiographical) works have in common is the aim and the
virtue of locating self not in the fastness of immediate private consciousness but in the
cultural-historical situation as well.
(Bruner, 1990, p. 107)
I thought I knew the story well but found new understandings as I wrote it, then further under-
standing as I heard others respond to it through stories of their own. I found a story of myself
within the stories of becoming and being teacher educators.
Narrative learning: A collaboration that is waiting to happen

I want to use an autoethnographic example to consider the relational and contingent nature of
narrative learning. Goodson et al. (2010) note that the ongoing construction of our own nar-
ratives and our understanding of how we act in the world is informed as much by the learning
that happens in the act of narration as it is from considering narratives that are shared by others.
Marcus describes autobiographical discourses as collaborations that are waiting to happen
(1994, pp. 274–6). Each autoethnography is an invitation for the readers to examine their own
memories while reading the memories of another. While the process of writing a self-narrative
invokes memory and brings new understanding for the writer, it also opens this possibility for
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the reader. Personal identities and conceptions of our selves are developed through what Polking-
horne describes as ‘narrative configuration’, making our existence into a whole by understanding
it as a single unfolding story: ‘we are in the middle of our stories and cannot be sure where they
will end’ (1988, p. 150).
The following example illustrates the ways in which the stories that we hear and read can
change the ways in which we hold, tell and retell stories about how we see ourselves, others and
the way the world works.
Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats

Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We’re all idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves
Dylan (1974)
In demonstrating elements of narrative research design, Adams (2012) draws attention to the
complexities of taken-for-granted assumptions about cultural phenomena through his autoeth-
nographic writing of working as a volunteer at a local aquarium. Working alongside paid work-
ers at this not-for-profit environmental educational facility, Adams thinks he gets to know a
number of them quite well, noting the struggles that they often have to survive financially, often
needing to work additional hours elsewhere. One day he asks a worker if she will be on duty at
the aquarium during the weekend: ‘It depends on whether or not you’re coming into work,’ she
replies. Adams learns that the number of paid jobs at the aquarium depends upon the number of
volunteers who have signed up, and that if a volunteer is scheduled to work on a certain day, paid
staff are asked to stay off or sometimes sent home without pay. It becomes clear that the paid staff
cannot establish a set pattern of work or develop any sort of collective bargaining position while
volunteers do the work for free. In later reflection, Adams recognises that:
I learned that my volunteering directly influenced others’ work schedules and pay.
Although volunteering made me feel good, and the organisation profited from my
presence, my free help hurt others. I came to regard my volunteering as harmful and to
resent the volunteering system the facility had established.
(Adams et al., 2015, p. 31)
Adams illustrates the way in which narrative reflection and analysis of insider experience can
generate and share insight that other methods might miss or actively discourage: interviewing the
paid staff about the problems that the volunteering system created for them would make their
position still more vulnerable; interviewing volunteers revealed that they were unaware and often
unwilling to engage with the way paid workers were affected by the programme: ‘Further, given
the culturally exalted status of ‘volunteering’, many people – the volunteers and the workers –
found it difficult to speak against the practice’ (Adams et al., 2015, p. 32).
In looking back reflexively, one of the questions Adams attempts to answer and one that
might occur to the reader is ‘how do you get to be such an idiot?’ By using the exact science
of hindsight, we might ask how Adams did not spot the situation from the start, and we might
feel that we would have seen things as they were and acted accordingly. When I read the story
and the analysis in preparing this chapter, I initially noted the features of autoethnography in
examining the cultural phenomena through personal experience. Through sharing the subjective
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experience, Adams comes to share something about the way the world works behind the fish
tanks, which tells us something about how the world works on our side of the water. I kept myself
out of these considerations until I suddenly seemed to appear in the story: not Tony Adams in
Tampa but Mick Hayler in Hackbridge:
Barry had a car so he would pick me up at Preston Circus at 6am. I always tried to get
out of the house without waking up the boys but sometimes they would appear, crum-
pled and creased and warm as fresh bread, squinting a ‘good luck Daddy’ kiss goodbye,
and I would be off into the Brighton dawn.
Graham ran the whole thing out of Heathfield. He had worked for one of the big
removal firms in the past so he had connections, and when they started using ‘agency
workers’ he knew lots of young men looking for cash-in-hand work which they didn’t
want going through the books for one reason or another. I was one of those: a mature
student with a wife and two children who everyone thought had lost it when he went
to university in 1987. When I worked it out over 36 weeks instead of 52, the grant
money was better than I was earning in the carpet warehouse. As long as I could work
the holidays we would be alright. But I couldn’t get the grant if I worked the holidays
which is where Graham came in – taking a cut on the side of course.
The Big Removal Company, based In Hackbridge had a big job in London this
Easter weekend: Elephant and Castle to Whitehall. Department of Health and Social
Security led by the Right Honourable Kenneth Clarke. The irony is not diluted by the
years that have passed since then.
When we got to Hackbridge the full-time Big Removal Company workers were
there. They didn’t like us and I didn’t really know why until I read Tony Adams’s story.
How do you get to be such an idiot?
I was not a volunteer, but as a ‘casual worker’ I had a role in undermining any chance
that the full-timers had of getting a better pay deal. The more of us the less of them, any
trouble you could collect your cards and get down the job centre. I had been a trade
union member since 1975 when I left school; I was in the National Union of Students;
I marched with the striking miners in 1984 and I realise only now that I also played my
small part in breaking the unions and the teetering labour movement in the neo-liberal
morning in South West London. I will have to live with it now but the stain wells up.
This is not how I like to see myself. One day Barry drove me away from Hackbridge
and Heathfield for the last time and I got to finish my degree and get a proper job of
sorts. My sons grew up and have jobs of their own, but I wonder if the lorries still run
out of Hackbridge, and who is on board these days. I left them and their sons to it while
I made my escape.
It took 25 years and a story from Florida before I was ready to see things this way. While one
narrative may be the source of rupture in another as one person’s epiphany evokes another’s, the
self-narrative can also be something that we hide behind. Ricoeur (1974) shows us that it is nar-
rative that gives the events of the past a meaning they do not otherwise have. Narrative ‘soothes
us’. Indeed, as Joan Didion says ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’ (1979, p. 11). Prompted
by the narrative of Adams and from the middle of my own story I come to know and narrate
something about myself, and by narrating the subjective experience I come to share something
about the way the world works, then and now. This process is a type of narrative learning where
my autobiographical memory is disrupted by another narrative, which leads me to engage reflex-
ively. Autobiographical memory becomes a site of narrative construction.
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As I come to understand my own experience in a new, if somewhat uncomfortable, way

I might console myself with thoughts of subsequent trade union activism and memories of
being . . . a volunteer. I was an unpaid worker at a local community writing and publishing
group for 10 years, working alongside a part-time paid worker, helping local people to write their
autobiographies, publishing on small press and selling the books locally. I am much more com-
fortable with this self-narrative and proud of the work we did there, but I now have to follow my
narration, prompted by Adams, to consider how the roles I took there might have affected others.
I benefited from the experience in so many ways and made an important contribution, but I now
wonder if the group would have had more funding if so many people had not been willing to
work for nothing. My intention is not to denigrate the volunteer or the important activism that
contributes so much in society, but to recognise the importance of context. I respond to Adams,
who draws attention to the complexities of taken-for-granted assumptions, by considering the
complexities of taken-for-granted assumptions in my own life.
Considering Adams’s story and my own brings me to reflect in a new way upon connected
cultural phenomena, and in particular the direction of government education policy in England
since 2010. The expanding development of free schools and academies with the incorpora-
tion of unpaid student/teachers, unqualified teachers, and unpaid internship as an increasingly
required route into many professions, indicates that education is a critical site of imposed, imple-
mented ideology where taken-for-granted assumptions need to be examined, questioned and
challenged. We need to pay attention and look closely at what is happening. In paying attention
we need to look at ourselves as well as the actions and motivations of others. I find myself posi-
tioned uncomfortably as the institution I work for pursues strategies that bring much of this
policy into practice. I realise that people who work in universities, people who teach teachers,
are caught within the contradictions of capitalism as a way of life every bit as much as I was on
my way to Hackbridge. Autoethnography that closely considers the relationships between life,
narrative and learning can make a contribution in helping us to see what is going on and what
we might make of it.
Autoethnography as an example of narrative pedagogy

In this final section of the chapter, I consider an example of how autoethnography can inform
a critical pedagogy that encourages and facilitates the type of narrative learning discussed previ-
ously. Alexander (2013) outlines a philosophy of autoethnographic pedagogy through his own
example of teaching that draws upon Denzin’s notion of ‘critical performance pedagogy’ (2003).
This has the specific aim of encouraging reflexivity where one’s ‘sense of comfort in knowing the
world is laid bare and vulnerable’, providing possibilities for seeing the world differently (Alex-
ander, 2013, p. 543). While my own example focuses on autoethnographic writing in the study
of education, rather than physical performance, many of the elements explored and explained by
Alexander contribute to the pedagogy of the ‘Reframing Identity’ module that I work on with
final year undergraduate students taking an education honours degree in England.
Aronowitz and Giroux (1991) envision a ‘border pedagogy’ that provides opportunities for
students to critically examine and articulate often conflicting experiences in the spaces between
culture, school and home. Border pedagogy allows students to:
engage the multiple references that constitute different cultural codes, experiences, and
languages. This means educating the students to read codes critically, to learn the limits
of such codes, including ones they use to construct their own narratives and histories.
(Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, pp. 118–19)
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Such pedagogical intentions link very closely to the ideas of narrative learning and the
‘dis-embedding’ of autobiographical memory. The boundaries between the study of education
and the lived experience become permeable in this approach where identity is ‘reframed’ in the
context of analysed and articulated personal experience. Autoethnographic engagement with
one’s own experience of education encourages an awareness of the social, cultural and political
contexts where learning takes place. Central to the theme of narrative learning, Aronowitz and
Giroux say that border pedagogy helps students not only to ‘undo’ and to critically examine
their own self-narrative, but further to understand how ‘one’s class, race, gender, or ethnicity
may influence, but does not irrevocably predetermine, how one takes up a particular ideology,
reads a particular text, or responds to particular forms of oppression’ (Aronowitz & Giroux,
1991, p. 121).
This requires the teacher to facilitate and encourage students to safely engage in the ideolog-
ical spaces of their own experiences.
Giroux (2001) argues for a public pedagogy:
marked by its attentiveness to the interconnections and struggles that take place over
knowledge, language, spatial relations and history. Public pedagogy represents a moral
and political practice rather than merely a technical procedure.
(Giroux, 2001, p. 12)
‘Learning outcomes’ and ‘success criteria’ act as institutional control that can subdue and silence
particular approaches to teaching, learning and expression in all phases of education. My own
experience of trying to negotiate the gaps between narrative autoethnography and the require-
ments of thesis success is a typical example of the tensions that arise between traditional frame-
works of assessment and approaches which foreground narrative inquiry, analysis and modes of
assessment (Hayler, 2011). In negotiating my own path of enquiry and communication with
a particular doctoral destination to consider, I adapted Anderson’s (2006) proposals for ana-
lytic autoethnography. Although this sometimes felt like an uneasy compromise, I was able to
develop a version of analytic autoethnography that satisfied the examiners without surrendering
my deepening commitment to an interpretive, narrative perspective with my own feelings and
experiences forming a key part of the data. I demonstrated a commitment to theoretical anal-
ysis in using Sartre’s (1963) progressive/regressive method of interpretation and presentation of
my narrative. I learnt a lot from this process and given that the undergraduate students faced a
similar challenge in balancing comparable requirements, I used this framework in designing the
‘Reframing Identity’ module.
The aim of the module is to support and encourage students to explore their understanding of
education and to develop critical engagement with their past experience, current knowledge, and
ideas for the future. Some of the students are planning to be teachers, while some aim to work
in educational-related settings other than schools. They take this module in the first semester
of their final year and I encourage them to draw upon their studies, placement experiences and
reading from earlier in the course. The module hinges around the written assignment in which
students critically reflect upon their own learning experiences in order to analyse and evaluate
the educational principles and values that underpin their understanding of education. In the first
sessions we focus on the nature of memory, and writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson,
2000). Discussion centres on ‘creative analytic practice’ and the crafting of story as a process of
analysis. The students further reflect upon their own view of education and how this has been
informed by their own experience through a writing task following each session, beginning to
serially assemble a draft of the assignment.
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In later sessions we consider memory in autobiography, looking at life-history and narrative

approaches. Discussion led by students considers the process of constructing their own stories
of education. As part of the process, I share some of my own experiences of education. Students
working in small groups prepare and share poster presentations on their understanding of the
terms ‘identity’, ‘culture’ or ‘narrative’. Each week we return to the serial assignment and discuss
how they are approaching their writing, what they are learning as they write, and what they
will do next:
• What is your writing ‘about’?

• Step back and consider the key themes that are emerging as you write – any surprises?
• Why have you identified these as key moments?
• What were the consequences of these moments/decisions?
• What are you learning about yourself as you write these tasks – is this research?
• What does it tell you about that time and your sub-culture?
From Week 6 we begin to work in smaller groups and consider ways of making sense of stories
from experience. I introduce them to the progressive/regressive approach (Denzin, 2001; Sartre,
1963) as a way of considering their data. The concept of the individual, defined as a praxis that
both produces and is produced by social structures (Sartre, 1982), forms the basis of the progressive/
regressive method as it combines psychological and sociological explanations of human action.
Here narrative is located in a particular historical situation. Sartre (1963) structured an analysis
that first looks forward from a particular point towards a conclusion of sorts as well as back to the
historical, cultural and biographical conditions that moved the narrator. This situates the memory
and interpretation of actions in time and space, illuminating the uniqueness of the individual while
revealing commonalities of the sub-culture. In practice the students consider and develop their own
texts assembled over six weeks and follow this process based on the progressive/regressive approach:
1 Make a time line of the period you have written about in your own learning story.
2 Mark the most significant moments (critical incidents, turning-point events, eras).
3 Choose one such moment; then ‘jump’ forward to now – note consequences of that moment,
incident, event. How did it change things?
4 Widen the context: personal – Go back to that moment on the time line to consider your
life beyond the circumstances of the incident. What was happening in your life at that point?
Where did you live? What were you like? How do you know?
5 Move forward to now: What were the consequences of the things you have noted in the
wider personal context? How did they work out?
6 Back to that point/moment on the timeline: Widen the context: education at that time.
What do you remember about school and education at that time? Do you need to find out
more to develop your understanding of this context?
7 Education now: What are the current consequences of the way education was at that point?
What is the same, what is different? Policy, ideas etc.
8 Back to that point on the timeline: Widen the context: politics. What was going on in the
UK politically at that point? What do you know about this? How could you find out more?
9 Politics now: What are the current consequences of the political context at that point? What
is the same, what is different? Policy, ideas etc.
While I acknowledge that this simplifies and reduces Sartre’s progressive/regressive model to a
somewhat mechanistic level, the results have been sometimes astounding, with students writing
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autoethnographic assignments that bring new understanding of their own experience to bear on
new understanding about the development and nature of education in England.
Hannah began with a memory of being withdrawn from class as she was struggling with her
reading when she was eight:
My heart would sink when Mrs. Jones came to collect us. She was nice enough but
everyone knew what it meant:‘they are the stupid group’. I remember asking mum what
had made me stupid and when she said I wasn’t, I said ‘I must be I’m in the stupid group.’
Bringing the memory forward to meet with her knowledge of policy then and now and the
pressure on class teachers at the time, Hannah considers the reasons for this approach: ‘I feel I was
removed because I would consume too much of the class teacher’s time if I was in the classroom.’
She later applies her knowledge of practice to her own example:
I know now it would have been more effective if I had been supported by a specially
trained professional who understood my individual needs and could help me to be
in the classroom with everyone else. This would have ensured I was getting the right
support but also treating me equally by keeping me in the class.
Simon remembered being bullied at school because other boys thought he might be gay:
I was uncomfortable with who I was (possibly more so because of the bullying) and
hadn’t come to terms with the fact I was indeed homosexual, trying to convince myself
that it was a ‘phase’.
He reflects on the process of writing the assignment:
I have illuminated a number of ways in which my experience of homophobic bullying

has worked towards my understanding of education. Even though there are a number
of other factors that have shaped these beliefs, it is my understanding that they have had
a major influence upon this. By using the progressive/regressive method, I have come
to a better understanding of the contextual factors surrounding those experiences and
how these factors possibly shaped my experiences within secondary school.
Encouraged by an environment that places reflexivity at the centre of a critical narrative peda-
gogy, from the middle of their stories, the students come to know and narrate something about
themselves, and by narrating the subjective experience they come to share something about the
way that education works – then and now.
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9
ON COMING TO NARRATIVE
AND LIFE HISTORY
Keith Turvey
The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and . . .
and . . . and . . .” This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be.”
Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are
totally useless questions.
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 26)
© Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1988, translated by Brian Massumi,‘A Thousand Plateaus: Cap-
italism and Schizophrenia’, The Athlone Press, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Introduction
How can we research others’ professional identities if we acknowledge they are in a constant state
of becoming? This struggle with the dangers, complexities and presumptions of attempting to
research and represent the ‘other’ first prompted me to re-examine that which I thought I knew
intimately – that is, my own story and my realization of the importance that narrative can play
in research. In this chapter, I explore my conceptual position of narrative ecology, how I encoun-
tered it and developed it as one approach to narrative inquiry that comes closer to understanding
the learning and development of ‘others’ and ourselves. The first half of this chapter plots the
genealogy of my research journey to a position of narrative ecology. In the second half I explore
what I term ‘threshold experiences’ which I define as those experiences that have recurring and
notable significance throughout our life course, connecting our past with our future to shape
and mould the present in ways that influence and challenge the on-going process of learning
and making meaning. I illustrate this through an aspect of my own story of becoming, which
is an account of my teacher-to-teacher-education story. I argue throughout that the process of
coming to know and becoming is effortful, on-going and capricious, but significantly rooted
in the here and now. Although narrative is both a significant and optimal medium for personal,
social, cultural and political renewal, it is not without risk from parochialism and dislocation. I
conclude that these risks are avoided by locating life stories within their wider historical context
to build narrative capital, which we may come to know.
116
On coming to narrative and life history
The inimitableness and fullness of experience

There is something inherently and dangerously presumptuous about researching and represent-
ing others’ experiences and learning. Schostak argues that narrative methodologies have the
potential to position research participants as ‘the expert in their own ways of seeing’ (Schostak,
2006, p. 149). Nevertheless, the researcher remains the go-between, mediating and representing
that which they ‘interpret’ to be the research participant’s ‘ways of seeing’. It is presumptuous
and dangerous precisely because we are never analyzing and interpreting the unmediated or
primordial; our listening presence as a researcher is as much an act of moulding as being moulded
in the moment, however much we vacillate on our capacity as researchers to ‘bracket out’ our
own preconceptions (Marton & Booth, 1997; Schostak, 2006). As Polkinghorne (1995) notes,
narrative analysis is co-constructed and not a ‘mirrored reflection’ (p. 19). This leads inevitably
to questions of representation for in researching others’ ongoing professional identities, how
can we represent others’ professional learning with integrity and honesty and what is our role
as researchers? It seems to me that too often research seeks prematurely to identify patterns of
human activity as proxies for some deeper truth or understanding, and, in the process, ignores or
is not sensitised to the existence of plural perspectives and contextual equivocality (Sanger, 1996).
Whilst our lives are, in many respects, necessarily patterned for convenience, what complexities
of lived experience are concealed beneath these patterns of convenience? A fundamental aim of
narrative analysis is an attempt to depict the fullness of lived experience, or what Polkinghorne
terms a ‘narrative gestalt’ (1995, p. 8). The concept of narrative ecology is, I argue, about recognis-
ing multiplicity and accepting uncertainty – that is, a kind of holding out for a fuller and deeper
understanding of social reality. Our research participants’ stories are positioned as an ecology
rooted in the present and constantly evolving from the middle. These stories are inextricably
connected to the past and future, but it is the potential of the present to get strange, or offer
glimpses of a new line of flight from the present in which we find ourselves, that I believe is the
engine of narrative and arouses our intentionality (Andrews, 2012; Deleuze & Guattari, 1988). It
is this sense of intentionality that I turn to now.
My first encounter with the troublesomeness of researching and representing others’ profes-
sional learning came through thinking about how we capture and make sense of teachers’ moti-
vations and intent as they exercise agency over complex contexts and technological tools (Turvey,
2010, 2013). This led to further questioning of how we represent authentic teacher voices in
education research (Cortazzi & Jin, 2006). Issues of equity and power have long been at the
core of methodological debates concerning representation in practitioner research and continue
today. Action research, evolving from Kurt Lewin’s work in the 1930s and 1940s, has seen several
resurgences (Freire, 1970; Hargreaves, 1996; Stenhouse, 1975), motivated in the field of education
by the desire for researchers and educators ‘to be seen as partners in a developmental process’
(Altrichter et al., 2008, p. 268). Narrative methodological debates have, amongst other concerns,
focused on issues of power and representation in education research (Chase, 2005; Goodson,
2005). My own struggle with representation was prompted by the complexities surrounding
the analysis of activity, language and thought, and thinking about how the outcomes of these –
recorded and transcribed utterances, textual fragments, observations of activity – may or may
not allow us insights into the motivations and intentions of participants. That is, going beneath
the what of observed activity to uncover the why. Bonnie Nardi (1996) illustrates the issue of
intentionality through her analogy to a hypothetical ornithologist and meteorologist surveying
the tree canopy in the woods through their binoculars. The observed behaviour and tools used
may be identical, but their intentions and thought processes are very different. Similarly, teachers’
activity in the classroom context may be observed to follow similar if not identical patterns of
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Keith Turvey
behaviour whilst concealing a complex multiplicity of intentions, motivations and lived expe-
riences. Observation and research from the distanced or singular perspective of the researcher
inevitably struggles to capture the fullness of lived experience. Säljö also highlights this issue
when discussing the character of pedagogical activity as the teacher exerts agency over activities
that ‘unfold in relation to a range of situated concerns and ambitions’ (2009, p. 316). However
we choose to define learning and development, we cannot ignore that it is a human and therefore
moral endeavor that requires ongoing judgments and choices that resonate profoundly with our
professional and personal identities (Biesta, 2007; Gill, 2014). Biesta (2007, p. 9) argues strongly
that ‘education is at heart a moral practice more than a technological enterprise’ because whilst
the means to a particular educational goal may be seen to succeed, such means remain more or
less desirable from an individual perspective. Wertsch (1998) also reminds us that attempts to ana-
lyse mediated activity in isolation or from a singular, decontextualised, dehumanised perspective
are always imperfect and potentially misleading.
It is then from this perspective that I argue that narrative and, more specifically, narrative as
ecology offer the potential for research to establish an adequate account of social reality and
participants’ internal thoughts and intentions (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1985) refracted through
the lenses of ongoing professional and personal identity construction. That is, narrative analysis
has the potential to ‘retain the complexity’ of activity together with the ‘emotional and motiva-
tional meaning’ inherent within such activity (Polkinghorne, 1995, p. 11). This still leaves issues
surrounding temporality in narrative that I argue we can begin to address by the configuration
of narrative as ecology because like identity, ecologies are dynamic organic systems rooted in the
present and always in a process of becoming.
Narrative as ecology
Identity or selfhood as an ongoing project in self-awareness is well established (Bauman, 2000;
Erikson, 1968; Giddens, 1991; Rogers, 1961), as is the role that narrative can play in facilitating
and signposting this process. As others note, the chronology of narrative connects events and
experiences in ways that provide contingencies for future possibilities (Andrews, 2012; Goodson,
2005; Polkinghorne, 1995; Riessman, 2008). Similarly, others have highlighted the ways in which
a narrative itself often becomes a site of new learning through the act of telling (Clandinin et al.,
2006; Goodson, 2008; Turvey, 2012). Temporality in narrative analysis operates at several levels,
from the micro-narratives of individual protagonists to the meso-narratives of communities and
place, and the macro-narratives of socio-cultural and political imperatives spawned nationally
and globally. Gill (2014) invokes Erikson’s (1968) location of selfhood and identity development
within a living web of experience and relationships where the development of identity is charac-
terized as an effortful enterprise involving the interdependency between individual personal life
histories and the social histories of place and space. This interaction between the personal and the
social, Gill argues (2014, p. 25), supports the ‘regeneration and development’ of both individuals
and their contexts in a symbiotic exchange. Goodson also draws attention to the multiple layers
of temporality that need to be taken into account in order to locate micro-level ‘stories of action’
within broader ‘theories of context’ (2013, p. 5). Goodson makes a vital distinction between life
stories, which focus on the personal, and life histories that integrate and make sense of the former
in their ‘historical and cultural backgrounds’ (2013), a process Goodson terms ‘periodisation.’
The process of periodisation can be seen as a development of Polkinghorne’s (1995) concept of
‘temporal gestalt’ in which multiple layers of temporality are synthesized into a narrative ecology
that ‘investigates the social and historical context in which these stories are enmeshed’ (Good-
son, 2013, p. 31). From this perspective the concept of a narrative ecology (Turvey, 2013) also
118
becomes a useful tool for the synthesis and configuration of a number of inter-related lenses –
biographical, contextual, temporal, spatial, political, technological – through which various macro
and meso-level narratives are ‘refracted’ or reinterpreted through the micro level of the life story.
At this juncture, however, I want also to emphasise that periodisation as conceived here (Good-
son, 2013) is not only a process undertaken by the narrative researcher. I argue that we are all charged
with the task of transforming our identity and making meaning in a modern era characterized by
‘fluidity, provisionality and instability’ (Kress, 2008, p. 339). We are all auto-ethnographers, to some
degree out of necessity. As authors of our own life stories, Hayler (2011) draws on Polkinghorne
(1988, p. 150) to remind us that we are always in the middle of our life stories ‘as we cannot be sure
where they will end.’ The synthesis of the life story with the broader life history – periodisation –
can also be seen in the context of Bruner’s construction of self through a process of self referencing
that proceeds ‘from culture to mind as well as from mind to culture’ (1990, p. 108). Others have
emphasized how states employ the technology of policy to re-mould and re-construct professional
identities through a macro to micro process of enculturation in the modern era, towards an agenda
of neo-liberal reform (Ball, 2003; Bernstein, 2000). Micro-level activity and pursuits of profes-
sionals become contingent on external political drivers as professional identity is re-constructed
to comply with the new order of performativity and accountability or, as Ball (2003, p. 217) puts
it, ‘value replaces values’ to make way for the commodification of knowledge in a competitive
market economy model of schooling. In this respect periodisation or re-periodisation is seen as a
macro-to-micro process as political structures act upon individuals. I argue here for a framing of
periodization as a bilateral process. As Loveless (2015, p. 62) notes, ‘we can answer back and go
against the grain to these wider narratives in our local lives and relationships’. That is, through
engaging with this process of periodization, we avoid the pitfall of conceptualizing narrative as an
over-simplistic linear progression of selfhood, and challenge the passive construction of identity in
response to externally imposed contingencies outside of the individual’s conscious self or control.
From a bilateral conception of periodisation, rupture in the life story becomes possible and is as
important as continuity and progression. Indeed, Goodson (2013) draws attention to how in the
modern era, the lifetime storylines of family, love, marriage and career that characterized previous
historical periods are often proving to be difficult for people to sustain, being characterized by
rupture necessitating re-construction. Rupture, I argue, is both an important catalyst and milestone
in the process of becoming, as I will explore now.
Threshold experiences and rupture

Rupture in the life story, I suggest, is characterised by the presence of threshold experiences
that set about a perturbation between the life story and the life history, casting the process
of periodization as troublesome. Others have characterised knowledge and the development
of subject-domain conceptual understanding as troublesome (Meyer & Land, 2006; Perkins,
2006). Meyer and Land (2006, p. 3) identify ‘threshold concepts’ as ‘akin to a portal, opening
up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something.’ Similarly I contend
that threshold experiences emerge from a bilateral conceptualisation of the process of peri-
odization, as we glimpse the various boundaries between our evolving life stories and the
broader life history or become aware of how our mind both proceeds to and from the wider
socio-cultural movements of our time (Bruner, 1990). As such, a threshold experience may pull
us in a new direction and arouse our intentionality as we re-evaluate our evolving life stories
and locate them within a wider socio-cultural ecology. Such re-selfing (Goodson, 2013) offers
the opportunity for a new line of flight in order to reinvent ourselves. Threshold experiences,
I contend, are also ever present, having recurring and notable significance throughout our life
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course as they endure, connecting our past with our future in ways that influence or chal-
lenge how we learn and make meaning, in the continual process of becoming and coming to
know, located firmly in the present. The concept of threshold experiences can be understood
from the perspective of Heidegger’s (1927) conceptualisation of historicality and recurrence in
which the past and our experiences of the past are always present and open to reinterpretation,
or, as Polkinghorne states, ‘The going back into the past is not a mechanical reproduction of
what has been; rather it is a fetching back of possibilities that have passed by in order to make
them real again in the present’ (1988, p. 133).
Thus the narrative whole or Gestalt is greater than the sum of past, present and future, as
these are always with us to varying degrees on the threshold of who we are becoming, making
sense of our life stories as they both accord and discord with the wider socio-cultural history of
our time. In the second half of this chapter, I focus on the analysis and significance of threshold
experiences from my own teacher-to-teacher-educator life story to illustrate the concept of
threshold experiences further.
A teacher-to-teacher-educator life story

In September 2003 I left my role as a primary school teacher of over 15 years and entered higher
education for the second time in my life, but this time as a lecturer in initial teacher education, at
a [university]. This was a significant time for me, surrounded with mixed emotions and anticipa-
tion about this new line of flight. My first attempt to go to university in the early 80s ended up
in failure as I did not get the A level results, so I left my comprehensive school in Birmingham to
do an extra year of retakes at a local 6th Form college. Many of my peers who were in this situa-
tion gave up on formal education at this point and entered the job market as their parents, unlike
my own, were either unable or unwilling to support repeated attempts to get the A level grades
to go to university. After the extra year I got into an arts college to study for a music degree. I
remember now how my parents would tell family and friends proudly that I was ‘at University’,
at which point they would ask, ‘Oh, which one?’ This was usually followed by a puzzled look on
the questioner’s face when they did not recognise the name of the arts-college-come-university,
tucked away in deepest Devon, England. Yet here I was about to take up a post in a university. I
had every intention of making the most of this new opportunity for a new trajectory in my life.
However, the intentionality and momentum with which I approached this new path had been
influenced by other factors too.
The first seven years of my teaching career were characterised more by learning than teaching.
I started in the South East coastal town of Hastings (1988) and ended up in Nepal (1993–1995)
via stints as a supply teacher in London and a period (1990–1992) as a primary school teacher in
an international school in the Middle East. I learnt a great deal about my own capacity to learn
working in Nepal. Although my attempts at learning a second language were unsuccessful at
primary and secondary school, being immersed as a VSO volunteer (Voluntary Service Overseas)
in a remote village in Nepal highlighted the significant difference between schooled language
learning and learning through total immersion in a different culture. I loved this experience of
learning to speak Nepalese and still retain some of this capability today. This time spent working
as a teacher trainer and living in Nepal has continued to resonate with me. I can recall many
experiences, but one in particular resonates strongly.
Neelam was a 10-year-old girl who lived and worked in a makeshift shack built of wood,
mud and rough thatch, next to the district education office. She spent her days delivering
tea, samosas and snacks to the ‘thulo manche’ (literal translation ‘big men’) who worked in
120
the district administration offices. When she wasn’t delivering refreshments to the offices she
looked after her baby brother, Rajendra, prepared food and washed clothes for her siblings
who were also at work. Her family were low caste and extremely poor, often having to repair
their home repeatedly during monsoon season whilst continuing to serve tea and samosas to
maintain an income. She would often visit my office, curious about the ‘bideshi’ (foreigners)
in the neighbourhood. A naïve and enthusiastic 27-year-old, I decided to try to teach Neelam
to read and write Nepali. As part of my role when I first arrived in Nepal, I’d spent three
months translating textbooks into English so that I would have an idea of what to expect when
observing and trying to support teachers in the field. I got Neelam a textbook, My Nepali, and
an exercise book. We started to practise writing and reading the phonetic sounds of various
keywords that also had illustrations to aid association between the written word and concepts
or objects. Things seemed to go quite well until Neelam stopped bringing her book. When I
asked her where it was she just gave me vague answers. She didn’t know what had happened
to it. Maybe it was lost? A few days later the mystery was solved. Neelam would always deliver
the samosas wrapped in newspaper. This day her father sent her to deliver the samosas to the
district education office wrapped in the last few pages torn out of the textbook My Nepali . . .
Neelam’s missing textbook.
I had taught Neelam very little but I had learnt a humbling lesson about the complex-
ities of learning and the assumptions we may make as teachers. I had approached the issue
of teaching Neelam to read from a purely mechanistic and cognitive perspective. What was
needed was an approach that recognised the socio-cultural complexities of Neelam and her
family’s predicament; poverty-stricken, with very little social or cultural status, due to the
cultural, social and gender inequalities of the caste system. For families such as Neelam’s,
there was little incentive to educate daughters, due to the dowry system, which encourages
the exploitation of young girls for their income-generating potential in the home economy.
In this complex socio-cultural context, a simple object such as a textbook had no meaning
as a tool with which to learn. Like Neelam herself, the textbook became absorbed into the
economic struggle of the family.
On my return from Nepal, I initially struggled to get a teaching job in a primary school
and ended up taking a post on a temporary contract for a year because, as the head teacher
explained, I had been out of the country for some time and they were ‘worried about my
knowledge of the National Curriculum.’ It seemed like the experience I had gained, working
and living abroad, becoming fluent in a foreign language, was irrelevant in the ever-narrowing
view of education. After a year, I was put on a permanent contract. In the last eight years
of my career as a primary school teacher (1995–2003), I became entrenched as a Year 6
(10–11 year olds) teacher and subsequently mathematics co-ordinator. The landscape of pri-
mary education in England had changed significantly since the beginning of my career in
1987 as a student teacher at a middle school in a Grimethorpe, South Yorkshire, still reeling
from the political strife of the Thatcher government (1979–1990) and the aftermath of the
1984–1985 miners’ strike. My last eight years coincided with the 1997 New Labour govern-
ment’s pursuit of a standards agenda through the widespread introduction of school league
tables and target setting for children’s attainment in mathematics, literacy and science. And
this was an agenda I committed to. My classroom teaching assistant and I dutifully entered
whole-school data into a Local Authority spreadsheet every year to help analyse how each
child had performed in each area of mathematics in their summative assessments. I used this
data to evaluate our teaching of the different areas of mathematics across the whole school.
Higher levels of attainment in successive annual results followed. But then things changed.
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Keith Turvey
As a school we received a letter from our ‘Schools Improvement Adviser’. The first paragraph
praised and acknowledged our efforts stating:
I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate your school on achieving its best
Key Stage 2 Level 4+ results for the past five years. We, the numeracy team, recognise
that this has been achieved through hard work, a commitment to improve and by an
increase in the level of challenge provided for pupils. Please convey our thanks to all
concerned.
The second paragraph of the same letter changed tone, focusing on a ‘need’ for a further increase
in attainment in the coming year’s tests thus:
The 2002 improvement at level 5 has closed the gap between the LEA and the national
statistic by 1% but the rate of improvement over time is still well below that of our
statistical neighbours and that achieved nationally. Boys are still more likely than girls
to achieve level 5. When placed alongside the level 4+ results the indications are that at
all levels the LEA needs a 5% increase during 2002–2003.
The letter ended with a rallying 10 ideas on how to meet the ‘LEA needs’ for a ‘5% increase
during 2002–2003’ (Figure 9.1).
This letter from the Schools Improvement Advisor initially struck some accord with me in
that it recognised that we had for some time been working hard at improving the teaching of
mathematics in our school. However, the more I read it and contemplated it, the more discord
and disaffection I began to feel about the primary school teacher I was becoming within this
historical context. I remember looking at the 2002 class list of children’s names and their math-
ematics test results. I was looking at the class list asking myself where the ‘5% increase’ that ‘the
LEA needs’ might come from? As I hesitated on the names of the children from 2002 who had
not achieved the ‘benchmark’ L4+ standard of attainment, I was reminded of the complex life
stories that lay emerging behind the test statistics and began to question whose ‘needs’ I was lis-
tening and responding to, and my very purpose as a teacher. The life stories behind the statistics
included extremes such as a recent parental suicide as well as children with varying degrees of
special educational needs, and other children experiencing complex and challenging circum-
stances beyond school.
I was and am not here looking for excuses as a teacher for why these children had not ‘per-
formed’ at this particular moment in time in this particular subject at this particular point in their
development. I knew, from my own experience as a pupil at school, the pitfalls and injustice of
making assumptions about children’s capabilities. What I felt was a challenge to my agency as a
professional teacher that prompted me to question my beliefs and purpose. I believed then, as I do
now, that the purposes of primary education are necessarily multiple, in order to meet children’s
complex and individual needs. The letter challenged my agency over the choices I made with
and about children, as a professional, in the best interests of those children to address all aspects of
their development – from the intellectual, personal and social to the moral and emotional aspects
of development. Furthermore, the tone of the letter seemed increasingly desperate to ensure the
children ‘performed’ at any costs regardless of their context or the reliability of their knowl-
edge and understanding. Even focusing narrowly on the intellectual and academic purposes
of education, the letter seemed lacking in vision and insight regarding children’s mathematical
learning and development. These 10 ideas were concerned with the superficial performance of
mathematical knowledge and understanding. Number 2 (Figure 9.1) focuses on ‘assessment’,
122
Figure 9.1 Ten ideas – Extract from School Improvement Advisor letter, October 2002
but its purpose is not to determine whether children understand the mathematical concepts
they are dealing with but to ‘find out how efficiently pupils respond to all 3 types of SAT papers
under timed conditions.’ Similarly, number 4 advises bypassing children’s difficulties in extracting
meaning from written mathematical problems by using an amanuensis rather than seeking to
address these difficulties. And number 7 advises that short-term planning ‘frequently focuses on
the mathematical content that historically pupils in your school score the least marks in’ rather
than the content that the children actually appear to be struggling conceptually to understand.
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Keith Turvey
‘Productivity targets’ were to be set during the mathematics lesson (number 5, Figure 9.1) to
ensure they were in the habit of tackling questions quickly so they could ‘complete SAT papers
in the allocated time.’ Any vision for mathematics education was becoming increasingly focused
on the Local Authority and school performance as measured by end-of-year SAT papers despite
the fact that the strategies being suggested to enhance the children’s performance could well mask
fundamental issues in their actual understanding of mathematics.
We did indeed manage another marginal increase in the Key Stage 2 mathematics results for
2003, but I felt increasingly uncomfortable as a professional about the authenticity and depth
of learning being promoted, and the marginalisation of a broad and balanced curriculum, as I
felt myself becoming increasingly focussed on extrinsically and narrowly defined performance
targets. In September 2003 I took up a post in initial teacher education.
Concluding discussion; from life story to life history

Zooming out of this brief teacher-to-teacher-educator life story, we can identify a number of
threshold experiences. In the foreground close to the point of rupture is the experience of a pri-
mary school mathematics co-ordinator and Year 6 teacher re-evaluating his professional purpose
and identity, on the brink of a new line of flight into university and initial teacher education. In
the distant background is the experience of the 6th form student struggling to get into university
and higher education. Also in the background is the experience of a student teacher who had
observed from a teacher’s perspective just some of the repercussions for communities and indi-
viduals when a mining community’s livelihood is abruptly ended. Then there is the experience
of the teacher-come-volunteer teacher trainer, immersed in and learning from a different culture
and forced to re-examine assumptions about learning, faced with the difficulties of engaging a
working child in learning to read. These threshold experiences are just some of the stories within
my teacher-to-teacher-educator story presented here. In fact my configuration of the story in
this way at this moment in time, supresses a plethora of other significant threshold experiences
that are equally entwined within my teacher-to-teacher-educator story but are too numerous to
record here in this chapter, or indeed too close for comfort at this time of writing. The support of
my parents features significantly in my own initial struggle to get into higher education and now
again as an educationalist I cannot experience the process of elderly loved ones fading through
dementia without reflecting on what it really means to know and remember; I am coming to
understand that the hardest knowledge to lose from memory is our knowledge of ourselves and
of those with whom we have shared significantly in life’s experiences – that is, our mutual stories.
But if we take the main point of rupture presented here, as the viewpoint, represented and
punctuated by my reflections on the letter from the School Improvement Adviser, we can see
how the stories within the main story and the main story itself transcend any temporal pinning
down (Andrews, 2012; Goodson, 2013). What we glimpse is a narrative ecology or stories within
stories, each with their own threshold experiences that continue to resonate and evolve in the
present. This is more than ‘a mechanical reproduction of what has been’ (Polkinghorne, 1988,
p. 133) because each threshold experience has common areas of sustained resonance and tension
as part of a living web of experiences that also transcend the life story (Gill, 2014). One such
common area between these threshold experiences is a tension between the framing of learn-
ing as a purely cognitive pursuit and a socio-culturally situated view of learning. The 6th form
student struggling to get to university situates learning in the wider context of my own family’s
aspirations and upper working class pride. The student teacher at the start of my teaching career
situates children’s learning in the wider disruption caused to family life as miners travelled further
and further afield to find work in the ever decreasing number of working pits, impacting on the
124
quality of their family and community life. The naïve VSO volunteer ignorant of, but learning
of, the gender, religious, caste, social and cultural constraints at play in trying to teach a working
child to read highlights yet again this area of resonance and tension between purely cognitive
and socio-culturally situated views of learning. And again, the Year 6 teacher and mathematics
co-ordinator story highlights this area of resonance and tension as the performativity pressures I
felt as a mathematics co-ordinator challenged my views about learning and the kind of teacher
I felt I was becoming. Each of these threshold experiences can be seen as constituent yet inter-
related parts of a configur[ing] plot (Goodson, 2005) in my own professional and intellectual
journey to understand the complexities of learning and the kind of educator I am becoming, a
journey which continues in the present.
But as well as transcending the simplistic temporal summing up of past present and future, this
teacher-to-teacher-educator life story is readily located within a broader life history (Goodson,
2013). Periodisation as a bilateral process of mind to culture and culture to mind can be detected
prominently at the point of rupture in the story. As a teacher and mathematics co-ordinator I
became aware of ‘the re-forming of relationships and subjectivities’ (Ball, 2003, p. 217) that were
contingent on the external managerial and accountability structures to which my colleagues and
I were being held to account along with our pupils. This concurs with teacher respondents in
Ball’s research and work on performativity (2003) where a sense of fabrication and inauthenticity
was a common feeling amongst professionals. That is, my own story is not merely an isolated
case but a constituent part of a much wider narrative of performativity characteristic of this
period. There can be no doubting the power of external structures to configure or re-configure
identities, professional or otherwise, and my threshold experience of trying to teach Neelam to
read is a constant reminder to me of the dehumanising and restricting powers that socio-cultural
and indeed religious structures can reproduce. But through narrating life stories and locating
them in their wider historical and socio-cultural ecologies I argue there is potential to ‘answer
back’ (Loveless, 2015) both individually and collectively to find cracks in these external structures
and contingencies, as a creeping rhizome seeks fissures and openings within its densely packed
surroundings, for the source of new life. If identity formation and learning are to be more than
merely ‘a reflection of external contingencies’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 1942) life stories need narrative
capital. Goodson argues we have shifted from a period in which politics was mainly about ‘capital
and labour to being largely about identity and sovereignty’ (Goodson, 2006, p. 10). He goes on to
illustrate how the symbolic, social and cultural capital associated with attending a school such as
Eton and then the University of Oxford no longer affords a leader such as David Cameron the
unerring legitimacy it once did. Thus Cameron, like political leaders of all persuasions, courts
the media to build their own narrative capital. Equally, the construction of narrative capital as
a bilateral process can be built from the bottom up; thus connecting and networking complex
personal and political ecologies can yield increasing narrative capital as the various political and
global shifts that have characterised the early 21st century can attest. We live in an age in which
the democratisation of media and the means to production is increasingly contested politically
and implicated in movements for social change. Castells (2012), for example, characterises Spain’s
2011 Indignadas movement at a time of political and economic crisis in Europe as a rhizo-
matic revolution ‘of multiple rich discourses’ in which ‘meaningful words and poetic expres-
sions constituted a language ecosystem expressive of new subjectivities’ (Castells, 2012, p. 125).
New subjectivities can be intrinsically and collaboratively generated through narrative, acquiring
increasing capital through their location within the wider political discourse and ecosystem. The
combination of narrative connected to the broader political ecosystem and employed for ‘wider
social purpose’ (Goodson, 2013, p. 129), with the digital tools of a networked age could prove a
powerful vehicle for shaping a more equitable and democratic future. It would be naïve to suggest
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Keith Turvey
such futures are within easy reach, as they will depend inter alia on sustained access to resources,
personal and community intent, and sustained collaboration. But it is beyond question that nar-
rative remains the optimum medium available to us as humans for communicating and sharing
the near fullness of how we experience the world as individuals and communities, and therefore
how we may act upon it to realise more sustainable and equitable shared futures.
I opened this chapter with what I think is a provocative quotation to those who believe in the
potential of narrative research. It’s not that questions about the past and future are ‘totally useless’
but Deleuze and Guattari (1988) are, I believe, inviting us to build narrative capital through the
actions we take in the present, which is what matters most. Questions about the past or future
must not become dislocated from the present. Similarly, life stories must not become dislocated
from their wider life histories (Goodson, 2013). It is through periodization and conceptualising
narrative within an ecology that we can gain insight into and challenge where necessary, the
wider socio-cultural and political movements of our time. Such insights build narrative capital
and provide an important culture of resistance against individual dislocation and parochialism.
The risks of dislocation and parochialism are high and are all too visible as I write this chapter.
In May 2015, people from many countries commemorated the 70th anniversary of Victory in
Europe (VE Day). Ironically, at the same time, the newly elected Conservative government in the
UK began implementing its manifesto plan to withdraw the UK from the European convention
on human rights (ECHR) and scrap the Human Rights Act (Conservative Party, 2015). The sto-
ries of our forefathers and mothers who fought for the fragile freedoms that still only some of us
enjoy are as important today as they ever were. Parochialism and dislocation of the past and future
from the present are significant risks to be avoided at all cost if narrative research is to play its
proper role in learning and development for social good. Stories do not speak for themselves but
need locating personally, socially, culturally, historically and politically if renewal is to be realised.
This is a vital role to be played by those engaged in research. That research must set people’s nar-
ratives within a broader historical understanding; otherwise, they remain uncoupled, politically
manipulable stories, which become increasingly difficult for us to know and understand.
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PART II
Methodological and
sociological approaches
Introduction
IN SEARCH OF LIFE HISTORY
Ari Antikainen
university of eastern finland
Introduction
Life experiences constitute the basis for individual and group development. Thus, it is natural to
assume that studying life histories would be common in the sociology of education or at least
more common than in most other fields of sociology. However, that is not the case (Antikainen,
2003). Our educational sociology research group decided to study the meanings of education
in Finnish people’s life just for the reason that the hypothetical social effects of education were
known but the meanings of education in individual and group life were largely uncovered sub-
ject in empirical research. We formed our research questions by our empowered voice in the
following way:
“We are investigating intersubjective social reality by means of a qualitative logic, and
not statistical representativeness. We are using a biographical method, namely a life-history
approach with a life-story interview and a thematic interview as our methods (Denzin, 1989;
Goodson, 1992; Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918–1920). According to our theoretical framework,
the meaning of education can be analyzed on three levels, by the following three restricting
questions:
(1) How do people use education in constructing their life-courses and life-histories?
(2) What do educational and learning experiences mean in the production and
formation of individual and group identity?
(3) What sort of significant learning experiences do Finns have in the different
stages of their lives? Do these experiences originate in school, work, adult study
or leisure-time pursuits? What is the substance, form and social context of
significant learning experiences?”
(Antikainen et al., 1995, p. 296; 1996, p. 9)
Which influences and experiences led us to this new path? In the European social philosophical
debate, Jürgen Habermas was the first gate opener. Habermas makes distinction between tech-
nical and hermeneutic interest in his theory of knowledge interests and the distinction between
system and life world in his theory of communicative action (Habermas, 1971, 1987). We realized
that the analysis of social reality is insufficient without the participant’s point of view. In fact, it
was indicated in Max Weber’s theory of social action.
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Ari Antikainen
The return to studies of the Chicago School, well-known from the textbooks of the history
of sociology, made our next step possible as we updated our understanding of their studies. The
Polish Peasant in Europe and America by Thomas and Znaniecki (1918–1920) is a classic of life his-
tory in sociology, a study that each generation of sociologists has to know and to take a stand on.
While Thomas’ and Znaniecki’s work deals ostensibly with ethnic identity and subculture, from
a more general perspective it studies the relationship between social order and life experiences in
the context of social transformation, connecting Znaniecki’s theory of social values with Thomas’
social psychology of individual attitudes. Since its publication the work has been misinterpreted
and misunderstood on various occasions (Denzin, 1986).
Upon its publication, The Polish Peasant was generally evaluated as a master work but at the
same time – and even by the same reviewers – it was seriously criticized. Norman Denzin (1986,
p. 64) summarizes the criticism that relies on two key arguments. First, much of the criticism
argued that theory and empirical data did not meet each other in the work. Second, the use of
life stories as empirical “data” was criticized. Even Herbert Blumer (1949, p. 7), a spokesman of
symbolic interactionism, made, among other issues, the following assessment:
A method which permits us to determine only cases of stereotyped activity and leaves
us helpless in face of changed conditions is not a scientific method at all, and becomes
even less and less practically useful with the continual increase of fluidity in modern
social life.
The reviewers’ misunderstanding of The Polish Peasant was connected with the way in which they
analyzed the position of subjective data and subjective factors in theories of individual and social
action. Thomas and Znaniecki were searching for a solution to the problem of causal explana-
tion in such cultural sciences as sociology and social psychology and tried to answer the question
why by using qualitative data. As pioneers within their disciplines, they were unable to question the
dominating positivist model. If they had chosen to do so, they would have questioned the sci-
entific nature of their new and rising disciplines at the same time. Under these circumstances
they acknowledged the criticism as legitimate. According to Denzin (1986), The Polish Peasant
offers grounds for a re-interpretation. It can be viewed in relation to Mills’s (1959) idea of the
connection of sociological biography and history or in relation to argumentation concerning the
nature and characteristics of interpretative and hermeneutic research. While it does not fulfil all
the conditions of Millsian sociology or those of more recent understanding and interpretative
sociology, it can be reinterpreted in their light.
Florian Znaniecki (1928–1930) published also a two-volume textbook on the sociology of
education. The first volume was subtitled “Educative society” and the second volume “Forming
the Educand”. Unfortunately, it has not been translated from Polish. Jan Wlodarek (1994) and
Elzbieta Halas (1998) have discussed the book, and Znaniecki’s programme of the sociology of
education in general. In their view, Znaniecki’s sociological thinking is located between G.H.
Mead’s symbolic interactionism and Talcott Parsons’s sociology. The concept of the humanistic
coefficient forms both the foundation of Znaniecki’s humanistic theory of culture and his system
of sociology. The term refers to his view that participants’ experiences should always be included
as a part of the analysis of the meaning of social action. Also his perspective on education as a
process, which “prepares for an innovative participation in culture” (Halas, 1998, p. 10), justifies
such approaches as life history. Unfortunately, Znaniecki’s ideas did not spread widely among the
contemporary researchers of education.
The second wave of immigration to the United States meant an immigration of people from
different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. American researchers became interested in the ways
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In search of life history
that people socialized in different circumstances employ to cope with and survive in their new
environment. The studies analyzed often social problems such as juvenile delinquency, crime,
drug use and homelessness, but also the urban ecology of ethnic groups (Becker, 1970,
pp. 63–73). It is also possible to recognize the influence of the European humanistic tradition in
these works by the Chicago School. Theoretically these case studies were often based on G.H.
Mead’s (1934) social psychology, and the methods used combined observation, personal documents
and open interviews. Howard Becker’s (1952) study on teachers’ careers represents this approach
very well, and Boys in White (1961), a study of medical students, is an outright masterpiece.
In general, however, the direction of the development became quite different in the 1940s and
since. Abstract theories and data which used those abstract concepts and classifications rather than
the concepts and categories that were used by or were meaningful for the people under study
corresponded to the ideals of the dominant positivist model. Also among the Chicago School
the primary interest focused on the processes and situations, not on life history (Goodson, 2001,
pp. 133–6).
Return of life history: New understanding

and interpretative directions in the 1970s and 1980s
The decline of life history studies continued until the mid-1960s. Biographical and life history
methods were not entirely abandoned but as they were used, for instance, in pilot studies or as
illustrations, and they did not emerge as established primary methods. In Finland, for example,
the life history method was applied in a noteworthy study on Karelian immigrant families who
were evacuated from the areas ceded to the Soviet Union following the Second World War and
settled in the countryside and cities elsewhere in Finland (Waris et al., 1952).
The 1970s was a period when positivism was critiqued, and qualitative methods became legit-
imate and more popular. Paul Thompson, a pioneer of oral history, published The Voice of Past:
Oral History in 1978, Daniel Bertaux edited the collection Biography and Society in 1981, and the
Research Committee of Biography was established at the International Sociological Association.
At this time Finnish studies dealt mostly with generations and the way of life (Roos, 1986).
Life history recovered, albeit slowly, also in the sociology of education. Yet, such excellent
ethnographic studies as Philip Jackson’s Life in Classroom (1968) or in Philip Woods’s Sociology
and the School: Interactionist Viewpoint (1983) did not use the life history method. At the turn of
the 1970s and 1980s, Ivor Goodson was the first scholar to restore life history in the sociology of
education. Goodson (1992, 2001) has analyzed teachers’ biographies in connection with social
history. For him, life history means a biography that is located in its historical and social context,
a definition and perspective that also our research group used. Teachers’ life stories have been
a rather common subject in life history studies (Ball & Goodson, 1985; Sikes et al., 1985). The
first reason for this is probably the difficulty to distinguish between the public and the private
in teaching. The second reason is to give a “voice” to the teachers and further to the students as
well. It became crucial, especially in the analysis of gender, social class and “race” to give a voice
to hidden or silenced lives.
In addition to social class and “race” or ethnicity, gender has emerged as a central subject both
in life course studies and life histories (Antikainen & Komonen, 2003, p. 153; Cruikshank et al.,
1990; Nyman, 2005), and silenced female voices were raised from the private sphere to the public
one (Gordon et al., 2008; MacDonald (later Arnot), 1980; Middleton, 1988; Personal Narratives
Group, 1989). Nordic researchers have been pioneers in this field (see Bjerén & Elgqvist-Saltzman,
1994). Since the theories and models in life course studies and life histories have been based
mainly on male lives, the concepts and models are not fully suitable for the analysis of female
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Ari Antikainen
lives because the fields of action, commitment and opportunities are different in female and male
lives. The analysis and interpretation of female lives require an approach in which the life course
or life history is understood as an integrated unity and which also includes the analysis of both
the so-called productive factors (education and work) and reproductive factors (family).
Why did it take so long to restore biography and life history in the sociology of education?
According to Goodson (2001, p. 136), the reasons for this can be found in the new trends of the soci-
ology of education. First, in the so-called new sociology of education or social phenomenology –
later called social constructionism – only few empirical studies were conducted (see Berger &
Luckmann, 1966; Young, 1971). Second, in contemporary symbolic interactionism – or in inter-
actionism in general – it was the situation, not life history, that became the central focus of inter-
est. While for G.H. Mead (1934) action, also with its historical dimension, was central, Herbert
Blumer (1969) narrowed the analysis to the study of interaction here and now. Denzin (1992)
calls the 1970s in symbolic interactionism a period of ethnography. I also would like to suggest
that many of the representatives of the new trends were very busy, if not impatient, reforming
the educational system and practices that they did not have the time to collect life stories and
analyze life histories. In addition, Goodson (1988, p. 78) refers to problems connected with the
researchers’ status. When he presented his paper at a conference in the early 1980s, a colleague
specializing in classroom interaction suggested the use of life history to be abandoned by pre-
senting the following argument: ‘We should not suggest new methodologies of this sort . . .
because of the problem of our academic careers. Christ! Ethnography is low status enough as it
is’ (Goodson, 1988, p. 78).
The macrolevel analysis of social mobility and human capital has long dominated the field of
the sociology of education. Its results have been even interpreted as a message claiming that the
tight coupling of the educational system and social reproduction make studies based on social
action theories and micro level analysis useless. Life history studies have played a central role in
invalidating this argument.
After the late modern or postmodern turn

The postmodern conditions (Lyotard, 1979) or the impacts of the reflexive late modernization
(Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991) meant a transformation in the direction and subjects of research.
In addition to the objective world, the formation of subjectivities became a recognized subject
of interest. Subjective, multiple and partial human experiences opened up for analysis (Goodson,
2001, p. 137). In individualizing society, many social identities such as social class, gender, genera-
tion and “race” are less coherent than before, and the production and reproduction of social iden-
tities is realized on the individual, subjective level. Therefore also societal analysis has returned to
study the world of individual experiences and life histories.
In the field of adult education, researchers of the European Society for Research on the Edu-
cation of Adults (ESREA) have actively pursued biographical and life history research (Alheit et al.,
1995). Their work also shows the long tradition of European biographical research, a tradition
that is, in fact, longer than the history of sociological research and has several national variants.
Over the years the meaning of biography and life history has become a challenge for adult
education. Many of its practitioners have recognized the capacity offered by biographicity, bio-
graphical knowledge and biographical qualifications to education and learning. The importance
of lifelong learning, application of social learning in innovation systems, meaning of informal or
everyday learning and the questions on identity and otherness are all examples of such thinking.
Peter Alheit (Alheit, 1999; Alheit et al.,1995) has addressed the biographication of social struc-
tures. In his view the social environment of learning has transformed in the western world in at
134
least three respects: traditional life worlds have deteriorated, milieux based on social classes have
broken up and “normal” biographies have disappeared (Alheit, 1999). What does this tendency
mean to biographicity and biographical learning? Alheit et al. (1994, p. 65) expresses his view
in the following way: ‘Biographicity means that we can redesign again and again, from scratch,
the contours of our life within the specific contexts in which we (have to) spend it, and that we
experience these contexts as “shapeable” and designable.’
Thus, we always have “the potential of unlived lives”, a potential that we use especially in
life transitions and turns to make new plans. Biographical learning can be seen even as the new
paradigm of the practices of adult education, yet it is to be distinguished from training and ther-
apy. In other words, biographical activity has also become more difficult as it is also a means of
constructing new environments.
The results of our research group from studies on education and learning in the lives of Finn-
ish people in general and especially those dealing with their “significant learning experiences”
parallel the foundations of biographical learning (Antikainen, 1998). In our studies the notion of
a significant learning experience describes an experience which has changed an individual’s life
course and life history by transforming and/or strengthening her/his identity. All of the people
participating in our interviews had had such experiences. Very often a significant learning expe-
rience had meant empowerment, and we studied its quality and length as well as the situation
in which it had occurred. It was always easy to locate personal and social relations supporting
learning, and we called these relations the significant others of learning.
Both the researchers studying biographical learning, such as Alheit, and our group have argued
that in addition to an action theoretical perspective also a structural perspective – in practice, life
course analysis – is needed. These approaches with their emic and etic perspectives supplement
each other (Antikainen & Komonen, 2003, p. 143). For instance, in our study on educational
generations in Finland, we advanced from educational cohorts based on age (“reality”), to the
experience of each cohort (“experience”) and further to the expressions of those experiences
(“narrative”). As our outcome we proposed a Mannheimian typology of generations: “the gen-
eration of war and scant education” (born 1935 or earlier) to which education was “an ideal”,
the generation of structural change and growing educational opportunities” (born 1936–1955)
to which education was “a tool” and “the generation of welfare and many educational choices”
(born 1956 and later) to which education was “a commodity or self evident” (Antikainen &
Kauppila, 2002; Kauppila, 2002). The educational narratives of all these generations were survival
stories, but this was particularly emphasized in the narratives of the older generations.
In life history research it is possible to aim at social theory analysis by investigating the social
context. Our research group has tried to do so by examining the interviews in the light of
Manuel Castells’s theory of information society and paying particular attention to the place it
allots to identity (Antikainen & Harinen, 2007; Castells & Himanen, 2002). Subsequently the
question of what kind of project identities are available in emerging information society gains
particular interest from the perspective of educational policy (Antikainen & Harinen, 2007,
pp. 335–6).
The case of Finland

Dale Dannefer (2012, p. 633) reminds that “‘making science’ is a human process, located in a
specific sociohistorical space, within the broader everyday life processes through which society
in continuously reconstituted.” Finnish society has been characterized by rapid structural changes
that have produced social generations in the Mannheimian sense of the term and whose life expe-
riences are different (see Purhonen, this volume). As a result, it is not surprising that as a member
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Ari Antikainen
of the baby boomers I wish to examine the social and cultural context of Finnish life histories in
the light of transformations and generations.
In recent years the Nordic countries – i.e., the Scandinavian countries Sweden, Denmark,
and Norway, and their neighbours Finland and Iceland – have performed extremely well in
various comparative international surveys and studies measuring such issues as economy, edu-
cation, innovativeness, and happiness. In the case of Finland, this is a product of a long history.
Finland became independent in 1917 after being a part of Sweden for hundreds of years and,
since 1809, an autonomous grand duchy of Russia. In the years 1866–1868 the country suffered
from a great famine like many other European nations, and the 1930s was characterized by an
economic depression, which remained quite short because of the first Keynesian actions aiming
at the formation of the welfare state.
The Winter War (1939–1940) and the Continuation War (1941–1944) were significant
sources of changes and experiences. While before the Winter War the Finns were strongly
divided into two political factions, the “whites” and the “reds”, i.e. the bourgeoisie who won
the Civil War of 1918 and the supporters of the workers’ parties who had lost, the war united the
nation also through “the January Engagement.” In January 1940, the employers’ central organi-
zation STK gave a public declaration recognizing the trade unions and their central organization
SAK as the negotiation partners in issues related to the labour market. Both parties agreed that
in future they seek to find agreement through negotiations, which is an early sign of the for-
mation of the basic requisites of the Nordic welfare state in Finland.
The experiences of those who had fought in the war were dealt with in Väinö Linna’s novel
Unknown Soldiers (1954/2015), first criticized by the elite but soon accepted by the whole
nation. Unknown Soldiers is written from the perspective of the ordinary soldiers and reveals their
informal organization and informal norms in the conditions of war. The resisting attitude of the
Finnish soldier, his “petty insubordination”, was one of the most significant factors increasing
willingness to fight. On surface, an army involved in warfare appeared as a rather undisciplined
group: one of the dominant norms since the beginning of the war was that officers “are not
greeted formally in the frontline”. Knut Pipping’s ethnographic dissertation (1947/2012) –
which was apparently unknown to Linna – had presented the same view, and in Pipping’s words
Linna’s novel was a sociological study as a well as a fictional work. Both Pipping and Linna were
non-commissioned officers in their respective machine gun companies.
Linna has remarked in a later interview that the Winter War was the most positive one of all
the wars that Finland had fought because in it both parties won. Yet Finland won less, as the coun-
try had to cede some of its areas to the Soviet Union, and in the Continuation War Finland’s losses
were much clearer. After the war had been lost but national independence remained, the Finnish
government sought to strengthen social integration and secure the livelihood of the nation’s pop-
ulation by giving them “frontsoldier” farms and houses. As stated in the Land Acquisition Act
in 1945, small holding farms were formed for former soldiers, families of the deceased, and the
people evacuated from areas ceded to the Soviet Union. This was Finland’s most significant land
reform and, as a result, Finland remained an agrarian society for several more years.
As agreed in the peace agreement following the Second World War, parts of Finland – Karelia
in particular – were annexed to the Soviet Union. Culturally Karelia is the region where for
instance most of the poems constituting The Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, have been collected.
The annexation of these areas led to the evacuation of over 400,000 people – more than 10%
of the nation’s population – across the new border and the birth of evacuation narratives telling of
the journey. After the Second World War, the evacuation journey has started to characterize the
memory work of evacuated Karelians maybe more than any other topic. An early large study
(Waris et al., 1952) addresses the experience of the evacuees in the form of a story telling of two
136
families, one of them resettling in the countryside of Inner Finland, one in a town in the South
of Finland.
In addition to adults, children’s experiences from the evacuation journey have also been stud-
ied through narratives collected in a national call for writing reminiscences and memories on the
topic (Savolainen, 2015). In the view of Savolainen (2015), for the child evacuees, the childhood
home is remote in time and place, and this distance is addressed in their reminiscences by con-
structing and reflecting on the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. Their
memories are linked with concrete markers such as objects, documents, places, bodily memories,
and meaningful narratives, which form bundles and crystallizations of desynchronized memories.
Meanings linked with food and social relationship are also addressed, and central issues include
children’s dependence on adults, their role in family and peer group, and the evacuees’ depend-
ence on the bene- or malevolence of other people. In Savolainen’s (2015) view, three different
narrative strategies can be identified in narrative reminiscing: truth and history oriented strategy,
reflexive narrative strategy, and literary narrative strategy.
The post-war period was an era of transforming economic structures. The number of
blue-collar workers and white-collar employees increased, and unemployed accumulated in
agrarian Northern and Eastern Finland. By the end of the 1960s, this structural change and the
related migration had led to the so-called Great Migration, i.e. migration from the countryside
to the urban centres of Southern Finland and Sweden. The number of Finns who emigrated to
Sweden is ca. 300,000. The response to the change included new economic and labour force
policies as well as the construction of the welfare state. In the Nordic model services and income
redistributions were made available to all citizens on the basis of the universal principle of social
rights. They were produced by the public sector and their level was relatively high internationally.
The proportion of private health care, insurance, and especially education was marginal. Eco-
nomically the Nordic welfare state was based on large participation in the labour market and low
unemployment. Originally the notion of the Nordic model was used by social policy researchers,
but it has become a central concept in other fields as well. The discussion and research on the
Nordic educational model has started relatively late, and the work of our research group was part
of this increasing interest in its features.
J.P. Roos (1986) initiated the sociological study of post-war generations. He distinguished
between four generations: (i) the “Generation of war and depression” born in the early 1900s,
(ii) the “Generation of reconstruction” born in the 1920s and 1930s, (iii) the “Generation of
the transformation” born during the Second World war and immediately after it, and (iv) the
“Suburban generation” born in the 1950s. Changing society and everyday life had generated the
experience of each generation.
When our research group started its studies of the significance of education in the meaning
of people’s lives in the 1990s, we were still living in a period when the representatives of the elite
criticized harshly the Finnish education system and its comprehensive school in particular. In
their view the Finnish comprehensive school was at very low level internationally. This criticism
was based on their resistance to the idea of comprehensive school and its aim of promoting social
equality, as they were thought to be obstacles to the school performance of talented children and
adolescents. The success of Finnish pupils in the OECD’s PISA studies has surprised the elite, and
it has made them at least officially supporters of the Finnish version of the Nordic comprehensive
school model.
However, the high importance of education for the development of the entire nation and its
citizens has been an observation and a narrative that has been accepted unequivocally both by
the elite and the wider populace. One of the first phases of this story is the birth of the Finn-
ish nation-state in the late 1800s. At the time Finnish folk culture was made possible by the
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Ari Antikainen
increasing use of the Finnish language and the triumph of folk movements, the printing press,
and education. The words of the national philosopher J.V. Snellman, “Civilization guarantees
the existence of a small nation,” have lived until today. The fact that education was considered
as an ideal by the representatives of the “war generation with scant education” who were born
before 1935, is in fact a marker of the importance of nation and “patriotism” amongst them.
Life in their view was typically conceived of as “a struggle.” For the “generation of structural
change with growing educational opportunities”, born in the years 1936–1955, education was
“a means” and “work the central meaning of life.” For the youngest generation, born in 1956
and later, defined as the “welfare generation with many educational choices,” education was “a
commodity” or something “taken for granted”: for them “one’s own identity was a problem”
and “hobbies the meaning of life.” These three educational generations and their characteristics
can be seen in Table P2.1 (Antikainen & Kauppila, 2002, p. 210; Kauppila, 2002).
After our study, researchers examining the youngest generations from the perspective of social
change and individual experience have decided to name the youngest generations as the “welfare
generation” and the “generation of individual choice” (Hoikkala & Paju, 2008). The compre-
hensive school, debated for decades and implemented gradually in the course of several years
(1972–1977) and in waves starting from the North and later reaching the South, was the central
educational context of this generation. An experience shared by the young and the entire pop-
ulation alike is the economic depression of the early 1990s – which was relatively seen deeper
in Finland than the Great Depression of the 1930s – and Finland’s subsequent rise through the
Table P2.1 Typology of educational generations
War generation with Generation of structural Welfare generation

scant education (–1935) change with growing with many educational
educational opportunities choices (1956–)
(1936–1955)
EDUCATION AS EDUCATION AS A EDUCATION AS
AN IDEAL MEANS TO CAREER A COMMODITY
PROGRESSION OR AS TAKEN
FOR GRANTED
“REALITY” Structure of Scant opportunities Educational Many educational
opportunities, events of for education, war, opportunities increase, opportunities, welfare
history, educational system parallel school system structural change, a state, economic recession,
(1921–1957) new parallel school unemployment,
system (1958–1975) comprehensive school
system (1975–)
“EXPERIENCE” Material experiential Institutional experiential Symbolic experiential
How experiences are made environment has central environment has environment has central
meaningful, experiential importance, situations central importance, importance, education is
environment, quality and of distress, intensive education has considered a commodity
duration of experiences experiences, struggle, instrumental meanings and taken for granted
education as an ideal
“EXPRESSION” Work, breadwinning, Work has central Several choices of
Contents and emphasis war connects stages importance in people’s educational institutes,
of narration, stages of of life lives, work and education self-searching, own
life, ways of approaching become more linked identity and hobbies
the narratives have central importance
138
creation and marketing of information technology best exemplified in the case of Nokia in the
late 1990s. In this way, the information society made possible the maintenance of the welfare state
that produced healthy and well educated people, whose lives were made meaningful by Finland’s
distinguishable national culture. The 2000s have been characterized by economic and political
difficulties of the European Union.
The media have been more active than the researchers and have provided a great wealth of
young generation terms, such as “generation zero”, “unknown generation”, “lost generation”,
“TV generation”, “city generation”, “generation X”, “green generation”, “ecogeneration”,
“bread and butter pudding generation”, “ecstasy generation”, “rave generation”, “rap genera-
tion”, “hip hop generation”, “skateboard generation”, “slump generation”, “EU generation”,
“technogeneration”, “global generation”, “Attack generation”, “historyless generation”, “fatless
generation”, “generation with language skills”, “culinary generation”, “generation me”, “gen-
eration why”, “Nokia generation”, “digital generation”, “pill generation”, “thumb generation”,
and “gay generation” (Hoikkala & Paju, 2008, p. 293). In other words, the media and business
create generations from their own limited interests. However, it is good to remember that not
all of the most provocative generalizations presented by researchers stand up to critical scrutiny.
Life is deeply every day life.
Our research group interviewed Finns on topics related to their lives several times. As I have
mentioned above, in-depth interviews dealt with significant learning experiences in particular.
What kind of contexts have generated for instance empowering learning experiences? Examples
of them are seen in the following four categories: (i) coping with widowhood, divorce, or unem-
ployment through education and learning, (ii) transitions from physical labour in rural setting to
white-collar urban work, often combined with health problems, (iii) in the case Sami or other
ethnic minorities, successful education amongst the dominant culture and return to defend one’s
own minority culture, and (iv) the realization of a social or personal dream as a representant of a
social movement or an alternative life style (Antikainen, 1998).
An old Sami man told his interviewer that “Masters and Doctors may have identities but I
don’t!” The answer may have been partly a result of language difficulties, but in any case it was
wrong. He had a very clear sense of identity. In contrast, in late modern culture an individual
is a relational and dynamic being that is constantly reconstructed in different institutions, social
relations, discourses, and practices. As a result, there is no stable and undividable core of identity.
To cope with the life course and its transitions, individuals need resources that can be defined
as identity capital (Cote, 1996). This has been the course of development also in Finnish society
since the 1980s.
Conclusion
As I have suggested sociological life history research started at turn of the nineteenth and twen-
tieth century in the context of social and cultural transformation. The rise of quantitative meth-
odology and its supreme status as more “scientific” than qualitative methodology suppressed
the development of biographical and life history research for a long time. In the sociology of
education, the recovery of hermeneutic and interpretative research, i.e. the emergence of the so
called new sociology of education, did not directly mean any significant rise in the research of
life history. However, the rise of gender studies and studies of diverse ethnic groups increased the
use of the life history approach, which has finally gained its proper place along the transition to
postmodern or late modern society.
Once again, social change and the change of scientific culture related to social change are
rewriting the methods of social sciences. It is possible to suggest, at least from the perspective of
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Ari Antikainen
a life history researcher, that life history is now receiving its appropriate place. I should also like
to hope that life course research and life history research would meet each other again.
The following chapters: The search advances

The following chapters expand and deepen this sociological and methodological review.
I am delighted and proud to be able to provide a short introduction to these significant
contributions.
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman argues in Chapter 10, “The Quest for Lived Truths: Modifying
Methodology”, that the cornerstone of narrative and life history research in the search for the
“lived truth” is the interplay between the researcher and her/his subjects. Starting from an anal-
ysis of Norbert Elias, Imre Lakatos and other prominent scholars in the field, the essay continues
towards the stage of the current and future information and network society where greater
transparency and inclusiveness is expected from social science research.
In Chapter 11, “Analyzing Novelty and Pattern in Institutional Life Narratives”, Jaber
Gubrium and James Holstein examine the construction of life narratives in the today’s world
saturated with institutions such as schools, work organizations, churches, human service agencies,
clinics, team sports and many others. The authors begin their exploration from George Herbert
Mead’s pragmatic ideas. Ethnomethodology and ethnography assist in the formation of analytical
concepts and in the analysis of “biographical work”, as also seen in some case studies presented.
The essay shows that novelty and pattern are present in all biographical work.
Semi Purhonen presents in Chapter 12, “Zeitgeist, Identity and Politics: The Modern Mean-
ing of the Concept of Generation”, a historical account of the concept of social generation and
evaluates its diverse uses. The history of the concept is linked to specific social changes that
occurred after the First World War and in the 1960s, and its classical theorist is Karl Mannheim.
In Purhonen’s view a generation has always also an author, and the use of the concept is not
entirely unproblematic.
Irini Siouti shows in Chapter 13, “Biography as a Theoretical and Methodological Key
Concept in Transnational Migration Studies”, how the biographical and historical approach is
an excellent way to explore the construction and nature of transnational migration as it allows
a broader mode of examination than the traditional inquiry attached to the nation-state. In her
essay Siouti refers to numerous German studies on the topic in particular.
Jopi Nyman explores in Chapter 14, “Culinary Border Crossings in Autobiographical Writ-
ing: The British Asian Case”, certain cultural border crossings in biographical writing to show
that the subject is a special but also for many a familiar everyday life phenomenon. Nyman’s
materials consist of texts by three South Asian diasporic writers, and he shows how the presenta-
tion of the culinary is a matter of negotiating cultural identity.
In Chapter 15, “Biographical and Narrative Research in Iberoamerica: Emergence, Develop-
ment and State Fields”, Antonio Bolivar describes and evaluates the rich history of the research
field in Latin America and Southern Europe. The origins, development and variety of this field
are presented in a nutshell with particular reference to Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Vene-
zuela, Peru, Columbia, Costa Rica, Spain and Portugal.
The starting points of Henning Salling Olesen’s chapter, “A Psycho-Societal Approach to
Life Histories”, are in its author’s long experience from the study of adult learning processes,
life histories and subjective experiences. In a kind of learning story of his research work, Olesen,
interested in the culturally mediated and sensory aspects of experience processes, wants to chal-
lenge the dichotomy between the social and the psychic, as well as that between Marxist and
hermeneutic research.
140
Karolina Dudek examines in Chapter 17, “Working-Life Stories”, this particular genre of life
stories and places special emphasis on their research methodology and methods. Dudek’s essay
can be read as a narrative of how a researcher of the working life examines, under the guidance of
Barbara Czarniawaska and other prominent scholars, the modern life-world and its one segment
or sub-universe in particular by applying the life history approach.
Amy Shuman’s chapter, “Culturally Available Narratives in Parents’ Stories about Disability”,
starts from the idea that the finding of culturally available narratives can be a fundamental part of
managing life experience. Based on a number of ethnographic studies dealing with families with
disabled children, the essay examines how the parents position themselves in their narratives, the
dimensions of tellability and the production of available narratives.
In Chapter 19, “Researching Higher Education Students’ Biographical Learning”, Agnieszka
Bron examines the use and application of longitudinal narrative interviews, as well as their
advantages and difficulties, in the study of the learning of higher education students. Bron shows
what kind of methodological and theoretical considerations and what research steps are needed
if new theoretical conclusions are to be reached. In so doing Bron also consider the position of
biographical work.
Marianne Horsdal describes in Chapter 20, “The Narrative Interview – Method, Theory and
Ethics”, how she applies the methodology and methods of narrative research that she has learned
during the 25 years of her research career. Underlining that she has received her learning from
interviewees, not only her teachers and research literature, Horsdal suggests that each narrative
life history is capable of broadening our horizons and frames of understanding.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the contributors and Ivor Goodson, Jopi Nyman, Jarmo Houtsonen and Elizabeth
Briggs for their support.
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10
THE QUEST FOR
LIVED TRUTHS
Modifying methodology
university of haifa
Introduction
In the preface to the first edition of the Handbook of Qualitative Research, Denzin and Lincoln
(1994, p. 9) allow that the
field of qualitative research is far from a unified set of principles promulgated by net-
worked groups of scholars. In fact, we have discovered that the field of qualitative research
is defined primarily by a series of essential tensions, contradictions, and hesitations. These
tensions work back and forth among competing definitions and conceptions of the field.
While the term ‘methodology’ is generally understood to stand for a cluster of well-established
practices governed by uncontested, perhaps even uncontestable, conventions, the literature shows
that this understanding does not apply to research projects in narrative and life history. Although
these are sometimes carried out according to a preplanned inflexible design, there is no consen-
sus that compels a commitment to such types of work. As a result many researchers dedicate a
significant proportion of their texts not only to explanations of what they have done but also to
apologies for deviations from ‘the rules’. This chapter argues that an examination of significant
works in the field provides convincing evidence that practices must be modified in order to
uncover ‘lived truths’. It would seem that the interplay between the researcher and the subjects
whose stories she is striving to understand is not only decisive in shaping and re-shaping meth-
odologies. It is the cornerstone of the field.
Dilemmas of research in the social sciences

Sources of the differentiation noted can perhaps be traced to differences among philosophers of
science as to the viability and the validity of research in the social sciences all together.
The development of science has frequently been seen as a subject for merely historical
study, whereas science as the object of systematic philosophical investigation has been
seen as in an eternal, unchanging state. The approach advocated here avoids this naïve
144
The quest for lived truths
dichotomy. It is neither systematic nor historical in the traditional sense of these con-
cepts. The development of scientific knowledge, whether about “nature” or “society”,
must itself be regarded as a transition to a new phase in the general human quest for
knowledge; only then can it be itself investigated and defined theoretically . . . This
development has many aspects and can vary enormously in detail. But it is possible to
establish the direction of any such development with some precision . . . Whenever the
vocabulary of a society is found to contain concepts expressing ideas about an imper-
sonal, self-regulating and self-perpetuating nexus of events, it is certain that they are
descended in unbroken line from other concepts implying a personal nexus of events.
In every case the personal was the point of departure.
(Elias, 1978, p. 55)
There are all sorts of standards designed to make the social sciences respectable, and yet
they are not. The social sciences are on a par with astrology, it is no use beating about
the bush. (Funny that I should be teaching at the London School of Economics!)
(Lakatos, 1999, p. 107)
La monopolization de la science que la claire distinction de ce qui est science et de ce

qui ne l’est pas, relèvent d’un dogmatisme antiscientifique.1
(Morin, 1968, p. 5)
Writing in the 1970s at the close of the youth rebellions of the 1960s, Elias and Lakatos each
attempted to summarize criteria for assessing the social sciences. In his charming attempt to
present a comprehensive picture of what sociology is, Elias (1978) took on the challenging task
of institutionalizing sociology. With this as his theme, he carried out an in-depth foundational
study of the concepts and the methods that enable sociologists to reach some semblance of
veracity about how human beings perform in perpetually shifting configurations. While Elias
does not doubt the scientific significance of research into the social, he locates their meaning
broadly as part of a new historical phase in the ‘general human quest’ for knowledge, a quest that
ultimately derives from ‘personal nexus of events’. Thus, he explains, contemporary sociological
research must be seen in context as a facet of the development of the nation-state, and a natural
parallel to the increasing ‘scientificization’ of control over nature. At the time of writing he saw
research in the social sciences as aligned with the discovery of new sources of energy, and with
a corresponding advance in occupational differentiation (Elias, 1978, p. 63). At the same time,
Elias holds to positivistic criteria of objectivity, exhorting the researcher to avoid ‘heteronomous,
extra-scientific considerations, whether political, religious or national – or even considerations of
professional status’ (Elias, 1978, p. 61).
While Elias was compiling his defense of disciplinarity as inherent to the social sciences and
of sociology as a distinct discipline, Lakatos (1999/1973) was giving a series of eight lectures
on the philosophy of science. In them he expressed his reservations about the procedures of
science, denying the possibility that accepted procedures enable researchers to find solid truths,
even when studying nature. He argued that all told, truth is not a reasonable scientific issue.
Researchers can at best, to his mind, compile hypotheses which may or may not have some
practical usefulness. Lectures Six and Seven of the course are dedicated to refuting even the
modest claims that Popper made for rules of the (research) game and of his thesis that theories
can be falsified by negative findings. As the above quotation shows, the social sciences were in
his view not even worthy of such careful clarification, much less studies carried out with qual-
itative methodologies. Despite the fact that Lakatos’ writings are held in high esteem among
145
philosophers of science, studies of the social have stubbornly refused to desert what he called the
‘primeval’ Comtian vision of discovering some scientific truths about society. And among those
seeking to plumb the meaning of living in relationships, biographical research and narrative
research remains an important field.
In the heat of the students’ rebellion, Morin (1968) accepted the uprising as an urgent indica-
tor of what Elias would later call a ‘new phase’ in the quest for knowledge. Adapting the political
stand of the students and the workers who joined them, he applied the principles underlying the
struggle for justice and egalitarianism to what he interpreted as the indefensible self-enclosure
of the world of science.
In practice, researchers seem to have adopted all the approaches noted in the quotations. They
derive general studies from personal experiences and even biases, and do not accept the idea
that there is no truth value in their studies. But in line with their scientific convictions, they are
highly aware of possible weaknesses in the conclusions that can be drawn. The enumeration of
reservations and hopes for future studies is an institutionalized part of every journal article; the
specification of qualms is certainly among the required sections of narrative studies. Once reser-
vations are specified, however, the custom is to proceed unabated with speculation based on the
initial suppositions. Thus, Turner (1990, pp. 146, 148), for example, admitted that his conclusions
from content analyses of ‘corporation biographies’ had disadvantages because ‘inferences (were)
being made from the analysed communication content to something else that is not observed’.
Having declared that he understood the limitations of the procedure, however, he went on to
draw conclusions from the executives’ stories about cultural differences between the USA and
England, and even to recommend that approach as useful for comparative research.
In a recent collection of sociologists’ autobiographies, Keen and Mucha (2006) find a sophis-
ticated way to evade the dilemma of assessing the validity of people’s stories about themselves.
While they ‘make no claims to any sort of objective truth’, the editors insist that the autobiog-
raphies they have collected are ‘sociological’ in that the interviewees use concepts that disclose
the ‘interplay between active agent and social structure’ (Keen & Mucha, 2006, p. 7, and see
below). To solve the dilemma, they ask readers to look upon the accounts as ‘testimonies’, and,
like all depositions by witnesses, they are accounts by ‘a reporting self . . . who has lived within a
particular historical context’ which can gain in credibility under situations of cross-examination
(Keen & Mucha, 2006, p. 14). They do not mention the widespread experience that under
cross-examination, testimony is perhaps even more likely to lose credibility. This possibility is
supported by several articles in the Handbook of Qualitative Research. Maurice Punch (2004) points
out that qualitative research in general and of course biographical research may provide ques-
tionable data for a variety of reasons beyond the control of the researcher. The authenticity of
testimony may be questionable because of political interests, because of long-term oppression, or
even because of limitations imposed by the environment. Fine (1994) proposes that authenticity
may be endangered by the ways in which researchers locate themselves in relation to ‘others’. The
narrator’s reaction to interaction with the researcher is a highly sensitive factor in determining
the authenticity, or even the verisimilitude of the account.
An examination of significant work in the field of narrative research and of biographical
research in particular, leads to the conclusion that the very differences in the situations created in
these studies, depending on the subjects of the studies and their interests, or on the relationships
developed between the subjects and the researchers; the highly varied methods that come into
play, may not be obstacles to be overcome in order to establish the scientific value of the research.
On the contrary, these variations are evidence of the meaningfulness of this type of research and
of its contribution to the accumulation of knowledge in response to the on-going human pursuit
that Elias sees as the heart of the scientific project.
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Variations in types of research

Schematically it is possible to distinguish between narrative and biographical research, which dif-
fer in terms of some phases of the procedures. One distinction is along the lines of the number of
story-tellers and the definitions of their status, or the intersectionality of their positions. Research
varies, as well, according to the researcher’s thematic focus, to the degree to which the stories
sought are typical or transgressive, and in regard to the theoretical scaffolding. Along each of these
dimensions there may be differences in how the researcher organizes the study, in the position
of the researcher vis-á-vis the subjects, in ways of collecting data or in modes of analysis, as well
as in modes of representation. We will look at a few of the bases for differences among studies.
Narrative research relies on thick layers of data and therefore can never deal with masses of
interviewees. There are distinctions, however, between research that relates to one person and her
relationships and research that seeks to grasp a rounded picture of the worlds of several people. In
both types there are approaches that emphasize procedural rigor and approaches that are loose.
Auto-ethnography
Among stories of individuals, there is a special niche for telling one’s own story, auto-ethnogra-
phy. Here, too, there are different approaches. Bochner (2012, p. 138) defends the scientific rel-
evance of impressionistic auto-ethnography. In his practice, auto-ethnography is a way of telling
a story in the first person from the point of view of the emotions experienced. The scientific
justification is that the researcher ‘focus(es) on generalization within a single case extended over
time’ rather than on generalizations across cases. By telling a continuous story, it is possible to
disclose hidden details and to show the ‘ebb and flow’ of relationships in episodic form so that no
relationship is, as Bochner notes derogatorily, just a ‘snapshot’. In auto-ethnography that is fired
by emotion, data are collected in terms of the dilemmas that the researcher sees as central and in
terms of the researcher’s implicit or explicit epistemology. While these positions are embedded in
the research, the impact of the subjective representation may be left to the intuition of the reader
(Ellis et al., 2011; Ellis & Bochner, 2000). Moreover, by insisting on the centrality of emotion
and on transparency, they intentionally eradicate, insofar as possible, the divisions between social
research and literature.
According to Denshire (2014, p. 837), this is a mode of research which is especially appro-
priate to feminist research as shown in the writings of Patti Lather and Laurel Richardson. In her
own research, Denshire deals with ‘transgressive’ auto-ethnography, making room for the ‘usually
silenced voices’ of others. To locate her own work, Denshire (2014, p. 843) quotes Ellis et al.
(2011), who point to varieties of stories of self and varieties of representation that can belong
to the genre of ‘emotional’ auto-ethnography, including: indigenous auto-ethnography, narrative
ethnography, reflexive interviews, reflexive ethnography, layered accounts, interactive interviews,
community auto-ethnography and contentiously personal narratives that stand alone. In the lit-
erature, there are still other possibilities such as performances of different kinds and collaborative
writing (Denzin, 2003; Diversi & Moreira, 2009; Norris et al., 2012; Pelias, 2012; Spry, 2001).
Defining auto-ethnography in rather pedestrian terms as ‘a self-narrative that critiques the
situatedness of self with others in social contexts’, Spry (2001, p. 710) completes that definition
even more provocatively. Presuming that ‘auto-ethnography is both a method and a text of diverse
interdisciplinary praxes’, she considers that a view of situatedness requires exposure to performance
and a kind of written account that converges completely with literature. Her auto-ethnographic
text illustrates the argument that auto-ethnography performance as a method of inquiry has
‘personal, professional, and political emancipatory potential’. But in the article, Denshire also
147
introduces theorization by maintaining a constant interplay between poetry that is to be, or has
been performed in conferences, and prose that explains the theories that inspired or legitimate the
performances. Thus, although the emphasis on performance can be considered transgressive in
itself, like Denshire, Spry echoes the argument of a considerable body of work which approaches
auto-ethnography as a project that can be and in effect has to be contextualized and analyzed
theoretically. She aligns her work with that of researchers who argue for what has been called
‘analytical’ auto-ethnography (Anderson, 2006; Hagoel & Kalekin-Fishman, 2015). They take the
view that the self-narrative can be disclosed both from within, in terms of the experience, and
from without, in terms of the type of theoretical generalizations that the self-narrative can be
understood to illustrate.
Accounts of groups
Most narrative research, however, relates to lives and stories of groups of people. Here, too,
there are different approaches. These are often closely related to the statuses of those whose
stories are told and to the theme pursued by the researcher. In these bodies of work, some
researchers relate the narratives and the life stories to events of macro-importance while others
emphasize experiences of intimacy. Another dimension that is explored is that of the limits of
procedural rigor.
Despite emphasis on enabling, even inviting, a transgressive approach to narrative research,
there are some general guidelines that have taken on a kind of orthodoxy. This can be found
even in what portends to be free and open interviewing. In querying the long-term impact
of the Holocaust, Rosenthal and her students (Rosenthal, 2010) look at how the history of a
collective is integrated into the history of the family and into the lives of individuals. In order
to draw out the significance assigned to what is remembered, and to discover what biographical
repair strategies are deployed to overcome the effects of a threatening past, this group follow
a demanding pre-planned pattern of elicitation. Initially the researcher asks a general question
about the interviewee’s life story and does not interfere as the person answers. Only in the
second stage is the researcher permitted to ask questions for clarification. If there is a need
there may be succeeding stages during which the researcher may seek out more details and,
for example, ask the interviewee to create graphic representations such as an abstract sculpture
of the family relations. Through analysis of the materials gathered at each stage, the researcher
can reach conclusions which are quite distant from the story narrated in stage one. The goal
is to create a body of data from which it is possible to shed light on a supremely painful and
ominous period in history.
In general, this method has also been adopted by Tom Wengraf and his group in the UK. The
method, which he calls the Biographical-Narrative-Interpretive-Method (BNIM), is applicable
to inquiry into life-stories of every kind. Wengraf emphasizes the approach to analysis, which,
in his system, is a group task. Dealing with the transcribed interview divided into sections that
each lead to a turning point, the group discusses possible alternative outcomes before going on
to examine the strategy of the interviewee. Thinking together and discussing ideas in a group
makes it possible to discover unexpected complexities in interviewees’ choices. But understand-
ing individual choices is not the only possible goal of analyzing biographical data.
In the volume of Keen and Mucha (2006) noted above, all the contributors responded to ques-
tions about how they began their acquaintance with sociology, how their careers have developed
or will develop, and about their on-going work. While the editors recognize that the life-story
accounts they have collected are not immune to contestation, they see in the interviews of a small
group of people a suitable completion to a historical trilogy and present the ten autobiographical
148
accounts as a legitimate body of information that sheds light on key historical events in Central
and Eastern Europe. The assumption of their collection is that because the essays create an image
of what it means to live as a sociologist, the cross-section of lives represented discloses important
details about the political and cultural transformation of a gigantic communist power, the USSR,
and its satellites.
But not all studies of group narratives are held to uniform procedures. In compiling a study
of young people who took part in the academic protests of the 1960s, Bertaux and Kohli
(2008/1984) reported on memories of events that had taken place about 15 years earlier. For
Bertaux there were two sociological issues: the nature of the subjectivity or subjectivities of
activists, on the one hand, and the viability of rational choice theory as an explanatory vehicle
for social activism, on the other. The point of the interviews was to collect material on actions
that the interviewees had initiated and in which they had taken an active part. Here the meth-
odological apparatus was unpretentious and rarely cautious. As Bertaux explains: ‘We usually
began the interview by saying, “What we would like to know is: how did you ever become an
activist?”’ In the free conversations that unfolded, the researchers discovered a combination of
values, emotions and sensitivities coloring what turned out to be the subjectivity ‘common’ to
narrators from six countries (USA, England, Ireland, Italy, West Germany, and France). Quoting
long excerpts from the stories of a few activists Bertaux and Kohli (2008/1984, pp. 157,
163–4) demonstrate that in relation to this subjectivity rational choice theory was irrelevant;
self-serving choices were overshadowed by moral concerns. Researchers could conclude there-
fore that in this stormy period of people’s lives rationality was far from being uppermost in
their minds.
Varieties of orientations
The literature that deals with narrative and life-story research is oriented to many different kinds
of themes, and following the variety, there are many differences in the methods deployed. Com-
mon to all of them is the fact that researchers choose how to position themselves. As Fischer and
Goblirsch show: ‘Presenting oneself in the “now” of the research interview – similar to conver-
sation in everyday life – allows one to position and to conceptualize the self in respect to one’s
lifetime in the double temporal horizon of past and future’ (Fischer & Goblirsch, 2006, p. 30).
Similarly, in their moving prologue to Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research,
Clandinin and Connelly (2000, p. xxvi) admit from the outset that while narrative inquiry starts
from an interest in the stories that we choose to tell about our lives, in the telling people affirm
some aspects and disconfirm others, highlighting changing emphases on any given experience.
A corollary of the insight that repeating a story does not mean repeating it precisely in every
detail is that the differences are likely to emerge from how the story is elicited and to whom it
is told. In Chapter Four of their book, Clandinin and Connelly (2000, pp. 51–7) retell the story
of a biographical doctoral dissertation carried out by a student who had come to Canada from
China to show how specific and how complex repetitions are likely to be.
Describing the significance of the student’s childhood narratives, the authors demonstrate
their conceptualization of experiencing times past, present and future as well as space in nar-
rative inquiry. While involved in guiding the students’ compilation of memories of a Chinese
childhood, Connelly went through a parallel process of recalling his childhood in a Canadian
backwoods village. There he had a fleeting acquaintance with a single immigrant from China,
a man who owned one of the two village stores. As a growing boy, Connelly knew a bit about
the man’s life only because of village gossip. But in this meeting of student and adviser, both
relived experiences with Chinese people remembered from childhood and their stories evince a
149
neat complementarity. While the student was collecting a mass of memories of a rich Chinese
childhood before the devastating cultural revolution of the 1970s, the adviser-researcher was
mining his own encounters with this one man when he went to one of the stores with the family.
Sharing these memories, he contrasted them to memories of his life on the ranch ‘then’ and his
accumulating academic experiences as a ‘world traveler’ ‘now’ thanks to opportunities to attend
conferences in different places around the globe.
In her explorations of teaching and teachers, Elbaz-Luwisch (2014) makes use of conversa-
tions with colleagues to underline the significance of life-stories to pedagogical practices. She
begins by focusing on memories of her mother’s life story as a setting for her own embodied
pedagogy as teacher-educator. These memories, enhanced by photographs, frame the life-story
narratives of six other teacher educators. In leisurely conversations, some of which took place
over months, the researcher interacted with the interviewees, who were asked to recall their own
family histories as these intertwined with their pedagogical orientations. In the analysis, the data
that were collected are conceived of as circling back to shed new light on the aspects of women’s
lives that gave the impulse to the project, the complex of memory and mothering as a frame for
orientations to pedagogy.
Emphasizing the theme of strategies for helping adolescents at risk, Fischer and Goblirsch
(2006) describe, as noted, free conversations between a social worker and a young person, where
the social worker elicits life stories. In their experience, contacts of this kind help uncover sources
of trouble at different periods of the interviewee’s life. Similarly, in studies of health and illness,
there is a growing interest in using free conversations to fathom how individuals conceive of risk
and how they understand their own health situation (Zinn, 2005). Iosifides (2011, pp. 191–7) rec-
ommends free conversations in order to understand the complexities of immigrant experience.
And indeed, Riemann (2003) and a group of students used the opportunity of a special issue of
FQS to show the usefulness of a ‘decision to methodically utilize off-hand-narratives of self-lived
experiences for sociological field research and the turn to autobiographical narrative interviews
and their sequential analysis which (is) fruitful with regard to the discovery of “structural pro-
cesses” of the life course’. Their data were collected in interviewing a Turkish woman who was
adjusting to what was for her a revolutionary reality in Germany.
Not always do such conversations lead to deep insights. Collecting life stories of ballet
dancers, Aalten (2005) was interested in understanding the career in dance as a way of life or
as a clash with real life. Since the age of retirement from active participation in a ballet com-
pany is relatively young, many dancers have to make decisions about how to take advantage
of the world outside a career dense with morning classes, afternoon rehearsals, and evening
performances. In her article, she does not bother to detail how many dancers she interviewed,
nor does she frame the stories in any theoretical structure. On the basis of free conversations
with professional dancers, she points out that dancers take one of three ways after their twen-
ties. Some continue dancing as a way of life; some combine dancing with a life away from the
dance; and some consider that life apart from the dance is most important, and act so as to
bring their idea to fruition. Aalten quotes dancers who dedicated themselves to dancing and
kept on with the company beyond the retirement age, others who left companies even before
the age of retirement and dancers who managed to keep dancing and to live. The author, an
anthropologist, quotes sources that cite the importance of listening to stories in order to gain
insights. However, in her report of what must have been an exciting project, she gives no
evidence of having listened for more than the rather dry concern with decisions. She is satis-
fied to note the three ways of dealing with the demands of the ballet, and explains the ‘thin’
findings as what she could manage to cull from necessarily short talks with dancers whose
lives are supremely busy.
150
Although there are few researchers who lock themselves into a single mode of researching
personal narratives, for many, structures are likely to enter into at least some of their biographical
and narrative research.
In the realm of teaching, for example, Aspinwall (1992) reports on a carefully designed and
framed study of the professional life history of one teacher. As she planned initially, she recorded
six interviews with the teacher. The first four, designed to elicit as much detail as possible about
the teacher’s life story, were transcribed, and the transcriptions were returned to the interviewee
for comments. In the fifth interview the teacher expanded on some aspects of her story and
clarified points that she felt were not covered adequately. The sixth and last interview provided
the interviewee with an opportunity to discuss what she felt she had gained from the experience
of sharing her reflections.
While all life-stories derive in large part from memory, studies that emphasize memories above
all are quite frequent. By contrast with the free exploration of memories of specific events led
by Bertaux, there are studies that actually seek to compile memories systematically. Investigating
adults’ memories of their political engagement as children, for example, Moss (2011) developed
a narrative study to test a hypothesis. She was interested in showing that children’s political
engagement is usually underestimated because it is assessed on the basis of affiliation with formal
political activities rather than by examining a wider range of engagement. To this end she worked
out a highly structured research design in which, to her mind, ‘questions (can be) broached
meaningfully’ (Moss, 2011, p. 2). In order to explore memories of ‘childhood in relation to events
usually associated with adults, such as war, religion, migration, policing, employment’, she selected
16 respondents who differed in ethnicity, class, and gender. She compiled three tools designed to
overcome the ways in which adults filter, select and evaluate memories: two semi-structured
interviews and a questionnaire. The first interview focused on a wide range of memories about
party politics and politicians, while the second interview focused on everyday experiences of
childhood. Background information about ‘social position, mobility and family heritage’ was
collected by means of a structured questionnaire (Moss, 2011, p. 3). As she hypothesized, the
study provided data about pointed memories of public events that took place in the locales of
interviewees’ childhood. Experiences remembered by people who grew up in Ireland refer to
policing; in England, to power cuts and racist prejudice; in South Africa, to brutality. From middle
class England adults remembered campaigns for animal rights and political alignments in various
places. From the carefully compiled responses, Moss was able to derive conclusions about chil-
dren’s emotionality in relation to political events. Here the researcher is unseen. Although there
are open questions, the formal design belies the theme of ‘freely remembering’. As appropriate
to a formal study, there is no indication of Moss’ own memories. One might guess that she chose
to study political memories because her own are colorful and varied, but the article itself gives
no information beyond the reliance on relevant literature.
Although her theme is intimacy in the family, Popadiuk (2004) also describes an almost
severely pedantic method of eliciting information about lives. Popadiuk (2004) describes what
she calls ‘the feminist biographical method’ that she used to understand the stories of abusive
family life of five women immigrants to Canada from Asia. In this case, too, the researcher, who
describes herself as a white native-born Canadian, holds herself apart from the group interviewed.
Concentrating on the mission of furthering feminist research, she does not disclose whether this
theme has anything to do with her own private life. In this article she focuses on describing the
project she carried out, providing useful details about how she engaged her interviewees and in
what context she was able to analyze their stories of trouble and trauma in family life. Although
her approach is rather didactic, the very nature of the steps that she took demonstrates that within
the framework of ‘the feminist biographical method’ this cannot be a required set of procedures.
151
Conclusions
Twenty years later, the statements quoted above about the unruliness of qualitative research
(Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) still hold true, and, as illustrated here, they are undoubtedly true of
narrative inquiry and of biographical research. While Denzin and Lincoln seem to have written
those sentences as an apology for the fact that qualitative research is not yet sufficiently scientific,
in 2014, the same statements come across as a conceptualization of science that has grown out of
long-term practice. To recall Elias, the contemporary phase of the human quest for knowledge
signals a broader setting for social (science) research in a world that is, in many senses, if still
ambivalently, increasingly open and inclusive, one in which, pace Lakatos, the potential of the
social sciences for improving the human condition is rarely contested.
With the fabled expansion of social media during the last several decades, debates have
stormed around whether the accumulated effects are gateways to greater self-realization or to
new forms of alienation (Castells, 2010a; Kellner, 1995). Castells (2010a), in presenting the second
edition of his study of network society, concludes that the complicated transformation of work
and employment, of communication, of space as places and flows, and time in human experience
apparently do not promise better lives. This is underlined in the third volume of his trilogy, End
of Millennium (Castells, 2010b), where Chapter 2 is headed ‘The rise of the fourth world: Infor-
mation capitalism, poverty and social exclusion’. Throughout, his three-volume opus provides
details of extremely troubled times.
At the same time, the network world, which Castells describes as realizing the darkest proph-
ecies that Kellner cites as possibilities, is playing host to steadily expanding social movements,
networks of activists, many of whom emerge from among the impoverished and the excluded
(see, for example, Klandermans et al., 2014; Langman, 2005). From some points of view, as Cas-
tells underlines, ‘we’ (all of us wherever we live) are controlled by those who control and regulate
information. But that is not the whole story. The very networks that flow across borders and
implicate people from all corners of the world and often from different strata also bear a democ-
ratization of knowledge. The networked flows that cannot be contained also shed light on the
dismal manipulations that underlie the often devious motives for transforming communication,
as well as the scope of space and time.
In the social sciences the networking has moved toward a democratization whose impact will
undoubtedly be seen with even greater clarity in the near future. Social scientists now recognize
that no study has validity unless it considers the subjectivity of the clients in at least two senses –
those being studied and those for whom the study solves some problem. Of course it is often
true that many of the same people are implicated in both groups. In their ground-breaking book
on the new production of knowledge Gibbons et al. (1994) described these relationships as part
of what they call Mode-2 science a science in which there is a potential for partnership among
researchers and partnership with the consumers of research. In their view, it is no longer justified
to draw a hard line between science and society, between science and life (Morin, 1968). This is
also at the heart of the claim by De Sousa Santos (2006, 2008) that both another knowledge and
another society are possible.
At the turn of the millennium Nowotny et al. (2013/2001, p. 7) re-interpreted their earlier
insights to show that because of conditions for the production of socially robust knowledge and
the emergence of socially distributed expertise, knowledge in the Mode-2 science is contextual-
ized in a new public space, the agora, a term borrowed from the public spaces of ancient Greece.
As Morin (1968) implied, there is close interaction of science and society that perhaps could
not be observed heretofore. Although succeeding chapters of their book recognize that in the
co-evolution of society and science, knowledge may be contextualized more or less tenaciously,
152
the social distribution of expertise has led to a re-visioning and a re-thinking of science, and a
recognition of social pressures for transparency.2
As highlighted in the 1970s by Latour and Woolgar (1979) and in the work of Knorr-Cetina
(1999), science was for long practiced as an armored black box. These studies, among oth-
ers, have underlined how humankind can benefit from overcoming the indefensible differences
between what is reported in journal articles and what actually goes on in laboratories. The need
for making the complexity of the experienced world transparent has come into play even more
emphatically in the development of actor-network-theory (Latour, 2005) which, as a theory
of how science and life are related, takes a comprehensive view as its point of departure. They
propose the understanding that in the world, objects and technologies, and of course, all forms of
life, act to shape action and the production of knowledge. There is, then, not only ‘co-evolution’
between society and science; there is an implicit requirement that scientific knowledge can only
be warranted if it sheds light on life as it is lived.
Once the black box of scientific publication is transgressed, it is clear that science as prac-
tice and the lived life are far less orderly than the polished reports that are customarily shared
with the professional and the lay public. According to Law (2004, p. 150 ff.), recognizing the
inevitability of messiness is the first step toward a healthy renewal of the quest for knowledge.
In his view, the ‘mess’ can be dealt with if there is ‘recognition of the indefiniteness of reality
and an acknowledgement of multiple realities’. This entails ‘recognition of imaginaries’ rather
than a strict alignment with the coldly rational. Through ‘reflexivity’ it is possible to be ‘gen-
erous – with a willingness to accept the importance of both imaginaries and materialities for
understanding realities, i.e., bodies, devices, theatre, apprehensions, buildings as well as texts
and figures. Thus, in the large, there is ‘emphasis on process rather than on the product’, an
emphasis that comes into play in the doing and in the reporting on what has been / is being
done. Working through this switch is reversing Weber’s diagnosis of humankind’s doom to
harsh lifetimes. Law sees in the contemporary quest for knowledge a ‘re-enchantment of
human experience.’
To Justify Mess in social research, it is important to make a multi-faceted Switch:

Emphasis on process rather than on product;
Generosity toward materialities;
Indefiniteness of reality – acknowledgement of multiple realities;
Reflexivity;
Recognition of imaginaries;
Re-enchantment of human experience
(see Law, 2004, pp. 152–4)
We have come around full circle. In the re-contextualization of science that has developed with
the network society, we come to the point where the realm of narrative research, especially in
studies that focus on life history, the practices that are modified in order to uncover ‘lived truths’
are pioneering the new world of Mode-2 science. The interplay between the researcher and the
subjects whose stories she is striving to understand is not only decisive in shaping and re-shaping
methodologies. It can be seen as a model for the evolution of a science that is intimately involved
in how people truly create society. This phase of the quest for human knowledge entails work-
ing through the poverty and exclusion, not to mention the violence that is so prevalent and so
easily identified in contemporary human relations on macro-, meso-, and micro- levels. Yet, in
the morass of what has been portrayed as inevitable alienation, it is the concern with stories that
153
people live by that promises the dawn of a hopeful era in science and in society. With ‘tensions
working back and forth among competing definitions’, the transparent messiness of this kind of
research is indeed the cornerstone of the field.
Notes
1 The monopolization by science (of the idea that) the clear distinction between what is science and what
is not, derives from an anti-scientific dogmatism. (trans. DKF)
2 Since 2011, the year of the Arab spring, there has been repeated evidence that people are demanding
transparency in politics and in policy as well as in ‘knowledge’.
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11
ANALYZING NOVELTY AND
PATTERN IN INSTITUTIONAL
LIFE NARRATIVES
Jaber F. Gubrium
university of missouri
James A. Holstein
marquette university
Life narratives are continually subject to reconstruction. Mundane as they might be, chance
encounters, events such as career downturns, and occasions like psychiatric consultations prompt life
revision. Emphasized are terms that reference the present, points of departure for the pragmatist
analysis of experience through time. In a seminal lecture titled “The Present as the Locus of
Reality,” philosopher George Herbert Mead (1959/1930) flagged this decades ago, explaining
that, in practice, “a reality that transcends the present must exhibit itself in the present” (p. 11).
As Arthur Murphy indicated in prefatory remarks, “(It was Mead’s view that) the irrevocable past
is the past of any given present, that which accounts for its occurrence” (p. xviii).
Mead was especially concerned with novelty in experience. According to Mead, it was the
ongoing accountability of the past in the present that served experience’s reconstruction, which
would otherwise be irrevocably patterned. Mead did not ignore patterning in experience, but
considered it rooted in the practice of everyday life. He advocated reflexively combining a view
to the everyday practice of reality construction with a working sense of the irrevocability of pat-
tern in life. Mead’s perspective and his sense of the immediacy of novelty in experience inform
this chapter’s analysis of institutional life narratives.
Analytic bearings
Today’s world is saturated with institutions – schools, churches, human service agencies, clinics,
work organizations, and team sports, among many others. From childhood to old age, they
pattern the flow of experience through time in relation to what Everett Hughes (1984) called
their “going concerns” (also see Gubrium & Holstein, 2000). In this environment, life narratives
cannot be viewed as organized on their own into personal wholes. They are more accurately seen
as the practical accomplishments of diverse sites of narrativity. In institutional reckoning, personal
wholes are configurations of concern continually subject to reconfiguration. Accordingly and
hyphenated, there is the personal-life-story-under-the-auspices-of-schooling, say, just as there
156
Analyzing novelty and pattern
is the personal-life-story-of-athletic-careers, and the personal-life-story-of-those-institutionalized-

for-dementia – each further hyphenated by the contingent presents of narrative events, occasions,
and locations.
Ethnomethodology provides Mead’s pragmatism with analytic bearings, offering concepts
that work empirically to showcase the operation of novelty in experience (Garfinkel, 1967;
Heritage, 1984). Ethnomethodologists use the term “artful” to highlight experiential novelty,
parallel to Mead’s use of the concept of experiential “emergence.” As the chapter will illustrate,
the everyday construction of life narratives, while “presentist,” is not automatic, but is a practical
accomplishment that is locally contingent, methodically organized, and demonstrably novel as
well as patterned.
Narrative ethnography
Participants in the construction of life narratives not only reference patterned senses of the
whole, but simultaneously work at assembling wholes in locally pertinent terms (see Gubrium &
Holstein, 1998). As this increasingly unfolds in institutional context, it requires a narrative eth-
nography, a method sensitive both to communicative practice and to its in situ conditions. It is a
method of procedure we have applied in a longstanding program of research on the construction
of life narratives in institutional settings (Gubrium & Holstein, 2008, 2009).
Narrative analysis is well established across disciplines concerned with the storied flow of life
(Clandinin, 2007; McAdams, 1993; Riessman, 2008). Much of it centers on the analysis of texts,
the output of a construction process that produces diaries, memoirs, letters, reports, case files, and
interview transcripts. Analysis entails discerning and categorizing themes or particular narrative
structures, for example. Narrative output, not the practice of narrative production, is the focus
of attention (Holstein & Gubrium, 2012). Analysis of the production of locally accountable nar-
ratives requires something more – narrative ethnography. It is a form of ethnography that pays
equal attention to novelty and pattern in the construction process.
Institutional environments
Life narratives constructed in institutional environments may appear quite different from those
produced in formal interviewing. They are often, but not always, shorter, semantically trun-
cated, and relate, often openly, to the working conditions of their production. Being practical,
their patterning or coherence relates as much to participants’ perspectives, institutional pref-
erences, and interactional contingencies, as to internal textual matters such as emplotment,
thematization, and characterization. They are constructed by all manner of speakers besides the
individual who is the subject of a life narrative, such as professionals and family members. As
Michael Bamberg (2006) suggests in distinguishing big and small stories, extended life narra-
tives (big stories) may be more the product of the duration and individualizing conditions of
life story interviewing, than the otherwise smaller narratives that are the product of real-time
accounts of experience.
Local pertinence
The local pertinence of life story material can be conspicuous when narrative production comes
into focus. Rather than being irrevocably lodged in life history, the past becomes virtual fodder for
real-time challenges and reconstruction. Accounts are not only subject to standard credibility cri-
teria such as validity and reliability, but simultaneously run the credibility gamut of participating
157
stakeholders’ views and preferences. Institutional stakeholders are now legion, extending from
those whose lives are being storied, to significant others such as family members and professional
agents like career counselors and psychological consultants.
Local pertinence is not just an abstraction. It is a concept that is hearable and can be doc-
umented. Nor is it just an ideal, as ideals in practice relate reflexively to varied and shifting
institutional preferences. In real time, pertinence operates by rules of its own making, which in
the process produces novelty, as the first of our illustrations below will show. The universalized
criteria of “accurate accounts” and “objectivity” are rather farfetched in this context. If they
come into play, they are accountable to local relevancies.
There is nothing extraordinary about local pertinence. Hearable accountability comes in end-
less ordinary cautions and requests such as “the way to put that,” “the right way of describing
it,” “what will sell,” “what we need to know,” “let’s think of it this way,” and “what they expect
to hear.” In practice, local pertinence is a process of invoking rules for patterning experience
through time. As far as the work of narrative production is concerned, rule-use reflexively is the
patterning that results from it. But this remains largely invisible or otherwise ignored by both
participants and researchers as important when patterning is the focus of attention. Were it not
for its analytic bearing, the sheer mundanity of local pertinence would cause us to overlook its
persistence presence in life narrative construction (Pollner, 1987).
Biographical work
We refer to the practice of life narrative construction as “biographical work” (Holstein &
Gubrium, 2000a). Referencing a life, the term “biography” is used to flag the substantive goal
of those who are the subjects of, as well as those who engage in constructing, related narratives.
The goal is to produce suitably patterned accounts of experience through time. As we illustrate,
in institutional reckoning, the local pertinence of biographical particulars often prominently leads
the way. The life histories psychologists need to do their work, for example, can contrast with the
accounts social workers need to carry out their responsibilities. Neither is likely to have much
use for really big stories, but rather just enough to shed light upon and facilitate professional
responsibilities. More can be much less under the circumstances.
The term “work” serves as an analytic reminder to keep practice in focus. Individuals do not
automatically or just suddenly break out into patterned accounts. They are prompted in some
way, under specific institutional auspices, and work at it with particular aims and preferences
in tow. A story of crime and a criminal career, for example, would hardly pass as seductive and
exciting – as a crime story – if it weren’t told with the flair and dramatic tension expected of such
accounts by listeners (see Katz, 1988). A crime story is a patterned outcome of the work entailed
in producing it. In institutional context, biographical work is especially strategic, operating not
just to produce biographies, but biographies pertinent to organized concerns.
Rule-use and novelty in a psychiatric review

The first illustration is taken from childhood and showcases rule-use and novelty in the bio-
graphical work of a psychiatric review. It presents an exchange reconstructed from fieldnotes
between a social worker and a psychological consultant on the occasion of a semi-annual review of a
child in residential treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Buckholdt &
Gubrium, 1985/1979). Under consideration in the exchange is the pertinence of family life
material drawn from the child’s case file. Reading through the exchange, you will notice how
the social worker and consultant figuratively step into and out of the case material, reflexively
158
both reading the material for its informational value and simultaneously negotiating its narrative
pertinence.
The occasioned ad hoc use of rules is where novelty develops (see Wieder, 1970). The rules
invoked on this and other occasions can be viewed as indexing their respective particulars, which
in the case under consideration, like in others, references specific case material, situated senti-
ments about the case material, in situ descriptive challenges, and local professional preferences.
While experiential patterning in the case emerges out of the consultation, and the case can be
compared to cases like or unlike others of its kind, there is no guarantee that the concrete process
and contingencies that led it to be described and categorized the way it is will be repeated later.
An entirely different configuration of invoked rules might generate the same case description
the next time around. A focus on textual outcomes could elide significant differences in textual
production.
Ethnographic information is helpful in further understanding what is transpiring in the
exchange, in particular how novelty relates to institutional preferences. The residential treatment
center served children 6 to 14 years of age, who at the time of the study were referred to as
“emotionally disturbed” and behaviorally “out of control.” These childhood behavioral condi-
tions are now commonly diagnosed as ADHD and can overlap with the spectrum of autisms
and Asperger’s syndrome. The center’s service intervention mandate was officially behaviorist,
combining an elaborate behavior modification regimen of assessment and treatment with half-
day schooling on the grounds and 24-hour residential care for a period of two years, counseling,
speech therapy, and recreational activity.
Most of the professional staff used behaviorist terminology for official purposes, produced case
material and reports reflecting that, and justified interventions in the same terms. While children’s
family histories were an abiding concern, the home was formally construed as a behavioral envi-
ronment with diverse reward contingencies and outcomes, largely bereft of past considerations.
Visible and countable behavioral acts were emphasized, not thoughts and feelings. For all intents
and purposes, families were domestic configurations of stimuli and responses, the behavioral
effectiveness of which for children hopefully led to better self-control. In behavioral reasoning,
domestic life was construed as a “cool” environment, whose dynamics could be understood in
terms of the contingent rationalities of visible activity. In sharp contrast to Christopher Lasch’s
(1979) contemporaneous concept of family as a “haven in a heartless world,” whose warm and
supportive interior defended members against the harsh realities of life, the effective family in
official reckoning kept members’ emotional lives firmly under control (also see Gubrium, 1992).
At the time of the study, psychiatric reviews at the center were outsourced to three consultants –
one was a behavioral psychologist, another was a psychologist who viewed himself as eclectic, and
the third was a child psychiatrist with Freudian sensibilities. This in itself produced novelty in
practice, especially when different consultants occasionally guided the reviews of the same child.
For reporting purposes, their narrative preferences had to be reconciled, usually by the social
worker, in writing up case material that reflected the behavioral emphasis of the institution, espe-
cially to funding agencies. Normally, consultants were assigned to specific children and, for the
most part, the consultants followed up only on the children assigned to them, thus maintaining
consistent narrative patterning over time.
While the psychiatrist especially brought a non-behavioral perspective on family and experience
to his exchanges with staff members, his opinions and advice were nonetheless widely admired and
valued. He was, understandably, professionally concerned with family history and children’s pasts,
which to the front line staff was repeatedly described as shedding important light on a child’s present
conduct. Oddly enough, in this context, a warm and supportive domestic environment was key to
children’s emotional maturity, a view quite contrary to formal institutional reasoning.
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Now for the exchange. The speakers are the child’s social worker and the behavioral psycholo-
gist substituting for the child’s regular consultant, the psychiatrist, who is currently on vacation.
Narrative pertinence on this occasion centers on the issue of how to translate past-oriented case
material generated under the auspices of child psychiatric consultation into equivalent present-
oriented information of professional interest to the behavioral psychologist. Pseudonyms have
been assigned to persons and places here and throughout the chapter.
Social Worker: (Reading from case material) Says that the home is pretty shattered emotionally.
(Elaborates)
Consultant: (Offering an equivalency rule) Do you mean everyone’s out of control at 671 Bradley
Street?
The consultant and social worker discuss the semantic equivalence of shattered emotions and being out of
control, eventually settling, for the time being, on the following reverse equivalency rule offered by the social
worker.
Social Worker: No, what I mean is just that the parents really feel bad about it and can’t seem to
get over that. Just that. It’s not that things are out of control, more like just deep
feelings. (Elaborates)
The discussion of meaning and pertinence continues, focusing next on what “feeling bad” and “deep feelings”
connote in behavioral terms. This is guided by the invocation of rules for translating these particular emotions
into behaviors, and reflexively leads eventually to rule justification by the very case material the rules were
initially meant to translate.
Consultant: (Turning to case material dealing with the “homework” assigned to the parents for man-
aging their child in the household) So then they’re still adhering to the assignment,
making sure Tommy’s on task and making sure what the consequences are, right?
(Requests information about how the child is being consequented) But they’re not exactly
happy that it’s come to that?
Social Worker: Pretty much, but they’re perfectionists and can’t seem to handle failure.
(Elaborates)
At this point, following a consideration of Tommy’s low grades, discussion shifts levels in rule-use, from the
presentation of equivalency rules, to the invocation of a rule about ruling.
Consultant: (Offers a rule about ruling) Okay, let’s not get into their heads. (Moving away from
the parents’ alleged perfectionism and now referring to a “contracted” or formally agreed
upon at-home behavior modification assignment) How are the parents handling the
contract? That’s the point.
Social Worker: They feel they could be doing better. Tommy was never this bad; he was a happy
kid until recently. What could have changed? As I said, they’re perfectionists.
(Elaborates from case material)
Consultant: (Reminding the social worker of the rule about ruling) Let’s never mind that, okay?
Just please stick to what’s going on right now. Feelings aside, they’re following
through (on the contract), right?
Social Worker: That’s right.
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Points in time and novelty in a career narrative

The second illustration is taken from midlife and showcases the role that events at various points
in time play in constructing novelty in a career narrative. As part of a study of American profes-
sional athletes at the end of their careers, former National Football League (NFL) players were
asked to describe their lives (Holstein et al., 2015). While players came from broad range of back-
grounds and had encountered myriad experiences along the way, their career stories invariably
began with childhood “dreams” of becoming football players and ended with their “retirement”
from the game. The pattern was strikingly uniform despite the differences in players.
James Fox, a retired nine-year veteran of the NFL, offers a typical formulation of an NFL
career.
When I was a kid, I was going to be a football player . . . I really got involved at nine
years old officially, when I started playing Pop Warner . . . I turned the television on
and there was a Monday Night Football game on. I went and got my shoulder pads,
my uniform, and put it on while I watched the game . . . I said, “I’m gonna play on
Monday night!” From that day forward, I said I am going to do everything I possibly
can to make that happen.
Fox proceeds to build his story, step by step, moving from his fanciful childhood dream,
through Pop Warner football, middle school, and into high school. At each stage, he tells of meet-
ing with success and encouragement, and, in his words, the dream became more of a “process.”
He describes an evolving plan, and the measures he took along the way to promote his football
success: “There was a lot of work. And college had to be a part of that . . . You had to go to col-
lege to play in the NFL.” Fox recounts how he abandoned all other interests to single-mindedly
pursue football, quitting other sports and pastimes and devoting countless hours to “working
out”: “I focused on football all of the time.” When he eventually earned a football scholarship
to attend college, football took on an even more demanding role. According to Fox, the game
consumed nearly all day, every day, year round. He tells of eagerly pushing his studies aside to
further his football training. Summing up, he noted: “I felt good about the course that I was on.”
After college, Fox desperately hoped to play in the NFL, but his dream came crashing down.
He wasn’t drafted by an NFL team; he wouldn’t get the opportunity to try out for a spot on
a team roster. “Draft time came. My name didn’t get called. I cried like a baby.” Fox dropped
out of school and got a part-time job that would allow him the time to work out most of the
day to improve his game. “Football was my deal.” As he recalls, his “big opportunity” came a
few months later when he was drafted to play in the newly formed World League of American
Football. As his story goes, he performed well, caught the attention of NFL scouts and eventually
signed to play with the Green Bay Packers of the NFL. “I was on my way . . . After I got put
in the starting lineup after my sixth game of my rookie year, I never came out during my whole
career.”
As with any life story, there are countless details that could have been included in Fox’s career
narrative. Like other players, he tells of wins and losses, awards, injuries, huge contracts, and crises
of confidence. These narratives establish a familiar career trajectory – a recognizable pattern, as
it were – assimilating diverse experiences into the career arc, with players looking back from the
terminal points of successful careers, descriptively turning football from a dream into a journey,
and ultimately a fulfilling obsession.
It is tempting to call these stories “career clichés” in the manner that Donileen Loseke (2001,
2012) once described the “formula stories” of battered women in human service shelters. Like
161
stories of alcoholism and recovery told under the auspices of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA, 1976),
NFL career stories present lives in cliché-like terms, but with institutionally distinct patterning.
AA stories typically involve a downward spiral into alcoholism, “hitting bottom,” then resurrect-
ing viable lives by traveling a “twelve step” path to recovery. The discursive pattern of an NFL
career has a similar institutional cast, but with a consistently upward trajectory.
But the rubric of formula stories emphasizes pattern at the expense of novelty – in this case
the biographical work of assembling diverse and multifaceted details into a coherent career narra-
tives at different points in time. Comparing accounts across time, the stories are not merely trite
or purely formulaic, but reconstituted in temporally and institutionally appropriate terms that
accord with each present’s novel circumstances. As trite as career narratives might be at particular
points in time, their variety at different junctures shows considerable novelty. When asked to
recount their careers from the vantage point of retirement, say, different “trite” accounts emerge.
Putting it in Mead’s terms, the irrevocable past follows from the perspective of different presents.
Even the irrevocable futures of discernible pasts are implicated. Asked to consider their futures,
recently retired players revisit and reconstruct past events in light of present circumstances. What
might have been at an earlier point in life the story of successful careers, is composed with alter-
native outcomes in play when told at a different point in time. Pasts reflexively change in light
of the descriptive contours of the present past’s future.
The sports and news media recently have highlighted the post-football troubles of retired
players, especially their financial woes. It’s been said that most players are on the brink of finan-
cial ruin shortly after they quit the game, despite the enormous amount of money they earned
while playing. In relation to these circumstances, players typically compose their careers in ways
that explain and justify a formerly unforeseen pattern leading to post-football travails. Taken
together, the resulting accounts are complex compositions of then, now, and the future, told from
the perspectives of the working presents.
Consider how Fox reconstitutes aspects of his career when asked what he plans to do to make
a living now that he’s out of the game.
When we was off playing football, our (college) classmates . . . were doing internships.
They was working their way up the ladder. While we were on the practice field learn-
ing how to tackle, they were learning the game of life. Now, all of a sudden, you played
10 years, now I am 32 years old, I’m out of the league, and my classmate that was in my
industrial technology classes, he is 32, but he has had 10 years on me, going through
the interview process, closing deals, so now, I am at 32, trying to compete with him.
That’s tough.
Narratives cast in an earlier timeframe as positive developments – the single-minded pursuit

of football skills at the expense of other skills and pastimes – are recomposed as drawbacks in
the biographical work of accounting for a problematic future. Fox recalls experiences at the
periphery of his previous career story that now coalesce into a currently coherent account for
why job prospects at the moment and into the future have been dampened by a newly salient
past. A juncture in his career that was previously constructed as a positive turning point – where
he began to devote all his attention to football – is reformulated as a detriment to present-day
occupational development.
The presentist lesson on this front again features the novelty of life patterning. Institution-
alized sports career narratives don’t so much construct players’ lives, as they serve as stocks of
knowledge for formulating sports careers according to one’s current circumstances. Rather than a
formulaic pattern institutionally rendering “the” career narrative, specific events in time work to
162
invoke circumstantially pertinent formulations. Formerly irrevocable pasts are transformed narra-
tively into new and equally irrevocable pasts that reflexively accord with the events of the present.
Standpoint and the novelty of the end of life

The third illustration is taken from old age and showcases how occasioned standpoints can shape
constructions of the end of life. Its point of departure is the concept of “narrative foreclosure,”
which Mark Freeman (2011) coined in his research on narrativity in relation to dementia. Free-
man was troubled by the common assertion made by disease sufferers and those otherwise trou-
bled that one’s “life is over” when the speaker continued living. Trouble derived from Freeman’s
sense of the mismatch between the life and living. Tying life and living to each other, he asked
how it was possible to assert that one’s life was over when living clearly continued beyond the
present? Untying the two and taking a different tack based on the idea of biographical work, the
illustration shows that the assertion is not so much a misstatement of fact, but an assertion that
flags a rhetorical project.
The illustration draws from extracts of narrative and ethnographic material dealing with
accounts of the quality of life in nursing homes (Gubrium, 1993). The study did not aim to access
residents’ evaluations of the quality of the nursing home or its care, but rather with how residents
constructed their lives in their present circumstances. Here, particular attention is paid to how
the assertion “life is over” accords with the circumstances of its application. When compared, the
occasioned use of the assertion presents considerable novelty in meaning.
The first extract is from one of several interviews with 84-year-old resident Alec, who had
been in skilled care at Holly Plaza for three years at the time. He suffered from diabetes and the
continuing pain of a double leg amputation. He had been a heavy smoker, now also suffered from
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and according the staff exhibited signs of dementia. In
the course of the study, interviewer Jay Gubrium came to know Alec and his family very well,
especially his 82-year-old wife Cora and their adult children Mark, Nina, and Kitty. The family
visited Alec regularly in the nursing home.
It did not take much prompting in interviews for Alec to speak about his life, both before
and after living at the Plaza. He was naturally chatty and didn’t hesitate to reminisce about what
many residents called “the old days,” more recent times, and their present and future lives in the
nursing home. Described by staff members as enduringly “active and busy,” Alec was a big man
and reported to have lived with “adventure in his veins.” One of his daughters claimed he was
the Ernest Hemingway of the family. As a young man, Alec had been a lumberjack and later
continued to work in and out of the lumber industry.
The following is a portion of one of many chats with him that converged on a narrative of life
now living at the Plaza. Note the eventual assertion of narrative foreclosure. The bold contrast
of then and now not only communicates an ending, but is persuasive and emotionally palpable.
Alec: You know how it is when you’re that age (his twenties), you’re as active as all get-out.
(Elaborates) Look at me now; you wouldn’t know it, would ya, Jay? I’m a big guy. Shit,
buddy, I was a really a big lunk then; I got around like none of the other guys (at work).
What a life! I was looked up to, too. No messin’ around with Alec. No sir! (He elaborates
about himself and his life at that time, pausing here and there, marveling and then sighing, as if to
convey what he once was in relation to what he’s become) Hey, what a difference; I’ll bet you
can’t believe it, can you, Jay? (Pause) Can you believe that this ole dying body once upon
a time coulda had a life? Can ya, buddy?
Jay: That’s amazing, Alec. Tell me about it.
163
Alec: Aw, come on. What’s to tell? You heard me a hundred times by now. (Laughs) I’m like
a broken record, right buddy? Well, hell’s bells, they take good care of you here; don’t
get me wrong. (Elaborates) But this ain’t no life. I’m dead meat, man. I sit here (laughing)
and I shit here. Right here, right? (Points to his bottom and we both laugh) Sit and shit. You
wouldn’t find me doin’ that before I got here. Don’t get me wrong, the gals (nursing aides)
are good about it; they better be or else! (Chuckles) Big talk, huh? Can’t wipe my own ass.
(Sighs)
Jay: Well, life . . .
Alec: Well, life nothin’, period. (His voice breaking) That’s it. That’s gone. It’s over. Farewell.
But, right or wrong, this wasn’t the whole story. If a common pattern of institutional despair
is evident in this account, other renderings tell a different story. Standpoint could figure signifi-
cantly in constructing the end of a life. Family members especially were part of Alec’s story and
also spoke of his life “then” and “now,” with accompanying judgments about whether Alec’s life
was over. Listen to how Alec’s wife Cora and their children spoke about his life on the occasion
of an evening’s departure from the nursing home after visiting Alec. It is a novel configuration
of both sameness and difference, casting doubt on a familiar institutional usage. For Alec’s family,
the same life experiences meant something quite different.
What Alec clearly and sometimes emotionally demarcated in interviews was a source of
contention in the family circle. If Alec forcefully stated time and again that his life was over,
encounters with family members could produce different emplotments, contesting what Alec
otherwise firmly communicated. For example, in the Plaza’s lobby one evening, far from Alec’s
room, Cora and the children weighed in differently on the matter before they left for home.
The encounter produced an opportunity for another formulation, one that contrasted with the
common assertion of life being over. At one point in the following reconstruction from field
notes, Alec’s son, Mark, sarcastically dismisses Alec’s references to life being over as a dramatic
trope without real meaning, contesting its common designation.
Cora: (Facing Jay) I’d take some of what he (Alec) says with a grain of salt. (Recounts the “truth”
of the matter) You know what he’s like, Jay. (Explains) At the same time, I know you know
what it’s like for him. Like it would be for you, too, if you were as active as he was, right?
(Whimpering as she elaborates) I could cry when he tells me like that, that his life is over . . .
So many of them here are just, I hate to say it, just vegetables, but not my Alec really.
Mark: Come on, Ma, don’t get yourself all riled up. He’s being dramatic. You know Pa. Always
puttin’ on a show. (Sarcastically) His life is over, my foot! Give him a drink and you’ll see
whose life is over. (Elaborates) Good thing he can’t drink anymore. That’s why his life is
over.
Cora: (Annoyed) That’s not true and you know it! Don’t talk about your father like that. I know
exactly what he means and he’s right, goddamn it!
Kitty: You guys, geez. Stop beating yourself up, Ma. Now you’re going to make me cry. (Nina
comforts her with accompanying sympathies)
Nina: (Gathering the family) See ya later, Jay. Thanks for looking out for him.
Contrasting accounts of foreclosure in the preceding extracts were not unusual in the empir-
ical material. From one individual or group to another, what was evident when each spoke of
life, even the same life, could be an irrevocable narrative, one heard over and over in stories of life
in nursing homes. At the same time, the novelty of particular stories could cast a familiar pattern
into something considerably different in meaning.
164
Conclusion
There is a line of thinking about institutions that takes a perspective on life narratives than differs
from the one that informs our illustrations. It has roots in Max Weber’s (1958) likening of the
bureaucratization of society to an “iron cage.” Weber used the metaphor to refer to what he
viewed as the inescapable consequences of the rationalization of society, which organize our lives
and our life narratives into patterns bereft of discretion and novelty. The view resonates strongly
in critical social theory, from Jürgen Habermas’ (1984, 1987) idea of the “colonization” of every-
day life, to overdetermined portrayals of Erving Goffman’s (1961) idea of “total institutions.” In
this view, the rationalization of modern life overshadows its everyday practice, novelty taking a
distant back seat, if any seat at all, to the iron-clad patterning of experience.
Instead and following Mead, this chapter has applied the view that however irrevocable the
presence of patterning in life, especially in institutions, novelty is an ongoing and inexorable fea-
ture of everyday meaning-making (see Gubrium & Järvinen, 2014; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000b).
We have used the microscopic advantages of narrative ethnography combined with a perspective
on the occasioned, eventful, and encountered salience of the seemingly insignificant in everyday
life to make the point. The biographical work and local pertinence of life narratives continually
pattern experience in terms otherwise figured to be fully colonized.
The novelty and pattern of life narratives is not exclusive to institutions. These are co-present
in all biographical work, as those concerned attend to local pertinences in sorting personal par-
ticulars into constant and comprehensible wholes. Institutional pertinences do matter on this
front. It is the hallmark of the agents of going concerns to take account of the formal mandates
of organizational conditions in doing their work, biographical work included. Yet, taking account
of mandates of this kind, while increasingly prevalent, is not the same as totalized control and
formulaic patterning. This chapter has argued that paying concerted attention to the working
contours of accountability in life narrative construction – even in institutional reckoning – allows
us to discern both novelty and pattern in everyday practice.
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12
ZEITGEIST, IDENTITY
AND POLITICS
The modern meaning of
the concept of generation
Semi Purhonen
university of tampere
Introduction
In literature on biography and life history, ‘generation’ has proved to be a crucial concept with
which people construct life-historical narratives and imagine historical time (Bude, 2000). As a
concept, ‘social’ generation provides means to situate private experiences, life events and memo-
ries in a wider socio-cultural frame. It can be used to link observations of micro and macro lev-
els, to integrate between personal experiences and characterizations of entire historical periods.
Generation, thus, literally answers to C. Wright Mill’s well-known call for filling the gap between
biography and history, ‘the personal troubles of milieu and the public issues of social structure’
(Mills, 1959, p. 8), which he saw as a general task of sociology.
If considered against other potential sources of collective identity, namely concepts such as
class or nationality that also can be used in relating personal experiences to socio-cultural struc-
tures, generation is distinctive in its special focus on social change. As a concept, generation
refers almost automatically to temporality, development and change (Corsten, 1999; Lüscher
et al., 2014; Nash, 1978). Talking about ‘my generation’ includes always the idea of how that
specific generation is different from previous, and possibly also younger, generations. Generation
is thereby a powerful concept with which to imagine and conceptualize time because it includes
an aim to categorize and classify – even name and label – history.
Generation, once called the ‘truest community’ (Esler, 1984), is distinctive also because its
membership stands outside of voluntary choice. You may be socially mobile or you may even
change your citizenship, for instance, but you cannot choose your generation – you either belong
to it or not, and this fact does not change in time (Rintala, 1979). According to a famous phrase
by Martin Heidegger in 1927, belonging to one’s generation is an inescapable destiny, which
‘completes the full drama of individual human existence’ (cited in Mannheim, 1952, p. 282).
The story is, however, different from the point of view of generation as a collective identity.
Even if it were the case that the ‘fate’ of a generation was already sealed from the outset, gener-
ational consciousness – the feeling of ’we-ness’ of the generation – continues to live its life until
the death of the generation; generational identities are socially constructed in communicative
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Semi Purhonen
processes over time and are never final and complete (Bude, 2000). The members of a generation
‘do not only have something in common, they have also a (common) sense for (a kind of knowl-
edge about) the fact that they have something in common’ (Corsten, 1999, p. 258). Generational
consciousness, or identity, of this type, is never a product of an automatic or inherent process.
Social generations are not born but made (Wohl, 1979).
Although sometimes interpreted as one of the ‘elementary concepts’ of modern sociology
(Jureit & Wildt, 2005), generation famously has many meanings, which have been widely dis-
cussed and profoundly criticized (e.g. France & Roberts, 2014; Kertzer, 1983; Pilcher 1994;
Ryder, 1965; Spitzer, 1973; Vincent, 2005). For more than sixty years, Karl Mannheim has been
the dominant figure in generation studies. His essay ‘The problem of generations’ (Mannheim,
1952; German original 1928) has become the canonical, unifying point of reference in the field.
The concern of this chapter is not with Mannheim’s view of generations as such. Here it is suffi-
cient that, for Mannheim, like for many subsequent sociologists, generations emerge only under
special historical circumstances and are thus something ‘more’ than simply age cohorts; they are
a group of people of similar age bonded by a shared experience that can eventually result in a
distinct self-consciousness, a world-view, and, ultimately, political action (Mannheim, 1952).
Rather, the aim of this chapter is to historically locate this view of social generation within
a wider historical process during which the meaning of the concept of generation has been
formed and evolved. Moreover, the aim is to highlight some of the problems with the concept
of generation, both theoretical and methodological, that are relevant for and should be addressed
in a sociologically sensitive usage of the concept.
From family generations to social generations

It is not always totally clear, however, what is meant by ‘generation’. The concept is widely used
in everyday language, commercials, or with reference to technological progress, and so on. In
social sciences, there are two basic ways to use the concept of generation (for different conceptual
demarcations, see Kertzer, 1983; Lüscher et al., 2014). The first is in reference to familial gener-
ations as a structuring principle in kinship system. This genealogical usage, unquestionably the
oldest and most profound meaning of the concept (Nash, 1978), appears in the studies that con-
centrate on the relationships between parents and children. This meaning thus dominates much
of the studies in the fields of anthropology, sociology of the family, life-course, ageing, youth,
social mobility and migration as well as discussions on education and socialization, and so on.
Understood in this sense, family generation is a basic model for age-related social organization in
all known societies (Eisenstadt, 1956).
The starting point of the second use of generation is more collective than generation under-
stood inside individual family or kinship groups. Generation, then, consists of a group of people
born at the same time, or during a certain period. Often, but not always, the view is supplemented
by the idea that these people are not only of a similar age, but that they also share common
unifying experiences – usually thought to be a ‘formative experience’ during young adulthood –
which separate them from older and younger groups and therefore is the reason behind calling
them a generation. Without the characterization referring to the shared experiences, ‘generation’
would be synonymous with age group or birth cohort. In many studies, generation is actually
used even more loosely when speaking of the ‘young generation’ when what is actually meant is
youth as a life stage, referring to the banal fact that there are people of many ages.
Some of the studies operating at the collective level use the concept without references to
shared experiences, but in this case generation becomes a purely demographic concept – a chron-
ologically defined cohort in a population structure – and thus it could, of course, be replaced
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Zeitgeist, identity and politics
by the concept of cohort. Many collective-level studies, however, mostly written by scholars
interested in the cultural, social and political significance generations might have, understand
generation as referring to the shared experiences. As a result, generation can be seen as a potential
source of collective identity which distinguishes it from other groups and which may realize itself
as a political force. Understood this way, the concept of generation has been called, depending
on the context, ‘social’, ‘historical’, ‘cultural’ or ‘political’. A typical contemporary definition of
this type is provided by Edmunds and Turner (2002, pp. 6–7), according to which generation is
an ‘age cohort that comes to have social significance by virtue of constituting itself as cultural
identity’, which means that ‘a sociology of generations involves the study of generational cultures
and consciousness’.
As a consequence of multiple meanings, the concept of generation has been used differently
not only between different studies but also inside one and the same study (Kertzer, 1983). A usual
conclusion from this state of affairs has been that in the sociological usage of the concept, the
meaning employed should be explicitly specified in the context of the study. Some scholars have
also wanted to define the concept for one specific purpose; most strongly, it has been argued that
the concept of generation should be saved for the meaning of family generation only. Ultimately,
it has been suggested that sociology should withdraw from using the concept of generation
entirely (e.g. Laslett, 2005).
The basic meanings of the concept of generation – family generation and social generation –
are different from each other in a significant manner in how they conceptualize social time, the
transmission of culture from one generation to another and socio-historical change in general.
The perspectives of family generation and social generation are different because the former
starts with continuity and reproduction whereas the latter stimulates to focus on conflicts and
discontinuities (DeMartini, 1985). Family generation, which ties its meaning to a system of
kinship, perceives the cycle of generations in a biological sense: generations follow each other in
a steady, continuous flow as the time which separates generations is constant (often seen as 30
years) and thus the perspective is easily limited to three coexisting generations at time, namely
children (‘young’), parents (‘adults’) and grandparents (‘old’). Indeed, generational continuity
was the foundation for cultural stability and ‘successful’ transmission of traditions and values in
pre-modern societies.
The concept of social generation is very different in this respect. From its perspective, condi-
tions in which generations might emerge and take shape are historically contingent, which means
that it is difficult – if not impossible – to say anything universal about the temporal variability of
the cycle of generations or about the construction of relationships between distinct generations
more generally. However, the formation of social generations is related with the speed of social
change; under circumstances of rapid social change, distinct generations might be identifiable
even within a pretty short period of time (Rintala, 1979). This way, in modern societies, genera-
tions may become ‘shorter’ than before (Berger, 1960), whereas in a static society, there are only
formal and superficial differences between generations. Therefore, it is also possible that a social
generation can be so ‘long’ that it covers several biological generations.
Thus, in stabile, traditional societies, family generations follow each other in a continuous
cycle, ‘reproducing themselves identically, with the same replacing the same’ (Kriegel, 1978,
p. 23), which meant that there were no room for divisions according to social generations. There
is one problem in this view, however. Given that there have been different types of upheavals
and discontinuities over time and not only in modern times, the view falls short in explaining
why the social meaning of generation is so new and was invented so late as a concept – and why
youth movements articulating their own specific generational experiences are also such a new
phenomenon (Braungart, 1984). The concept of social generation emerged only during the late
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nineteenth century and has been used more widely only since the beginning of the twentieth
century when it began to be codified in theories and manifestoes (see Burnett, 2010; Jureit &
Wildt, 2005; Kriegel, 1978; Wohl, 1979). Its meaning is, in fact, profoundly modern.
A brief history of the concept of social generation

Like many other key concepts in social sciences, the concept of social generation has been formed
and transformed in a mutual relationship with surrounding society and the changes that have
taken place in it (Koselleck, 2004). From this perspective, it can be argued that ‘theoretical under-
standing of the generational idea has evolved in tandem with the apparently increasing historical
significance of generational conflict’ (Esler, 2001, p. 6047).
It is possible to identify specific phases that have been crucial in the formation of the modern
meaning of the concept of generation (Eisenstadt, 2001; Jaeger, 1985; Knöbl, 2005; Kriegel, 1978;
Lüscher et al., 2014; Marías, 1970; Wohl, 1979).
Nineteenth century ‘prehistory’

The first phase in the history of the concept of social generation consists of the notions pre-
sented in the nineteenth-century enlightenment where the concept of generation was connected
with the ideas of social progress and development. This meant, at the same time, that that the
concept was abstracted from its ancient genealogical meaning. The most important authors of
these efforts were Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill. Both saw the succession of generations
as an important causal factor in social change and progress. Comte argued that present soci-
ety is conditioned by history, and that emerging generations, through precise 30-year intervals,
regulate ‘the historical modification of society’ (Marías, 1970, p. 24). But although Comte and
Mill emphasized the importance of generations as a social phenomenon, they actually used the
concept in the sense of age group (or in modern terms, birth cohort, a concept first defined by
French lexicographer Émile Littré in 1863).
It was only the great German hermeneutic philosopher and historian Wilhelm Dilthey who
clearly broke away from treating generations as mere age groups and tried to analyze the basic
structure and significance of social generations, signifying the end of the prehistory of the con-
cept. Dilthey, in his 1875 study about German romanticism, proposed that unifying experience
is at the heart of generation:
Those who receive the same impressions during their formative years form a gener-
ation. In this sense, a generation consists of a close circle of individuals who make up
a holistic unit through their dependence upon the same historical events and changes
which they experienced during their formative years in spite of other differences.
(Dilthey, 1875, p. 39; cited in Jaeger, 1985, p. 276)
One thing that differentiates Dilthey’s vision of generations as based on shared experiences dur-
ing the ‘formative years’ from a more modern view of social generations is that Dilthey’s view is
rather individualistic and lacks the idea of representation. When he lists the names that comprise
the object he studies – the romanticist generation of Novalis, Hölderlin and others – he does not
see the ‘close circle of individuals’ as belonging to a generation; those individuals are the genera-
tion themselves (Marías, 1970).
In sum, during the nineteenth century, the concept of generation transformed from the
concrete kinship context into a general social category that carried a new kind of future and
170
forward-looking time-consciousness (Koselleck, 2004). As a causal force behind progress of soci-

ety, the role of succession of generations was clearly pronounced, for instance, in the work of
Comte. Moreover, German hermeneutic philosophers and historians, above all Dilthey, recog-
nized generation as a term applied to a relationship of contemporaneity between individuals,
namely between those who grew up together and therefore shared unifying experiences.
The ‘golden age’

The proper modern meaning of the concept emerged only at the turn of the century in a pro-
cess that culminated with the ‘golden age’ of the concept of generation, events that took place in
Europe after the First World War, especially in the 1920s. At that time, the concept was codified
in numerous theories and manifestoes, written by European intellectuals, that emphasized the
priority and importance of youth and especially youth experiences as the basis for the idea of
generations (Wohl, 1979).
There were several structural factors at the background of the emergence of the concept, all
of which can be labelled under the grand concept of European modernization and the social
changes brought by it (Eisenstadt, 2001; Jureit & Wildt, 2005; Kriegel, 1978; Wohl, 1979).
Developments in the division of labour and demographic changes influenced the way in which
the status of youth was seen in the new society. Nation-states were organized according to uni-
versalistic principles of citizenship, which undermined the role of family as the basic unit of pol-
itics and the social sphere. Similarly, industrialized economies were based on more differentiated
division of labour than before, which also diminished the status of the family, as the division of
labour became more and more independent from family and kinship. Economic change made
especially young men more independent from the authority of their parents than before, a process
which was strengthened by the expansion of two key institutions of modern society: military and
university. These tendencies reinforced the possibility of different types of age-based groupings
and organizations (which included members of about the same age) to develop and increase their
significance (Eisenstadt, 2001; Wohl, 1979).
The increase in life expectancy contributed to the same direction, to the ‘objective creation of
age groups, clearly demarcated and separate, because their members are destined to go together
through the basic steps of childhood, adolescence, marriage, parenthood’ (Kriegel, 1978, p. 24).
Traditional sources of social identity, mainly based on family and local community, became gen-
erally weaker whereas the sense of collective destiny related to similar age increased (Wohl, 1979).
These processes gave ground to the new type of symbolic expressions of youth and new
generations (Eisenstadt, 2001). To be young was suddenly a forefront issue in European modern
societies. Around the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of generational rebellion began to
crystallize into an ‘ideology of youth’ that was connected to the rise of new kind of youth move-
ments in Europe. The concept of generation referred now not only to the contemporaneity, but
also to the difference between new and old generations. New terms such as ‘rising generation’,
‘new generation’ and ‘young generation’ were popularized. If the future was thought to be totally
different from the present, then the young were seen as ‘the standard-bearers of the future in the
present’ (Wohl, 1979, p. 204).
It is only a slight overstatement to say that the modern concept of social generation, as it
is known today, is actually produced by one single social generation, namely, the ‘generation
of 1914’ (Wohl, 1979). It has survived the Great War, directed great expectations towards the
new rising generation, and used the concept of generation as a unifying catchphrase. Basically
these theories, with only minor modifications, are still used in social sciences today. Especially
the 1920s saw the rise of many ambitious theories and analyses. The Great War was an extreme
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Semi Purhonen
event from the point of view of generational consciousness as it divided the history into two parts
(Kriegel, 1978). But who were these new theorists of generation? Robert Wohl summarizes in
his magnificent study of The Generation of 1914:
In early twentieth-century Europe generationalists were almost always literary intellec-

tuals living in large cities. They were members of a small elite who were keenly aware
of their uniqueness and proud of their intellectual superiority. What concerned these
writers or would-be writers was the decline of culture and the waning of vital energies;
what drove them together was the desire to create new values and to replace those that
were fading; what incited them to action was the conviction that they represented the
future in the present; what dismayed them was their problematic relationship to the
masses they would have liked to lead.
(Wohl, 1979, p. 5)
As a 1893-born a member of the ‘generation of 1914’ also himself, Karl Mannheim was indeed
not presenting his account on generations in a vacuum; generation was generally very fashion-
able concept among European intellectuals in the 1920s. Although probably best known for
his sociology of knowledge, Mannheim’s aim as a scholar and intellectual during the 1920s was
above all to understand the spirit of the epoch – zeitgeist – he was living in. Mannheim shared a
typical idea of the crisis of culture and the alienation of mind in it, which characterized the whole
German intellectual life after the Great War (Frisby, 1983). The motivation for Mannheim’s soci-
ology of knowledge was, thus, that it could provide a basis, an unbiased standpoint, from where
to analyze and capture the spirit of the times. This link between the sociology of knowledge and
an attempt to understand zeitgeist is strongly present also in Mannheim’s views on generations
(see Mannheim, 1991, pp. 2–3 and pp. 238–48).
To summarize some elements of Mannheim’s theory, which made it distinct from other
conceptualizations of generations of the era, the first is that Mannheim ambitiously tried to
synthesize previous approaches to generations; on the one hand the ‘positivist’ conception which
quantifies generations as chronologically continuous cohorts (cf. Comte above), and on the other
hand the ‘romantic-historical’ tradition – which was much closer to him both intellectually and
geographically – which emphasizes the fundamental, qualitative differences between generations
in terms of their inner experiences (cf. Dilthey above).
Secondly, Mannheim clearly used social class as a model in his theorizing of generations.
Especially his notion of ‘generation location’ resembles class position as the objective criterion
of generation from which ‘generation as actuality’ (a kind of version of Marxist ‘class-for-itself ’)
might emerge, resulting in political mobilization of generation-conscious movements, namely,
‘generation units’ with their representatives and spokesmen (cf. class-politics under the guidance
of the Party). This three-fold conceptual division – generation location, generation as actuality
and generation unit – is strongly teleological; it is a question of potentials which might actualize
under favourable circumstances, not of a deterministic process (Mannheim, 1952; Zinnecker,
2003). The third distinctive feature, thus, in Mannheim’s theory is that, unlike many other gen-
erationalists, he clearly emphasized that not all age groups become real generations. Even similar
‘generation location’ – which is not only about similar ages but includes also similarity in terms
of geographical and cultural location – does not guarantee that individuals exhibiting it would
always be also ‘generation as actuality’ or develop distinct generational consciousness.
Fourth, Mannheim is distinctive because of his ambivalent position regarding the question
of the unity of zeitgeist and the possibilities of one group to interpret it as a whole. On the one
hand, he criticizes many of his contemporaries of assuming that the zeitgeist is homogenous and
172
covers all of the society at a given moment. On the other hand, Mannheim suggested at the same
time that intellectuals nevertheless do always represent also something ‘more’ than just themselves,
namely, the spirit of the times. This paradox can be seen as parallel with the question of the rela-
tionship between generation-conscious units and the ‘generation location’, the generation ‘itself ’
in a wider sense, assumed to be at the background. According to Mannheim (1952, pp. 307–8),
the former can, after all, articulate the experiences of the latter, which is why the ideas developed
inside a generation unit can attain wider influence.
Mannheim was therefore distinctive in some of his formulations (and probably also generally
more careful in his words than many of the other ‘generationalists’ of the time whose claims
could be rather extreme and exaggerating), but on the other side, his theory of generation was
definitely a child of its time.
Modern Anglo-American mainstream sociology

The worldwide influence of Anglo-American sociology increased significantly after the Second
World War and soon, during the 1950s, it became the model for new, ‘modern sociology’ almost
everywhere. In this sociology, the role of the concept of generation was theoretically marginal
(Knöbl, 2005). Age groups, the allocation of roles according to age as well as the significance
of age in producing social integration were examined within the dominant functionalist frame-
work (e.g. Linton, 1942; Parsons & Bales, 1955). It was particularly emphasized, however, that
age groups should not be self-conscious in order to take care of these functions (Parsons, 1949).
The concept of generation was, however, kept alive in many of the great American studies
that dealt with radical social change, studies that could be interpreted as aiming at ‘diagnosis
of the times’. This is logical in the sense that when someone is presenting a thesis about major
change or upheaval (whatever it may concern), history is divided into two and it is only natural
to use the concept of generation when comparing those who have lived before to those who
have lived after the change. Thus, the concept of generation has a role, for instance, in major
studies about changing character types or personalities like The Lonely Crowd (Riesman et al.,
1950) and The Organization Man (Whyte, 1956) as well as the study proclaiming The End of
Ideology (Bell, 1960).
Generally, though, the US-driven post-war mainstream sociology found less usage for the
concept of social generation. From the late 1950s onwards, one peculiar feature of modern
American sociology was, in fact, a kind of aspiration to purify the concept of generation from its
‘metaphysical’ roots. This was clearly shown in intentions to modify the concept to be more suit-
able for empirical analysis, or either in suggestions according to which sociology should totally
withdraw from using the concept (see Knöbl, 2005). The project became best evident in efforts
that were made to replace the concept of social generation with a more technical and statistically
sophisticated concept of cohort, which would fit better the needs of quantitative analysis.
The most influential formulation on behalf of the concept of cohort – and against the concept
of social generation – was by Norman B. Ryder (1965). Ryder wanted to reserve the concept of
generation only to the meaning of family generation, whereas in collective-level studies, sociol-
ogy should adopt the concept of cohort. His famous definition of cohort goes as follows:
A cohort may be defined as the aggregate of individuals (within some population defi-
nition) who experienced the same event within the same time interval. In almost all
cohort research to date the defining event has been birth, but this is only a special case
of the more general approach.
(Ryder, 1965, p. 845)
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Semi Purhonen
With reference to Mannheim, Ryder rejected the idea of collective consciousness and the dis-
tinction between ‘generation location’ and ‘generation as actuality’ (Hardy & Waite, 1997). It is
noteworthy, however, that in Ryder’s definition, the significance and potential causal power of the
concept of cohort still rests on the idea of unifying experiences of certain events. Thus, employ-
ing the concept of cohort does not by any means resolve the problem of how shared experiences
produce one type of outcomes and not others that can make the cohort distinct from previous
and next cohorts; this remains still something a researcher has to reason and interpret indirectly
(Spitzer, 1973). In any case, as a result of Ryder’s text and in the work of his followers, the meaning
of Mannheim’s ‘problem of generations’ transformed mainly into a technical question of how to
separate cohort effects from the effects of two other ‘time variables’, namely, the effects of age
(in the meaning of life stage) and period. Nonetheless, it is not unusual that these studies employ
also the concept of generation and use it as synonymous to cohort.
Although these efforts to purify the concept of generation and replace it by the concept of
cohort have been widely supported (e.g. Elder, 1975; Kertzer, 1983; Pilcher, 1994; Riley, 1987),
they have, generally speaking, failed to reach their goal. The main reason for this was the histor-
ical changes in society: the worldwide rise of new kind of youth and student movements in the
1960s brought the theme and the concept of social generation to an era of unequalled popularity.
On the one hand, movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, such as the movement against the
Vietnam War, were generation conscious themselves and targeted their rebellion explicitly against
the values and traditions of older generations. On the other hand, social and political scientists
immediately started to interpret the movements by applying the concept of social generation –
using particularly Mannheim’s theory and related concepts such as ‘generation unit’,‘generational
movement’ and ‘generation gap’ as starting points (e.g. Braungart, 1984). As a result, the concept
of social generation became popularized through wider publicity. Unlike in the 1920s, when
the concept of social generation emerged among European intellectuals, by the late 1960s the
concept was not anymore used by small circles of literary intellectuals; it reached the attention of
entire populations of people of different ages (Eisenstadt, 2001).
The current situation

Today, there is still a great diversity in the social scientific usage of the concept of social gener-
ation. First, the concept has firmly established itself into many specialized research fields where
it is used as an analytic framework. These include thematic subfields like sociology of ageing
(Gilleard & Higgs, 2005), but also certain methodological branches like life course, biography and
narrative studies (see Mayer, 2004). Secondly, however, opinions considerably vary about how
the meaning of the concept should be demarcated. In many, mostly quantitative studies trying to
detect the effect of generation, the concept is used as synonymous to cohort, referring to entire
age groups, whereas more ‘Mannheimian’ usage of generation has been found valuable mostly
in qualitative studies analyzing generational experiences and identities. Thirdly, there is also a
theoretical discussion going on about the value and meaning of the concept, within which some
have been speaking of a distinct field of ‘sociology of generations’ (Edmunds & Turner, 2002;
Eyerman & Turner, 1998). The theoretical debate has revitalized in the late 1990s and 2000s and
it has been most vivid and promising mainly within continental sociology, especially in Germany
(see Lüscher et al., 2014).
One promising line of research has recently suggested that the sociological study of generations
should pay more attention to generational discourses and the way in which the terms, concepts,
labels, classifications, manifestoes, even scientific theories, shape generational identities and how
people perceive the relations between generations (Aboim & Vasconcelos, 2014; Bohnenkamp,
174
2011; Corsten, 1999; Jureit & Wildt, 2005; Purhonen, 2007). Discourses can be seen as a mediat-
ing level between generational experiences and consciousness – a level which was largely ignored
by Mannheim and the line of thought following him until recently. From this perspective, it can
be argued that social generations tend to produce themselves by their discourse about themselves
(and other generations). Usually this takes time, which brings in the role of commemorative prac-
tices and collective remembering of key experiences and symbolic events of the generation in the
construction of generational identities (Eyerman & Turner, 1998; Schuman & Scott, 1989). The
institutionalization of generational identity and the collective memory of a generation goes often
hand in hand, which also implies that the identities are not ready-made and stabile but negotiated
and contested in communicative practices. Generational identities can be seen always as more or
less formed and coloured by the articulations and representations of social generations presented
in the public discourse. An emphasis on the discursive ‘generation-making’ can shed light on the
process by which a generation becomes a group and an object of identification.
Conclusion: Social generation as a

political and problematic concept
The concept of social generation has emerged and been formed in interplay with the changes
of western societies. However, only rather special historical circumstances and situations have
been crucial in this process, allowing generational consciousness to become ‘articulated in terms
of youth symbolism’ (Eisenstadt, 2001, p. 6058). Among such situations two are of special
importance. First, World War I and the experience of it, which produced the condensation
of the meaning of the concept of social generations into specific manifestoes and theories by
young European intellectuals (‘the generation of 1914’). Second, the ‘generation conscious’
social movements in the 1960s that were interpreted by applying the concept of generation,
which made the final popularization of the concept into wider publicity possible (‘the gener-
ation of 1968’).
A reflexive approach based on the conceptual history reveals that a specific view of social
generations, which originally dates to early twentieth-century Europe and its intellectuals, can
still be found in many sociological studies today as well as in popular discourse. In its essence,
the concept of social generation, understood in this sense, is in many ways problematic, and
ultimately, a political concept. At the heart of the concept of social generation – if understood
like ‘generationalists’ did – is a totalizing tendency that causes trouble with intra-generational
differences and easily produces caricatures of different generations.
For the original generationalists, the concept of generation served as an alternative to the con-
cept of social class, a new way to think about social change and progress. Ever since, the concept
of generation has been paired with the idea of the zeitgeist or some other controversial way of
defining what is essential (meaning what it is that creates generations) at a given point in time
and in a given culture. In this sense, the concept has clear elitist connotations; the idea of some
kind of vanguard (‘the elite’), which represents an entire generation by proclaiming itself as its
spokesman, automatically creates a counterpart, namely, the others in the peer group, who are
thought to be represented (‘the masses’). Indeed, from a constructionist perspective which sees
social categories and identities as resulting from symbolic struggles (e.g. Bourdieu, 1991), social
generations – like all social groupings and classes – can exist only through their representatives.
However, this very relationship of representation is problematic because rarely is the relationship
totally unambiguous (who can legitimately represent whom and by what authority), and often
there are opportunities for misuse. Thus, as a product of classification struggles, the idea of social
generation is fundamentally a contested concept.
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Semi Purhonen
Social generation as a collective identity based on shared experience is possible only if some-
one articulates or formulates the very existence of the generational experience and its meaning to
the people first; only then can others begin to identify themselves with that generation. Usually,
however, it is not clear to what degree the ‘representatives’ of a generation reasonably and legiti-
mately represent an entire generation as they claim. There is always someone – usually some kind
of social movement or elite, intellectual faction – who articulates the generational experience.
By defining itself (‘us’), however, it usually extends the interpretation to encompass the entire
group of peers, that is, the whole ‘generation’ (Hazlett, 1998; Purhonen, 2007; Wohl, 1979). This,
of course, has nothing to do with how large a group of people the generational interpretation
may really touch.
As for social generations, there are two basic relationships through which the processes of
representation should be analyzed and studied in contrast to just assume them. The first is the
supposed relationship of representation between the individual actor (thought of here as the ‘repre-
sentative’) and the generational movement or other concrete group behind the actor. The second
is the supposed relationship of representation between the movement or the group (thought of
here as the ‘representative’) and the entire generation itself that is postulated as being behind the
group or movement. This latter relationship between the generational movement members and
all other age-group peers has constituted a real problem to all generationalists and classic genera-
tional theories, including Mannheim’s (1952) ambivalent position with regards to the relationship
between ‘generation unit’ and its possibility to articulate the experience of entire ‘generation
location’, or, zeitgeist.
The concept of social generation is not necessary for sociological research; most studies would
do fine without it, and hence the term generation could be reserved only to the meaning of fam-
ily generations, and differences between age groups could be conceptualized by using cohorts.
However, social generations are a social fact per se, from the point of view of collective identifi-
cation, and people really do have generational identities (of different types and that are more or
less clearly pronounced). If we want to study and understand those identities and the numerous
debates in which the concept of social generation plays a key role, then we have to continue to
adhere to the concept.
The final conclusion with the concept of social generation is, after all, rather obvious. First, we
must be reflexive in our usage of the term. Second, we must be skeptical when we see someone
talking about ‘my generation’ or classifying and labeling generations.
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13
BIOGRAPHY AS A THEORETICAL
AND METHODOLOGICAL KEY
CONCEPT IN TRANSNATIONAL
MIGRATION STUDIES
Irini Siouti
university of vienna
Introduction
In transnational migration studies the concept of biography is used as a theoretical and method-
ological key concept for investigating migration processes in the age of globalization.
The biographical approach provides an excellent way of researching transnational migration
experiences and processes because it offers a methodological way to capture empirically the
diversity, process and transformational character of migration phenomena and identity construc-
tions in the age of globalization. The biographical approach proceeds from the characterization
of biographies as ‘radical documents of the sociality of the individual’ (Apitzsch, 1990, p. 90). In
this way, processes of change and identity constructions can be investigated. Biographical analysis
can thus look at problems and conflicts, but it can also examine the subjective coping strategies
which are available to the subjects as ways of dealing with social structures. As Apitzsch and
Inowlocki point out, the focus of biographical analysis is not the reconstruction of intention-
ality that is represented as an individual´s life course, but the embeddedness of the biographical
account in social macro-structures (Apitzsch & Inowlocki, 2000, p. 61).
Hence, the biographical approach facilitates a differentiated way of looking at migration
processes, which can incorporate both the initial social situation of migrants in the country of
origin and in the country of arrival. While traditionally migration research has taken place in
the framework of a nation state with a strong focus on the country of arrival, the biography
perspective focuses on the narrated life experiences in both contexts. Thus, it offers a method-
ological possibility of overcoming the trap posed by methodological nationalism (Wimmer &
Glick Schiller, 2003) and of investigating “new” forms of migration, for example transmigration
(Glick Schiller et al., 1992), which lies at a tangent to both the region of origin and the region of
settlement and constitutes a form of a transnational life existence in its own right (Pries, 2001).
In this chapter I present the biography approach as an approach to research in the interdisci-
plinary field of transnational migration studies. I will explain biography as a theoretical concept,
as a historical-empirical object, and as a complex methodological strategy.1
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Irini Siouti
I start with a brief history of the biographical research perspective and how it became estab-
lished in the social sciences, especially in the context of migration. Secondly, I discuss the concept
of transnational biographies, before focusing on the methodological use of narratives. Finally I
set out the key principles of biographical analysis, focusing on case reconstructive biographical
analyses. I conclude with some reflections on methodological challenges in transnational biog-
raphy research.
The development of biographical

research in migration studies
The biographical approach originated in the tradition of the interpretative paradigm developed
by the Chicago School of sociology. William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, two sociolo-
gists belonging to the Chicago School, were the pioneers of biographical research in the sociol-
ogy of migration. In their study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, the research for which
was conducted during World War I and which was published in the USA in 1918, biographical
research was developed as an innovative research method in the social sciences in order to explain
complex migration-specific social phenomena as qualitatively new in terms of the originating
and the receiving society (Apitzsch & Siouti, 2007, p. 3).
Thomas and Znaniecki’s methodology, distinguished by the fact that biographical mate-
rial was used as sociological data to gain insight into the principles constructing the lives
of migrants, inspired the empirical research tradition of the Chicago School from the 1920s
onwards. It was here that the use of biographical material for sociological investigations, par-
ticularly in deviance research, was continued and systematized as a biographical method during
the 1930s. This was achieved in particular by means of Clifford R. Shaw’s book The Jack Roller
(1930), which was the second significant study in the development of biographical research.
Shaw used biographical material not only for the purpose of illustration, but also – together
with other sources – for case studies (Fuchs, 2000, p. 91). While quantitative research subse-
quently replaced the biographical method in American sociology and caused an interruption in
its development, the method was readopted by European, and particularly German, sociologists
during the 1970s. The biographical research tradition has been strongly influenced by Euro-
pean and North American traditions of interpretative sociology (Apitzsch & Inowlocki, 2000;
Chamberlayne, 2004). Even though the biographical research approach is an international and
diverse research field, it is particularly common in the German-speaking social sciences, where
it has become more firmly established as an interdisciplinary research field in migration studies
since the beginning of the 1990s (see Apitzsch & Siouti, 2007). Until around 1990 migration
research in Germany had been dominated by quantitative approaches and policy reports, which
were established as research on guestworkers and their children. The focus was mainly on the
social conditions and problems experienced by migrants during their integration process into
the receiving society (Breckner, 2005, p. 22). The theoretical discourse was dominated by a
mononational research perspective, which concentrated mainly on the process of becoming
settled and on assimilation and integration theories. With the help of the biographical research
perspective it was possible to initiate a slow shift in the discourse of German migration research,
so that migration can be seen as a resource rather than a deficiency. Empirical studies based on
biographical case studies have shown that migration processes are structured by both principles:
action schemes and trajectories of suffering (Schütze, 1981). Biographical research can thus be
seen as a process-analytical research procedure which gives an idea of the genesis of the course
of social events and records social reality from the perspective of acting and suffering subjects
(see Schütze, 1983).
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Biography as a key concept
The range of biographically oriented research on migration phenomena has expanded stead-
ily since the end of the 1990s and now covers different types of migration (see Apitzsch, 1990;
Apitzsch, Inowlocki & Kontos, 2008; Breckner, 2005; Guitierrez Rodriguez, 1999; Gültekin,
2003; Hummrich, 2002; Inowlocki, 1993; Jimenez Laux, 2001; Juhasz & Mey, 2003; Ofner,
2003; Ricker, 2000). In the last decade new migration patterns have been observed and gender
has become an important aspect of research in the context of new migration processes. Fem-
inist scholars have studied the phenomenon of domestic work in different disciplinary fields,
using the transnationalism approach in combination with biographical research perspectives (see
Hess, 2005; Karakayali, 2010; Lutz, 2007, 2011a; Shinozaki, 2004). The transnationalism approach
and the concept of transmigration – which were developed in American social anthropological
research (see Glick Schiller et al., 1992) – were introduced in biographical migration research and
entailed a paradigm shift. While classical migration research analysis traditionally concentrated on
examining integration and assimilation within the paradigm of the nation state, the focus of trans-
nationalism perspectives has underlined the intersections of the local and the global by looking
at forms of interconnectedness that transcend nation-state borders (Ruokonen-Engler & Siouti,
2013, p. 248). In this context the concept of transmigration was introduced as a new form of
migration that is characterized by commuting between different national, cultural and geograph-
ical spaces. The prefix “trans” was used by the pioneers in the development of this approach,
Glick Schiller et al. (1992) in order to place the everyday worlds and ways of life of immigrants in
a new conceptual framework. Biographical-analytical research on transmigration has shown that
transmigration emerges not just as a new form of migration in the age of globalization influenced
by new technologies in communication, but also in the form of biographical work processes,
which can be seen as an unintended consequence of strategies that are structurally determined
(see Siouti, 2013). Transmigration represents a complex life history transformation process. The
motives for, as well as the effects of, transmigration on further life history are revealed in narrative
biographies. This facilitates empirical access to migrant life strategies in which both the original
conditions and the nature of transmigration phenomena are the focus of the analysis.
In recent years several empirical studies have shown that the biographical approach opens up
a new perspective for the investigation of transnational social spaces (see, for example, Fürstenau,
2004; Kempf, 2013; Lutz, 2007; Ruokonen-Engler, 2012; Siouti, 2013). These studies extend clas-
sical biography theory through a transnational perspective by focusing on the question of how
transnational biographies are constituted through the migration processes and how they can be
theoretically defined. In this context, the concept of transnational biographies was developed as
a way of linking biography theory and the concept of transnationalism (see, for example, Apitzsch &
Siouti, 2014; Lutz, 2011b).
The theoretical concept of transnational biographies

In the biographical research approach, the concept of biography is conceived as a social construc-
tion which ‘constitutes both social reality and the subjects’ worlds of knowledge and experience,
and which is constantly affirmed and transformed within the dialectical relationship between
life history knowledge and experiences and patterns presented by society’ (Fischer-Rosenthal &
Rosenthal, 1997, p. 138). Thus, the biographical perspective opens up both theoretical and meth-
odological access to the embeddedness of biographies in social micro, meso and macro structures
(Dausien, 1994, p. 152). In the field of transnational migration studies the main questions of
interest to biography-theoretical research are how people ‘produce’ a biography in transnational
cultural contexts and social situations, and which conditions, rules, and patterns of construction
can be observed in the process of transnational migration. The concepts of ‘biographical work’
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Irini Siouti
in the sense of identity work and ‘biographicity’ are significant in relation to this question, which
relates to the role of biographical reflexivity in making sense of orienting one’s self over a lifetime.
At the center of the theoretical concept of ‘biographicity’ is the synthesis of structure and indi-
viduality. According to Alheit (1995), ‘biographicity’ is the intuitively available genetic structure
of a biography. It is the ability of the individual to shape that which is social ‘self-referentially’,
and to place oneself in relation to society. Biographicity means that individuals can continu-
ally reinterpret their life in the contexts in which they experience it, and that they themselves
experience these contexts as ‘mouldable’ and ‘shapeable’ (Alheit ebd.). Referring to these pre-
sumptions, transnational biographies can be seen as a result of interactive and reflexive processing
of biographical experiences in transnational social spaces (Ruokonen-Engler & Siouti, 2013).
While in migration sociology transnational social spaces were defined in a way that followed
Norbert Elias, as ‘contexts of social integration . . . relatively permanent, dense configurations of
every day social practices, and systems of symbols, which are distributed across several locations
or spread between a number of spaces, and which are neither delocalized nor deterritorialized’
(Pries, 2001, p. 53), from a biography-theoretical perspective it is the biographical construction
of transnational social spaces that is of interest. Thus, from a phenomenological perspective, it
has been argued that the metaphor of transnational social space is equated with the phenomenon
of biographical knowledge of subjects, which is accumulated and symbolized in life courses of
individuals and groups. Hence, the transnational social space is ‘overformated’ by hegemonic
relations and is simultaneously produced by the migration subjects’ biographical work and con-
cretized in the structure of the migration biography. A ‘transnational biography’ is seen in this
conceptualization as a ‘site’ for the biographical accumulation of experience and knowledge
(Apitzsch & Siouti, 2008, 2014). Although each individual has his or her own biography, there
are typical sequences of events which are specific to transnational migrants and which tell us a
great deal about the invisible, but very real, structures of the immigration society. Transnational
biography as the source of transnational and transcultural spaces is a point of intersection between
collective constitution and individual construction. The biographical shape of the sequence of
separations and border crossings in migration, which can be reconstituted on the basis of one
individual’s life story, usually represents a certain type of the objectively possible (and more or
less threatened) paths of the transnational border-crossing options (Apitzsch & Siouti, 2014). The
point of this repositioning is to treat transnational biography not just as a product of subjectivity
(Lutz, 2011b) but also as a way of gaining access to invisible but nonetheless objective structures
of transnational migration spaces.
Drawing on postcolonial theories and especially on Stuart Hall’s concept of articulation, Lutz
(2011b) conceptualizes transnational biographies as articulations. Referring to Stanley (1992,
p. 7), she understands articulations as ‘narrative negotiations of biographical experiences’ (Lutz,
2011b, p. 356). According to Lutz,
articulation implies a double dimension and creates hybrid perspectives. It is the expres-
sion of the antagonism of discourses, practices and positions and it is simultaneously
generated by these processes. Articulation, then, is not only a copy or expression of the
interior but also a generator of the disconnection and new conjunction of elements.
Therefore, articulation is produced by, and simultaneously produces, subjectivity. Defin-
ing transnational biographies as articulations can therefore be viewed as an attempt to
understand the self and other images and positioning expressed in biographical narra-
tives as either an action scheme or a trajectory of suffering; individuals or collectives are
a product of dis- and articulation.
(Lutz, 2011b, p. 356)
182
Both of these concepts include typical notions of subjectivity; on the one hand the situated-
ness of the self as an expression of accumulated biographical experience and knowledge, and on
the other hand the performance of the self in the form of articulation, something that can be
reconstructed with the help of the methodological use of narratives.
The methodological use of narratives:

The biographical narrative interview
In biography research the method primarily consists of narrative biographical interviews, which
are used in order to gain insight into the transnational ways of life of migrants. This involves
auto-biographical impromptu narration by migrants, who narrate their transnational life history
in an interview setting.
The methodological terms of reference of the narrative interview are characterized above
all by the theoretical traditions of interpretative sociology. It incorporates elements from soci-
olinguistic theory, the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schütz, and the sociology of the
Chicago School, especially symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology.
As a procedure for a social science survey, prompting the informant to give a comprehensive
and detailed impromptu narrative of personal involvement in events and corresponding experi-
ences in the given theme field, the objective of the biographical narrative interview is to allow
the individual to relate how he or she has experienced certain life history processes and his or
her own life history (Schütze, 1983).
Thus, the main idea of the biographical-narrative interview is to generate a spontaneous
autobiographical narration which is not structured by questions posed by the interviewer but by
the narrator’s structures of relevance. During an interview, the interviewee is firstly requested to
tell his or her own life history. While the life history is being narrated to the interviewer (who
plays the role of the interested and empathetic listener), the latter does not interrupt the main
narrative but encourages the biographer by means of non-verbal and paralinguistic expressions of
interest and attention. The interviewer waits until the narrator breaks off the story of his or her
own accord, and only then asks questions in the second part of the interview. The interviewer
first asks narrative questions on topics and biographical themes already mentioned. In addition,
in the last part of the interview or in a second interview the interviewer asks about issues that
have not been addressed by the biographer (Rosenthal, 1993, p. 60).2
A very important aspect, which has to be taken into account not only as a context but also
as part of the method, is the working alliance between researcher and interviewee. The social
relationship between them, their specific interests and perspectives, and the social setting in which
they meet and which they themselves produce during the interview have to be reflected and
are always part of the analysis of biographical narrative interviews (Riemann, 2003; Ruokonen-
Engler & Siouti, 2013). However, theoretically the interview technique is based on the assump-
tion that biographical self-presentations are most convincingly rendered using narrative as a textual
form to communicate events experienced by the self (Fischer-Rosenthal & Rosenthal, 1997, p. 136).
Schütze’s thesis means that the narrative acts as a trigger in the interview situation, which is
an interaction situation, but that it is not primarily controlled by the situation. It is controlled
by the content and experience structure of the person who has experienced the events. Seen
linguistically, the necessary elements are triggered by means of the narrative flow. Schütze dif-
ferentiates three necessary elements of the narrative: the law of closing, the law of relevance and
condensation, and the law of detail (Alheit, 1993, p. 3). In guiding and organizing the description
during the impromptu narrative, four principles of narration are at work. Schütze calls these
principles cognitive figures. The cognitive figures are not artificial constructs, but elementary
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Irini Siouti
schemata which are used quite naturally during the narration of personal experiences and cannot
be circumvented (Dausien, 1996, p. 113). Schütze distinguishes four cognitive figures: (1) biogra-
phy and event holders, (2) frames of events and experiences, (3) social structures: situations, life
milieus and social worlds, and (4) the entire shape of the life history (Schütze, 1984). Besides the
cognitive figures, four kinds of process structures were identified by Schütze (1984) in his stud-
ies of biographical accounts. These empirically based concepts are: (a) the process structures of
action schemes, in which planning, initiative and action are dominant; (b) the process structures
in which institutional expectations are in the foreground; (c) the process structures of trajectory,
which indicate a potential loss of control over the life because of extraneous conditions; and
(d) process structures which suggest an unexpected or unaccountable turn towards a creative
transformation in the biography. The process structures correspond to experiences and are rep-
resented in distinctive ways in the course of biographical accounts.
Even though investigating and evaluating data collected from narrative interviews remains
an excellent method for research into transnational migration biographies, researchers are con-
fronted with some challenges when using the method of narrative interview in the research field
of migration. The method of narrative interview was developed in a monolingual research con-
text, and its basic assumptions were not developed in the field of transnational migration studies.
Thus, researchers have to reflect and deal productively with questions of language, multilingual-
ism, code switching and translation not only theoretically, but also in the interview setting and in
the process of the analysis of the data material (see Lutz, 2011b; Tuider, 2011).
Reconstructive biographical analysis

In biographical research there is not only one single method bound to a particular theoretical
position, but different ways of doing biographical analysis.
Biographical analysis is an interpretative research approach to understand how individ-

uals partake in social contexts and make sense of them. The analysis of biographical
narrative interviews aims at revealing structures of personal and social processes of
action and suffering as well as possible resources for coping and change.
(Gültekin et al., 2003, p. 1)
The methods used in biography analysis have in common the fact that they are based on case
reconstructive procedures. The emergence of reconstructive research logics in the social sciences
goes back to the Frankfurt School and to Adorno’s critique of positivism as a social-scientific
research approach. Instead, Adorno underlined the importance of analytical interpretation in
order to see beneath the surface of phenomena. The reconstructive research tradition was devel-
oped further in the faculty of social sciences in Frankfurt in the 1980s and 1990s by Ulrich Oev-
ermann, who integrated central concepts from Adorno’s thought into the method of objective
hermeneutics, which has also influenced strongly the methodological debate about biography
research.3 The general assumption of the reconstructive tradition is that it is possible to trace or
reconstruct general statements or general traces of social phenomena already in a single case
study. Methodologically, this means that a single case study has to be researched in its ‘wholeness’
in order to reconstruct the intermingling of agency and social structures. A case reconstructive
procedure follows specific basic assumptions. In general, these are the key principles of recon-
struction, abduction, sequentiality and reflexivity. Furthermore, they concentrate on the detailed
analysis of a single case and refer to it as a basis for generalizing. In doing so, case reconstruc-
tive procedures always proceed in a methodological way that avoids confronting the empirical
184
material with predefined systems and variables and classifications (on this point, see Apitzsch &
Inowlocki, 2000; Apitzsch et al., 2008). In practice, this means that in biographical research first
of all the abductive and innovative aspect is unfolded during the research process by following
the research strategies of Grounded Theory as a methodological framework concept, in order to
anchor a theory (in Robert Merton’s sense, as a middle range theory) in the empirical material.
In detail, biographical researchers adapt the methodological steps of the integration of the pro-
cesses of collecting and analyzing data through the development of contrastive comparisons and
the concept of theoretical saturation (see Strauss & Corbin, 1990). However, the case analyses
of the biographical narrative interviews follow the key principle of sequentiality in the process of
the hermeneutic textual interpretation of biographical narrative interviews. The key principle of
sequentiality presumes ‘that any manifest social act expressed in a text is understandable by the
presumption that a latent objective meaning – a case structure – underlies the individual authen-
tic performance that represents a special selection of the objective possibilities’ (Apitzsch et al.,
2008, p. 16).4 In doing so, most studies refer mainly to the method of narration analysis, which
was developed by Schütze (1983), and to the method of biographical case reconstruction in the
tradition of Rosenthal (1993).
Schütze (1983) developed a systematic method for the hermeneutic textual interpretation of
biographical interviews, which aims to reveal structures of personal and social processes of action
and suffering as well as possible resources for coping and change. Schütze’s methodological terms
of reference are shaped in particular by phenomenological sociology and by the sociology of
the Chicago School, especially symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. Schütze made the
suggestion of a sequential single case analysis which consists of a combination of three steps. The
first step is the formal textual analysis, where the transcribed interview has to be segmented into
its thematic segments as well as its narrative, argumentative and descriptive parts. The second
step is the structural description of these segments. The purpose of the structural description
consists of explicating the substantive biographical structural processes: trajectories of suffering,
biographical action schemes, and other social processes which are represented in the narrative.
The structural description proceeds sequentially and regards the textual structures as indicators of
the narrator’s sedimentation of experiences. It takes into account how the narrator is taken over
and influenced by them (see Riemann, 2003). The aim of the structural description is to describe
and analyze the interview in its structure and to reconstruct in a detailed line by line analysis the
manifest and latent meaning of the text. It is important to stay at the level of the text and start
off from the narrator´s own categories, making use of the whole array of formal features of the
text. In the next step of the analysis, the analytical abstraction, the entire form of the interview
has to be revealed in order to arrive at more abstract theoretical categories. Finally, the single
case analyses are compared and contrasted with each other, to generate a theoretical model (see
Schütze, 1983). In the methodological development of biographical analysis there have been
modifications and additions to Schütze’s position, for example the method of ‘hermeneutic case
reconstruction’ (Fischer-Rosenthal & Rosenthal, 1997; Rosenthal, 1993). Rosenthal has developed
a method of narration analysis, which is partly based on Schütze’s procedure but also utilizes the
analytical resources of objective hermeneutics and focuses on the structural difference between
lived and narrated life history. The method of ‘hermeneutic case reconstruction’ developed by
Rosenthal distinguishes explicitly two levels for the analysis of narrated life stories, the analysis
of the ‘lived life’ through the experienced life history and the analysis of the narrated life story
(Rosenthal, 1993).
The purpose of the genetical analysis is the reconstruction of the biographical meaning
of experiences at the time they happened and the reconstruction of the chronological
185
Irini Siouti
sequence of experiences in which they occurred. The purpose of the analysis of the
narrated life story is the reconstruction of the present meanings of experiences and the
reconstruction of the temporal order of the life story in the present time of narrating
or writing.
(Rosenthal, 1993, p. 61)
For the analysis of biographical narrative interviews, she suggests five steps: (a) analysis of bio-
graphical data, (b) text and thematic field analysis (reconstruction of the life story), (c) reconstruc-
tion of the life history (lived life as experienced), (d) microanalysis of individual text segments,
and (e) contrastive comparison of the life history and life story (see Rosenthal, 1993, 2004).
These two methods can be combined for biographical analysis applied to transnational migration
research. However, in recent years scholars have been developing empirically based strategies for
the analysis of narrative interviews, in a way that combines biographical analysis and discourse
analysis and is compatible with postcolonial theory perspectives as well as the intersectional
approach in Gender Studies (see, for example, Lutz, 2011b; Tuider, 2011). It is argued that in
transnational migration studies, it is important to follow an open methodological perspective that
is guided primarily by key principles and allows combinations of different methodological per-
spectives. Doing biographical analysis in transnational research contexts requires a deeper reflec-
tion in regard to the frames of the analysis, the research relationship, and the role of the researcher
in the process of transnational knowledge production (Ruokonen-Engler & Siouti, 2013, p. 251).
In doing so, the interpretation and reflection process should take place in a multilingual collegial
research group. This is particularly important as a way of ensuring that the individual reflection
and interpretation process can be monitored and methodologically controlled.
Conclusion
Biography research is particularly suited to the analysis of transnational social phenomena and
migration processes in the age of globalization. The knowledge gained from a biographical ana-
lytical approach is obvious. With the methodological use of biographical-narrative interviews,
empirical access to transnational life strategies and migration processes can be facilitated. Thus,
the original structural conditions as well as the nature of (trans)migration phenomena and pro-
cesses are the focus of investigation. This allows problems and conflicts to be part of the analysis,
but at the same time focuses on the subjective coping strategies which are available to the subjects
to deal with being a migrant and with the expansion of action spaces. By means of reconstructive
biographical analysis and the principles of abduction, reconstruction, sequentiality and reflexivity
in biographical case study analyses, the biographical approach facilitates a differentiated way of
looking at (trans)migration processes, which can incorporate both the initial social situation of
migrants in the country of origin and in the country of arrival and can record their transnational
positioning. Furthermore, the linking of transnationalism perspectives and biographical research,
in the concept of the transnational biography, offers an innovative opportunity to expand and
penetrate the field of discourse in order to obtain a biographical theoretical perspective. At the
same time a transnationalism perspective requires us to rethink previously valid premises of bio-
graphical research at the level of methodology and methods and to reflect on current practice.
Clearly there are current challenges in transnational biographical research which we have to deal
with in the debate on methods. These include the question of the applicability and limits of
biographical analysis in postcolonial and transnational research contexts as well as the question of
the validity of central theoretical assumptions and premises of biographical research in different
cultural spaces. These questions, in my opinion, can only be answered by means of empirical
186
investigations. Without a doubt, they represent one of the central challenges for doing transna-
tional biographical research in the age of globalization.
Notes
1 I focus in this section on the theoretical foundations of the method of biographical analysis and its
elaboration in the German-speaking social sciences because the empirically founded concepts of biog-
raphy theory and highly differentiated methodology were developed from the 1970s onwards in the
German-speaking social sciences. Even though the field of biographical migration studies has always
been international, it can be argued that it has been strongly influenced by the Frankfurt tradition of case
reconstructive biographical migration studies as developed by Ursula Apitzsch, Lena Inowlocki, Maria
Kontos et al. since the 1990s in the Department of Sociology at Frankfurt University. The method of bio-
graphical policy evaluation in the field of transnational migration was developed there and later on used
in a number of international research projects which have been funded by the European Commission
during recent years (see for example Apitzsch et al., 2008). Among these projects have been ‘The Changes
of the Second Generation in Families of Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Intergenerational and Gender Aspects of
Quality of Life Processes’ (2002–2005) and ‘Integration of Female Immigrants in Labour Market and
Society: Policy Assessment and Policy Recommendations’ (2006–2008), both coordinated in the Institute
for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt.
2 On the narrative interview technique, see Riemann (2003) and Rosenthal (1993).
3 The method of objective hermeneutics is in its self-understanding not exclusively an analytical proce-
dure for biographical-narrative interviews but a strictly analytical method for dealing with the unbroken
development and reconstruction of objective sense and meaning structures. Gabriele Rosenthal (1993)
adapted the steps of micro analysis and the analysis of the biographical data from the method of objective
hermeneutics suggested by Ulrich Oevermann.
4 For a detailed discussion of hermeneutic biographical methods, see Apitzsch and Inowlocki (2000). For
an explanation of sequential analysis in theory and practice, see Maiwald (2005).
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14
CULINARY BORDER
CROSSINGS IN
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING
The British Asian case
Jopi Nyman
university of eastern finland
Introduction
In responding to the condition of postmodernity and globalization with their increased mobilities
and flows (Appadurai, 1996), contemporary autobiographical writing by migrant and diasporic
subjects shows how they cross various state, ethnic, and cultural borders on their way towards new
locations and identities (see, e.g., Luca, 2014; Rahbek, 2014). In narrating such life histories as
part of global mobility, life writing by migrants reveals that identity is transnational and commu-
nal, and that memory plays a major role in the making of migrant subjectivities. In representing
migrants’ life histories, rooted in global transitions, autobiographies rely on memory and related
tropes to link with each other distant spaces and times, and construct new subjectivities in the
process. Sara Ahmed et al. (2003, p. 9; emphasis original) understand this process as an act of ‘mak-
ing home’ that ‘is about creating both pasts and futures through inhabiting the grounds of present’.
This chapter suggests that food is a particularly strong trope in this context: it connects the
migrant subject with home and identity, as well as shows their problematization as a result of
cultural transitions and encounters. Rather than understanding food and the culinary as mere
markers of nostalgia or of assimilation, this chapter suggest that their emphatic presence in con-
temporary autobiographical writing by South Asian migrants in Britain negotiates cultural and
personal identity in transnational spaces to reveal and address histories of cultural contact and
boundary crossings. In addressing the topic, the chapter links the concerns of postcolonial studies
of migrant identity with recent critical studies on the writing of food suggesting that representa-
tions of food are not apolitical but the ‘food is an equally important vector of critical analysis in
negotiating the gendered, racialized and classed bases of collective and individual identity’ (Man-
nur, 2010, p. 24). As a sign of this, this study foregrounds the symbolic and cultural meanings of
the cultural and culinary difference(s) in autobiographical writing and examines their role in the
construction of transnational migrant identity.
The connection between autobiographical narratives and ethnic and cultural identity has
become a central topic in contemporary criticism that has challenged the view of Gusdorf (1982),
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Culinary border crossings
who suggested that individuality, rather than community or collectivity, is crucial to the forma-
tion of autobiographical writing and subjectivity. Since then, studies of autobiographical writing
telling of the crossing of various borders have shown how the genre reveals experiences and
cultural memories of the formation of non-hegemonic identities challenging dominant national
narratives and identity positions (see Boelhower, 1991; ed. Folkenflik, 1993b; Moore-Gilbert,
2009; Wong, 1998). Writing of the genre Asian American family memoirs, Davis (2011, p. 11)
suggests that owing to their emphasis on relationality, both familial and often transnational, such
texts ‘foreground the collective nature of memory’. According to Davis (2011, p. 30), autobi-
ographies are both personal, cultural, and historical, and they transmit ‘community narratives of
self-identification that helps preserve a sense of identity and connection to the members of the
community and their shared history’. In other words, transnational relationships and memories
are central to the formation of subjectivity in the contemporary conditions of migration.
In recent years, a particular form of autobiographical writing, the genre of the culinary mem-
oir, has been deployed increasingly to narrate communal and ethnic identities (see Goeller, 2007;
Nyman, 2009). By addressing issues of food and identity, such autobiographical texts reflect upon
tradition, home, and belonging to show how contemporary identities are products of diverse border
crossings and related transformations. This issue is at the core of this chapter that examines three
contemporary autobiographical narratives by South Asian diasporic writers in Britain in the con-
text of food and identity: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cook Book: Tales of Love, Migration,
and Food (2010), Rohan Candappa’s Picklehead: From Ceylon to Suburbia; A Memoir of Food, Family
and Finding Yourself (2006), and Hardeep Singh Kohli’s Indian Takeaway: One Man’s Attempt to Cook
His Way Home (2008). Each text explores its narrator’s attempt to discuss British Asian identities by
examining their and their families’ histories of migration to and experiences of Britain through sto-
ries of food, cooking, and memory. The chapter suggests that the central role given to home, family,
and the past in the genre of the culinary memoir is an attempt to address the reconstruction of the
migrant’s self in the context of cultural contact and border crossings challenging the maintenance of
tradition. In other words, food and the culinary are links to the migrant community and its history
but they also have the potential to generate cultural border crossings, bridge the gap between the
host and the (im)migrant in the context of postcolonial Europe, and examine cultural hybridization.
Food, identity, and diaspora

The recent study of food culture has provided new perspectives onto identity, consumption, and
other topical issues. By paying attention to various aspects of the culinary and its cultural rep-
resentation, scholars have discovered the important role of food in the construction of identity in
minority cultures in particular. While the linking of food and identity in mainstream discourse
may serve to create questionable images of the Other by representing, exoticizing, and objectify-
ing it ‘through gastronomic images through which the nation is to be consumed’ (Huggan, 2001,
p. 82), or lead to a self-orientalization (Khushu-Lahiri & Rao, 2008), the overwhelming presence
of such tropes in South Asian diasporic texts is not necessarily a cliché. Rather, as Maxey (2012,
p. 164; emphasis original) puts it, it is the cultural significance of food and the culinary in South
Asian diasporic communities that ‘makes it difficult . . . not to write about them’. Other critics
have presented similar views. While Kunow (2003, p. 163) claims that food is a major means
in diasporic Indian writing to link the subject with the larger community, Mannur (2010, p. 8)
suggests that food is used in cultural texts in at least two ways linked with identity and difference:
the ‘culinary’ most typically occupies a seemingly paradoxical space – at once a site of
affirmation and resistance. Affirmation, because food often serves to mark defining
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Jopi Nyman
moments in marking ethnicity for communities that live through and against the vagar-
ies of diasporized realities, marred by racism and xenophobia. Resistance, insofar as the
evocation of a culinary register can deliberately and strategically disrupt the notion that
cultural identity is always readily available for consumption and commodification and
always already conjoined to culinary practices.
In other words, food brings ethnic communities together in often problematic circumstances but
its complex symbolic meanings also problematize the notion that ethnicity and ethnic foods can
be understood as mere marketable commodities. In her study Mannur (2010, p. 16) emphasizes
that the emergence of food as a thematic in a not insignificant number of (South) Asian Amer-
ican literary works – should not be seen as a mere ‘ethnographic’ marker telling of lived realities
through ‘mimetic realism’. Rather, fictions and other narratives telling of the culinary reveal ‘how
food serves as an idiom to imagine subjectivity’ (Mannur, 2010, p. 18). What this means is that
cultural texts telling of South Asian diasporic experiences through food are ways of discussing
and defining identity through difference.
Since autobiographical narratives are ways of narrating the story of becoming oneself, seen in
Lejeune’s (qtd. in Folkenflik, 1993a, p. 13) famous formulation defining ‘autobiography [as] the
retrospective narrative in prose that someone makes of his [sic] own existence when he [sic] puts
the principal accent upon his [sic] life, especially upon the story of his [sic] own personality’,
this chapter examines the significance of food in contemporary autobiographical narratives by
British writers rooted in the South Asian diasporic experience and shows how their narratives
negotiate identity, constructing and crossing culinary and cultural borders between the migrant
self and the host community. The applicability of the term autobiography has, however, been
problematized. While it remains a widely used genre label, the term has been contested because
of its intricate links with the culture of the Enlightenment and the tendency to promote the
(western) ideal of the autonomous individual and his development (Smith & Watson, 2001,
p. 3). According to Smith and Watson (2001, p. 3), life writing appears as a more general term
covering various texts exploring life, ranging from biographies and fiction to historical texts or
more conventional narratives of self: ‘Life narrative, then, might best be approached as a moving
target, a set of ever-shifting self-referential practices that engage the past in order to reflect on
identity in the present’.
What is at the core of the critique of the term is its limited applicability to life writing
produced by non-western writers, various minorities, and women in particular. As studies of
post-colonial life writing, including narratives by diasporic and migrant writers, have shown,
there are certain differences between conventional autobiographical forms and their post-colonial
equivalents, especially concerning the way in which the self-reflective subject and its story is
presented. For instance, Moore-Gilbert (2009, pp. 14–16) suggests that postcolonial life writing
often promotes decentered rather than centered and coherent selves in a manner resembling the
construction of the self in western women’s autobiographical writing. Moore-Gilbert (2009,
pp. 31–3) also claims that the idea of the relationality of the self plays an important role in post-
colonial life writing – the case is the same in western women’s autobiographical writing but less
so in canonical autobiographies. Rather than presenting generalizations, Moore-Gilbert (2009)
emphasizes the generic, cultural, and historical variation between the western texts on the one
hand and non-western life narratives on the other hand, as well as within each group. Yet the
thematic of dislocation and subjectivity appears to be particularly important to postcolonial
authors of life writing: while responses to various experiences of ‘home’, ‘exile’, and dislocation
may range from alienation to finding solace in homelessness, in the contexts of postcoloniality
192
‘auto/biographical Selfhood can scarcely be conceived separately from socio-spatial concerns’

(Moore-Gilbert, 2009, p. 66). In other words, the identities imagined in postcolonial life narra-
tives are linked with physical locations that play a significant yet ambivalent role, showing for
instance how journeys from originary homes to other spaces involve various border and bound-
ary crossings, generating new experiences of dis/locationality and belonging, as the readings of
the three texts below will show.
In the three texts under study, the construction of subjectivity is linked with the notions of
border and boundary crossing that I will discuss with particular reference to diasporic life writing
in Britain. Since life writing explores the construction of identity, linking the past with the pres-
ent, memories of various borders (cultural, ethnic, national and so on) and their (non-)crossing
are relevant for narratives telling of the mobility pertinent to the diasporic experience. Writing
of the importance of memory in thinking about borders and borderlands, ‘places where different
cultures coexist and enrich each other, creating “hybrid” or “Creole” identities’, Zhurzhenko
(2011, p. 74) suggests that such locations ‘are not marginal places but central sites of power where
the meaning of national identity is created and contested’. While Zhurzhenko’s focus is more on
national memories and borders, the fact that diasporic cultures such as South Asian cultures in
Britain are similarly located and implicated in various borders and crossings should be taken into
account in the analysis of their culinary life writing.
As a sign of this, food is often situated at the border between cultures where it may mark
both ethnicity and difference, as well as link the present with the past. Its importance has
been pointed out by Kunow (2003, p. 173; emphasis original), who suggests that food nar-
ratives show how food emerges ‘as a culturally saturated collective representation, as sign of a
differential identity’. A good example of this is Durán’s (2007) analysis of the culinary in the
memoir Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (1999) by the Arizona-born Chicano writer Alberto
Riós. Structured upon the Mexican dessert capirotada and its preparation, Durán (2007, p. 68)
argues that for Riós the dish and the stories related to it function in the memoir as ‘an impor-
tant metaphor and a good way to talk about the nature and symbolism of the narrator’s border
identity’. In the manner of the dish, the narrator’s identity comes from elsewhere: ‘Border
identity is then constructed from elements from many other places, not just from “here”, but
from both Nogales, Arizona and Sonora. The border is then represented as a polyvalent space’
(Durán, 2007, p. 69). By telling the story of the dish, and linking its making to his memo-
ries of family and community, its materiality transforms into ‘an extended commemorative
experience’ (Durán, 2007, p. 69) and the narrator’s identity is connected to that of the ‘border
community [and] his very own border intra-history’ (Durán, 2007, p. 70). In a similar vein, the
South Asian diasporic narratives examined in this chapter explore histories of cultural contact
and border crossings and use the trope of food as a means of constructing communal identity,
revealing both a ‘distinctive blend of ethnic and historical specificity’ and ‘a heartfelt, unwaver-
ing respect for cooking and eating traditions’ (Maxey, 2012, p. 185). In so doing, such narratives
are counter-memories that redefine the present by linking it with the past in surprising ways
(Smith & Watson, 1996, p. 14).
Alibhai-Brown: From Africa to Britain

The autobiographical work The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food by the
well-known British journalist and cultural critic Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who arrived in the UK
as a young student in the early 1970s, is a combination of recipes and memories of doubly
diasporic East African Asians living in the United Kingdom since their forced removal from
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Jopi Nyman
Uganda by the dictator Idi Amin and his racist politics in the 1970s. In the ‘Prologue’ to her
book, Alibhai-Brown (2010, p. 1) makes clear its role as a communal historical record, as she
mentions that the history of Ugandan Asians is practically forgotten and they lack a sense
of roots:
our far past was swept away by careless fate impetuously carrying off my folk across
the seas, away, away to new beginnings. They took little and left behind even less. Like
many other East African Asians whose forebears left India in the nineteenth century,
I search endlessly for (and sometimes find) the remains of those days. Few maps mark
routes of journeys undertaken by these migrants; hardly any books capture their spirit
or tell their story. Then Africa disgorged us too, and here we are, people in motion, now
in the West, the next stopover.
The narrator emphasizes that the history of Ugandan Africans is also disappearing as the result
of the death of her parents’ generation and that it will soon be accessible only in memories and
dreams. Upon reading the old newspapers in which some of her old household objects have
been wrapped, she remarks that ‘Our past has been fading faster than Argus newsprint. Words,
languages, faces, images, landscapes are drifting away. Sometimes I struggle to summon them
back’ (Alibhai-Brown, 2010, p. 8). One of the aims of the volume is to restore this community
and its culture through its distinct culinary culture, to counter this amnesia partially generated
by political upheavals: ‘There are no films about our old lives. East African Asians have been
wary of written words and records which, once set down, can hold you to ransom, come and
get you’ (Alibhai-Brown, 2010, p. 13). As Maxey (2012, p. 189) remarks, The Settler’s Cookbook
is a part of Alibhai-Brown’s larger political attempt to make visible the South Asian presence
in East Africa and also to show its importance for multicultural Britain. Food plays a strong
role in the process: ‘If we transformed Britain, Britain moulded and transfigured us too. So here
is our tale. Here are the dishes that carry our collective memories and imagine our uncertain
future’ (Alibhai-Brown, 2010, p. 17). This aim to tell the unwritten history of a community
is supported in the narrative by incorporating into it recipes, passages from historical texts,
including oral history interviews telling of the life of the first generation of South Asian
indentured labor in the late 19th century (see Alibhai-Brown, 2010, pp. 52–3, 72), excerpts
from fictional works addressing the Indian experience (see Alibhai-Brown, 2010, p. 76), as
well as personal and family stories. As a result Alibhai-Brown’s narrative takes a hybrid form:
by incorporating elements from various genres it shows that the narrator’s story is at the same
time both communal and gendered one. To use the terms of Castillo and Córdoba (2002, p. 98),
like the contemporary Chicana border autobiographies in their study, The Settler’s Cookbook is
‘a patchwork collection of fragmentary units that help flesh out comprehension of a collective
identity’.
The use of the culinary idiom in Alibhai-Brown’s narrative is an attempt to address culture,
tradition, and their meaning in the narrator’s life – it is both a personal and collective autobi-
ography. This is seen in the way in which the text both contextualizes the dishes it discusses in
a larger historical frame and reflects on the meaning of each particular dish from the personal
experience of the narrator. The many-sided cultural heritage of Asians in East Africa is repre-
sented in the text on various occasions but the chapter ‘Paradise Found: AD 68–1920’ in par-
ticular weaves the various foods enjoyed by the community to historical border crossings. While
the community enjoys and even considers some dishes as its own inventions, they are products
of cultural contact and trade. For instance the chilli lamb mishkaki is revealed to originate from
contacts between the Arabs and the Portuguese (Alibhai-Brown, 2010, p. 46). Such interaction
194
is an ongoing process, and at a later point the book develops this theme of hybridity by revealing
how English food was appropriated:
But too much of it was bland and tepid. So began a whole new adventure. Victoria
sponges were lifted with lime juice or saffron; shortbread was pepped up with grainy
cardamom seeds; grated cheese was added to kebab mixtures; roast chickens were stuffed
with pistachios, figs, almonds, green papayas, spicy eggs or spicy mashed potatoes. [. . .]
Strange but true: England gave us an exciting new food emporium to pick and choose
from.
(Alibhai-Brown, 2010, p. 167)
The culinary results of these cultural encounters are complemented in the narrative by its nar-
rator’s personal memories of food and its significance in her family and community, which in
Maxey’s (2012, p. 190) view makes it an elegy to the generation of her parents. What is particu-
larly emphasized is the narrator’s relationship with her mother, Jena, whose care and love are
communicated with comfort food. In addition to linking the female narrator with the gendered
South Asian tradition where mother’s home-cooked food is highly important to the extent that
it is often ‘life-affirming’ (Maxey, 2012, p. 166), Alibhai-Brown’s memoir emphasizes the role of
food in the construction of community. It underlines its importance during festivals at the local
mosque (2010, p. 225) and shows the need to prepare particular dishes for rituals (2010, p. 284).
It also reveals that when forced to leave Uganda, women travelled to the airport with homemade
Indian food in tins and plastic containers (2010, pp. 22–3). This insistence on the importance of
food to cultural and diasporic identity is ultimately confirmed when the narrator, in 1988, after
her divorce, sits down and enjoys a meal she has prepared for her new male friend. As she has
realized that former identities cannot be escaped, while she had once thought so (‘In Oxford,
supremely detached from all our reality, we believed we could drop our past identities, dump
them as we did our clothes from back home, homemade and embarrassing’ [Alibhai-Brown,
2010, p. 288]), the meal takes the narrator back to her childhood community with its customs
and links her with previous generations of women. Unlike in 1972 when she refused to accept a
chilli bhajia from another Indian woman on the plane to Britain, she now dares to link food with
her identity. Risking that her new potential partner would see her as one of the ‘backwater desis’,
she decides to eat with her fingers, only to discover that he follows her example immediately:
forks and knives corrupt the taste of South Asian cooking, make it taste metallic and
cold. On this evening, primal urges took over. I needed that old intimacy we had with
our food, the feel of it warming the skin, the soothing memories of safer times. All
through childhood, my mother and aunts (real and adopted) had, with their hands,
fed me chapattis and yoghourt, rice and dhal, hot meat pies, cake slices, Huntley and
Palmer biscuits dunked in sweet tea, patiently teaching me the care you had to take so
you didn’t look like a greedy piglet emerging from a trough.
(Alibhai-Brown, 2010, p. 368)
While the passage shows how food binds together the community, as well as the two diners, the
text also reveals that food may function as a marker of difference. While the racist slur telling of
curry-smelling immigrants does not overshadow the experiences of Alibhai-Brown’s educated
immigrant family, the text reveals that cultural conflicts are embedded in culinary practices, as
shown when the narrator tries to cross into Britain upon her arrival at Heathrow airport in
1972. Rather than allowing the narrator – whose passport identifies her as a ‘British Subject,
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Citizen of the United Kingdom and colonies’ (Alibhai-Brown, 2010, p. 34) – to enter the coun-
try, the interviewing immigration officer asks her an extensive set of ‘impossible questions’, and
then demands her to identify the recipients of the five boxes of mangoes that she is carrying in
her hand luggage: ‘Write out the names and addresses of all those you intend to present with
mangoes’ (Alibhai-Brown, 2010, p. 35). Food, as Alibhai-Brown’s autobiography reveals, is both
personal and political, and refuses an interpretation that would see diasporic Indian food as a
mere commodity to be consumed by westerners. Rather, it emphasizes the role of the culinary
in the transformation of British culture as indicated in its ‘Prologue’ (see Alibhai-Brown, 2010,
p. 17). As a sign of this, its final chapter, telling of her son Karim’s marriage to a conventional
fox-hunting Cheshire family, makes the point by revealing that the transcultural meal at the
reception includes both ‘samosas and smoked salmon’ (Alibhai-Brown, 2010, p. 416).
Candappa: Tracing the father

Candappa’s Picklehead: From Ceylon to Suburbia; A Memoir of Food, Family and Finding Yourself tells
of the meaning of food in the life of its second-generation British-born narrator growing up in
Britain in the 1970s. Through a series of reflections on food and its role in diasporic Indian culture
and his family, the narrator seeks to reconstruct his identity because of the death of his father. The
importance of his father – as well as that of his late grandparents – reveals the text’s generic status
as a memoir where relationality and others play a role that may appear as more important than that
of the narrator (see Smith & Watson, 2001, p. 198). My reading of the memoir’s representation of
identity suggests that Candappa’s text pays particular attention to borders and crossings, address-
ing both the historical migration of the family from the subcontinent to Britain and the role of
cultural borders separating mainstream Britons from Indian migrants and their culinary culture.
In narrating the migration history of the narrator’s family, the text discusses its mobility in
various ways, including an imagined narrative of origins involving a shipwrecked sailor from
Portugal arriving at the shores Cochin, Southern India in the 18th century. It also addresses the
narrator’s parents’ entry to post-World War II Britain, revealing that his father arrived as a young
man from Ceylon aiming to study architecture in London in the 1950s and her mother’s family
escaped the wartime occupation of Burma. While the stories share an emphasis on border cross-
ings that transform the life of migrants, the text also tells of cultural and racialized boundaries
separating the migrants from the host culture. The narrator reflects on his sense of outsiderness
through intertextuality and reveals his identification with an episode in Kenneth Grahame’s The
Wind in the Willows where Rat and Mole observe the life in a village from afar, unable to enter the
homes. While the passage explicitly raises the issue of ‘race’, it also connects their outsider status
with the father’s hidden bitterness resulting from his class and family background and experience
of not fitting in with the colonial structures dominating life in Ceylon in the 1930s:
Whatever I do, wherever I go, a part of me always feels out in the snow with my faced
pressed up against the window. I’d always put it down to being a child of immigrants.
To having a brown skin in a predominantly white world. To not even being part of the
mainstream British Asian community. But when I started to delve into my father’s story
I discovered another possible explanation as to why I’ve always felt on the outside. That’s
because he did too. Even in Ceylon, the country he grew up in.
(Candappa, 2006, p. 71)
Importantly, the story featuring his father’s emergent sense of being an outcast, an outsider, in
his childhood is in the text narrated through food served to him by his unwelcoming extended
196
family at a celebration. While the others were partying, the young boy is expected “to sit in the
kitchen with the cooks eating the third class of rice. Rice that you had to pick husks and small
stones from before you could eat. And young though he was, he no doubt got the message”
(Candappa, 2006, p. 77). From the perspective of the migrant, this sense of being outside the
dominant class and culture signifies a cultural border and is supported further with the narrator’s
experiences as an Indian child in a South London school in the 1970s, also conveyed through the
culinary idiom. As he is served a portion of odd-looking curry that in the view of the dinner
ladies should appeal to him as an ‘Indian’, he accepts the option, falsely expecting a multicul-
turalist response from the other. The other children, however, find the dish repulsive and select
the more familiar dish: ‘Eughh! Smelly curry! Yuk!’ (Candappa, 2006, p. 3). To quote Candappa
(2006, p. 3):
What should I do? Take the ‘curry’ or go for the spam fritters and chips? It was a very
hard decision. But – I am proud to say – I rose to the occasion. Defiantly I lifted my
plate, looked straight into the dinner lady’s eyes and said, ‘Curry, please’.
The dinner lady smiled. The lady was hoisted. The ladle was tipped. And a sea of
over-stewed grey school mince, with raisins in it, spread over the pristine white place
like an oil slick seeping out of a stricken tanker. Half a spoon of rice was added and
some over-boiled cabbage.
What Candappa’s text shows is that food is linked with the migratory experience: ‘It is a link
with the world your parents come from. It has echoes of past places, past people and past events.
It is a conduit of both family history and history in a far wider sense’ (Candappa, 2006, p. 10).
Following Mannur (2010, p. 9), this can be seen as a way of discussing nostalgia through the
culinary idiom with the aim of negotiating and ‘remember[ing] home’. In the case of Candappa,
a second-generation immigrant who identifies himself as a ‘South Londoner’ (2006, p. 70) and
feels distanced from ‘the mythical “Asian community”’ (2006, p. 305), this search for lost stories
and past identities, defined by Maxey (2012, p. 189) as ‘a process of excavation’, is intertwined
with the transformation of Britain and counters a perceived loss of cultural identity signified in
the father’s death.
These changes underline the narrative’s status as a hybrid text that manages to address diverse
issues characterizing Asian identities in modern Britain. To address the transformation of Britain
and its culinary culture, the memoir contains a historical narrative that intercepts the flow of the
main narrative and discusses such topics as the history of the spice trade, the introduction of curry
in Britain, and the development of the Asian restaurant business (see Chapters 8½ , 9½ , 10½ , 12½ ,
and 16½ , each part of ‘A Brief History of Curry in Britain’). In so doing the family narrative is
combined with a larger narrative of cultural change culminating in the former Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook’s (2001) pronouncement of Chicken Tikka Masala as ‘a true British national dish’
in 2001. To represent this cultural transformation of curry, Candappa’s hybrid memoir brings
in other curry-related texts from other genres: recipes and personal notes from the narrator’s
grandmother’s ‘handwritten cookbook’ (2006, p. 135), a curry poem by the author (2006, p. 153),
references to popular culture such as The Jam’s song ‘Down in a Tube Station at Midnight’ (2006,
pp. 249–50), English soccer fans’ 1998 World Cup chant ‘We all like vindaloo/We’re England’
(2006, p. 256), and a short story where the mother compares tasteless British fish to their Indian
counterparts (2006, pp. 148–52).
In contrast to the mainstreaming and commodification of South Asian food in the public
sphere, the narrator, however, refers frequently to a sense of loss. This may partially result from
aging and a nostalgic reflection on one’s childhood and early life, seen in particular in the
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description of the family’s ways of spending the Christmas with the extended family in the 1970s,
a feast that links Asia and Europe together:‘What was on offer was a glorious collision between the
Christmases my mother had grown up in Burma and India, and the full-on British-style approach’
combining roast turkey and Christmas pudding with various curries and Indian sweets (Candappa,
2006, p. 66). The present, however, shows that in contemporary modernity togetherness and
community are things from the past, and that their loss is characterizes the life of a second-generation
migrant distanced from their community. This is clear in the way in which the memoir’s first
chapter gives particular prominence to a ‘jar of Sainsbury’s own label korma cooking sauce’
(Candappa, 2006, p. 6), a symbolic object returned to at least three times in the course of the
narrative (see Candappa, 2006, pp. 122, 143, 246). Examining the sauce jar while shopping at his
local supermarket, the narrator decides to cook a proper curry for his children but is frustrated
with its demands for time and ingredients. In this sense the difficulty to maintain the culinary tra-
dition is equated with a concern over the maintenance of diasporic culture. Rather than authentic,
Sainsbury’s cooking source is a mere ‘approximation’ (Candappa, 2006, p. 143), but the fact that its
prospective consumers now include ‘second-generation Asian immigrant[s]’ (Candappa, 2006,
p. 46) such as the narrator is an apparently unpredicted outcome of the migration process. In
other words, the loss of ‘real’ food, available only in cookery books, appears to hint at the loss of
family, community, and belonging owing to increasing assimilation, as also seen in the narrator’s
ambiguous relationship with the Asian community. As the final lines of the memoir suggest, iden-
tity is not to be understood as unchanging but as ‘a conversation between the past, the present and
the future’ and what is important is that should be kept ‘going’ (Candappa, 2006, p. 311). In other
words, memories affect the construction of identity but identities are constantly transforming in
unexpected ways as seen in the migratory routes of the narrator’s parents.
Kohli: Cooking British in India

Like the texts by Alibhai-Brown and Candaap, Indian Takeaway: One Man’s Attempt to Cook His
Way Home by Hardeep Singh Kohli, a second-generation Scottish Sikh broadcaster and amateur
chef, is a hybrid autobiographical text that combines post-colonial life writing with travel writ-
ing. Writing of the links between the two genres, Moore-Gilbert (2009, p. 83) has suggested that
they are connected because of their interest in self-understanding and personal quests. Using the
culinary idiom as its structural backbone, Indian Takeaway takes Kohli on a journey through India.
During his travels Kohli cooks British dinners for the various people he encounters and finally
reaches his father’s hometown Ferozepure in the Punjab. The trip to India is both the narrator’s
attempt to understand his father and his journey to Britain and a way for Kohli to define his own
identity: he is a diasporic Indian whose primary identification is with Scottishness rather than
with India, a country he has not visited since childhood. The problem of identity is revealed in
a passage describing his response to insisting queries concerning his origins:
Implicit in all their interrogations was the accusation that I did not belong, that I was
other, that my home was not here. To them I could never be Scottish.
Yet neither did I feel particularly Indian. Of course, I was born to Indian parents and
grew up in an Indian house. But that Indian house was always somewhere in Glasgow.
It was all very confusing.
(Kohli, 2008, p. 4)
Describing his identity as ‘a cultural car crash’ (2008, p. 4), Kohli also claims that in his childhood
he was Indian once a week, on Sundays, when the family visited the local gurdwara, the Sikh
198
temple and community center. The book addressed food in detail and it gradually becomes a
core issue for the construction of the narrator’s identity. Following the reference to the visits to
the local temple, the text starts paying close attention to food, first referring to the semolina-based
sweet prasad and then discussing the cultural practice of langar, the free meal prepared at the tem-
ple and offered to everybody (Kohli, 2008, pp. 7–8). Reflecting on the meaning of food in an
Indian restaurant, right before embarking on his journey, the narrator notices the culinary trans-
formation of Britain in words reminiscent of Paul Gilroy’s (2005, p. 11) ‘culture of conviviality’,
characterizing the culture of cohabitation in Britain’s urban spaces where it has replaced formerly
dominant forms of racism and xenophobia. As Kohli (2008, p. 17) writes:
the joint was full of every sort of person: black, white and everything in between joining
the massed ranks of Indians. The common theme seemed to be that we were all British.
Food unites. . . . I started to think that maybe I should return to India what India has so
successfully given to Britain: food. If I was to find myself in India, I must take some of
myself with me. And what better to take than my love of food and cooking. I resolved
to take British food to India.
As the quotation reveals, Kohli sets out to India to clarify his identity. While his British dinners are
not always successful, the decision to cook such meals in India tells of his attempt to cross cultural
borders and of a refusal to conform to conventional categories of identity. In other words, Kohli’s
British meals, while defined as such, do not necessarily represent traditional British fare, as is the
case with the seafood meal he prepares for Nagamuthu, a local restaurant owner in Mamallapuram
on the East Coast, or the fried aubegines with chilli babaganoush he cooks at the yoga school
in Mysore. The reception of some of his meals surprises Kohli several times: the American yoga
teacher/poker professional insists on vegetarian food but upon eating it complains that he would
have wanted meat; the old family friend Bharat in Bangalore leaves his toad in a hole untouched
(see Kohli, 2008, p. 155). Unlike Kohli, others do not wish to cross culinary and cultural borders.
What Kohli learns, however, is that to find a solution to his dilemma of being in-between two
cultures, to understand ‘Why did I feel the need to apologise for being British when in India, and
apologize for being Indian when in Britain?’ (2008, p. 155), is a more demanding task than it has
initially appeared. This frustration and identity questioning is evident in Kohli’s (2008, p. 155)
comments on Bharat’s behavior in Bangalore, a center of global telecommunications representing
the New India:
I had hoped that I would come to Bangalore and somehow understand how the two
sides of my life met; Bangalore seemed the perfect place to learn about that. . . . I ended
up relying on Bharat who is himself part of old India, the country’s past rather than its
future. . . . If I thought I was going to find anything of myself with Bharat, then I was
sadly deluded.
The central task of autobiographical and the travel writing genres, to define the self, appears
increasingly problematic in Kohli’s book, which can be explained by the features of the task
itself. Rather than accepting a post-modern and post-colonial view suggesting that identity is
never complete or stable, but consists of fragments and patchwork, the narrator insists on finding
an autonomous and coherent self. This struggle between two different conceptions of identity
is evident in the way in which the conflict between the narrator’s British and Indian selves, as
discussed above, occupies a central role in this travel text until the narrator understands the futil-
ity of the task: ‘I cannot truly do so [find himself] until I lose myself in the experience of India’
199
Jopi Nyman
(Kohli, 2008, p. 184). The conflict between the two identities is encapsulated in the scene in
which he prepares shepherd’s pie (with a twist of chili) for a group of young Delhi socialites some
of whom have studied and lived in Britain. For them Kohli is not British but just ‘British-born’
(2008, pp. 220–1), and so his food is not seen as ‘bland English shit’ (2008, p. 220). This recogni-
tion of the potentiality of hybrid identity capable of crossing back and forth across the cultural
border separating the homeland of his father from the diasporic reality of his second-generation
Scottishness is a revelation: ‘all the plates are empty. But my heart feels full’ (Kohli, 2008, p. 21).
The section following the narrator’s visit to Delhi takes him to his father’s hometown and is
crucial for his identity. In so doing the text contextualizes the family’s history in the violence of
Partition Punjab and provides a further historical context to the problem of the narrator’s divided
identity and sense of displacement: ‘I can’t help feeling that on some level I am not meant to be
here’ (Kohli, 2008, p. 262). While he has not learnt of the events in full before his adulthood, it
is now referred to as ‘a good story’ that ‘became my story’ (Kohli, 2008, p. 261), adding a further
dimension to his father’s migration to Britain. Yet it is eventually here, upon meeting his uncles,
shopping for turbans, and cooking Indian food for his Sikh relatives, that the quest ends. Signif-
icantly, it ends with a realization and recognition of hybrid identity, that India and Glasgow ‘For
the first time in my life . . . are not two different places but the same unified space’ and that ‘Home
is where I want it to be’ (Kohli, 2008, p. 284). Identity, as the final words of the memoir put it, is
fragmentary and multiple: ‘British me; Indian me; British Indian me; Indian British me. Just me.
My name is Hardeep Singh Kohli and I have finally arrived home’ (Kohli, 2008, p. 285). In other
words, the different parts of his identity can be bridged to form a hybrid and multilocational
identity that recognizes the presence of various cultures in it.
Conclusion
This chapter has examined the role of food and the culinary in three autobiographical texts by
South Asian diasporic writers in Britain. I have suggested that regardless of the diverse potential
functions of the culinary, it plays a major role in the crossing and maintenance of various borders
in contemporary autobiographical writing and brings the diverse historical and personal memo-
ries of diasporic migrants under our gaze. Rather than marking merely nostalgia, the representa-
tion of the culinary in contemporary autobiographies locates identity in transnational histories of
cultural contact and boundary crossings. As the three texts discussed show, the autobiographical
narrative is both personal and communal, seen in Alibhai-Brown’s story of the East African
Asian community, Candappa’s reflections on the impending loss of cultural memory, and Kohli’s
negotiation of second-generation British Asian identity. In different ways, their representations
of the culinary are ways of countering historical amnesia and loss of difference through the lives
of the narrators and their communities.
Note
This research is part of the research project EUBORDERSCAPES: Bordering, Political Landscapes and Social
Arenas: Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts in a post-Cold War World (290775) financed
by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7-SSH-2011-1).
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15
BIOGRAPHICAL AND
NARRATIVE RESEARCH
IN IBEROAMERICA
Emergence, development and state fields
Antonio Bolívar
university of granada, spain
Introduction
Telling one’s life experiences and “reading” (in the sense of “interpreting”) these events/actions,
based on the stories that the agents narrate, has become a research perspective in its own right. In
Iberoamerica, as in Europe, after the crisis of positivism and the hermeneutic turn in the social
sciences, the biographical approach has become a specific research perspective (Bolívar et al.,
2001). With the “narrative turn”, there is an attempt to grant the deserved relevance to the
discursive dimension of individuality, that is, to the ways humans experience and attach meaning
to the world of life through language. Within qualitative research, the biographical and narrative
approach has been acquiring its own identity in Iberoamerica in the social sciences.
Life-stories and narrative inquiry, along with international research, have established a particular
field of research in Latin America that becomes more important with time, partly strengthened
by postmodern disenchantment with the grand narratives and by the demand for the personal
and emotional dimension in the social sciences. A certain disillusionment with the explanations
of subjectivity by sociological or historical referents has produced the strong emergence of the
dynamic materiality of the subject’s word as a component of his/her experiences, memory and
identity. The new biographical and narrative genres have the potential to represent the experience
lived in the social life; therefore, they have extended into the field of education (Abrahão, 2012).
The (auto)biographical research has become generalized. It is used by more and more research
projects, and a growing number of articles and books have shown the importance and/or use-
fulness of this perspective as the integration of different areas of knowledge in education. Stories
and histories are increasingly viewed as relevant material for social scientific analysis in education.
The subjects’ word is our only access to the world as, in the words of Derrida, il n’y a pas hors de
texte (“there is nothing outside of text”).
We review the origins, development and variants of narrative inquiry and life stories in edu-
cation, both in Spanish (Spain, Latin America) and Portuguese (Portugal-Brazil) speaking coun-
tries, which form part of the Iberoamerican community (Bolívar & Domingo, 2006a). What has
202
Research in Iberoamerica
been done in education was initially dependent on and enriched by the set of discursive genres
that compose the “biographical space” (Arfuch, 2002), at a crossroads where different disciplines
converge (Anthropology and Ethnography, Sociology, History, Linguistics and Literary Theory,
Philosophy, Psychology). Sharing the same Latin language (Spanish, Portuguese) and publishing
world allows the ideas and investigations to flow from one side of the Atlantic to the other. In the
Spanish case – moreover – with Spanish exiles moving to Iberoamerican countries after the Span-
ish Civil War (1939), there is an interrelationship between Spanish-speaking countries, which,
in some cases, is increased by their later return to Spain, coinciding with its democratization.
Origin and development of the

narrative-biographical methodology
The qualitative methodology in Spain, as in the rest of the Iberoamerican countries, has a long
historical past in social research. Due to the dictatorship in Spain, with the resulting isolation
of the main theoretical movements, it is in Iberoamerica where the first developments of the
qualitative methodology, and more specifically, of the narrative-biographical methodology, take
place. In this regard, we would like to emphasize, as Saraiba and Zarco (1997, pp. 32–6) highlight
in their history, the sociological work carried out by José Medina Echevarría in various coun-
tries (Mexico, Colombia and Chile). At the beginning of the 1940s, Medina publishes his work
Sociology: Theory and Technique (Medina, 1941), where he maintains – following the ideas of the
German thought of Dilthey, Rickert and Weber, and extended in Spain by the Ortegian circles – a
specific methodology for the cultural sciences, compared to the natural sciences. Borrowing ideas
from the Chicago School, Medina considers that human behavior is a symbolic activity that must
be studied with a corresponding methodology, considering The Polish Peasant by Thomas and
Znaniecki to be “the best monograph of the century so far”.
Life stories are used in two texts in the 1970s. First, as various authors have pointed out
(López-Galán, 1996; Valles, 2009), in Buenos Aires (and a few years later in Spain), Juan Francisco
Marsal (1969) publishes a life story about a Spanish immigrant to Argentina, exemplifying in
the Argentinian case, the life story of the peasant told by Thomas and Znaniecki (2004) in
their opus magna about Polish people who emigrated to Chicago. In addition, in one of the first
compilations about life stories in Spanish, in Buenos Aires, Balán (1974) publishes a monograph
on Life Stories in Social Sciences: Theory and Technique, where he includes relevant articles on the
topic. In the following years, together with Elisabeth Jelin (Balán & Jelin, 1980), he publishes
a second treatment of the topic called The Structure of the Personal Biography. From that time on,
the methodology increases its presence in the social sciences (Ferrarotti, 2014). Thus, in Buenos
Aires, the Social Science Notebooks by FLACSO publish a monograph on Oral History and Life
Stories, which includes relevant work by Bertaux (1988). In the Spanish setting, the book by
Marinas and Santamarina (1993) marks the official introduction of this methodology into the
university setting.
We start with the different review and systematization efforts made in this oral history field, as
well as the specific review carried out by Valles and Baer (2005) in the Spanish setting of the evo-
lution of qualitative research in the social sciences. We conduct a global review in order to elab-
orate a bibliographical guide for investigation in the social sciences from the narrative-biographical
point of view (Bolívar et al., 1998). Recently, the Mexican Journal of Educational Research dedicated
a monographic issue (num. 62, 2014) to a review of autobiography in the Iberoamerican setting,
with the title: “Autobiography and Education: Traditions, Dialogues and Methodologies”, which
we use in this paper.
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An initial historical treatment in the Iberoamerican context of the origin and development of
the biographical method reveals that it has had many changing viewpoints and topics of interest
over time. They range from narrative-literary considerations and diverse ideographic and con-
servationist positions to the use of voices and personal documents oriented toward recovering
the historical record of episodes, personalities and situations of special personal and/or social
relevance, or from the other history, the non-official one, that of common people, minorities, the
defeated, farm workers, the silenced or the “voiceless”. Later, autobiographical accounts and life
stories have gradually been introduced as relevant material in educational research. This method-
ology becomes diversified and specified “in crescendo” from the so-called “biographical symptom”
(Santamarina & Marinas, 1994) to its blossoming in the present day, which discusses “the reason
behind the symptom” (Marinas, 2004):
Life stories and biographies seem to have a new importance at the present time. Pre-
cisely because there is an in-depth review of our social knowledge . . . there is an interest
in the individual, group and collective memory processes, at a time when the society of
the mass media tries to homogenize all forms of knowledge and social communication.
(Santamarina & Marinas, 1994, p. 260)
From this indicator – called the “biographical symptom” – a discourse arises that was previously
hidden in traditional sociological research and now reappears with strength, broadening its
view to retain and form a self-awareness of society. Stories and histories are increasingly seen
as relevant material for social scientific analysis. Thus, a scenario is established that, from dif-
ferent perspectives and with different influences and trajectories (some local and some clearly
international), begins to develop into a shifting of the parameters of social science research,
mainly based on oral histories, the political demands of the defeated and majority minorities
(women, peasants or common people), and the rise of qualitative sociological research. At the
same time, a theoretical corpus is being created (arguments, reasons, principles and procedures
for action), which gives it methodological and epistemological form and structure, to the point
of becoming an approach in its own right, with its own ways of using the qualitative method-
ology to work with and on life stories, experiences and (auto)biographical sources, as we have
argued (Bolívar, 2002).
Main moments and points of interest

We describe the emergence and development process in the Iberoamerican setting according to
topics of interest, time and countries. Our approach will rest on some moments or phases that
have been accumulating and reconstructing themselves up until the present time. With velocities,
centers of attention and specific circumstances by countries, on the whole it follows an evolution
similar to the approach at the international level.
In the 1920s, some anthropologists feel the need to document the minority or exotic cultures
shown in the accounts. In this way, they begin to establish the way customs and institutions are
experienced from within, in order to rescue the history of indigenous peoples, peasant commu-
nities, or accounts of the Mexican Revolution, generally collected by non-academic institutions
and agents. As forms of oral history, biographies and testimonies of outstanding personalities are
extensively collected. Thus, anthropology uses biographies to chronologically reconstruct the
individual experience to show how an individual reacts to the cultural norms. An interesting
variant is to use various “crossed testimonies” by key informants and “parallel narrations” of those
involved, which give the account a “polyphonic structure” (Lewis, 1961).
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Recovering the historical memory

Within a political and dissenting use of the oral history, after the restoration of democracy in vari-
ous countries that had gone through dictatorships, an important movement emerges that involves
the restoration of truth or telling the other story (silenced and hidden). Life stories are told to
keep people from losing their identity and, at the same time, to recover the biographical memory
of events that otherwise would remain invisible and unpunished. As Schwarztein (1995) points
out, in Latin America this approach has special transcendence related to these memory recovery
processes, based on an option of political commitment and close ties to social movements.
In the Spanish context, in addition to the already classic study by Fraser (1979), numerous
studies (literary, journalistic and sociological research) recover accounts of survivors, “spies”,
women and exiles during the Spanish civil war. Among others, Isabel Allende describes the coup
d’état of General Pinochet in Chile in a very personal way, and she tells her family story up until
that time so as not to lose either the memory or the identity.
Studies on marginalization
From the period between the two World Wars to the 1960s, the research focuses on social change
and acculturation, and it especially addresses marginalization, minorities, etc., based on the indi-
vidual or experiential dimension. With this rise in positivism and quantification, the biographical
methodology is restricted to collectives that are difficult to access and impossible to quantify, due
to residing precisely in the margins. It corresponds to a shift from an exterior or distant exoticism
(testimonials of the first documentalist anthropologists) to an interior or interactionist dimension,
stemming from the psychoanalytic and anthropological school of the study of culture and per-
sonality and the more sociological approach of the Chicago School.
Due to the transcendence of his work, Oscar Lewis (1961) holds a prominent position, espe-
cially regarding his first great studies (Anthropology of Poverty, first, and The Sons of Sánchez, later,
followed by Pedro Martínez), where he sheds light on the experience of marginalization and
poverty (Aceves, 1994). Although his point of view is the subject of discussion (North American
and colonialist anthropologist), he shows the virtues of the biographical method, specifically by
collecting multiple autobiographies and constructing, through intersecting life stories, a poly-
phonic synthesis that makes it possible for the biographical dimension of families to emerge as
the unit of analysis. Although it is true that the social and structural contexts that determine the
biographical conditions are not sufficiently visible, he goes beyond the mere individual account
to approach the social through the individual. Later, he opts for another more emancipating and
dissenting perspective that deals with marginalization as a proposal to make the “other” society
emerge, in order to try to understand the deeper reasons for it, the structural violence it suffers
from, and the solution attempts experienced and lived by its protagonists.
Generalization of the biographical-narrative research

A qualitative leap occurs when the approach is generalized to deal with everyday experiences.
Then it is possible to say that the area of study has been institutionalized as a space for interdisci-
plinary debate and as a specific field of qualitative methodology. The acceptance and generaliza-
tion of biographical-narrative inquiry as a methodological approach in its own right means that
more and more research projects use it, with a systematization and specialization in these types
of research, incorporating new contributions, perspectives, and methodologies. The different
biographical variants (life stories, oral histories, biography, autobiography, testimonies, stories,
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videography, scholastic writing, among others) are used profusely. At the same time, this renewed
strength of studies about the lives of the actors brings changes in the research conceptions and
the role of the subjects. A growing dialogue and academic cooperation exists among authors,
with mutual influences (Abrahão & Bolívar, 2014).
Differential development by countries

The biographical and narrative methodology has become consolidated in the different Iber-
oamerican countries, being gradually enriched by new contributions, perspectives and method-
ological approaches. Recovering the historic past through oral histories or life stories, particularly
in countries that have had dictatorial governments, has evolved into a fruitful research area.
The auto(biographical) and narrative sources (life stories, oral accounts, diaries, autobiographies,
biographies, memories, accounts of experience, scholastic writing, videotapes, etc.) have become
a research object in the social sciences in Iberoamerican countries, with different degrees of
development, while broadening the methodological approaches and resources for knowing about
subjects’ life experiences. An example of this vitality and internalization is the collection “Nar-
ratives, Autobiographies and Education”, which is editing a set of books by Brazilian, Argentine
and French authors.
To some degree, Mexico and Argentina could be considered the precursors of studies and
systematizations of this methodology. On the one hand, in the former, in addition to the studies
by Oscar Lewis, Jorge Aceves (1993), from the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social
Anthropology (Ciesas), introduces some of the most accredited international investigators (Paul
Thompson, Daniel Bertaux, etc.) in his publication on oral histories. On the other hand, years
before that, from Argentina, Jorge Balán (1974) introduces some of the most accredited voices in
the social sciences (Howard Becker, Juan F. Marsal, etc.) in his collection about life stories. Both
authors help to illuminate new forms in the entire Iberoamerican world. Undoubtedly, their
publishing potential is felt through the projection of their own approaches and contributions or
the translation of works of considerable interest that would have had trouble reaching Spain at
certain points in history.
Argentina has a widely developed oral history, as shown by the creation of the Oral History
Archive of the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires, with the journal Recovered Voices, which contains
accounts of union leaders or about Peronism (Schwarztein, 1991). In addition, there is a strong
Oral History Association (“Ahora”) that promotes the use of oral accounts in historic research and
biannually organizes International Oral History Encounters. The book edited by Balán (1974),
referred to above, has a strong impact and involves a revalorization of autobiographical accounts.
In the past twenty years, as Suárez (2014, p. 766) points out, “the qualitative research modalities
of (auto)biographical and narrative inquiry have become widely dominant and generalized in the
territory of the educational sciences”. In a re-occurring way, the (auto)biographical narrative is
used in knowledge production processes and the wisdom they produce. From the University of
Buenos Aires, Daniel Suárez develops an extensive project of elaborating and gathering accounts
of teachers’ pedagogical experience (Suárez, 2011) (Network of Teacher Training and Educa-
tional Narratives) and leads the Latin American Network of Narrative Inquiry, (Auto)biography
and Education (Rednaue).
México has experience in the use of the oral history as an important part of the study in the
social sciences. The influence of tendencies and contributions from North America (especially
from the Chicago School), in addition to other European traditions, produces the development
of an ethnographic anthropology focused on the world of the suburbs and poverty (Lewis, 1961).
According to Jorge Aceves (1996), the oral history: “is interested in the social acts and events
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where institutions and individuals intervene in certain economic, political and cultural-symbolic
processes. It is interested in producing knowledge, and not just in being a channel for the oral
presentation of testimonies”. In the past decade, according to a review of the biographical pro-
duction in the past decade in Mexico, Serrano and Ramos (2014, pp. 849–50) state that “the
production on the biographical theme in education has broadened, diversifying topics, referents
and perspectives. It is organized by generic designations (auto/biography, trajectory), the meth-
odological approach (life stories, oral history), or the technique used (interview). Ideas have
circulated from the diverse European, North American and Latin American traditions”.
The use of life stories in Brazil is initially also inscribed under the influence of the oral his-
tory. There is (since 1994) a strong Brazilian Association of Oral History (ABHO), integrated in
the International Oral History Association, which joins together collectives and researchers in the
areas of history, social sciences, anthropology and education. In addition to an electronic Bulletin,
it edits (since 1998) a journal (Oral History) in Portuguese and English that contains Brazilian and
international studies from an interdisciplinary perspective on orality. Later, the use of life stories
is generalized, highlighting research groups, seminaries, symposia, congresses, dissertations and
theses, book publication and journal organization, and the creation of associations and research
networks (Bueno et al., 2006; Souza, 2014a). In this regard, the International Congress of (Auto)
biographical Research (Congreso Internacional de Pesquisa (Auto)biográfica, CIPA) stands out for
its relevance, as it has fostered exchanges among groups about analytic perspectives of ques-
tions related to the potential of (auto)biographical sources. It has contributed to strengthening
ties between institutions and professionals from different disciplinary traditions and approaches.
Likewise, in these CIPA, the epistemological and theoretical-methodological reflections about
research on life stories stand out, as well as their implications as research-training practice. The
6th CIPA took place in Rio de Janeiro (November, 2014), with the theme of “Between Public
and Private: Ways of Living, Narrating and Keeping” (Abrahão et al., 2014).
In 2008, the creation of the Brazilian Association of (Auto)biographical Research (BIOgraph)
made it possible to group Brazilian professionals who investigate (auto)biographies, memory, life
stories and training practices. Moreover, it promotes and coordinates studies and investigations,
events and teaching in this area, and it has established international relations with Latin America
(Rednaue) and Europe through the Latin America-Europe Scientific Network of Biographical
Inquiry in Education (BioGrafia). In Brazil, the narrative experiences were evaluated and organ-
ized as training memorials, educational narratives and life stories of outstanding Brazilian educa-
tors, among others, who, apart from the singularities of each of the expressions and the way they
are developed by researcher-educators, value the reflective writing of the training path.
In the regions of the Andes, there is an immemorial oral history tradition, with myths and
traditions reflected in biographies that explain the deeper ideas of the peasants. In Chile there
is interest in topics related to worker militancy or laborers who reach the city and fight to find
a place, highlighting – as in the previous case – the organizational capacity of the popular sec-
tors and the interest in everyday situations. In Bolivia at the end of the 1970s, anthropologists,
historians, sociologists or linguists began to use in-depth interviews and biographies to collect
the accounts, traditions, culture and language of indigenous communities. Currently, biograph-
ical research is used as a source of documentation to understand social events. There has been a
movement from an oral history of gathering autobiographical narrations toward another more
systematic and investigative study. In Venezuela, Córdova (1990) performed a systematization
of the approach to open it up to the social sciences in general. He understands that life stories
make it possible for human experience and subjectivity to be the source for constructing social
knowledge. In Perú, research studies have been conducted with written sources and interviews
(narrative), and there is a multi-disciplinary space for learning, research and the diffusion of oral
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history around an Oral History Group (GHOPUCP). In Colombia, anthropologists, sociologists

and historians have worked with oral traditions and life stories to establish the transformations
of indigenous communities and peasants, as well as worker movements. The two-volume book
by Lulle et al. (1998) includes the 24 speeches, in addition to the study by Coninck and God-
ard, presented in the Seminary “The Uses of the Life Story in the Social Sciences”. It is a good
expression of the variety of approaches and experiences in the use of the biographical method in
Latin America. The journal Education and Pedagogy edited a monographic issue (num. 61, 2011)
on “Narrative(s), (Auto)biography(ies) and Education”, which shows the latest developments
(consolidation of the field of study, with a plural methodology, and interchange among European
and Latin American authors).
Other Iberoamerican countries have experienced their own development of the narrative and
oral history. In some countries the emphasis is placed on the peasants (Mexico and Costa Rica)
or on the immigrants (Argentina and Uruguay). In others (Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador
and Ecuador), oral histories and biographies have a clear relationship with the literacy campaigns
carried out in these countries. In another dimension, the collection of data, traditions, culture
and languages of indigenous communities is done by anthropologists, historians, sociologists and
linguists. The oral history and biographies have had a relationship with the alphabetization
campaigns undertaken in these countries, from the perspective of Freire or using an educational
approach, developed by Dominicé or Pineau. In Costa Rica, national contests have been held
to recover peasants’ autobiographies, which serve as the basis for reconstructing the history of the
country from pre-Columbian times.
On the Iberian Peninsula, Spain has a well-developed tradition in the study of the (auto)
biography, although with more of a historical and literary nature than a purely sociological one.
The philosopher Ortega-Gasset (1947, pp. 40–1), who spread the ideas of Dilthey, pointed out – in
his essay History as a System – that “in contrast to purely mathematical-physical reasoning, there is,
then, a narrative reasoning. To understand something human, personal or collective, it is necessary
to tell a story . . . The life experiences made the future of man narrower. One’s life is based on the
past. In sum, man does not have a nature, but rather a history”. The personal relationships experienced
by each individual become the basis for the hermeneutic comprehension of human actions. The
continuation of this methodology, from the perspective of generations, can be seen in the work
by Ortegian disciple Julián Marías (1949) in the historical method of the generations. Years later, the
traditional German influence is replaced by North American sociology.
In the 1990s, two systematic presentations were published on the life story approaches, one
from an anthropological perspective (Pujadas, 1992) and the other from a sociological view-
point (De Miguel, 1996). In the area of education, my research group has solidly contributed
to extending this biographical-narrative approach, both in research (Bolívar, 1999; Bolívar &
Domingo, 2006b) and in its systematization (Bolívar et al., 2001). The Barcelona group, formed
by Fernando Hernández, Juan María Sancho and collaborators, started up a life stories network
that has held various congresses whose minutes have been published openly in electronic format
(Hernández & Rifà, 2011), and the University of Málaga (Rivas et al., 2014). In addition, as shown
in the review by González-Monteagudo and Ochoa (2014), the group from the University of
Seville has developed the autobiography in teaching contexts, following the French proposal
(González-Monteagudo, 2011). In Spain, there has also been widespread development among His-
tory of Education researchers of the use of oral sources in historical research. In turn, the autobiography
is defined by the object and problem addressed: reconstructing the culture and educational memory
from the perspective of the subjects or actors in it (Escolano & Hernández, 2002, Viñao, 2009).
In Portugal, Professor Antonio Nóvoa (1992) from the University of Lisbon introduces
the French line (Geneva School), oriented toward training teachers and adults. His traditional
208
proximity to the Anglo-Saxon and French worlds allows him to include both contributions. In
this case, the impacting study by Nóvoa and Finger (1988) reflects the entire French tradition
in this direction and its development in the area of teacher training, and it becomes a “work of
reference for those who are interested in biographical research in Portugal, as it gave it visibility,
above all in the field of education” (Lechner & Abrantes, 2014, p. 861). Adult education pro-
grams were relevant in the development of the autobiographical approach, as reconstruction and
reflection about the competencies developed in different life experiences were conceived as an
important tool in the “lifelong learning” process. Likewise, studies on personal and professional
identity have been extensively carried out (Lopes, 2009). The training process is established as one
of individual development in constructing the figure of the teacher, as a critical re-appropriation
of the past and of the experiences lived. The training processes are adapted according to their
relevance to the professional trajectories, and the teacher education becomes a mobilization and
development of experiences, generating new knowledge.
Field and territories in (auto) biographical research

Two main territories have defined the (auto)biographical in the Iberoamerican countries:
investigation-action-training and biographical-narrative inquiry. In fact, the biographical
approach is, simultaneously, a research method and an educational tool. This dual function
justifies its use in the area of the educational sciences. According to the review by Passeggi et al.
(2011), four aspects of (auto)biographical research have been established as axes of action and
research: the act of narrating as an anthropological phenomenon; narrative autobiographies as
a research method; narratives as a (self )teaching practice; and the use of narrative autobiogra-
phies as an educational intervention procedure.
Teacher education
The biographical approach has been applied to initial and continuing education studies, with
emphasis on aspects linked to dimensions of the professionalization, insertion and professional
development of teachers of different educational levels, in a confluence between narrative, (auto)
biography and training. The (auto)biographical space in education has had, from its origins,
a close relationship with education, particularly of adults, between autobiographical discursive
practices and the pedagogical training of teachers. The life stories emerge in the context of per-
manent training. The subjects of teacher training increase their value through their life stories. As
Souza (2014a, p. 790) points out: “another logic of adult education, based on tacit or experiential
knowledge and the explanation of learning constructed throughout life as a meta-cognition
or meta-reflection of the knowledge itself ”. The (auto)biographical narratives collected in a
research process or in training practices make up a corpus for analysis, in order to reconstruct
the life of an individual or a collective in some area of human experience at different times of
comprehensive-interpretive analysis (Souza, 2014b).
Compared to the marked heteronomy produced by training modalities focused on preparation
in teaching strategies elaborated by expert knowledge, self-training changes the place occupied
by the subject of the training, promoting forms of self- and co-training. Teachers have a set of
experiential skills constructed throughout life that can be the object of critical reflection, serving
individual professional development and professional identity. Placing the adult at the center of
the training process seeks to give value to these experiences inscribed in autobiographical pro-
jects, as a possibility for professional orientation and reorientation. From the French perspective
of Histoires de vie en formation (Histories of life in the making), when people write their own life
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stories, they can also become hermeneutics of their own writing and, thus, of their own lives
(Pineau & Michele, 1983).
Biographical research
Each country has its own historical rhythm but, in both, the exhaustion of functionalism and
the criticisms of positivism in anthropology and sociology allow the slow blossoming of (auto)
biographical research. In their place, there is a return of the actor and of the voice of the subjects to
explain social phenomena, liberated from empiricists and functionalists (Cisneros, 2013). As a
form of social research, where subjectivity is a source of knowledge, (auto)biographical accounts
have their own research traditions. Narrative inquiry makes it possible to represent a set of
dimensions of experience that formal research ignores without being able to explain certain rel-
evant aspects (feelings, objectives, desires, etc.). Diverse personal documents (daily autobiographies,
letters, photographs and personal objects) and biographical interviews, which can be oral or written,
become objects of study. Specific ways of practicing biographical investigation, as we show, have
their own viewpoints about approaching the research.
Biographical narration offers a conceptual and methodological framework with which to
analyze essential aspects of the development of society or a profession in the lifetime of a person.
It marks “his or her” personal lines and expectations for development, providing a biographical
framework that makes the complexity of life and human and social action intelligible. Life can
be interpreted as a story, and this is fundamental to beginning to understand human action and
knowledge. The outbreak of the entire Anglo Saxon tradition of narrative inquiry as accounts
of experience, mainly reflected in studies like the one by Larrosa et al. (1995), means that an
important qualitative leap is taken.
The (auto)biographical research, as pointed out by Passeggi et al. (2011), is configured as “a
common territory suitable for dialogue between researchers in a national and international net-
work” (p. 370). The biographical-narrative approach and its corresponding methodologies are
becoming more and more seductive. Within a “hermeneutic” type methodology, it is possible
to both give meaning to and understand the cognitive, affective and action dimensions. The
revalorization of life stories lies in the hermeneutic shift, where social phenomena are under-
stood as texts, and the interpretation as attributing meaning to and making sense of individual
and collective experiences. The collaborations undertaken among the different research groups
in the Brazilian case, and the networks of relationships with Francophone and Latin American
associations and institutions, show the ways the international biographical movement has inten-
sified and gained strength.
After the increase in the popularity of the approach among researchers, which signifies a
growing rise in its use and an initial thematic and methodological convergence, it was seen as a
strong perspective to look closely at the variety of topics dealing with personal aspects, culture,
identity, gender, the day to day, etc. Now, with less naivety, the approach has addressed some
questions of interest related to collecting and analyzing life stories, which requires greater sys-
tematization in gathering and validating the information. Given the importance of the credibility
and validity of qualitative research, in-depth reviews of their epistemological status are formulated
(Bolívar, 2002), complementing the work that, basically, Ricoeur (1984–88, 1992) has been car-
rying out in the field of the narrative.
A critical view emerges about the usefulness and uses of the method. With this consolidation
process, a serious debate also arises – initiated by Polkinghorne (1995) and echoed by Bolívar
(2002) – between supporters of paradigmatic analyses stemming from qualitative research – more
willing (likely) to perform categorical analyses of the information and use packets of information
210
that foster the research – others who are more purists and from a native point of view try to
manipulate the information as little as possible, reaching the conclusion that the best idea is to
show the evidence through the voices of the protagonists without later interpretation, and others
who – in line with what the reviewers propose – try to look for a productive balance between the
two extremes. There is a demand, then, for a different method from the conventional qualitative
paradigm, without being limited to a methodology of collecting and analyzing data (Bolívar
et al., 2001).
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16
A PSYCHO-SOCIETAL
APPROACH TO LIFE HISTORIES
roskilde university
A problem-oriented methodology development

This article is rooted in pedagogy and educational research but intends to direct reflections on
problem-oriented methodology more broadly to critical social science. It summarizes experi-
ences of a research strategy that studies adults’ life histories and their subjective experience of them
as an empirical and theoretical framework for an understanding of their educational career and
their learning processes.
Adult learning processes are primarily linked to their life experiences and general life situa-
tion. Therefore, an interdisciplinary research group at Roskilde University studied theoretically the
driving forces in educational activity and the effects of education in the context of learners’ life
histories. Later followed many and varied empirical studies of people who on their own initiative
or encouraged by their institution related to learning and education in the light of crises and
upheavals, especially in their work and career (Dybbroe, 2002, 2012; Larsen et al., 1998; Salling
Olesen, 1994, 1996; Salling Olesen & Weber, 2002; Weber, 1995, 2007, 2010).
The concept of experience which originally structured our research questions (Salling Olesen,
1985, 1989) was taken from the Frankfurt School and its Marxist and psychodynamic the-
oretical tradition. In (Danish) adult educational practice it was linked to a notion of collec-
tive political learning processes, inspired by Negt (Negt, 1964, 1999; Negt & Kluge, 1972),
which transcended the immediate individual experience. In Negt’s version, collective learning
processes (exemplarisches Lernen) were by definition only possible through communication
of individual subjective experience of common societal conditions in a historical dialec-
tic between everyday life experience and a mediated historical/theoretical knowledge. Our
understanding of the participants’ experiences combined everyday practical plausibility with a
broader understanding of the relationship between learning processes, everyday life, culture and
the formation of societal institutions – informed by phenomenological sociology and Berger &
Luckmann’s understanding of how specific individual actions contribute to the overall cul-
tural productivity of society (scientifically, politically and practically (Berger & Luckmann,
1966; Salling Olesen, 1985)). It connected the subjective entirety of learning processes, including
the meaning of their content, with prior socialization processes and the objective life circum-
stances which provide their social and cultural framework and ascribes dynamics and a social
transformational meaning to them.
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A psycho-societal approach
In order to substantiate this concept of experience, we viewed empirical analyses of specific

individual experiences as mediations of non-concurrent but interrelated dynamics: on the one
hand, individual inner psychic dynamics and their importance in identity processes, and on the
other, contradictions and historical conflicts in various levels of societal formation that both structure
the content of learning processes and provide framework conditions for them. This meant a dia-
lectical understanding of relationships between individual and societal factors through the study
of concrete subjective processes. With support from the Danish Research Council, this resulted in
the life history project (Salling Olesen, 1996), designed as a theoretical and methodological umbrella
for various empirical projects with a wide range of contexts and outputs, often on a broader
basis than the purely pedagogical or educational. Apart from qualifying these projects, including
PhDs, we aimed to use this diversity of research as a lever for the theoretical and methodological
development of research into education and learning as empirical critical social science (Salling
Olesen, 2006).
It was no longer teaching but learners who formed the research basis; this allowed for a wide
variety of inspirational influences from neighbouring disciplines dealing with the individual
as a subject in a social context: cultural research, biographical research and (psychodynamic)
socialization research – besides gender studies and Marxist social research. We sought theoretical
models and concepts that went far beyond education and learning research and methodological
experiences to be used in data production and processing.
In the given situation, we needed a manageable and obviously practical methodology, but
which also placed educational participation and its learning processes in a scientifically relevant
context. We found these resources in extensive empirical biographical research. A lengthy visit-
ing professorship of Peter Alheit, who played a key role in educational biographical research in
Europe (Alheit, 1994a, 1994b; Alheit & Dausien, 2002), had a decisive influence. We also drew
inspiration from the development of sociological biographical methodology (Rosenthal, 1992),
including an active involvement in the research committee “Biography and Society” of the
International Sociological Association.
Such inspirations have enhanced the quality of our empirical research, especially at the meth-
odological level (sampling, interviewing techniques, transcription, coding). They have also stim-
ulated our work on more general methodological issues. This was an exciting challenge for a
research environment previously mainly based on inspiration from critical theory, and thereby
Marxism and psychoanalysis. The organization of the life history project enabled a more princi-
pled and critical discussion of the methodologies and the development of theoretical problems in
an understanding of subjective dimensions of societal processes through empirical data analysis.
The autobiography as text and life history

The common feature of the traditions that inspired us is the use of narrative life-historical
interviews as data, particularly autobiographical (spontaneous) interviews where informants are
invited to present their autobiographies in a relatively free narrative. One aspect that appealed to
us was the method’s distinct “inside perspective”. We worked on open-ended qualitative research
interviews in advance, both from general political solidarity with “the affected parties” and their
views, and because our research interest implied identification with their lifeworld perspective.
We find the same concern idealized in certain types of anthropological field work which are
much more resource intensive. The spontaneous narrative autobiographical interview provides a
methodologically manageable opportunity to leave the (re)construction of the informant’s per-
spective to the person him- or herself.
215
However, the term biographical research covers a wide range of perceptions regarding analysis
and theoretical understandings. Some researchers generally do not distinguish between “biog-
raphy” and “lived life”, but view biography as an alternative perspective on society and history.
A description of certain events and experiences in a biographical perspective involves primarily
the (re)construction of a context – which besides recording events and their interrelationship,
leading to discussions of causality, perceptions of continuity and possible future projections, is also
a description of an individual’s life, a biography. An individual life is considered by definition as a
relatively limited but in itself meaningful object, and our understanding of lived life (the lifeworld
perspective) is channelled through this new object. Some apply general source-critical criteria to
the data, being in this sense methodologically close to oral history traditions and ethnographic
methodologies; this has been the basis of biographical research in social science (Bertaux, 1981;
Bertaux & Thompson, 1997). In relation to our interest in subjective experiences, this was of
secondary importance. In the narrative biographical research a new object is produced, which
simultaneously represents both lived life and the interviewee’s interpretation of this in his or her
lifeworld perspective, including ideas about future life (something like a “projet” in Sartre’s sense
(1960, p. 63ff ).
But how is this relationship between biography and lived life analyzed? Some narrative bio-
graphical research aims to identify certain patterns in the stories which reveal real-life processes
and practiced dispositions. One important approach with a theoretical background in symbolic
interactionism has helped to renew sociological biographical research. It seems to be based on
an understanding of a homology between the structure and subject positions of the narrative
and the agency of lived life, and can thus in the manageable form of the interview gain access to
something less apparent in other forms, namely the lifeworld perspective of social actors (Alheit,
1994a; Apitzsch, 2003; Schütze, 1984).
Some research in the life history project has used this narrative structural analysis, but always
kept in mind that an autobiography is a subjective act, spoken from the interviewee’s life-world
perspective. Through the “narrative contract” – a common understanding with the interviewee
to narrate his or her life – the cultural modes of narrative structure and cultural templates are
established. These will tend to be binding within a given cultural framework and the narrator will
seek to fill them; the discursive and normative regulation of the self-presentation is subordinated
to this. In the research context, the production of a text must be analyzed, not as a source, but as
an expression (speech act). In this perspective, narrative structure may be seen as the utilization
of a cultural repertoire of formulas and legitimate reductions by interview subjects to make sense
of the diversity of events, constraints and impulses which form part of lived life.
From the perspective of symbolic interactionism, as mentioned above, the narrative is seen
to have a particular closeness and resemblance to the agency of lived life and meaning making.
However, one may also emphasize other aspects than the narrative’s structural similarity to the
agency of everyday life. In our first life history studies, we conducted themed, semi-structured
interviews on concrete life histories, in relation to, for example, experiences of education, gender
socialization, work experience, work identity and future prospects. The themes were theoreti-
cally justified expectations of how structural conditions could have a differentiated impact on
the interviewees’ life histories, but the analyses were also marked by a very open attitude to the
empirical material. If the biography is seen neither as a source of lived life, nor as a proxy, it
will be clear that, although the same linguistic interface is involved, the narrator is subjectively
formulating experience of this lived life – and possibly also trying to “talk around” certain
aspects of it. The gestalt character of narration draws the telling close to subjective impressions
of the narrative present, including aspects of emotions, mood and sensory perception, which
provide experience of the life history that would not be reflected in a more logical argumentative
216
discourse. This understanding has been motivated by Bruner’s theory of two modes of thought,
paradigmatic and narrative (Bruner, 1986). Bruner’s concepts point to a “cultural reality”, a
meaning context excluded from logical cognition and general language use. Rather than accept this
language-theoretical or anthropological dichotomy as a precondition, one can instead consider it
as an observation of the diversity of linguistic expression of subjective experiences of lived life.
We prefer to see an ongoing process that at the individual level articulates specific experiences in
language as a social medium, and at the cultural/societal level incorporates new specific experi-
ences into the “semantic stock” of this medium. Interestingly, we find similar thinking in a com-
pletely different culture, far distant from autobiographical research and psychoanalytic cultural
analysis. In connection with mutual translations, I have discussed this with Brazilian colleagues
conducting pedagogically oriented biographical research which almost has the character of sub-
jective cultural archaeology: learning processes through the acquisition of life historical narratives
(Menna Barreto Abrahão, 2012; Salling Olesen, 2010; Souza, 2012).
Peter Alheit made some use of narrative structural analysis but was also interested in the actual
(self )consciousness articulated in the biographical narrative (e.g. Alheit & Dausien, 2002, p. 290):
A biographical perception and narration of one’s life requires an awareness of its individuality and
the ability to constantly shape it and feel responsible for its course under changing circumstances.
Alheit uses the concept of “biographicity” to characterize this particular epochal quality of (adult)
learning processes, which he sees as a necessary response to our (postmodern) de-traditionalized
way of life. Biographical analysis of adult participation in education and learning processes
inscribes individual autobiographical narratives into society’s modernization process. This will
scarcely be equally valid or relevant for all individuals but for a specific person or group represents
a way to understand their life and navigate in it.
To some extent this was the approach in our early analysis of education for socially oppressed
groups, such as unemployed women. Through their autobiographical narratives, we sought to
understand whether and how education gives them opportunities for self-definition and auton-
omous expression (Larsen, 1992). Precisely at a time of disruption, where women only with
difficulty and against obvious odds define their lives as their own, a biographical approach may
be particularly relevant because it shows “solidarity” with their effort to gain relative autonomy
as wage earners. But we have also seen that unemployed people, subject to obvious structural
constraints, produce narratives about their struggle to secure a position in certain segments of the
labour market which also include ideas of real self-determination in (working) life and can fuel
alternative life plans that are quite beyond the intended qualificational perspective. The narratives
as a whole were interpreted as an expression of the individual perception of a “destiny” in society,
where specific work experience, class and gender played key roles. Autobiographical interviews
represent interviewees’ interpretations of their life histories as they wish to portray them at the
moment of narrating.
These different ways of understanding the relationship between biography and lived life and
the particular nature of narrative material revolve around the relationship of subjective experi-
ence to cultural modalities – and its possible limitations. The desire for solidarity with people
whose lifeworld and future perspectives we want to understand does not assume that people
necessarily know their own life history in full, neither events and objective circumstances that
have influenced it, nor the dynamics of their own consciousness. Most of the events that interfere
with the individual’s life, and then form the raw material of a biography, are essentially struc-
tured by quite different factors than the importance of the event to the person or the intention
expressed by the person in the context. Bourdieu has – as an exponent of a commonly held
attitude – referred to the “biographical illusion” (Bourdieu, 1986). If these events are objectively
structured in contexts that have no specific connection with the individual or simply reflect
217
societal contingency, the construction produced by the biographical ascription of meaning is not
merely illusory, but misleading. The biographical context is objectively justified by the biological
life cycle, which involves certain standardized and specific framework conditions (e.g. ageing
or disease). Major events in an individual life, such as starting a family, choosing an occupation,
becoming unemployed, etc. are dependent on objective societal conditions. The autobiograph-
ical interpretation may be more or less oriented towards the local or personal “little story”, at
the expense of the “big history”, or the biologically “normal” story. How do we deal with the
relations between them?
Marxist social theory and psychoanalysis, as conveyed by the tradition of critical theory,
were the general frames of reference for our work. Both involved a theoretical premise of non-
transparency, meaning that reality is not entirely transparent for either the actor or the observer.
In traditional Marxist theoretical discussion, one could say that a form of structuralism – not
unlike Bourdieu’s argument about the biographical illusion – dominated until the 1960s, and
in the Anglophone world even later. This poor theoretical background probably explains why
our approach to biographical research was initially challenged for drawing on grand theories
(e.g. Marxist social theory) in our analysis of narrative biographical material. Progressive social
research in the USA, but partly also developments in qualitative methods in Europe, insisted on
the actor perspective and the subjective meaning based in the lifeworld interaction. But our
reason for approaching biographical research was precisely that we saw it as a way to address
some of the difficulties in the grand theories, without abandoning them. So the challenge was –
or is – to examine how biographical material could be analyzed in the broader context of the
grand theories.
Against this background, we reached an understanding of a looser coupling between data
production and analysis/interpretation. So long as the requirements of a hermeneutic procedure
are met, the objectified data may be transcriptions of various kinds of interviews or interactions
and also field notes, audio and video recordings, etc. This does not imply irrelevance of the data
production method or the characteristics of the data. On the contrary, reflections on aspects of
data production form part of the interpretation process, and this then becomes a crucial link
between the concrete analysis and the research question.
The sociality of subjectivity

The aim of the life history project was to establish an understanding of learning processes and
education from a subjective perspective. Empirical research of concrete subjective expressions –
including biographical narratives – was intended to elucidate the experiences of specific people
of lived life and its sociality. Oskar Negt’s reformulation of the basis of political learning processes
(1964) was the first major attempt at a connection between the subjective endeavours of everyday
life and non-structuralist Marxism. Until then, subjective factors appeared to be reduced to either
false consciousness or class consciousness, which in a global context were colonized by the Len-
inist political understanding of Soviet communism or by various elitist avant-garde theories. In
the neo-Marxist debate in Western Europe, which included the Frankfurt School, the revival of
Marx’s analysis of capital opened up a new recognition of subjectivity, so that at least criticism of
the dominance of exchange value and the commodity form could actively change society. In the
education economy there arose a rudimentary understanding of the significance of the human
factor in system change, but mostly only as an analysis of contradictions in the capitalist system.
Parts of the new left (e.g. via Marcuse) were also inspired by Freudo-Marxist thinking, which
had otherwise been somewhat marginalized in a form of drive-based essentialism in the 1930s
(Reich). But most of these theoretical developments were in fact still very abstract “openings” of
218
particular importance for the general critique of capitalism – Frankfurt School critical theory was
for example generally seen as “pessimistic” because it correctly identified the pervasive effects of
the capitalist political economy on all levels of cultural and social life.
Since the life history project distinguished between biographical life history and the narrator
as a situated subject, it became clear that the object of analysis was the subjective act where the
subject in a given situation (usually specified by research) interprets lived life and its circum-
stances, and more or less consciously envisions his future life. We must try to understand the indi-
vidual subject’s relationship with himself and the world as a path to understanding subjectivity as
an aspect of sociality in a broader sense. We were not primarily interested in the individual, but
saw him/her as exemplary, as a specific person who could variously enhance our understanding
of how subjective processes can emerge.
We were therefore especially interested in the contradictions, the “breaks” and “gaps”, which
appeared in some of the biographical narratives, as pointed out by both analysts (see Schütze,
1984) and critics (Nielsen, 2005) of narrative structural analysis. They are particularly interesting
in potentially enabling an entry point to an analysis of how both recognized and unrecognized
circumstances and experiences are involved in the processing of conflicts and constraints and are
attributed new meaning. One can first look for signs of the defence mechanisms that are inevi-
tably embedded in a narrative self-representation. The story can in itself be a form of rationali-
zation to provide a coherent and reasoned view of one’s life. But the task of narration, including
requirements for concretisation and completion, will naturally also involve topics and memories
already surrounded by defensive reactions such as repression or rationalization, or a need may
arise to “repair” elements of the story during narration. They may appear as flaws in logic or nar-
rative, contradictions, obvious omissions, breaks in the story line, changing evaluations of people
and relationships, etc. But they can also be expressed by directly opposing inner emotions. Apart
from helping to reconstruct objective elements and enhancing our understanding of how the
narrator interprets them, they may also sometimes be perceived as expressions of ambivalence, i.e.
emotional ambiguity regarding some aspects of the narrative or the basic self-representation itself.
Ambivalences are particularly interesting subjective expressions for two reasons (Becker-Schmidt,
1982; Weber, 1995). Firstly, they could represent cultural and societal contradictions of interest
in understanding the relationship of the individual narrative to a broader context. Secondly, our
fundamental research interest lay in learning, especially the learning processes of everyday life,
as mentioned in the introductory comments on educational research issues. Learning processes
involve shifts of consciousness and discontinuities on many levels, and both logical ruptures and
emotional ambivalences in the autobiographical narrative can therefore indicate learning pro-
cesses or provide the potential for them.
Our methodological approach in the life history project was (deep) hermeneutic interpreta-
tion, inspired by a method based on social psychology which Leithäuser et al. used in research
into working life and everyday life (Leithäuser & Volmerg, 1988). Here too we adopted a proven
empirical method that could plausibly be justified in social intervention projects (Salling Olesen &
Weber, 2002), albeit with a quite different theoretical basis from biographical research. It is pri-
marily a procedure for textual interpretation, mostly generated through transcription of themed
group discussions (a cross between a focus group interview and a social psychology experiment).
The group discussion is stimulated by a chosen theme the researchers expect to be of vital impor-
tance to the participants. Group discussions establish group dynamics that may be assumed to
include elements of unconscious interaction involving participants in relationships to each other
and perhaps to a particular theme. The interpretation is not aimed at individual life historical
experiences but at understanding the indications of subjective experience activated by the theme
in the social interaction. This is also fundamentally an example of hermeneutic interpretational
219
practice, and the aim is to understand interaction and meaning in a broader societal context
through analysis of the psychodynamic levels of communication. This psychoanalytically inspired
interpretational practice was originally developed as cultural analysis, with, for example, works
of art as its primary empirical object. Leithäuser and colleagues applied it thus first to working
life, and its use was later expanded to a variety of material that objectifies social interaction in
everyday life situations and organizations in the form of texts in the broadest sense (Leithäuser,
2012) . This was further developed by the International Research Group for Psycho-Societal Analysis
(Salling Olesen, 2012), which included German, Danish and British researchers.
The methodology is based on the psychoanalytic recognition that subjective meaning is rooted
in life historical memories that are scenic wholes. Cognition and emotion in a present situation
activate memories of similar past situations, and initiate a process of cognitive and emotional dif-
ferentiation. In a social interpretation, one can thus achieve a more comprehensive understanding
of subjective aspects of this situation by trying to understand the scenic recollections it might
activate for the people involved. The first point in this scenic understanding is to interpret subjective
meaning and especially conflicts, by attending to emotional and relational aspects of communi-
cation which require a situated attention and imagination. But it is also important to understand
how the whole of a societal context has influenced subjective experience and forms the context
for conscious as well as unconscious imagination of a future. Within the theoretical framework
it would be more appropriate to talk about a wider (in a societal context) rather than a deeper
understanding of the meaning under study than what is normally understood in hermeneutic
interpretation. It counts on levels of meaning which may not be represented, or not adequately
represented, in the socialized language, but nevertheless are embodied and subjectively significant.
In brief: all the marginal(ized) meanings.
The main theoretical originator of the methodology, Alfred Lorenzer, called his method deep
hermeneutics (Lorenzer, 1986) to indicate that the method is hermeneutic but also goes beyond
an understanding of the immediate social surface. The depth metaphor is problematic since it
connotes certain stereotypical understandings of psychoanalysis as an objectification that allows
the analysis to “uncover” deep-lying “causes” in the psyche. This stereotype is fed by the original
Freudian theory of drives but is far removed from the interactional understandings of psychody-
namics of all the researchers involved. Conversely, “psycho-societal analysis” points out that its
mandate is to broaden its perspective in both psychodynamic and societal directions.
It is primarily Lorenzer’s theory of socialization and language acquisition that provides a
theoretical basis for this type of interpretation. Lorenzer’s socialization theory is based on the
material, social and bodily interaction experiences of early childhood, and its particular feature
is the symbolization of these life experiences through language acquisition. In connection with
Wittgenstein’s language-game theory, he sees socialization as an entry into the linguistic com-
munities that establish an attachment between the individual, situated and sensory experiences
and a socially defined semantics (symbolization). This originally interested him because he saw
disturbance and discontinuity in this process as a key to the understanding of various mental
disorders. But it gradually became a complete socialization theory, providing an understanding
of how the total interactional experience is translated into pre-verbal interaction forms and then
becomes part of symbolization, enabling the individual psyche to include both conscious and
unconscious dimensions and be in lifelong development and transformation. It is not possible
here to present further details, which may be found in a special issue of Forum: Qualitative Social
Research (2012/3).
In order to reach this form of scenic understanding the psycho-societal approach takes advan-
tage of the researcher’s subjective relationship to the field being researched. The point here is that
imagination is scenic in its format: It inter-relates all informative, sensory and situated impressions
220
in holistic images. The strength of this theoretical background is that it offers a material expla-
nation of how unconscious subjective dynamics in everyday situations are based on life experi-
ences (social interaction). It thus becomes more readily comprehensible that the interpretation of
linguistic material can provide access to meanings that are not explicitly formulated in language
but must be interpreted by the researcher’s imagination. In order to achieve this kind of scenic
understanding, the approach uses the researcher’s (interpreter’s) subjective relationship to the field
under study.
Psycho-societal interpretation uses the experience of psychoanalysis of communication
between interpreter and interpreted text that is socially produced but unconscious. With ref-
erence to the psychoanalytic concepts of transference and countertransference, one obtains
a theoretical understanding of the fundamental methodological question of the interpreter’s
involvement in the interpretation, which is reflected in any hermeneutical method. In practical
terms, the researcher’s imagination is supported in the analysis of social interaction through inter-
pretation groups and similar social interactions, which both encourage a variety of conceptions
and also represent a kind of first step in a communicative validation.
The assumption that the researcher’s conscious and unconscious prior experiences are
resources in interpretation, and not “disruptive elements”, touches on a principled discussion we
have often met in the discussion of biographical research. It concerns the relationship between
the researcher’s pre-understanding/prior knowledge and his/her interpretation of the interview
subject’s knowledge of and meaning ascription to some of the same elements of the narrative.
The researcher’s prior theoretical or empirical knowledge of objective social contexts and psy-
chodynamics, such as defensive reactions and hence the potential distortion of life history by the
biographical perspective, is used in this strategy as a store of insight or an analyst’s prerequisite
for interpretation. This may be a particularly crucial point, since biographical research is based
on respect for the interviewee, but this in reality applies to all qualitative research which aims to
respect the autonomy of the research field. The delicate point, where the interpretation becomes
“deep hermeneutical”, is where the researcher has an critical attitude to the interviewee’s stated
interpretation of his/her life, and attempts to understand possible unconscious dynamics or to
analyze it as pragmatic consciousness in connection with a specific societal practice and position
(see Habermas’ argument in Habermas & Apel, 1977; Leithäuser & Volmerg, 1988). The critical
aspect of the interpretation will then be to open up for the suppressed or latent features of this
articulation – but still with the intention of understanding the subjective meanings (better).
The theoretical basis for this is on the one hand the analysis of how fundamental social
structures appear systematically distorted in the immediate social practice and to the immediate
experience. This is most fundamentally attributed to Marx’s concepts of socially necessary ideological
consciousness, and in the critical theory tradition to the permeation of exchange value and rei-
fication into social relations and forms of everyday practices. On the other hand, most relevant
is the psychodynamic theory of the unconscious and the understanding of the psychodynamic
defence mechanisms’ distortion of communication and individual consciousness. Here too there
is a “socially necessary distortion” insofar as defence mechanisms are necessary mediations of
emotional aspects of practical lived life. In both of these bases lies a theoretical justification for
a materially produced intransparency. The intention is thus by no means that the researcher must
“see through” the distortions or reveal other causalities or explanations of the life course in the
biography. They are rather to be used to enrich the understanding of the subjective expressions
with an understanding of how they handle conditions of reality and their latent possibilities if
this handling was altered. No more than this; the rest is up to the interpreted subjects. But this
fundamental consideration should suggest why the critical interpretation is supplemented with
an interpretation with space for learning processes and life historical opportunities.
221
Life history, learning processes and work identity

The above methodological discussion was related to the general question of how to empiri-
cally study subjectivity in everyday life interaction. It was based on the argument that some
key issues in pedagogy and educational research could best be theorized in this way, but also
that this required a concept of subjectivity that is historically and societally specified. This
relationship between subjectivity as the focal point and a societal macro perspective was the
source of our interest in empirical methods. The life history approach was conceived as a unit
of an empirical method based on life histories and a theoretical understanding of the social
constitution of the subject.
The issues in focus during the 1980s – the need to investigate the subjective dynamics related
to educational participation and the need to theorize learning processes in a way that covers both
life learning and more formal education – have meanwhile almost become mainstream policy
issues under the heading of lifelong learning, with a dominant interest in how to mobilize all
citizens’ subjective engagement in learning and educational participation. In this sense, develop-
ments have justified the research strategy but thereby also intensified the theoretical and meth-
odological challenges for a critical research. I have described how we over time have redefined
the methodology, primarily by taking a consistent hermeneutic position and supplementing the
methodological repertoire, but also by developing a psycho-societal, analytical concept of sub-
jectivity and including this in the interpretation of subjective aspects of the empirical data and
also as a prerequisite for the interpretation in the understanding of the interpreting subject (researcher
subjectivity).
Using the concept of experience as the theoretical perspective on learning and education can
help life historical, empirical analyses of everyday life, work and education to lead to a critical
social scientific development in education and educational research. It also seems confirmed that
the understanding of learning processes as a subjective dimension in all social interactions will
enable these methodological experiences to be applied to other areas of research.
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17
WORKING-LIFE STORIES
Karolina J. Dudek
institute of philosophy and sociology, polish academy of sciences
Introduction1
‘Let me tell you a story about me and my dad and my brother. We go ice fishing every Novem-
ber,’ says a policeman while trying to explain a decision of his to a subordinate by sketching a par-
allel. ‘Oh, shit,’ the subordinate comments insolently, dissatisfied with his boss’s refusal to support
his plan. ‘Just listen to me,’ the boss continues, ‘You keep each other warm, you drop a line and
you just wait. When my brother says: “Let’s go in October,” he wants to go ice fishing in October.
My dad says: “No the ice is too thin.” My brother says . . .’ The younger policeman interrupts; ‘I
know what you’re saying. Your brother went down on the ice, the ice was too thin, your brother
fell through the ice into the water, because he was too eager. And you are saying I am too eager. Is
that what you’re saying?’ The boss denies this. ‘What are you saying?’ asks the younger policeman
impatiently. ‘We’ll finish the ice story another time, young man,’ concludes the boss, and he tells
the policeman to get down to work. The quoted conversation, a scene from the award-winning
film American Hustle (2013), illustrates perfectly the role of stories in working life. Narrative is
used here as a parallel, as a device that gives meaning to everyday tasks and actions.
It is through stories that people learn, convey knowledge, and make sense of what happens in
their professional life – or at least try to, as in the scene from American Hustle. The narrative turn
(Mitchell, 1981) in the social sciences has also influenced management and organisation studies
and brought the focus on stories used and created in organisational contexts. Scholars study this
naturally emerging cultural phenomenon, but also use storytelling as a research technique. In
particular, working-life stories, as a type of life story, have recently attracted much attention and
have proved very productive in career studies and in research on sense-making in organisations.
In her explanation of why researchers should study the practices of storytelling within organisa-
tional settings and working-life stories, Barbara Czarniawska (2004, p. 39) refers to the concept
of the ‘work-world’ inspired by Benita Luckmann (1978), ‘who pointed out that the lifeworld of
modern people is divided into segments or sub-universes.’ By using the concept, Czarniawska
seeks to draw attention to the genres of storytelling:
Accepting [Luckmann’s] reading means a deviation from the common viewpoint

that workplaces are ruled by the rigid arm of the ‘system’ and hence stand in oppo-
sition to the ‘lifeworld’. Luckmann demonstrated two interesting traits of such ‘small
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Karolina J. Dudek
life-worlds’: one, that they are surprisingly similar to traditional communities; and two,
that the main difference between ‘the modern person’ and his or her traditional equiva-
lent is that there are several such worlds in modernity which requires (but also permits)
frequent ‘gear shifting’. The stories circulate in all, although gear shifting might also
mean genre shifting.
(Czarniawska, 2004, p. 39)
In the present context, this means that working-life stories can be elicited and analysed in the
same way as any life story, and it is the teller who decides what is included in a working-life
story. Thus the aim of this article is to discuss working-life stories as a research technique. First,
I briefly review the antecedents of the life story approach. Then, I reflect upon the emergence
of narratology within the social sciences and the ways it has changed the basic assumptions and
analytical techniques used to approach the stories people tell about their lives. Hence, I use the term
life stories in contrast to life histories. In this section I also point to differences between the two
waves of narrative studies. Finally, I outline the working-life story approach: drawing on the
theoretical underpinnings, I present hints for eliciting life-stories and conducting analysis. In the
last section I draw my conclusions.
Historical approaches
Life history method

As mentioned above, the life stories approach has antecedents that are older than the narrative
turn. The history of life stories must thus commence with an overview of the life histories
method. This method assumes the use of biographical materials, among many other documents
(triangulation), and it focuses on determining the course of events. The formal structure of the
story is of lesser importance – the narrative is just a means to determine what has happened. It is
the reality external to the story that the researcher seeks to understand.
James L. Peacock and Dorothy C. Holland (1993, pp. 369–70) distinguish between two sub-
types within the life history approach. The first adopts an objective stance and analyses stories as
windows into historical events, whereas the second, subjectivist approach, sees a life history as an
expression of its narrator’s psychological dispositions. In both instances, it is recommended that
a life history be elicited and recorded in a way that allows its integrity to be kept, as well as the
impartiality of the data. The researcher should make all necessary efforts to record an undis-
torted account. Within the first subtype, the external validity of the data is verified against other
data – the focus is on the objective events that the life history reveals. Within the psychological
approach, the elicited story allows the inner life of the narrator to be understood – the focus is
on subjective experience.
Writing on developments within the life history method, Daniel Bertaux (1981, pp. 6–7)
points to Clifford R. Shaw’s research conducted in the 1920s. It concerned juvenile delinquency
and was described then as case history. Commenting on the autobiographies of delinquents
published at the time, Shaw suggests that the methods used needed amendments to ensure the
validity of the outcomes:
The value of these documents [i.e. the autobiographies of delinquents], however, is

greatly diminished because of the absence of supplementary case material which might
serve as a check on the authenticity of the story and afford a basis for a more relia-
ble interpretation of the experiences and situations described in the documents. As a
226
Working-life stories
safeguard against erroneous interpretations of such material, it is extremely desirable

to develop the ‘own story’ as an integral part of the total case history. Thus each case
study should include, along with the life-history document, the usual family history, the
medical, psychiatric, and psychological findings, the official record of arrest, offenses,
and commitments, the description of the play-group relationships, and any other ver-
ifiable material which may throw light upon the personality and actual experiences of
the delinquent in question.
(Shaw, 1930/2013, p. 18)
Within organisational studies this path has been followed by researchers who have sought to
examine the histories of particular organisations from the perspective of personal accounts. The
aim of such studies is to describe historical facts: changes in work organisation and the impon-
derables of organisational everyday life. In Poland, for example, these studies focus on the process
of transformation and are conducted within the framework of biographic-narrative interviews
(autobiographical narrative interviews).
Biographic-narrative interviews
The growing popularity of the autobiographical narrative interview method is reflected in new
analytical approaches (Brockmeier & Carbaugh, 2001, p. 3; Chase, 2005. p. 651; Kaźmierska,
2012). However, this methodology is still relatively new and diverse, as its clearest and precise
methodological guidelines were developed by Fritz Schütze, who, particularly in his works pub-
lished in the 1980s, formulated a method that has inspired researchers conducting studies situated
at the intersection of history and sociology.
Schütze proposed a coherent method of analysis that consists of ‘a technique of collecting the
material, which leads to so-called narrative of life, and a method of analysis based on consistent
theoretical assumptions’ (Kaźmierska, 1996, p. 35). The essence of this approach lies in dividing
the interview into two separate phases: the spontaneous narrative and the in-depth interview
phase (Schütze, 1983, pp. 285–8). During the first narrative phase, the researcher seeks to record
a long (a few hours), undisturbed account of a life history. The next phase entails an in-depth
interview, during which the researcher can ask the interlocutor to clarify any discrepancies and
inaccuracies, develop unfinished themes, or ask theoretical questions that allow the narrator’s
opinions to be evoked.
Research inspired by Schütze can be viewed as the first wave of narrative interview research;
the second wave began in the 1990s. However, before I explain the differences between these
two approaches, I will briefly describe the theoretical underpinnings of the second wave, i.e., the
narrative turn in the humanities and social sciences.
Narrative turn in social sciences

The focus on narratives combines the life stories approach with a broader perspective of narrative
inquiry. While the beginnings of narratology can be traced to the works of Vladimir Propp writ-
ten in the 1920s, and particularly in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928/1968), the development
of narratology proper occurs in 1960. Structuralist narratology was strongly influenced by lin-
guistics, which is reflected mainly in the aim to describe the general characteristics of a narrative.
The narrative turn and, in particular, the book On Narrative (1981), edited by W.J.T. Mitchell,
presented new ideas and resulted in a growing body of literature. During the 1980s and 1990s,
many works within the narrative inquiry field were published (Webster & Mertova, 2007, p. 13).
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Karolina J. Dudek
New approaches that constitute post-classical narratology have found their place in recent pub-
lications (Alber & Fludernik, 2010). However, when social scientists refer to narratology, they
usually mention classical narratology scholars (Heinen, 2009, p. 195).
Although narratology developed in the field of literary studies, narratological inquiry is now
conducted by researchers representing different disciplines – from philosophy to economics
(Webster & Mertova, 2007, p. 1; Heinen & Sommer, 2009). In particular, studies on organisa-
tions and organising are to be found among works inspired by the narrative turn (Boje, 2001;
Czarniawska, 1997, 1998, 2004; Gabriel, 2000). Storytelling is now not only a popular research
method, but also a recognised management technique (Boje, 1991; Brown et al., 2005; Denning,
2005; Fog et al., 2001/2010; Linde, 2009; Musacchio Adorissio, 2009).
Narratology opens up new perspectives for social researchers, though some of them point to
the pitfalls of narrative inquiry. The danger, according to Barbara Czarniawska (2004, p. 41),
is of constraining the study merely to identifying narrative structures or other narrative devices
revealed within the course of analysis. Research outcomes that, first and foremost, indicate struc-
tures (‘Look, here’s a narrative structure’), usually meet critical remarks from the reviewers (‘So
what?’). This approach is obviously inspired by classical narratology and the works of structur-
alist narratologists, who concentrated on describing deep structures and the universal ‘grammar’
of stories (Brockmeier & Carbaugh, 2001, pp. 4–5). The aim of social scientists, however, is to
explain the consequences of the use of particular narrative devices both for those who use them
and those who listen to the stories (Czarniawska, 2004, p. 41). The task is to understand the form-
ative effects of narratives, that is – how they inform behaviour and actions (Chase, 2005, p. 658).
One remark needs to be made here: the narrative approach (its concepts, terms and analytical
tools) in the social sciences often involves accepting the assumption that human beings are homo
narrans – storytelling creatures – and that expressing one’s life as experienced in narratives is a
basic method of being in this world and making sense of it (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 2;
Heinen, 2009, p. 196). Galen Strawson (2004) disagrees with this thesis. In his view, to claim that
narrative is the elementary way for human beings to experience their lives is the first step towards
insisting that it is crucial for a good life (Strawson, 2004, p. 428). Strawson does not agree with
this normative stance but claims that, despite the fact that in the academic world it is quite com-
monly assumed that people experience and grasp their lives in a narrative, there are equally good
ways of living one’s life in a deeply non-narrative way (2004, p. 429). Appreciating his comments
in full does not deny the fact that narrative modes of human communication were until recently
neglected in the social sciences and therefore call for special attention from narrative scholars.
Differences between two waves of narrative studies

The differences between the first and second wave of narrative studies manifest themselves on dif-
ferent levels. The most significant one is that the methodology of the first wave of studies entails
big stories – whole life narratives – whereas in the second wave of studies (works published since
1990s) small stories are at work (Bamberg, 2008; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008; Brockmeier &
Carbaugh, 2001; Czarniawska, 2004; Georgakopoulou, 2007; Linde, 1993, 2001b, 2009). Alexan-
dra Georgakopoulou (2007, p. 8) and Ann Phoenix (2008, p. 64) juxtapose the two approaches
and emphasize the fact that the first wave was oriented towards the analysis of the ‘story as text’
and ‘big stories’, whereas the second focuses on ‘stories-in-context’ and ‘small stories’. The role of
the researcher and techniques suggested for analysis within the two approaches are considerably
different. Controversy as to whether it is better to use small or big stories has caught the attention
of many scholars. This issue is brought up especially by sociolinguists and researchers focusing
on identity (Bamberg, 2007; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008; Freeman, 2001, 2007, 2010).
228
Although recounting the whole of one’s life is a unique situation that most people never
encounter, delivering ‘small stories’ about everyday life situations occurs on a daily basis. What
do you do? What happened at work? Did you enjoy your holidays? Answering such questions,
people express feelings and attitudes, talk about daily routines and extraordinary experiences.
These stories are not only carriers of what is individually and socially meaningful, but they are
also sites of narrative production where meaning is constructed (Bamberg, 2008, p. 184).
Unlike the first wave of narrative studies, in which more structured and conventional proce-
dures are more common, the second wave brings a plurality of methods and analytical procedures.
The code of practice in eliciting and recording life stories is not as strictly specified as in the
method developed by Schütze. Analysis within his framework involves separating the description
(which tells the course of events) from the argumentative parts of the story, that is, the ideological
stances which express what the interlocutor thinks independent of what s/he had done (Kaźmi-
erska, 1996, p. 38). The longer the purely narrative parts are, the less the story is contaminated
by control of information (Schütze, 1976, p. 226). These theses entail a normative claim that the
first part of the interview should record a ‘non-ideological’ description of the course of events.
From the perspective of the second wave of studies, separating the description from the argu-
mentative parts, as the bio-narrativists suggest, is not possible. ‘It would be naive to suppose that
only the argumentative parts of the text communicate ideology. This may happen equally well
in descriptive and narrative parts of the text; but the manner in which it happens is different’
explains Mieke Bal (1985/1999, p. 34). She also suggests the following method of analysis that
is inspiring for life-story research:
The argumentative parts of the text often give explicit information about the ideology
of a text. It is, however, quite possible that such explicit statements are treated ironically
in other parts of the text, or are contradicted by descriptive or narrative parts of the text
to such an extent that the reader must distance herself from them. If we want to evaluate
the ideological tenor of a text, an analysis of the relationship between these three textual
forms within the totality of the entire text is a crucial element.
(Bal, 1985/1999, p. 34)
In what follows, I present in greater detail a branch of narrative studies called life stories, and, in
particular, its variation known as working-life stories.
Narrating a life, narrating professional life

Working-life stories, just as life stories, are not merely a set of facts and descriptions of events.
They express meanings that people give to their lives as they experience them – life stories are
interpretations of what people experience (Mishler, 1986, pp. 67–8). Charlotte Linde (1993, p. 68;
see also Plummer, 1983/2001, p. 153) emphasizes that instead of providing an account of what
has happened, her aim is to analyse the ways in which stories are organised, and why certain
events are chosen as worth telling. Stories that are ‘tellable’ are those that, on the one hand, are well
grounded in conventional narrative models and on the other introduce an element of surprise.
The ‘tellability’ of a story depends not only on the structure and meaning of the story, but also
on the context where the story is told.
David Silverman points to the fact that even the most banal stories are constructed according
to cultural models (Silverman, 1993/2006, pp. 134–7). These models are expressions of common
ways of categorising or expressing and understanding one’s life. Thus, each story expresses both
individual experience and the socially constructed categories and modes in which one gives
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Karolina J. Dudek
meaning (Brockmeier & Harré, 2001, p. 46; Freeman, 2001, p. 287). In a sense, every story is
formed by all previously told stories. ‘Simply put, “my story” can never be wholly mine, alone,
because I define and articulate my existence with and among others, through the various nar-
rative models – including literary genres, plot structures, metaphoric themes, and so on – my
culture provides,’ as Mark Freeman (2001, p. 287) puts it. Each story contains allusions to other
stories: intertextuality is immanent in any text ‘whether or not it explicitly responds to any prior
text’ (Linde, 2009, p. 168).
Those cultural models are narrative devices that help construct understandable plots (Jönsson,
2004, p. 279). On the basis of these models it is possible to distinguish between good and bad
characters, and understand actions and motivations since they lead to a predictable conclusion.
Good examples of such model narratives are provided in stories about successful weight loss
(Brown, 2005). Other models can be found in popular management literature – for example,
stories of corporate self-made leaders, mirroring the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin or
Lee Iaccoca. Model stories establish not only standards, but also desirable values and aberrations
from them, and are a reflection of the possible, ‘thinkable’ theories of life. In this sense, they can
be seen not so much as accounts of what happened, but rather as reflections of dominant cultural
constructs and theories, as Jerome Bruner puts it (1987/1990, pp. 3–5).
Some narrative models are more popular in a particular time and culture while others remain
marginal. Dominant narratives are paradigmatic stories that serve as a point of reference in the
creation of individual stories (Linde, 2001b, p. 525). Among the marginal stories there are also
alternative stories, which are less legitimate, ‘but nonetheless vital, interpreting the world, life,
and relationships’ (Wolanik Boström, 2008, pp. 515–16). Such stories can play a double role:
on the one hand, they may merely complement the canonical repertoire, while on the other
hand, they can challenge the dominant narrative, and thus undermine it. Model stories can also
motivate, support and create new dimensions of existence, thus having a positive influence; on
the contrary, they can stigmatise and act oppressively (Björkenheim & Karvinen-Niinikoski,
2009, p. 125).
Linde (2001b) explains the impact of certain stories as models shaping other narratives by
providing an example of the dominant company narrative (the official history of the company)
and the individual stories by members of staff. Stories are used in the daily work of most organ-
isations, as I have already noted. They include both stories produced and used by employees
informally as well as and narratives created in official situations that refer to the professional
discourse, e.g., medical or legal (Linde, 2001b, p. 518). The repertoire of the stories is formed
within a discourse environment:
I am not claiming that each agent or manager telling their story has the founder’s
biography directly in mind at the moment of telling, although they all will have heard
his story as part of their training. Rather, they are telling their stories in an environ-
ment strongly shaped by the founder’s story and by other stories that refer back to the
founder’s story. Such a discourse environment shapes what can be easily formulated as
a recognizable story and what can be understood as an appropriate story for a member
to tell.
(Linde, 2009, p. 169)
Linde (2009, p. 170) labels such environments as the ‘textual community’. While most of its
members do not know all the texts relevant to the community, they have encountered many of
them, for these texts function as a matrix of stories constituting a source serving as inspiration
for new stories (Linde, 2009, p. 194).
230
Linde (2009, p. 170) emphasizes that the notion of ‘textual community’ does not refer to all
the viewers of the TV series Star Trek, but only to those who participate in certain activities such
as meetings of Star Trek fanclubs, discussion groups or conferences, and who interact with one
another. ‘A textual community,’ Linde (2009, p. 192) explains further, ‘supports and organizes
itself around a group of highly valued texts. Such texts are not isolated but are rather related to
one another through various intertextual relations: citation, quotation, parallel evaluation, cri-
tique, irony, and rejection.’
Among the types of relationships within textual communities, as indicated by Linde, the first
three require additional explanation. The difference between quoting certain texts and citing
them is small, but significant. In both instances it is required of those who listen to the story to
have some prior knowledge, although the scope of the information needed is different (Linde,
2009, p. 178). Citation – as defined by Linde (2009) – involves making an explicit link between
a particular story and a prior text. It requires less knowledge, though one should be aware of
the existence of the text cited, and should understand its importance. In quotations the link
between the texts is not marked and so, in order to recognise the quotation, one must know the
prior text. Evaluations in narratives, that is, the morals or summaries expressing and organising
their meaning, can be built in parallel with the evaluations made in other texts. Linde provides
examples of parallel evaluations in stories told by the employees of an insurance company where
she conducted her research, and evaluations in the dominant organisational stories, such as the
biography of the founder. These stories constitute the dominant group identity.
Eliciting work-life stories

Collecting life stories is not subject to strictly described procedures but it is certain that the
process should not be confused with a routine, passive occupation similar to mushroom picking
(Czarniawska, 2004, pp. 37–8). Eliciting stories is a practice of stabilising structures rather than
discovering ‘ready-made’ stories that are just waiting for a researcher equipped with a recorder.
Czarniawska (2004, pp. 42–4) points out that there are two other main methods of obtaining a
narrative in research focusing on work-life stories: by recording spontaneous incidents of story-
telling during prolonged field research and collecting written stories that are created and circu-
lated in organisations.
In contrast to research focused on life histories, in which interlocutors are asked to tell the
story of their whole life, in working-life story research the focus is on small stories, biograph-
ical snippets referring to particular events or periods. Questions should, therefore, be general
enough not to limit the possibilities of expression, but at the same time specific enough for
the interlocutors to understand what is expected of them. It is important to clarify that this
is not a thematic interview, during which answers should be more specific and related to the
suggested themes. One can begin the interview with an opening phrase that will elicit the
story: ‘So, tell me about yourself,’ or ‘Please talk about your first experiences in the company.’
Linde (1993, p. 52) has asked about the interlocutor’s choice of profession. In my research on
career narratives I have asked my interlocutors such questions as ‘Why did you choose to study
at the Warsaw School of Economics?’, ‘What did you study in your curriculum?’, ‘What else
did you do to prepare for a professional career?’ and ‘What do you do now?’ These questions
have invoked complex stories that gave insight into diverse experiences and revealed how tech-
nology co-constructs knowledge in business environments. My interlocutors did not follow a
single well planned career path. They tried, on the contrary, different activities in sometimes
far-flung business areas, e.g. s/he began an apprenticeship in marketing, then worked as a
business consultant in order to finally move to finance and banking. In my analysis I focused
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Karolina J. Dudek
on how narrative became a sense-making device that allowed these diverse career steps to be
presented as coherent and meaningful.
In my other study on creating contemporary offices the eliciting questions were: ‘Could you
tell me about your recent (office design) project?’ or ‘Could you tell me about your office?’
I talked to architects, managers and furniture suppliers who plan and design workspaces but also
to those who actually work in offices. From neo-institutional and constructivist perspectives,
workplaces are not created by ingenious architects, but by groups of actors whose actions are
enabled and shaped as well as constrained by other human and non-human actors (Dudek, 2014).
Stories, which are told, retold, enacted, are the fabric of office space. Designing process begins
with a narrative. Managers tell architects about their company: what was in the past and how
they envision the future or what are the problems that they have to face now. Stories are also
told and retold by all parties engaged in the designing process. Analysis of such workspace stories
reveals how norms, regulations, architectural theories and fashions but also dreams and images are
employed in the process of office creation. The process of creating an office as an organizational
activity involves sensemaking – office space emerges through sensemaking (see also Weick et al.,
2005, p. 410).
The main questions used to elicit working-life stories are supplemented by additional ques-
tions, depending on the experiences of the interlocutor, which allow for more details to be
introduced. Open-ended, unstructured questions allow the researcher to address certain subjects
but leave room for unexpected answers and stories that the researcher cannot foresee. Even
unstructured interviews involve, to a certain extent, an imposition of social control as they give
shape to what people say (Silverman, 1993/2006, p. 125). However, the method enables one to
identify themes and motifs and broaden one’s understanding, and the researcher is open to new
concepts and themes that may emerge (Kalof et al., 2008, p. 90).
The researcher becomes the co-author of the story since stories are always told differently,
depending on the listener and the overall context in which the story unfolds (Linde, 2001a,
p. 165; Miller & Glassner, 1997, p. 127; Mishler, 1986, p. 82). Additionally, stories within this
approach are not perceived as a message addressed solely to the person being spoken to – in this
case the researcher who conducts the interview. Every statement is understood as an interaction
with a wider, implied audience or as a response to earlier criticism (Taylor & Littleton, 2010,
p. 106). From the perspective of the theory of localisation (standpoint theory), established within
feminist epistemology, it is important to draw attention to the location within the network
of social relations of both the author of the text and the subjects involved in the research
(see Harding, 2004; Smith, 1990). Paul Rabinow discusses similar issues within anthropological
research:
anthropological analysis must incorporate two facts: first, that we ourselves are histori-
cally situated through the questions we ask and the manner in which we seek to under-
stand and experience the world; and second, that what we receive from our informants
are interpretations, equally mediated by history and culture. Consequently, the data we
collect is doubly mediated, first by our own presence and then by the second-order
self-reflection we demand from our informants.
(Rabinow, 1977, p. 119)
Inevitably, the position of the narrator shapes the story. Therefore, analysis should comprise
a detailed description of how the interviewer presented himself to the research participants,
how the aim of the study was explained, how this influenced the circumstances surrounding
the research situation and how it affected the interlocutor’s storytelling (Andrews, 2010, p. 86).
232
Recording and transcribing a life-story freezes and stabilises a specific version of the story, as it
was told, and renders it ready for analysis.
Analysing working-life stories

Analysis of life stories allows for the identification of certain common elements such as life trajecto-
ries and commonly accepted interpretations (Taylor & Littleton, 2010, p. 104). Indicating elements
of the story enables further work and interpretation of the material, and it also allows the researcher
to show how these stories are shaped by meanings which function in a broader social context.
The method of analysis results from assumptions regarding the construction of the story. Usu-
ally, it is assumed that the creation of the story, i.e., a story with a plot, requires three elements: the
initial state of affairs, the event or actions, and the ensuing state of affairs (Czarniawska, 1998,
p. 2). Individual events should be ordered in a causal chain to which the narrative gives coherence
(Linde, 1993, p. 25; Webster & Mertova, 2007, p. 19). What is convincing about the stories is not
their probability, but their consistency (Czarniawska, 1998, p. 5). The statement ‘The engineer
did not get the promotion, and then went skiing’ may reflect real events and their sequence, but
it will come across as incomprehensible, argues Czarniawska (1998, p. 5). What is needed is an
additional element that will allow the listener to understand the events as causally related.
Individual elements of the stories are combined with the use of narrative tools, sense-making
devices providing consistency to the stories. Linde (1993) discusses systems of creating cohesion
such as common sense and expertise systems, but also their common, colloquial versions. Among
various expertise systems, one of the most important is undoubtedly Freudian psychology. In
explaining how different systems of cohesion are used, Linde (1993, p. 164) refers to two short,
but extremely relevant examples of answers to the question: ‘Why did you become an account-
ant?’ The first answer builds on a common-sense understanding of the characteristics typical for
an accountant: ‘I believe that it is because I have an analytical mind and I like digging into details.’
The second explanation builds on the popular version of Freudian theory: ‘Well, my mom started
getting me used to using the potty when I was 6 months.’ Sense-making tools and common sense
understanding or the popular version of Freudian theory allow us to create convincing explana-
tions and combine contradictory elements.
The first two goals of the analysis can be derived from the above described assumptions about
stories: the identification of sense-making tools and systems of creating coherence. The next task
is to analyse the ways in which values and norms are reproduced or contested by storytelling,
as well as the ways in which identity and distinction (individuals’ and organisations’) are created
in stories (Linde, 2001b, p. 518). In my research on career narratives, seemingly dry questions
have provoked long and complex stories where life and work are closely intermingled. Their
analysis has revealed sense-making devices used to organise career paths and choices, and it has
also contributed to the understanding of learning practices within and outside organisations in
complex knowledge networks.
Conclusions
Let us get back to the ice story from the American Hustle scene which I quoted at the beginning.
One might say that it is just a movie scene – a fiction. But fictional as it is, it sounds familiar to
everyone engaged in the common experience of listening to stories being told at work or telling
them to others. People live in multiple life-worlds rather than occupy a single and coherent one,
and they tell stories in all of them. Stories travel between these worlds just like the ice story – a fam-
ily story which was told in a professional environment to give sense to organisational activities.
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Karolina J. Dudek
However, there are stories which are told only in professional settings or are typical only in
particular organisations. Not all stories are ‘tellable’ within all contexts, as I have argued in this
article. Working-life stories as a research technique enable us to understand which stories, and
why, are ‘tellable’ in work-worlds, and to study the formative effects of narratives in professional
environments. They can be applied across a wide range of studies, including those concentrating
on particular work-worlds and those comparing the role and types of stories in different organ-
isations, as well as studies examining the role of stories from the point of view of the individual
and his/her identity creation or career path, and those focusing on the role of stories in manage-
ment and organisational dynamics.
Note
1 This article is based on a chapter from my PhD thesis (Dudek, 2014), supervised by prof. Barbara
Czarniawska and prof. Andrzej Rychard and reworked as part of research financed by the National
Science Centre (Poland, decision number: DEC-2011/03/N/HS6/04945). I would like to express my
sincere gratitude to prof. Barbara Czarniawska for her guidance when I was working on the Polish
version of this paper.
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Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M. & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organiza-
tion Science. 16. (4). pp. 409–21.
Wolanik Boström, K. (2008) Opowieść paradygmatyczna. Pole, kapitały i gra dystynkcji w opowiadaniach o
karierze. In M. Kostera (ed.) Nowe Kierunki w Zarządzaniu. Podręcznik akademicki. pp. 511–29. Warszawa:
Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne.
Filmography
American Hustle. (2013) Film. Directed by David O. Russell.
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18
CULTURALLY AVAILABLE
NARRATIVES IN PARENTS’
STORIES ABOUT DISABILITY
Amy Shuman
the ohio state university
In an essay in the New Yorker, novelist Jonathan Franzen (2011) describes the current proliferation
of first person accounts as a desperate attempt to traverse the sometimes self-imposed, sometimes
stigma-imposed gulf between oneself and others. His discussion challenges what has become
a premise in oral history and life history research: the idea that recognizing oneself in a shared
narrative can mitigate the experience of feeling that one is alone, the only one who has had or
who knows some experience.
In my work, although I have argued against the too-easy and often erroneous idea that stories
make meaning out of the chaos of experience – the fact is, sometimes they do, and sometimes
they don’t – I still hold to the claim that the proliferation of personal narrative is part of the
fundamental process of recognition that is central to building community and to countering
stereotypes and prejudices (Shuman, 2005). Here, I consider the production of culturally availa-
ble narratives and counter narratives by parents of children with disabilities; I consider how the
parents position themselves in relation to their own and others’ expectations in reconfigurations
of their life stories. Tellability, available narrative, and prevailing dominant narratives are cultur-
ally specific and understanding the ways that narrators position themselves in life stories requires
ethnographic thick description to identify the challenges narrators and listeners face. My work
here benefits from the extensive research undertaken by scholars such as Gail Landsman (2009),
Michael Bérubé (1996), Cheryl Mattingly (1998), Kenzaburō Ōe (1995), Michael Angrosino
(1997), Suzanne Kamata (2008), Stanley Klein and Kim Schive (2001), Helen Featherstone (1980)
and others. All have observed that it is not just a matter of what people tell but how they tell
it, and that parents tell these stories against what they perceive to be dominant imposed scripts,
including compulsory narratives, and, often, a demand for inspirational stories. Building on the
earlier, important work that has been done, my goal here is to suggest ways that we might better
hear the stories that parents face so much difficulty to tell (Landsman, 1998).
Life stories, especially stories that are difficult to tell, are produced at the intersection of per-
sonal and collective narrative. Kai Erikson offered the following distinction between individual
and collective trauma:
By individual trauma I mean a blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defenses
so suddenly and with such brutal force that one cannot react to it effectively . . . By
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collective trauma, on the other hand, I mean a blow to the basic tissues of social life
that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of
community.
(1976, p. 153)
In life stories, the individual and the collective often overlap, and even when tellers describe their
experiences as personal, they draw on culturally available narratives and either confirm or refute
their listeners’ perceived expectations and categories.
The concept of second storying offers one way to understand the relationship between cultur-
ally available narratives and counter narratives (Bromberg, 1982; Norris, 1997). In conversation,
shared narrative can be marked by ‘that happened to me, too,’ or ‘I know what you mean.’ These
frames, although seemingly a sign of recognition, have more to do with the interaction among
the participants than with knowledge about others’ experiences. I will argue that, more generally,
the concept of availability is intertextual and describes more about the position and alignment
of the participants than about the knowledge they have or don’t have about each other. Saying
that a narrative is available does not mean that narrators consciously or strategically assess a corpus
to find a suitable narrative.
Availability points in seemingly disparate directions, to the availability of shared communica-
tive resources and to familiar scripts that explain life experiences, but they both involve a temporal
disjuncture that is at the core of creating narrative meaning (Couser, 1997). As Sidonie Smith
and Julia Watson observe, ‘In telling their stories, narrators take up models of identity that are
culturally available. And by adopting ready-made narrative templates to structure experiential
history they take up culturally designated subjectivies’ (1996, p. 9). Available narratives come to
consciousness most often when someone rejects a familiar script or expresses offense at a violation
of the usually unstated rules for who can say what to whom and when. Narrative is one way of
attempting to make sense of traumatic situations that completely disrupt ordinary life, but once
disrupted, and it is always disrupted, attaining the ordinary is an inevitably unfinished project.
I will consider three dimensions of the concept of available narratives and then turn to a dis-
cussion of narrative, empathy, and mutual understanding. First, I will address how co-participants
position themselves in relation to each other as part of producing mutual understanding through
what are called second stories, or stories that say, ‘that happened to me, too.’ Second, I turn to how
parents’ stories about children with disabilities raise questions about the tellability of stories and
what is sayable and unsayable. Third, I’ll address questions of intertextuality, scripting, dialogic
narration, and narrative circulation as part of the larger problem of available narrative. The idea of
available narratives refers to a seamless point of connection, but to the extent that that is accom-
plished, it’s an effort to obscure the inevitable gaps, that occur at all levels, not only between my
understanding of your experience, but also, temporally, for example, in a person’s retrospective
account of what happened and what should happen next. It’s fundamentally an intertextual gap.
Harvey Sacks observes that second storying in conversation, for example, in the phrase, ‘That
happened to me too,’ is not so much a shared topic but a shared interaction (1992, p. 768). Sec-
ond storying, an example of intertextuality, is a way for co-participants to orient toward each
other; it orients, or aligns texts to each other. The particular phrase, ‘that happened to me too’
is what Erving Goffman later described as a frame, but Sacks takes his discussion in a different
direction. Quoting Freida Fromm-Reichmann’s Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy (1960), Sacks
points out that the second storyteller has been reminded of a story by the first (1992, p. 768). It
is offered as if prompted, framed as a spontaneous remembering. And this is where Sacks makes a
particularly interesting observation.1 He says that we aren’t reminded by a particular character or
incident. Instead, he writes, ‘What seems to happen is that the character that the teller was in the
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Parents’ stories about disability
story they tell you, is the character that you turn out to be in the story that you tell them.’ In the
second story, the teller plays ‘an equivalent role to the storyteller’ in the first story (1992, p. 769).
This may look like a very small point, but it leads to a larger point about how storytelling
about personal experience can produce mutual understanding. In Sacks’ example, the first teller
describes seeing a car accident. The second teller describes experiencing the same sort of thing
the first teller described. By saying ‘that happened to me, too,’ the second story offers confirma-
tion or agreement with the first, for example, to signal that the teller did the right thing in a dif-
ficult circumstance, or that the listener understands what the first person suffered. In other words,
second storying is a way of demonstrating understanding. Sacks writes,‘It’s not unique, you’re not
alone, you’re not crazy to have done it, etc. etc. i.e. you look at the world right’ (1992, p. 771).2
In the examples I discuss here, stories told by parents of children with disabilities, although
some narrators report shared experiences or a sense of familiarity with others’ stories, many more
offer counter-narratives that dispute assumptions and expectations and describe a lack of nar-
ratives that resonate with their own experiences. Parents of children with disabilities, like many
people narrating about trauma and illness (which are, of course, different) often describe the
experience of being unmoored, on unfamiliar ground. They don’t say so in so many words, but
they describe a connection between the loss of predictability and the loss of explanation. They
(and I include myself here) (Shuman, 2011) are describing no longer having the moment before,
as in the moment between the time the phone rings and you answer it, or the moment in between
the lightening and the thunder, or between seeing someone across the street and recognizing that
it’s someone you know. Ann Carson describes this as a moment ‘in between when you hear the
phone and when you get it, all palpable explanations of why it rang and what to do’ (2003, p. 56).
Narrative is, in part, about this connection between predictability and explanation. Narrative
form and genre guides us to at least recognize that the characters are about to choose one fork
in the path rather than another, if not actually predict which path that will be.3 And those con-
necting choices often are driven by or add up to an explanation that helps us to understand how
things came to be as they are. Commenting on the narrative dimension of moral experience,
Cheryl Mattingly describes, ‘experiencing oneself to be living within possible narrative plotlines
that stretch backward and forward in time, within a field of narrative potentiality’ (2013, p. 318).
Often, for parents of children with disabilities, as for people with disabilities, the potentialities or
limits of a narrative plotline are contested; the available narratives are considered inadequate, and
narrators turn to counter-narratives with alternative plotlines.
Many parents of children with disabilities turn to memoire, journal writing, and other
first-person writing forms to explore the life-changing experience of discovering that they and
their children are outside the parameters of what counts as ‘normal.’ First-person writing can be
a means of exposing the arbitrariness of those parameters and of creating new life narratives with
different contours of normalcy.4 This process of resisting the dominant narratives and assessing
the available stories often places parents in the position of the ethnographer entering an unfamil-
iar cultural space. First person writing offers important possibilities for discovering shared stories
and new kinship formations5 (but just as often, writers comment on challenges, including coming
up against what seems un-sayable or un-tellable and resisting the too-easy tale of suffering that
make one person’s story of struggle into someone else’s appropriated source of inspiration).
Parents’ stories about their children with disabilities often stand against, in contradiction to,
in defiance of, or as an alternative to the many other narratives, especially those imagined nar-
ratives that the parents may have once believed, before they became the parent of a child with a
disability. Life stories often serve this role, a testimony to a personal truth that needs to be told
to set the record straight or to resist a commonly held misperception.6 In the case of narratives
about being the parent of a child with a disability, these stories often carry some insistence. Like
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other situations, especially anything related to illness or impairment, disability is narrated in

euphemism;7 much is unsayable, or what is said doesn’t always apply.
Parents of children with disabilities often describe needing to rethink the script of their and
their child’s lives.8 Children with disabilities sometimes don’t achieve the same milestones as
other children; indeed, this is one of the things that marks them as having a disability. We could
say that having a disability means having a different plot, a different narrative. The medical term
for the narrative of disability or illness is a prognosis, a set of expectations and limitations. Gail
Landsman writes, ‘By leaving a prognosis undetermined, the stories allow hope for a future with-
out disability’ (2009, p. 118).
Here I am focusing not only on the full life narratives, the exquisitely formed stories that make
sense of even the most chaotic, incomprehensible, unpredictable parts of a life that doesn’t fit the
usual script of being a parent (which of course doesn’t ever match reality), but the snippets. It’s
the snippets that both capture the sense of finding oneself in events one never imagined and that
people may not want to hear and that sometimes make their way into inspirational stories that
get passed from one person to another, as inspirations that remind people to count their blessings
or to strive harder to overcome their difficulties.
It’s these snippets that motivate me to write about being the parent of a child with disabilities,
because the inspirational ones, though they move me, inevitably make me mad, angry on the
part of the person whose story has been robbed, as if the life itself only counts when it serves as
inspiration.
One of the available narratives is the self-sacrificing mother; Skinner and Bailey report that
this theme was found in 73% of their interviews (1999, p. 487). For example:
For me, that was an experience which forced me to mature (madurar a la cafiona). I had
to give up who I was to he able to become my son’s mother . . . I forgot everything. And
I dedicated myself to finding all that would benefit my son, so that in the future I would
be able to say to myself that at least I did something. He didn’t recover his sight, but
at least I did something so that he could begin to act more or less like a normal child.
(Skinner & Bailey, 1999, p. 486)
Many narratives have this structure, beginning with the discovery of the disability, the acknowl-
edgment of the fact that things will never be as they were, and then, importantly, forecasting a
future. The parent describes the arrival/diagnosis of the child with a disability as ‘an experi-
ence which forced me to mature.’ In other words, having a child with a disability directed
her to a particular path in which she ‘forgot everything,’ referring, presumably to other things
she might have been doing.
Claude Bremond’s model for understanding implied alternative narrative plots, designed for
the study of the folk tale, can be usefully adapted to consider how available narrative and counter-
narrative work, generally, and how available narrative and counter-narrative work in life
stories about illness and disability. Bremond divides narratives into two kinds: processes of deg-
radation (in which things get worse) and processes of amelioration (in which things improve)
(1980, pp. 390–1). Such an observation could be only reductive, but Bremond moves from this
simple observation to explore the opposing interests of characters when ‘the event affects at one
and the same time two agents moved by opposing interests: the degradation of the fate of the
one coincides with the amelioration of the fate of the other’ (1980, p. 392). In a comment in
the republication/translation of his earlier work, Bremond clarifies that amelioration and deg-
radation should be understood not as a binary opposition but as two dimensions of the larger
issue of ‘modificatory processes,’ and ‘preservative processes’ that describe actions and reactions in
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narratives (1980, p. 410). For example, the mother of the blind child describes dedicating herself
to finding resources for her son so that she could say, ‘At least I did something. He didn’t recover
his sight, but at least I did something, so that he could begjn to act more or less like a normal
child.’ This is one available narrative for parents of children with disabilities, to do everything
one can toward achieving greater normality. Narratives such as these are over-determined in
parents’ narratives about having children with disabilities. The amelioration narrative driving this
parent, the possibility of becoming more normal, is not always possible and isn’t even necessarily
the desirable trajectory. One place to begin to unpack the ways that this amelioration narrative
becomes over-determined and compulsory is to better understand how it implicates a degrada-
tion narrative, in this case the idea that the child would not have the available resources and might
not become more normal.
In narratives about disability, the questions of degradation and amelioration are paramount,
and Disability Studies lodges one of its fundamental critiques at this construction by arguing that
the compulsory choice between cure/no cure instantiates an unchallenged and over-determined
medical narrative.
Fairytales differentiate sharply between good and evil, not permitting the possibility of the
kind of complex response to illness or disability found in Disability Studies discourse (Richards,
2004; Siebers, 2008). Some of the counter-narratives in parents’ stories about children with disa-
bilities imply a rejection of the typical fairytale cycle of amelioration, degradation, and reparation
described by Bremond (1980, p. 405). However, some of the parents’ narratives keep parts of the
cycle in place, especially the idea of sacrifice, which ‘occurs every time an ally renders a service
without being so obliged’ (1980, p. 403). In the fairytale, sacrifice calls for reparation (1980,
p. 403) and thus, I would argue, places the narrator in the over-determined cycle.
Bremond’s analysis of the fairytale considers the necessary steps toward amelioration, especially
a task to be completed and allies who assist in its completion. In Disability Studies discourse, the
allies can accordingly, implicitly, without problematizing the expected roles of the characters,
turn the hero into a beneficiary. In Bremond’s analysis a hero can help himself and become his
own ally (1980, p. 395), a position more sympathetic to Disability Studies discourse. As Bremond
points out, allies are not always cooperative (1980, p. 396) or aligned with the hero’s goals, just
as the allies in disability and illness narratives can occupy complex and contradictory positions.
A second available narrative refers to the idea that God chose the parent to have this child
(Landsman, 1999). In some cases, this narrative is posed as the counter-narrative to the idea
that a parent with a child with a disability is being punished for something they have done. For
example:
I think that I was chosen to have a child like this. For example, there is a woman I met
who was very materialistic and vain. She was Puerto Rican. She once said something
about my child that made me think she couldn’t handle (no podia bregar) a situation
like this. That was when I realized that God chooses people because I don’t believe He
could send a child like this to a person like that, rather to someone who can give herself
(alguien que se entregue) like I have done.
(Skinner & Bailey, 1999, p. 487)
This narrative more directly references what is often an unsaid alternative story. The narrator
positions her own (second) story against that of the Puerto Rican woman who couldn’t handle it.
A mother of two children with intellectual disabilities offers the same second story. ‘Silly
people expect me all the time to do all the right things, as though they were saying, “All right,
now, be God-like!”’ (Murphy, 1981, p. 57).
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In all three of the stories, the parent takes up a character defined for her by someone else.
The gap is produced by the contrast of these characters. This sort of available narrative is often
explained by the obviously relevant cultural, and especially religious discourses, but I think we
miss understanding how available narratives work when we point to contextual difference rather
than the intertextual gaps as the source of the problem of the available narrative.
Available narratives refer to a collective and accepted discourse, what Judith Butler describes,
referring to Theodor Adorno, as a collective ethos. Butler begins her book Giving an Account of
Oneself with Adorno’s argument that moral questions only arise when the collective ethos has
failed (2005, p. 3) and, she insists, this failure is not something to mourn. ‘The collective ethos is
invariably a conservative one, which postulates a false unity that attempts to suppress the difficulty
and discontinuity existing within any contemporary ethos’ (2005, p. 4). It is the appearance of
collectivity.
Following this argument, we could say that dominant available narratives can serve as evidence
of the illusion of collectivity and can suppress discontinuities and difficulties. It is, as Gay Becker
observes, a matter of managing the discontinuity. He writes that in the face of discontinuity,
people’s narratives acknowledge ‘personal responsibility for managing the disruption’ (1997, p. 99).
Importantly, for my discussion, Butler describes this as an anachronism, not something living in
the past, but instead refusing ‘to become past’ (2005, p. 5). This temporal disjuncture is crucial
for understanding how narrative projects into a future, claims past understandings as continually
valid, and participates in and perhaps obscures that moment that I described as the in between,
between the phone ringing and answering it.
Harvey Sacks accounts for this temporal disjuncture at the level of narrative interaction. He
describes availability as imagined, hoped for. He gives several examples of people in terrible
circumstances imagining telling about it later, in fact, imagining surviving it to be able to tell it
(1992, pp. 218 and 780). He writes, ‘In living through, e.g., an experience of pain, one can, by
virtue of attending its tellability, make it somehow more bearable, in that, in viewing the occasion
of its tellability one can visualize one’s survival at least until then’ (1992, p. 780). He continues
by pointing out that the importance of this availability is independent ‘of whether one, oneself,
will be available to tell it’ (1992, p. 780).
Availability, then, can be a temporality problem. It’s not only the problem of needing to remap
a past leading to an unexpected future, as Arthur Frank describes in his discussion of illness nar-
ratives (1995, p. 55). Granted, one of the problems faced by parents of children with disabilities is
that often there are no scripts to describe their experiences, and at the same time, others, especially
professionals, are scripting their lives for them. For example, in their reports, professionals write,
‘They’re not being realistic’;

‘They won’t accept the child’;
‘They’re shopping around, looking for someone who’ll say there’s nothing wrong.’9
Alternatively, professionals guide parents toward a positive attitude (Buscaglia, 1994, p. 147),
which can be very helpful for many. Some narratives, however, are barely tellable. For example, a
parent who decided to place her daughter in an institution several decades ago wrote:
My daughter is never going to be anything but a headache to me or anyone else. She

has no future. And I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life being a slave, twenty-four
hours a day taking care of her and alone at that – I get no help from him – he goes
around the world not knowing we exist. Well, now it’s time for me to get something
out of life. I’m going to start to live again – for myself.
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And along the same lines, another parent said,
I sometimes think of myself as a robot: ‘the care-taker.’ . . . But still, deep inside me, a
voice – the old voice I listened to for years – comes back to haunt me, and twinges of
guilt and duty and rightness crop up within me . . . I wonder if these feelings and all the
hopes I have, my own personal longings, I wonder if they make me an unnatural parent.
(Murphy, 1981, p. 46)
The first two examples, first of a self-sacrificing mother and second of a mother who feels
divinely chosen for her task, stand against the second two examples, in which being a mother
and having a self are described as incompatible.
In his marvelous memoire/autobiography about being the parent of a child with Down Syn-
drome, Michael Bérubé invokes all of the above narratives and more to tell his story of being a
parent who is constantly surprised by what his son Jaime can and cannot do. He writes against
the culturally available narratives about children with Down Syndrome and their parents, and
importantly, he cannot forget them. Counter narratives, as Mark Freeman points out, are not
about forgetting. Instead, memory and forgetting are in a dialectical relationship in which an
excess of memory makes any particular account either sustainable or adequate. Parents of chil-
dren with disabilities often describe themselves, as do the parents I quoted, as not having chosen
their children. Given this lack of choice, many describe themselves as making choices, whether
the choice to live for themselves, for their children, or, in Bérubé’s case, for a larger cause of
disability rights (2003). But we might be confused by this narrative move of choice if we fail
to see it as a second story. Observing the intertextuality of counter-narratives as second stories
to culturally available narratives opens up the gap that is obscured if we see the second narrative
as only a rejection of the first. Instead, both are implicated in the narrator’s memory. In Mark
Freeman’s terms, they expose a surplus that exists within historical consciousness (2002, p. 204).
The category disability only exists as a second story to this historical consciousness, expressed in
countless narratives of ability.
Within Disability Studies, the proliferation of first-person life narratives about different
bodily, cognitive, mobility, and sensory experiences served as a counter-narrative to the many
accounts (medical, legal, and literary) about people with disabilities (Mitchell & Snyder, 1997;
Couser, 1997). Life stories served as a form of critique and a challenge to how disability had been
represented. In particular, Disability Studies prompted a critique of what is called the ‘overcoming
narrative,’ the story of overcoming adversity.10 In life story counter-narratives, people with disa-
bilities observe that they don’t necessarily regard themselves as facing adversity, and they certainly
don’t regard what would otherwise be the most ordinary achievements of everyday life as an
act of overcoming. Further, they reject narratives that celebrate super-achievements and thereby
accord value only to those who could be categorized as ‘super-crips.’ The overcoming narrative
is also critiqued as a redemptive, even compulsory, as a story that only recognizes super-achievement
and makes people with disabilities into inspirational heroes.11
For example, in her book Don’t Call Me Inspirational, Harilyn Rousso describes an occasion in
which she told the story of her mother teaching her to drive to a student group, and although
most of the students laughed at what was a humorous story, one student cried. Rousso writes,
Have you pushed me away, turned me into an outsider? The crippled girl’s triumph
over adversity, driving despite her disability? Or is it the presence of the crippled girl
herself, her odd movements and halting voice, that evokes your tears, overpowering the
meaning of her words?
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How can I convince you that the tragedies of my life have to do with commonplace
disappointments, disillusionments, and losses – the lover, the job that got away, the death
of someone dear – not disability? Perhaps I can’t. You need to keep me at a distance,
as though I were contagious. To see me as a sister scares you, shakes you, shocks you.
Then I would be like you, and what’s worse, you would be like me. Better you should
see me as courageous.
It makes me cry.
(2013, p. 161)
For Rousso, the opposite of the overcoming narrative is a narrative of ordinary struggles, ‘com-
monplace disappointments, disillusionments and losses.’ The overcoming narrative is pervasive,
and part of the work of Disability Studies scholars has been to describe its tenacious hold as well
as the ways it is destabilized. Both are evident in the narratives of parents of children with disa-
bilities. The overcoming narrative is compelling in its offer of hope, and it is destabilized by the
distancing Rousso describes. The overcoming narrative breaks down in part because it is someone
else’s narrative. (Thus, the reclaiming of one’s own story serves as critique and corrective.)
Of course, an overcoming narrative also breaks down because it isn’t possible; there is no
super-achievement to report aside from coping day-to-day. As futuristic, prognostic narratives
projecting into the future rather than reporting accomplishments, overcoming narratives prom-
ise what Gail Landsman describes as ‘a particular and culturally acceptable ending.’ Parents of
children with disabilities ‘Emplot the scattered events of their children’s lives in anticipation of a
particular and culturally acceptable ending – that of overcoming (or at the very least minimizing)
disability’ (2003, p. 1952).
Overcoming narratives are destabilized not only by a compulsory plot of over-achievement
but also by an unknown future. Retrospectively, overcoming narratives describe an individ-
ual who has acted courageously to surpass some obstacle. Prognostically, imagining the future,
overcoming narratives are sometimes suffused with hope. Writing about biomedical prognoses,
especially cancer, Sarah Lochlann Jain comments, ‘“Living in prognosis” might serve as an alter-
native to the identity politics that has infused Disability Studies – and indeed, if pressed, I would
argue that all of us in American risk-culture live to some degree in prognosis’ (2007, p. 79).
Further, ‘living in prognosis, then, is about living in the folds of various representations of time’
(2007, p. 80).12 Certainly, the overcoming narrative asserts a limited temporality, one that often
does not work for a narrative of disability in which causes and effects and even risk matter less
than sustaining what the narrator above referred to as strength and hope, common elements of
parents’ narratives.
As Landsman’s research indicates, many parents of children with disabilities are constantly
negotiating how to describe their children’s situations (2003). A child may not meet a particular
development milestone, which might or might not be significant, a prognosis of sorts. Often,
Landsman reports, parents express a preference for an undetermined prognosis:
Such stories, in which a child may not conform to an absolute scale of attaining
developmental milestones in particular domains, but nevertheless shows progress,
are common features of mothers’ narratives regardless of the mother’s age or edu-
cation; by leaving a prognosis undetermined they allow hope for a future without
disability . . . The concept of developmental delay therefore sets a script not only
for the child, but for the mother as well. Her actions – her refusal to give up on
her child’s ability to progress.
(2003, p. 1956)
244
The prognosis is thwarted by its self-declared lack of knowledge – it is a guess, a trajectory

mapped onto a future, countered and refuted by alternative trajectories. Landsman reports that
some parents of children with developmental delays connect uncertainty with hope in contrast
to a diagnosis that they experience as foreclosing possibilities. Importantly, she points out, the
narratives parents tell set their decisions and actions in motion (2003, p. 1955). One of the parents
in her study preferred not to hear about possible consequences of her baby’s condition ‘because
she’d “rather just take things one step at a time”’ (2003, p. 1956). Some of the parents in her pro-
ject refuse to map onto the future at all, except in the most nebulous ‘let’s see’ attitude. Landsman
observes a connection between the narratives the parents tell and their actions. Mothers discuss
their commitment to Early Intervention services in terms of belief in their efficacy in promoting
progress, with progress largely being defined as movement toward normalcy rather than accom-
modating disability. At the beginning and end of her publication, Landsman describes herself as
a parent who accepts her child with disabilities as she is.
In my desire for my daughter to change . . . I probably offend the disability rights

movement and support mainstream American disability perspectives. But from the
latter viewpoint, my co-existing and seemingly paradoxical passion for my daughter’s
right to be who she is as she is, my inability to even imagine her without disabilities,
lends itself to claims of resignation. I would argue instead that it represents not defeat,
but my own growth and transformation.
(2003, p. 1958)
It takes courage for a Disability Studies scholar such as Landsman to declare her ‘paradoxical
passion.’ Her own ‘growth and transformation’ aside, she has articulated many of the issues at stake
in finding an available narrative.
The overcoming narrative is clearly problematic, but once the critique has been made, the alterna-
tives are not necessarily easy to find. Rejecting the available narratives is one thing, but finding one’s
own narrative requires a complicated reassessment and repositioning of oneself and others. Mattingly
discusses what she calls ‘willing as narrative re-envisioning of the self ’ (2006), a concept that invokes
questions about advocacy, social justice, citizenship, and empathy, all key to Disability Studies.
The concept of empathy is particularly complex because people with disabilities are so often
deployed as stand-ins for compassion, a position that most certainly distances them and insists on
transcending difference as the condition of their inclusion. In other words, empathy is predicated
on the idea of difference, on the idea that we walk in different shoes but that we might try on each
other’s shoes to traverse that difference. Because we inevitably put our own shoes on at the end of
the exercise, the difference remains. The goal, as so many scholars of trauma have observed, is to
practice critical empathy, that is, the effort to understand, often through narrative, vastly different
experiences and to know that understanding is limited, that witnessing, what La Capra calls true
witnessing, is empathic unsettlement (2001).
Individuals like Rousso offer examples of their own resistance to the overcoming narrative;
the multiple life histories and memoires by people with disabilities and their families provide
examples of this repositioning and ongoing negotiation. Rejection of the overcoming narrative
acknowledges a more fundamental instability of narrative, the self, and the body. Disability
Studies scholars have observed that reclaiming life stories does not mean substituting one stable
identity for another. Instead, the reclamation, in the form of disability life stories, just as often,
or some would say, preferably, destabilizes any coherent narrative of normal bodies. For example,
Garland-Thomson writes, ‘Of our most tenacious cultural fantasies is a belief in bodily stability,
more precisely the belief that bodily transformation is predictable and tractable’ (2005, p. 114).
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Amy Shuman
The stakes are high for the parents seeking an available narrative to tell about a child. Find-
ing a narrative to tell and learning to listen to alternative narratives are companion efforts with
different consequences. As Landsman has discussed, there are huge consequences for the parent
not only seeking a narrative to make sense of things or even a tellable narrative, but consequences
for how to makes decisions and act in the world. These are not just academic issues about the
usefulness of overcoming narratives. People with disabilities and their families position themselves
between vulnerability and strength or between acceptance and overcoming, and even when we
reject the overcoming, inspirational story, we still find ourselves mapping our lives onto available
narratives or having them imposed on us.
Notes
1 See Arthur Frank’s discussion of Roger Schank, who says, ‘We need to tell someone else a story that
describes our experience because the process of creating a story also creates the memory structure that will
contain the gist of the story for the rest of our lives. Talking is remembering’ (1995, p. 61).
2 See also Arthur Frank: ‘Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of
where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new
destinations’ (1995, p. 53).
3 See Claude Bremond and Elaine Cancalon’s discussion of the implicit possible paths in narrative.
4 For a discussion of the normal and normalcy in Disability Studies, see Davis (1995).
5 See Rapp and Ginsburg’s (2011) discussion of kinship among parents of children with disabilities.
6 Disability Studies scholars caution against speaking on behalf of people with disabilities. Narratives by
parents can fall into this category. Most familiarly, disability activists have coined the phrase, “nothing
about us without us” (Charlton, 1998). Many people with disabilities have written life stories, but life
stories by people with intellectual disabilities are rarer. For an exception, see Kingsley and Levitz (1994).
7 Landsman reports the following: ‘When asked to define the term [developmental disability], one doctor
at the Newborn Followup Program responded, “It means your child is mentally retarded but I don’t
have the courage to tell you”’ (2009, p. 107).
8 See Landsman on the ‘trauma of dashed expectations’ (1998, p. 76).
9 ‘When professionals interpret parents’ words and behaviours as denying reality, rather than demon-
strating the ideals of “acceptance” and “being realistic”, the parents may be viewed as dysfunctional’
(Kearney & Griffin, 2001, p. 583).
10 See Rosemary Garland-Thompson’s review of many studies that engage in this critique (2005).
11 Writing about illness narratives, Thomas Couser writes,
The narrative formula of ‘overcoming’ impairment – rather than challenging disability
(though the two are not always easy to distinguish) – has its drawbacks. A high-achieving
with an obvious impairment is always in danger of becoming a Supercrip, an Inspirational
Disabled Person who overcomes impairment through pluck and willpower.
(1997, p. 203)
12 See also, Jasbir Puar’s (2009) discussion of the implications of hope in Jain’s argument. Puar recom-
mends assemblages as an alternative to the compulsory demands of dominant narratives.
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19
RESEARCHING HIGHER
EDUCATION STUDENTS’
BIOGRAPHICAL LEARNING
Agnieszka Bron
department of education, stockholm university, sweden
Introduction
Students learn at higher education (HE) institutions both formally and informally, or at least this
is what they are supposed to be doing. On the one hand, their learning can be seen as a result
documented by exams and certificates, and on the other, as a process, which is much more dif-
ficult to understand. This chapter explores and identifies HE students’ learning experiences and
opportunities by means of qualitative methodology. Moreover, as learning processes are parts of
student’s biographies, this chapter focuses on researching students’ learning biographies.
HE stands for a tertiary system of basic and advanced studies at universities and university
colleges. It includes professional and general programmes of different status depending on society
and labour market demands. With HE in Europe and the US becoming a mass institution (Bron,
2014), the student body is changing. We can ask then who HE students are today. How can such
a diversified group by gender, socio-economic background (class), age, and ethnicities, as well as
diverse family backgrounds and work experiences, be described and understood?
The focus of this chapter is on biographical research and longitudinal narrative interviews
with HE students and the methodological steps to be taken. It describes how to start the project,
access the students and conduct narrative longitudinal interviews, how to work in an ethical
way, how to analyse interviews and theorise biographical work, and finally what difficulties and
advantages/benefits we can expect by using this methodology.
Starting a longitudinal research project

On initiating a research project, the driving force is the researcher’s curiosity, interest or doubt,
grounded in former research and literature. Interesting topics can also be found in social life.
Being interested in students’ learning and experiences at HE, the narrative and life history
approach directs us to think about several issues before engaging in the project.
Before starting a research project, it is first worth thinking about what significance there is to
learn or to discover and second how to collect the data. While these issues seem rather rational
and cognitive, we also need to use our imagination. In other words, we must be creative and able
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Agnieszka Bron
to imagine the whole project from start to finish using sociological or educational fantasy. Thus,
we need to exercise our ability of having new and exciting ideas.
Several issues are important to consider when starting the longitudinal narrative project.
Research question
At the very beginning of the project, a research question and the aim of study need to be formu-
lated. We search for appropriate questions that are process-oriented and social in their character.
The shape of the questions shows us a direction towards both the social issue we want to inves-
tigate and also towards a possible method to be applied. The aim of the study tells us why we
want to investigate the specific topic. However, not all questions are suitable to be investigated by
the narrative approach. The suitable questions capture the process of human action in a longer
perspective and are both personal and social.
The European project concerning non-traditional students across Europe can serve here as
an example (cf. Finnegan et al., 2014). Its objectives were to identify the factors that promote
or constrain the access, retention and completion of non-traditional students in HE and to
increase the understanding of what promotes or limits the construction of a learner’s identity of
non-traditional students to become effective learners. However, in the case studies each team was
involved in some specific questions. One example of how to compose and structure the questions
is taken from one of the articles we have written. In this specific instance of the Swedish case,
we have asked, ‘What struggles do students go through when participating in HE?’, and ‘To what
extent are these struggles related to the intersection between class and ethnicity?’ (cf. Bron et al.,
2014, p. 64).
Methodology
There are several examples of how to use biographical approach in research (cf. Alheit 1995;
Antikainen et al.,1996; Finnegan et al., 2014; West et al., 2007). Generally, it means using a quali-
tative research methodology when collecting stories from a person’s own life and, in our case, from
the student’s life. If we want to know about life experiences of individuals and how they interact
with others, a biographical approach seems useful. It can be applied in cases when we want obtain
accounts that are rich and in-depth and give us insights into people’s identities, education and
health; tell us how they cope with their personal and social life, with religion and politics; and
develop attitudes toward themselves and others (see Bron & Thunborg, 2015). In our case, we
used a longitudinal method, which means that we contacted the same student several times dur-
ing her/his HE career. We were talking to the first year students as well as the last year ones, using
the so-called cross-cohort approach. Such methodology can also produce much data concerning
processes of learning and identity forming and transforming. However, I will concentrate here
on the former methodology: that is, longitudinal.
Theory
While the methodology helps us learn how to find out about the study question or phenomenon,
and it has an epistemological character, a theory serves to preliminarily recognize and understand
the question and look for concepts that can open up the process of investigation. The theory, in
other words, gives us support in choosing an ontological position to understand and explore the
question under study.
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Researching biographical learning
As an example, in the study mentioned above, when the focus was on understanding students’
identity formation and change, we drove on symbolic interactionism and Mead’s (1934) ideas
about becoming the self. However, to bridge sociological and psychological approaches, within
the European research team, we agreed upon two sensitizing concepts (Blumer, 1954), from other
perspectives: habitus from Bourdieu (1990) and Winnicott’s (1971) transitional space. We found
both concepts useful as they opened up for the analysis of interviews. These sensitizing concepts
corresponded quite well with our own perspective. Nevertheless, in the analysis, transitional space
served as a better heuristic tool than habitus (Bron & Thunborg, accepted).
Bron and West (2000) point out that the use of biographical methods yield experience-rich
material providing understanding into structure and agency intersection and into culture and
‘psyche.’ Individuals repeatedly coming back and telling their biographical stories are in the pro-
cess of constructing and reflecting their lives and reality in which they are situated. Obviously,
while analysing biographical data, similarities and differences as well as certain patterns can be
found and theorised.
Access the students

When starting the longitudinal biographical research project, an essential issue is how to access
and select individuals to be interviewed. Usually a theoretical sample is needed, which means to
choose persons who differ as much as possible to be able to achieve the variation of cases. In the
European study, referred above, we concentrated on non-traditional students. ‘By non-traditional
students we meant students who were the first generation in their families to study at HE institu-
tions’ (Bron & Thunborg, 2015, p. 4); thus, we extended our definition from mature students only
to those who were younger but did not have a tradition in their families to continue education.
At the same time, such demographic categorizations as age, class, disability, ethnicity and gender
were our concern as well.
Our theoretical sampling strategy to access the students was built on three levels. First, we
were searching for institutions with a large number of non-traditional students and such with a
limited numbered of non-traditional. It turned out that the largest number of non-traditional
students were at the most prestigious HE institutions. Thus, we decided to choose three HE
institutions in Stockholm, all of them being traditional and elite with quite a number of
non-traditional students (Bron & Thunborg, 2015). Second, to contrast programmes, which
differed in the degree of participation of non-traditional students, we chose two educational
programmes at each institution. They were general academic, prestige and elite programmes on
the one hand and professional, connected directly to specific labour market appointments, edu-
cational programmes, on the other. Third, we contacted students at each institution by sending
a short questionnaire asking about their affiliation as non-traditional students and about their
willingness to participate in the project. In that way, we selected quite a number, and finally
we were able to conduct 100 interviews with students from five programmes (as we could not
access students in one of the programmes).
Rapport with students

Finding interviewees is crucial for the research project – most of all people who are willing
to be involved in biographical interviewing, ready to participate and to tell their own stories
(Bron & Thunborg, 2015). However, this is only the first step. The second will be to introduce
and establish a good rapport with students. It is a matter of trust from the beginning, building
the understanding to be able to continue the interview relationship based on mutual recognition
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Agnieszka Bron
and awareness, an attitude of bonding and empathy. In fact, the interview situation is built on a
power relationship, which usually is an asymmetrical one. The interviewer possesses power over
the interviewee. However, in a biographical research such a relationship would not contribute
to good rapport based on openness and freedom to tell the story without any pressure. Thus,
the relationship is asymmetrical but the power is shifted to the interviewee. In our example,
a student has a control over how much and what she wants to tell, when she wants to stop or
continue, and even when she wants to withdraw. I will come back to these important ethical
considerations.
In our case, we contacted students by e-mail and phone to secure appointment, and meet in
an appropriate time and place that suited them. The place is important, and as we know from
our experience, the best is one where the interviewee feels safe. It can be a student’s own apart-
ment or a room, thus a private or personal space. However, sometimes it can work well to meet a
student, as we did, in a public place – like at a café or another place on university premises. The
worst scenario would be the interviewer’s office. Once the contact is established and a student is
willing to participate, the rapport needs to be taken care of, and the first session can begin. The
casual form of conversation is a good beginning for establishing the rapport as two strangers are
meeting for the first time.
Saturation effect
In order to get access to students, a researcher has to have in mind a variety of cases. Here the
theoretical sampling is useful as it directs us towards diversity. Thus, variation is crucial as it
contributes to saturation of data. We look for new cases only as long as they do not differ from
the ones we have already chosen and from the aspects we have already found. We can stop inter-
viewing new students when the saturation effect is accomplished. Thus, there are two strategies
for selecting interviewees. The criteria for the selection can be decided in advance; this means
getting involved in theoretical sampling. Another strategy is to follow the rule of saturation. This
involves interviewing until the researcher is satisfied that no more variation could be possible and
then stop collecting interviews (Bron & Thunborg, 2015).
In our case, as we wanted to ensure a diverse student body we were searching for non-traditional
students within several programmes (Bron & Thunborg, 2015). However, although a strict plan-
ning of how to access and select interview candidates to biographical research is necessary, it is
not always possible to follow the plan. From our experience with the project mentioned above,
we learned some lessons. Even if a researcher has a theoretical sampling in mind, thus obtaining
variation of cases, the strategy for selection cannot be strictly followed. As interviewing was based
on voluntary participation, we could only approach the students who wanted to be interviewed.
Finally, the approach was to find enough non-traditional students of specific ages, genders, ethnic-
ities, social classes, and disabilities to be interviewed. Accordingly, we were looking for variation
of experiences and stories to be sure that the rule of saturation was reached (Bron & Thunborg,
2015).
Narrative interviews
Using narrative interviews is useful when researching HE students’ biographical learning. ‘Bio-
graphical research, especially of a longitudinal kind, can illuminate and facilitate the exploration
of identity formation and change across a life’ (West et al., 2014, p. 30). Already during the
storytelling, students are engaged in forming and negotiating identities in the stories they tell
us (Thunborg et al., 2013). We find these processes crucial in biographical work. This research
252
designates using ‘individual stories or other personal documents to understand lives within a
social, psychological and/or historical frame’ (Merrill & West, 2009, p. 10).
For managing biographical research, we need to decide the form and type of the inter-
view. There are several options, which are connected both to the role of an interviewer and an
interviewee, as well as types of questions that are asked. In biographical research, we can find
in-depth interviews, which often means open, not structured, with one or a few questions that
help to start up and unlock a story that a person is willing to tell us. On the other hand, there
are semi-structured interviews, with several questions that are prepared beforehand. They can
also emerge during the interview when a researcher is probing. The latter means a more active
involvement of the interviewer in structuring and conducting the narrative interview.
Thus, the important issue when dealing with a longitudinal biographical research is a question
of how to conduct an interview. The quality of research is based on in-depth non-structured
interviews that are conducted over time. The role of a researcher in in-depth, open interviews
is to let the interviewee take over the responsibility for the story told: i.e., its duration, form and
scope. In semi-structured interviews, the researcher’s role is more visible and much stronger.
However, there are researchers who use auto/biographical interviewing:
This combines notions of the social subject – shaped by historic and structuring
processes – with ideas of the defended subject too, drawing on psychoanalysis, and
especially object relations theories. In these perspectives, psyche is rescued from the
epiphenomenal status frequently given to it by many sociologists, and given a dynamic
life of its own. Biographical narrative research, using a psychosocial interpretative rep-
ertoire, offers insights into why people tell the stories they do, including to researchers,
often in defended ways: or why they may create narratives of overly idealized pasts, or
presents, in processes of psychological splitting.
( West et al., 2014, p. 28)
While using these perspectives biographical researchers explain their approach as a ‘clinical style.’
By that, they mean to pay ‘attention to anxieties in the interview and to what may remain silent
or be difficult to say, and to the qualities of interaction between researchers and researched,
including unconscious forms of communication’ (West et al., 2014, p. 28).
At all institutions, in the case described above, we were facing some problems with finding
non-traditional students who were willing to be interviewed. Nevertheless, once in the study,
students wanted to come back to the next session(s). Each interview meeting helped the student
to deal with her identity formation and/or transformation through the narration, offering an
opportunity to reflect about life experiences and learning. Coming back to the interviewer felt
like being able to tell the story repeatedly, with new insights and a new flavour.
Conducting interviews
In the project, we focused on generating in-depth biographical narrative interviews. To achieve this
objective, and after a short explanation, we asked the interviewee to give ‘an uninterrupted recol-
lection of his or her own story.’ This was an elaboration around an open question concerning stu-
dents’ application to university and his/her experience as being a student thereafter. Only after this,
interviewer assumed ‘a more active role, attempting to steer the interview in the direction of certain
events or topics to be explored in a greater depth’ (West et al., 2014, pp. 30–1). Giving the interviewee
enough time to elaborate freely on a given topic was the main strategy used by the interviewer;
however, more specific questions could be posed as appropriate in the final part of the interview.
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Agnieszka Bron
We were interested in finding out how students were coping with their studies over time.
What problems do they have in life situations, with commitment to university and willingness
to continue or withdraw? In addition, which of them are dropouts, and how can we find them?
After only a few interviews, we noticed that in the Swedish case we needed to talk about drop-in
and dropout students. They were allowed to withdraw (which was not reported) and come back,
usually to another programme, but sometimes to the same, after a while. Both narrative inter-
views and longitudinal interviews helped us to understand processes of learning, identity forming
and transforming, as well as strategies to continue, to change, to make a break and to withdraw.
As the project lasted three years, we chose to interview a student in her first year, then to
meet again in the middle, and continue with the third interview at the third year. Each time we
approached the student with a transcribed interview, which she had read beforehand, and the
interview started with commenting on what had been said, what new had happened, and how
she could see her situation from the current perspective (an important aspect of temporality).
Each interview was in-depth and non-structured, meaning that the student was in charge of the
session and the interviewer was only helping to open up and continue the narration. However,
some questions were asked in the end to clarify what had been told.
Eliciting narratives through biographic interviewing involves certain scientific and methodo-
logical considerations. Moreover, it includes ethical criteria, which will be discussed in the next
subsection. To become a skilled interviewer takes time, and gaining experience for newcomers is
done through pilot interviews, ‘although each biographical interview is unique and has its own
demands’ (Bron & Thunborg, 2015, p. 6).
We are able to learn the skills of conducting an in-depth longitudinal interview. The most
important aspect is to learn how to listen, to show empathy, to be patient, be non-judgemental
and to have an open mind. The listening skill helps also to be open for an analytical and reflective
attitude, preparing for analysis and understanding what is going on – in both the story told and
in the interview situation itself.
Ethics
Researching non-traditional students’ biographical learning in HE through longitudinal narra-
tive and biographical research requires ethical deliberations during the entire project and when
writing up. A typical question that a researcher is faced with is how to deal with the issues of
ethics. We have different ethical codes to take into account in the countries where research
was conducted, as codes can differ from state to state. In Sweden, the state research agency –
Vetenskapsrådet – has its own requirements that can serve as a good way to approach ethical
questions in the project we consider. The website (http://www.codex.vr.se/en) gives us rules
and guidelines for research generally and in Sweden specifically (see Hermerén, 2011). To guar-
antee the ethics of our performance in biographical research, we need to use an oral or written
agreement with the interviewee (see Bron & Thunborg, 2015).
The biographical researcher needs to take into consideration several ethical aspects, includ-
ing voluntary participation of a student, opportunity to withdraw during the whole process,
confidentiality, and how the information is going to be used. Even though we are involved in
individuals’ life stories on behalf of the research project, the ownership of their life stories is
theirs. Thus, a written agreement based on a shared ownership of the interviews is needed (Bron &
Thunborg, 2015).
In the written agreement, we first introduce general information about the project and its
method. Second, we give the interviewee the right to refuse answering certain questions, to with-
draw from participation during and after the interview, and as a result, to extract the material.
254
Third, the contract includes the entitlement of confidentiality and the right to remain anony-
mous outside the research team. Finally, we provide the ownership of interviews by stating the
interviewee’s right to receive and edit the transcripts. ‘By signing the agreement, interviewees
allow researchers to use the material and indicate their choices regarding remaining anonymous
and receiving a copy of the transcript’ (Bron & Thunborg, 2015, p. 7).
During the project, we are likely to face several ethical dilemmas to be resolved. Examples
of those are how the information about research results can be used. Generally, there is a need
to inform the scientific community of the results, and this is fine, but have we a right to report
findings to the public? How much and how? How can we grant that biographies are not going
to be used in unexpected situations? How can we protect our informants?
Qualitative analysis of students’ biographical learning

Even during the process of collecting data (i.e., while the process of obtaining students’ narratives
has started), a systematic organization of records is needed. In this way, we are involved in the
process of conceptualising and theorising learning biographies. Organising data is usually done
by generating theoretical concepts from the interviews, in accordance with a given theoretical
perspective chosen by the researchers – in other words, from the ontological point of departure.
However, in our case, we were involved in neither an inductive nor a deductive but rather an
abductive analysis (Swedberg, 2012). In this type of scrutiny, the researcher, by relying on imag-
ination and interpretation, is alternating between theory and data. This alternation is done by
using sensitizing concepts derived from theories and, as in our case, earlier analyses of empirical
data, i.e., concepts guiding us through the rich material of a biographical interview. However,
the researcher is constantly opened to new findings that are conceptualized and used in further
analyses (see Bron et al., 2013). We usually start our interpretation by focussing our attention
already during the interview and continuing throughout the process of transcription, looking for
the richest data, and the most curious cases. When interesting categories are generated from one
or a series of interviews (longitudinal data), we move to the next interview, to look for similarities
and differences. We are continuously involved in comparison, moving forward and backward
between interviews, looking for the best understanding of the data (Bron et al., 2013)
Dealing with a multiple longitudinal biographical material, when in the phase of analysis, the
purpose is of maximising and minimising the data, i.e. to narrow and to broaden the perception
of understanding (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss, 1993). This is carried out by
searching for similarities and differences within the data, first in one interview, a series of inter-
views, and then moving to the next interview/a series of interviews. This is like a continuous
testing of emerging hypotheses and categories, by looking for processes between and within the
stories to find the match and the mismatch. In this process of analysis, writing up vignettes of
particular biographies of students is useful. A vignette means a short summary, an essence of the
story in which processes of forming and transforming identities are highlighted. Vignettes help
us to see data in their wholeness and to move quickly among the data.
It is while dealing with the dynamic of biographical data and searching for processes, which
were occurring there, that our concepts emerged. When students were telling about their actions,
how they were experiencing them and what they were feeling about them, what they emphasized
and how, we could capture the basics of their approaches and attitudes. In other words, we were
involved in unpacking the sequences of life, and in discovering the temporality of data, i.e., stories
just told, reflected on and explained in terms of a rationale of acts, etc. (see Mead, 1934). We
looked for a red line, a core motive or a core category, which we tested and compared in other
interviews (vignettes). Moreover, all the steps contributed to opening up the data, and eventually
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Agnieszka Bron
by focussing on what emerged from the data, we could pose questions both to the material as
well as to ourselves (Bron et al., 2013, p. 9).
Students’ involvement in biographical learning

With the support of two sensitizing concepts, habitus and transitional space, and the core cat-
egory, struggles, that emerged from the data, we could work further to discover processes of
forming identities. Moreover, we could find out how biographical learning takes place and
how with the help of an additional two concepts that emerged from former research, i.e.,
floating (Bron, 2000; Bron & Thunborg, 2011) and anchoring (Fenwick, 2006), we were able
to discern how transformations of identities take place. These two processes, anchoring and
floating, become crucial for understanding how learning identities and students’ identities are
being formed and transformed. These two differ; a ‘learning identity is seen as part of a person’s
biography connected to previous experiences of learning, whilst a student identity relates to a
specific setting of HE during a certain time in a person’s life’ (Field, 2012; Thunborg et al., 2013,
p. 185). We also distinguished three learning identities, first in the story of one student and later
in other stories: the learning failure, the instrumental learner and the good learner (Thunborg et al.,
2013, p. 185). Finally, we were able to put together a typology of students’ learning identities
(see Bron et al., 2013). These identities were situated at the continuum between low and high
commitment to HE, on the one hand, and risk of dropping-out or continuing, on the other. In
the typology, we sketched out altruistic students, ambivalent students, car park students, instru-
mental students, life-long learners, one-track students, risk of failing students, and self-realizers
(Bron et al., 2013). However, as students are continuously in the process of forming and trans-
forming their identities, they move easily from one to another depending on their programmes,
sequence of life, and experience. In other words, identities are flexible, resembling more ideal
types, and so is the typology.
Biographical work
Processes of identity forming and identity transforming while learning biographically led us
further to discover the processes of biographical work. We problematized the biographical work
as a theoretical concept in Bron and Thunborg (2013), based on the analysis of biographical
longitudinal interviews. Thus, biographical work is seen as a process in which an adult is retro-
spectively aware of being continuously involved in identity struggles that result in forming and
transforming of own identity. In this sense, biographical work means that by telling and retelling
a story to others and oneself, and by writing and rewriting it, we are repeatedly constructing and
reconstructing our biographies. This includes being surprised by discoveries, and being involved
in reflection and self-reflection, thus learning (Bron & Thunborg, accepted).
We conceptualised biographical work as ‘a process in which identity struggles give way to
processes of floating, i.e. feelings of being fragmented without a past or present, and anchoring,
i.e. feelings of belonging to a specific context or grounded in oneself ’ (Bron & Thunborg,
accepted, p. 7). The last process, i.e., anchoring, meaning involvement in continuously forming
of identities, together with anchoring, denotes engagement in the process of transforming iden-
tities and represents the identity struggles that students are involved in. There are two options for
a student, the first a ‘situated identity,’ meaning a social identity that relates to a specific context
or a group, and the second an integrated identity (personal identity). The situated identities are
at the center of our typology, consisting of eight student identity types in higher education.
However, when we analysed biographical work, the integrated identities were in focus, such as
256
adopted, floating and multiple integrated identities (Bron & Thunborg, accepted). Consequently,
biographical work goes beyond being a student and emphasizes being an adult all together.
Results – theorising
The final issue, while exploring higher education students’ learning opportunities and experi-
ences by using longitudinal biographical approach, is to be involved in theorising the results.
Presentation of the results can be both descriptive and visualised in figures and schemes. Vis-
ualisation helps to abstract the findings analytically, by looking for location, connections, and
dependencies among different concepts, categories and sub-categories. One example can be a
presentation of typologies. In our case, the typology of fluidity of students’ identities in HE (Bron &
Thunborg, accepted) was situated in the four-filed figure by using two axes: two continua that
denoted commitment to HE and willingness to stay. The first was about students’ motivation,
while the other about students’ retention.
Theorising belongs to analytical skills, which we develop already while collecting the data,
transcribing interviews, analysing the data with the help of sensitizing concepts, looking for
new concepts to appear. These new concepts and categories need to be described in a more
theoretical, abstract language and still connected to the data. They are generated from the data
we acquire. Theorising means understanding the data in the processual way, i.e., what is going
on there and how it is functioning. An advantage in theorising comes from a good schooling in
sociology and/or psychology, in both former theories and terminology. As for adult educators,
we look for learning processes in the data.
In our case, we began with looking for instances for biographical learning and ended up with
discovering the process of biographical work, which includes biographical learning. Biographi-
cal learning led us to recognize identity forming and transforming. However, our first category,
which students encountered, was identity struggles, and their description of HE as a battlefield
or a free zone or both. The concept or theory of biographical work is a way of connecting
several processes in students’ identity struggles, giving them a connotation that makes sense.
We describe biographical work as a process in which one becomes aware, retrospectively and
consciously, about one’s own identity struggles while being involved in their forming and trans-
forming. An adult constructs and reconstructs his/her own biography ‘by telling and retelling a
story, by writing and rewriting it, by being surprised by discoveries, reflecting and self-reflecting
through analyses of biographical interviews’ (Bron & Thunborg, accepted, p. 14). Working with
the concept of biographical work, the narrative interview becomes an evident source for it. By
uncovering how students’ identities develop and change, we could ‘move to the meta-analysis and
meta-theory in understanding’ these processes of identity formation and transformation (Bron &
Thunborg, accepted).
Theorising from biographical data is an important part of biographical research, but also of
the development of adult education as a discipline.
Using longitudinal narrative interviews

To be involved in longitudinal narrative research in which interviews are a basis for theorizing
about adults’ identity construction and reconstruction and about adults’ learning is certainly a
challenging task. Such research has both advantages and disadvantages. Let me start with the
latter: what kind of difficulties can be encountered while using longitudinal narrative interviews
when studying students’ learning at higher education. There can be several problems, like lack
of good theoretical and methodological preparation, difficulty in establishing access to students
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Agnieszka Bron
during a longer period, having too little time and patience when conducting interviews. More-
over, there can be also lack of imagination and creativity, difficulties in establishing the rapport
with the interviewees, a risk of getting too close or not being distant enough, and finally, the chal-
lenges of following all ethical considerations when selecting the cases, conducting the research
and reporting the results.
So, are there any advantages of using longitudinal narrative interviews when studying students
learning at higher education? It is an excellent opportunity to get access to such data, which can
provide insights into students’ life and learning. Still, it requires a complex process of qualitative
analysing and being aware that the stories told by interviewees have different narrations, which need
to be taken into consideration. Otherwise, one can lose the parts of the interviews, which can be
contradictory or inconsistent. Yet, the aim of analysis is to make the complete individual story, as
well as numbers of stories, work and make sense. By doing so, researchers have an opportunity to
establish concepts, typologies and in-depth understanding of the stories told, and use imagination
for generating theory from data.
Conclusions
This chapter reveals ways of conducting research into higher education students’ biographi-
cal learning by using a biographical narrative in-depth approach. Moreover, it shows different
methodological and theoretical considerations and steps to be taken to get results, which can lead
us to new theoretical conclusions – in this case, about biographical work. It also points to the
importance of ethical considerations as well as well as risks and benefits in applying this particular
methodology. Finally, it describes biographical work as an interesting phenomenon, which is not
only characteristic of higher education students, but adults generally. Of course, such conclusion
needs further investigation and testing.
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20
THE NARRATIVE
INTERVIEW – METHOD,
THEORY AND ETHICS
Unfolding a life
Marianne Horsdal
university of southern denmark
Introduction
The methodology I developed during more than 25 years of narrative life story research, first in
the Department of Literature, then in Cultural Studies, later in Education, had its original point
of departure in both pragmatic and ethical considerations. The first collection of life stories I
published (Horsdal, 1991) was intended for foreigners, both as a Danish Cultural History and as
a text book for the study of Danish as a second language. I interviewed 25 Danes from all over
the country from various social and cultural backgrounds, marvelous story tellers, the oldest born
in 1893 and the youngest in 1968. I visited them with my pen and a writing pad in order not to
disturb them with a lot of equipment, and while I listened and wrote down what they told me
about their lives, each voice opened up to a new world of experience.
I realized that every single person gave me a gift as they shared their stories with me, and as
a small return they had their stories back. ‘Did she write it like you told it?’ a sister to a farmer
born in 1906 asked. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘and it is true, every single word’.
I was immensely fascinated by this work, so I continued to collect life story narratives in the
context of cultural studies and later researching lifelong learning, identity, and democratic partic-
ipation. I read other samples of collected life stories, taped and transcribed, and found the often
incoherent, fragmented recordings to be embarrassing to the tellers, who might think:‘Am I really
so halting verbally?’. I wanted my narrators to be – if not proud of their stories – at least, at ease
with the event and the result of the telling.
Back then, I was not able to explain why I liked letting their words flow through my brain,
through my fingers, to the paper, in a rhythm of collaboration. But the stories became more
coherent as the collaborative rhythm implied a reduced pace of verbal speech, and the tranquility
gave space for more than superficial memories to come to mind, and for some reflection on how
to express the memories, thoughts and feelings. On my behalf, being busy catching each and
every word, the writing prevented me from interrupting the narration with precipitate questions.
Inspired by theoretical research on narrative and identity by many (Bruner, 1986, 1990; Carr,
1986; Kerby, 1991; Mitchell, 1980; Polkinghorne, 1988; Ricoeur, 1984, 1992; Somers & Gibson,
260
The narrative interview
1994 a.o.), I tried to find my theoretical feet and arrive at more solid ground for an under-
standing of the basic features of narrative and published my first theoretical book on life story
narratives in 1999 – in Danish. More inspiring researchers joined the field in the years to come,
and I supplied my theoretical insight, studying the acquisition of narrative, memory and cogni-
tion and other related issues alongside working with numerous research projects using narrative
interviews. I suggested three interconnected dimensions of narrative: an embodied, a cognitive
and a sociocultural dimension. Finally, in 2012, I managed to write a book in English, bringing
together neurophysiology, philosophical perspectives and research data, and to formulate a new
understanding of narrative analysis in biographical research (Horsdal, 2012).
Combining theory and method

A narrative is a symbolic representation of a time span. A narrative unfolds in time and covers a
time span, a course of experienced (or imagined) time, and with its demarcations of beginnings
and endings, a space of time. Narratives enable us to make sense of the transformations of tem-
porality within a bounded space of time, and autobiographical narratives enable us to make sense
of our experience of the transformations of temporality in our lives within a bounded space of
time, and of our own transformations in time (see Horsdal, 2012, 2014; Ricoeur, 1984).
Next to temporality, crucial features of a narrative include selection, sequence, and hierarchy.
The meaning of a story depends on which events and other elements are included, in which order
and weight. Realizing that every told narration to a certain extent is a co-construction implicat-
ing the listener (or interviewer), the potential of narrative analysis grows substantially the more
the choice of selections, the choice of sequence, order and hierarchy is up to the narrator herself.
After the initial phase of the interview, during which I thoroughly prepare the interviewee, the
narrator starts telling her story as a response to one single question: ‘Please, tell me about your life
from the beginning and until we are here today.’ Where to begin is up to the narrator; beginnings
may vary from the life of great grandparents to first memories or even later, but the ending at the
time of telling is fixed, although the narrator sometimes include future plans and dreams. During
the telling I listen attentively and write down every single word, as I have instructed the teller to
speak slowly and make small pauses in order that I may keep up to the speed of narration with
my pen. (Some of my students use a laptop.) I do not interrupt the narration on our way. Only
as the teller exclaims: ‘I think, this is it’, or ‘here we are today’, I may interfere for potential clar-
ifications. The narrator chooses what to include and what to leave out. She decides the order of
the narration, which rarely is chronological and may show flash back, flash forward, repetitions or
ellipses. The narrator decides what is significant and insignificant for her story, and, importantly,
she constructs the plot, the configuration of her story by herself.
This enables a much more qualified and deep textual analysis of the narrative as the teller has
not been led astray by the interrogations, questions, preferences, and agendas of the interviewer.
The point is to allow for a construction of a narrative which reflects the experiences, preoccu-
pations, values and interpretations of the narrator in her attempt to make sense of her life from
the situated point of telling, and not just a mirror of the themes which the interviewer already
beforehand finds interesting or important – that is, if the aim of the narrative interview is to
learn from the narrator’s configurations of meaning and to research the interpretations of self and
existence of the interviewees.
An autobiographical narrative is a symbolic and aesthetic representation of lived experience:
not only a form of discourse, however, but also embodied reflections of our physical journeys
and interactions in time and space. The combination of the cognitive ability for mental time
travelling (Wheeler et al., 1997), autobiographical memory, and imagination, and the acquisition
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Marianne Horsdal
of narrative discourse allows us to transcend the here and now in which we as embodied beings
are situated, and make sense of and share our journeys of the past or imagine the future colored
by the frame of the present. Neither the acquisition of language and narrative discourse, the abil-
ity to form and communicate autobiographical memory nor the experiential representations of
interactions develop in a cultural vacuum. We are always embedded in cultural contexts. Thus, a
substantial theory of autobiographical narratives must, in my view, combine a cultural, cognitive,
and embodied approach connecting the bodies, the minds, and the stories.
The plural form is intentional. The autobiographical life story shows our interdependence
and connection with other human beings and our environment (Kerby, 1991). Our stories
reflect our individual journeys through life, but we are not able to give any firsthand record of
our beginnings or endings (Clandinin & Conelly, 2000; Ricoeur, 1994). We depend on other
people’s stories to complete our own. And we share stories. Stories give access to vicarious
experience as we are listening or reading. As the interviewer follows the story line, she partici-
pates in the mental time travel of the teller, vicariously she walks the path of the narrated jour-
ney from beginning to end. Attentive listening (or reading) makes room for identifications,
joined new perspectives, and different expeditions in – and constructions of – time and space.
Narratives are invaluable, important short cuts to understanding, considering the fact that
the journey through life of each individual (apart from Siamese twins) is different. Through
stories we may not only transcend the here and now of our experience of our existence and
interaction, but also transcend our own perspectives. Though narratives we can transcend our
own limited perspective on experience towards a wider potential for human understanding
and negotiation of meaning.
The potentials of narratives as vicarious experience are in many respects great (Nair, 2001).
The theory of mirror-neurons may explain how this identification, shared perspective, vicar-
ious emotional and experiential sense making come about. Gallese, Iacobini, Rizzolatti and
Craighero, among others (Carr et al., 2003; Gallese, 2005; Iacobini et al., 2005; Rizzolatti et al.,
2001), have written about the mirror neuron system and expanded our knowledge of the spon-
taneous understanding of the actions, interactions, intentions and emotion of others that we
perceive. The mirror neuron system is a motor simulation system that allows us spontaneously
to catch an idea of the social actions going on around us. According to Gallese and his col-
leagues, we spontaneously experience the actions and emotions we are witnessing vicariously
through a motor simulation system almost AS IF we were performing the actions or emotions
ourselves. Following this theory, perceived, imagined, planned or communicated actions and the
accompanied emotions are immediately interpreted according to our own repertoire of motor
actions and emotions.
Taken together, these data suggest that we understand the feeling of others via a mech-
anism of action representation shaping emotional content, such that we ground our
empathic resonance in the experience of our acting body and the emotions associated
with specific movement.
(Carr et al., 2003, p. 5502)
We do not only possess a visual motor simulation system but also an echo neuron system
that allows identification with and simulation of both the sound of action and action sentences.
I suggest that the ability to vicariously experience through narratives and spontaneous identifi-
cation with their protagonists may be neurologically grounded in this motor simulation system.
It makes good sense that the immediate experience of identification with narratives, including
narrated life stories, is grounded in embodied experience of action. The attentive listening
262
and physical writing probably intensifies the identification with the vicariously experienced
trajectory.
The rhythm of telling and writing

Before the narrators start telling, the interviewer must persuade them to reduce their normal
speed of speech a little, to try not to make too-long paragraphs and to make little pauses between
the sentences in order that she may keep up with their flow of talk and write down every uttered
word. The interviewer looks up and faces the narrator as she finishes a paragraph, and soon
they coordinate and accommodate mutually into a joint rhythm of narration and writing. The
interviewer’s full attention to each and every uttered word is obvious and unmistakable as she
is writing. There is no chance of drifting away – as often happens while just listening, e.g. to a
tape-recorder. The reactions to the stories told are mainly non-verbal. The interviewer expresses
her attentive listening and emphatic reaction not only through the writing that, obviously,
transforms the words of the teller into text, but non-verbally through her bodily – and facial –
expression of an accommodating carriage and attitude. This collaboration produces a calm and
safe space for the emerging thoughts, memories, and emotions. The absence of interrupting
questions emphasizes the safe space, as there is no danger that the interviewer’s interests and
interrogations (however sympathizing) may force the narrator into too vulnerable and uncertain
mental ground, from which it can be difficult to escape. This ethical preoccupation with a safe
space, considering that interviewers in a research context rarely are therapists, may occasionally
prevent the inclusion of some very traumatic and problematic events in the narratives. On the
other hand, the very construction of the safe space and the time for reflections and consid-
erations may also give way for the emergence of a new content of experience. As one of my
students at a Ph.D. course on method stated, having tried out the method both as a narrator
and a listener/writer: ‘The calmness made me look inside and get in touch with my memories
in an unusual way.’ The other participants agreed. As usual, I asked them to go together two
and two and tell one another in shifts about their first memory. Even such a short exercise may
display the depths and emotional richness of this collaboration, in spite of immediate skepticism
about the impacts of the slow rhythm of telling and the concentration of the busy writer, who
must look at her notebook or laptop most of the time. The slow rhythm allows for the time
and space for creation of a verbal expression of the mental time travel, thus providing the well-
known mental benefits of the reifications of symbolic representations of experience that can be
communicated. Pauses or halts of any kind are not embarrassing or troublesome as may be felt
when tape-recorders are running. On the contrary, they are welcomed; they give the interviewer
a break to change position, complete eventual abbreviations or have a sip of coffee or a drink
of water.
The theory of the mirror neuron system offers, in my view, a reasonable explanation of what
is going on in this safe space of joint narrating and writing. As the interviewer listens and trans-
fers the sounds into written words on paper, she vicariously walks the same mental path with
the narrator, joins the actions and emotions according to her own repertoire of experience, and,
simultaneously, contains the vulnerability of the narrator in her attentive listening, and supports
the comforting distance to experienced events through the process of reification as the memories
and feelings are transformed into text.
The ethical implications for this collaboration and creation of a safe space for the narrations
without the dangers of transgressions into too private or vulnerable spots are obvious. Further,
the slow rhythm and time for reflection in this method reduces the frequent danger of leaving
the interviewee with a feeling of not being good enough, not having responded appropriately,
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Marianne Horsdal
not being able to produce a good enough story – or a good enough life – to satisfy the researcher.
Obviously, the interviewee is instructed before the narration starts that she alone decides what
to tell and how to tell it.
Any transformation of spoken words into writing involves some interpretation even though
every single word is put down on paper or computer. Beyond the challenge of understanding
what is being said, you have to judge and decide the type of demarcations in the flow of speech.
Is this pause a full stop or less or even a new paragraph? Sometimes an unfinished paragraph
calls for three dots, or a passage is considered to be an insertion in writing perhaps surrounded
by hyphens.
After the interview, the time-consuming process of transcription is reduced to a proof-reading
and writing. The interviewer may, for private use, develop abbreviations etc. but naturally it is
important that she can read her own handwriting. Afterwards the proof is returned to the narra-
tor, who may correct for mistakes, supply with eventual further information, or remove parts that
she regrets having told. Only interviews approved by the narrators can be used, and the narrators
obviously decide the degree of anonymity in their stories (Merril & West, 2009).
In quite a few research projects I let the autobiographical narrative life story be followed
by a semi-structured qualitative interview in order to ensure that central issues of the research
project in question are covered in the responses. Some interviewees continue their free narrative
in their responses to my questions while others show the well-known inclination toward proper
performance in their answers – that is, producing the ‘good’ and ‘right’ answers. Interestingly, the
well-behaved interviewee in this type of response reduces the ambiguity, polyphony, and nego-
tiation of meaning that makes the free narratives so rich. The comparison between the narrative
parts and the responses to specific questions in an interview can be quite interesting. In my
experience this comparison indicates the profit of free narrative interviews due to the enhanced
complexity of the responses.
Normally, I do not set a time limit to the interview beforehand. The interview is finished
when the time of telling and the time of the story told coincide. An interview may be quite short
or very long. In a few cases I had to stretch the interview over two meetings, but most interviews
take about two hours. Busy people who ask about the duration of the interview may have a
time frame of one hour. The intense collaboration in the writing process may also exhaust the
interviewer after some hours.
The situated interview

Our mental time travels into the past or into the future are, of course, always framed by the pres-
ent. The narrative interview is constructed at a certain time, at a certain occasion, in a specific
type of interaction, and from a certain perspective. The frame in which the interview is situated
concerns the context of the interview itself, but also the context of the teller’s life and situation
as such. Recent events in the life of the narrator or in her surroundings or environment color
the life story and affect the perspective. In the case of severe present crisis, the experienced trans-
formations may block the configurative act, as no meaningful configurations of past and present
experiences seem possible at the moment. Later, when the crisis is overcome, the transformations
may be configured as a turning point in the life story. Narrative competence (or its absence) and
previous retellings, as well as narrative activities in the context of psychologists or social author-
ities may also impact the stories told.
The collaboration between the interviewer and interviewee during the interview is crucial,
but also the context of the interview matters, and the interactions before and after. Bruner (1990)
characterized narratives as ‘rhetorical justifications’. This is very much to the point for many
264
narratives told in asymmetrical contexts, children to adults, or stories told to authorities who
may punish or reward the teller. We find a different prototype of life story exchanges between
new friends who simply want to share the path of life they did not walk together in order to get
to know one another better. Interviewees are not new friends, but they should share the open
mind to the narration they are offered without prejudice as a gift they receive, as a means to a
larger horizon. Preparations convincing the narrator that her experiences and interpretations of
life and existence are acknowledged and appreciated may help to reduce the asymmetry between
researcher and interviewee. However, other parts of the context of the interview, the theme of
the research and the election of interviewees may, unfortunately, contradict the attempt of equal-
ity. Possible bias due to asymmetry must be taken into account in the analysis of the narrative
interviews.
Just as the narrator’s present life situation may influence the story she tells, also the present
context of the interviewer and interpreter may have an impact. Many years of experience of
assessment work have convinced me of this personal bias of interpretation and analysis.
Analysis of life story interviews

In biographical research a great number of analyses of interviews unfortunately seem to confine
the interpretation to a thematic analysis of the life story. The impact of studies in literature is
apparent in the following suggestions for analysis.
How the life story is told is equally significant to what is told in a free narrative interview.
Having considered the impact of the context of the situated interview, the next step is to clarify
the order and content of the story (Genette, 1980). This is exactly about analyzing the significant
elements of a narrative: selection, sequence, hierarchy, and eventually emplotment and configura-
tion (Ricoeur, 1984), which are decided by the teller following this methodology of a narrative
interview.
How long is the time span covered by the narrative? Many stories have flash backs to earlier
episodes, or include retellings of family stories etc. Some stories seem to end years before the
time of telling as if nothing much happened in the latest years. Many stories have ellipses, course
of actions, episodes and periods omitted from the telling, or, on the other hand, some incidents
may be repeated several times during the telling. Obviously the frequency and richness of detail
underscores the significance of a narrated event. Some events may be elaborated they take up
considerable space in the story while others are briefly passed over in a single or a few sentences.
Flash back, flash forward, frequency, duration, and order of the narrated events both indicate the
weight and significance of certain issues in the story and build up to the configuration of the story.
The analysis of the composition of the narrative interview supplies and strongly enhances the
outcome of the thematic analysis. But there is much more to be done to refine and deepen the
interpretation of the themes in the story.
One issue concerns the ‘stuff ’ of the narrative interview. Not every part of a narrated life
story is a narrative in a strict sense. A narrative life story interview often contains arguments,
negotiations of meaning, factual information, descriptions and characterizations, reported con-
versations etc. Considering the types of discourse of each sequence of the interview may be very
informative.
Also the voices in the telling are important. First of all, the interviewee takes up two distinctive
roles in a narrative life story interview. She is the narrator, the voice who tells the story at the time
of enunciation and mainly responsible for the construction of the story. But the interviewee is
also the ‘I’ in a different sense, the protagonist of the autobiographical narrative, the main char-
acter of the story, whom the narrator is telling about.
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Marianne Horsdal
How is the relationship between the two, the narrator and the protagonist? We may tell about
ourselves years back with a distance from the point of view of today, or we may try to transport
ourselves in imagination to the time of the happening and tell about an event during childhood
from the point of view of the child back then. We may even shift from past to present tense. Or
we may shift back and forth between the two positions. Many narrators include other voices in
their life story. They say ‘we’ and stress the relationships, or they try to downplay the ego saying
‘you’ or ‘one’ instead of ‘I’. Interviewees may quote other voices, describe themselves from the
point of view of relatives or other persons, and they may include ‘public’ voices or quotations
from poems in order to characterize themselves. And narrators may use irony.
The style of the narrator’s voice, or voices, is significant. How does she present herself in her
way of telling? Which emotions are conveyed? A narrator may present herself as active or passive,
as positive or negative, as neutral or emotional, as persuasive or cautious. And the life story con-
sequently may represent a certain genre (Denzin, 1989). The interviewer may hear a fairy tale, a
victim’s account, a ‘Bildungsroman’, a story of success or failure. The configuration of the narra-
tive is a significant component of the emergence of genre. Transformations of some kind are an
inherent feature because of the temporality of narratives. Some stories show a rather steady pro-
tagonist character in the midst of a changing world, while others mainly describe the narrator’s
transformations and development. Many narratives have a turning point, ‘tragedies’ from better to
worse, or developmental stories from hardship to a better life. Some stories remain in the same
tone almost without transformations, while others contain more than one transformation. Turn-
ing points and their alleged causations are obviously important elements of the interpretation.
Quite often, life story narratives display an attempt ‘to redeem the past’ to use Taylor’s expression
(Taylor, 1989, p. 50). We want our lives to have meaning, he says, and therefore, we may try to
repair problematic experiences in the past through new initiatives, which connect to the past and
improve the outcome of similar interactions. Bruner claimed that narratives were extremely suit-
able for negotiation of meaning due to their construction of ‘possible worlds’. Narrative life story
interviews contain negotiations of meaning, often in the form of narrative causations. Narratives
are logically a form of abduction, a possible hypothesis of how things are, or rather, including
the important temporal feature, possible explanations of how things went the way they did, and
narrative causations of why something happened. However, many autobiographical narratives are
polyphonic and negotiate between different interpretations of existence and self.
However, the negotiation of meaning, reflective considerations about what happened, how,
and with which impact implies a certain amount of narrative competence (Horsdal, 2012, 2016).
I have in my work as a researcher come across interviewees with very poor narrative competences
who were almost unable to negotiate meaning and reflect on why things happened. They express
difficulties with the act of narrating, and their stories are often very short and factual, more lists
of happenings than narratives. The continuous reflexive identity work typical of late modernity
does not encompass all members of society. To some people life is still considered fate, things
merely happen as a result of circumstance. Not everyone is overwhelmed by the amount and
responsibility of personal choice.
Another key to the meaning of narrative life story interviews are the metaphors. I do not mean
just figurative speech, but metaphors in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson (1999). We use a lot of
metaphors about the life trajectory itself. Life IS a journey, as we actually move our bodies from
place to place in time during our lives. On the way we may encounter impediments to motion,
things may go uphill, or the path may be smooth. We may halt, standstill, or rush forward. Our
feet may be planted in the ground, or we may float. Numerous examples indicate our embodied
emotional relationship to our environment through metaphors in the stories. We use metaphors
to characterize our relationship to others and to the world around us in general.
266
Narrative interviews are full of cultural narratives, collective interpretations of the world we
inhabit. Cultural narratives include political, societal, religious views. They become part of our
identity, constructed through stories we have heard, and reproduced within our own stories. Cul-
tural narratives change over time and differences may be identified between different age groups
among interviewees. An example of the change of cultural narratives – and the accompanying
metaphors – concerns the theme of education and work: Education used to be a means to an
end, and the end was to get a position. A position is a place where you stand and where you may
remain until your retreat. Today, it is a problem not to move forward, to stand still, or to be left
behind. Lifelong learning and constant development are part of a cultural narrative about growth.
Thematic analysis is important. The free narrative interview offers a fine possibility to notice
the selected subjects and issues. The occasion and the research questions obviously may color the
selection of ‘relevant’ themes, but contrary to the methodology of a semi-structured interview
the interviewer’s questions do not influence the narrator’s choice of relevant themes in a free nar-
rative interview. Most interviewees want to give relevant responses, and it is up to the interviewer
to prepare the interviewee in a way that she understands that her own experiences, viewpoints
and interpretations are central.
So which themes are presented in the narrative? Some issues may be vaguely touched upon,
others frequent, redundant and elaborated. The interpretation of the choice of themes combined
with the attention to genre mentioned above is significant. Positive or negative experiences con-
nected to various themes and a presentation of the teller/protagonist as active or passive in the
interactions are valuable indications for a thorough analysis.
Communities of practice and affiliations

Traditionally, narrative theory describes the plot as a configuration of events (e.g. Ricoeur, 1984).
During the analysis of about 120 narrative life story interviews some 15 years back researching
identity, learning and democracy (Horsdal, 2000), I realized, however, this was rarely the case in
the interviews. The narrators told their stories from the contextually situated point of view of
here and now, and during the narration they constructed a configuration of the experience of
other contexts of there and then. The contexts of there and then can be described as communities
of practice, and as identity creating affiliations. Narrators do not only tell about themselves, but
about themselves in relationships with others in certain places at certain times. The narratives
of our individual journeys through life are fundamentally embedded in communities and affil-
iations. We tell about ourselves in our family, in kindergarten, at school, with the grandparents
or with friends, in educational contexts, leisure time contexts, work contexts, new intimate rela-
tionships etc. Some affiliations are lasting, others are brief. Some communities are freely chosen,
others are not. We participate in several communities of practice both simultaneously and in a
serial order.
The recognition of this characteristic feature of the narrative life story interview had an
impact on the analytic methodology. Inspired by Lave and Wenger (1991), each community of
practice could be regarded as a learning site as well as a context for identity creating affiliations.
This view underscored the emphasis on the relationship between the members of the commu-
nity (the interactions between the narrator and the other members), the emotional impact, and
not least the development of interactions within the community over time, and the relationship
and transitions between the different communities of practice. Lave and Wenger analyze different
particular communities of practice. But in the context of a narrative life story interview, each par-
ticular community of practice and identity shaping affiliation, as well as the experience of the
trajectory throughout the various communities, is in focus.
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Marianne Horsdal
In some communities we feel that we are legitimate participants. We feel welcomed and
included. In others we may feel marginalized or even excluded. The interactions and relationship
may change over time. We can move in a centripetal direction and become more central mem-
bers, or remain in a peripheral position. Some communities of practice facilitate transitions and
inclusion into other communities while others may block or impede access to other contexts.
Repeated negative experiences in various schools or educational settings may be turned upside
down in a new context in which the narrator finds out ‘that she is not that stupid after all’. The
impact of the experiences of participation and of the relationships in various communities of
practice on the interpretations of self and experience is massive.
Careful analysis of the interactions and characterizations of each mentioned community, as
well as attention to the trajectory between them, which configures the emerging identity con-
struction, fulfills the interpretation of self and existence in the narrative.
The number of communities in which the narrator feels or felt included, welcomed, and
accepted in itself are significant, as well as the opposite. Repeated experiences of exclusion may
result in a fragile sense of identity.
An examination of the above mentioned focal points for analysis of autobiographical nar-
ratives ensures a deeper understanding of the texts. Specific analytic interests according to the
type of research in question remain to be carried out. But this is so much easier and the results
more convincing on a background of a thorough interpretation of what actually is told in the
narrative text.
Samples of autobiographical narratives

Research projects may vary from the analysis of a few case studies to the analysis of a sample of
several hundred life stories. Whether we are to interpret five or 50 narrative life story interviews,
each single interview should be thoroughly analyzed.
Naturally, patterns begin to emerge already during the phase of collecting the interviews. But
the polyphony and ambiguity within the single narrative interview should not be overlooked in
the effort to generate common patterns and clear results too hastily. On the contrary, this com-
plexity may bring about much more refined interpretations and actually generate new knowledge.
Distinct patterns do, however, emerge from the polyphony in the samples of life story narratives,
informative on reappearing cultural narratives, certain worldviews, habitual or transgressive inter-
actions, societal conditions, and lots of other patterns according to the direction of the research and
the selection of narrators. Also, differences may be remarkable. You may find differences according
to age, generation, regional belonging, social situation, and numerous other issues. And differences
also generate patterns. Obviously, the outcome of many years of research in a variety of very
different projects is difficult to summarize, but the significance of relationships and affiliations in
the communities of practice in which we participate throughout our lives is outstanding. Large
samples also show a transition during several generations from an interpretation of existence based
on collective stories of the conditions of life to an interpretation of existence full of individual
choices. The construction of young people’s narratives nevertheless confirms the significance of
affiliations in spite of the cultural narratives on individualism and autonomy.
Added value
Every single time a researcher is listening to another human being’s life story narrative, she is
invited to a joint mental time travel symbolized and represented from a point of view different
from her own. Each narrative life story enlarges our horizon, our frame of understanding, in
268
Gadamer’s sense (Gadamer, 1965). The number of life stories, with their different perspectives
in time and space, allows for a richer foundation for a negotiation of meaning, which makes the
work of the researcher so rewarding. We learn to recognize the individual pass ways through
life, and we learn to abstain from too simple generalizations. Narrative life stories enable a view
of other people beyond the narrow context of here and now due to the focus on biographical
experience in a variety of contexts in time and space.
The interviewee can also experience an added value through the interview. The transforma-
tion of spoken words into writing allows for the symbolic representation to travel in time and
space, so she can confront and negotiate the sense of the written interview in a different situation
and benefit from the possibility of reflection. One story may give birth to other stories.
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269
PART III
Political narratives
and the study of lives
Introduction
POLITICAL NARRATIVES AND
THE STUDY OF LIVES
Molly Andrews
university of east london
I would like to begin this part on political narratives and the study of lives with two stories –
fitting, perhaps, for a handbook on narrative and life history.
The first story takes place in Autumn 2014. I am in London, hosting a symposium and exhi-
bition opening which commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the opening of the Berlin
Wall – a topic which relates to my long-term research in East Germany. Three East German
dissidents have come over to London to participate in the symposium, to discuss their memories
about these historic events and their thoughts on the days, months and years which preceded and
succeeded the now famous date of November 9th, 1989. Not only in Germany, but across the
world, the media is in full swing, bursting with iconic images of the opening of the wall. It is as
if the whole world is commemorating one great big party. It is a worthy cause to celebrate, we
are reminded time and again: Democracy triumphed over dictatorship.
The morning before the symposium, I accompany one of our East German guests to British
Museum to view an exhibition called “Germany, Memories of a Nation: A 600 Year History in
Objects.” My guest is keen to attend; he is most interested to see how this history is represented
in the heart of Britain. Before actually entering the exhibition, one encounters ‘a piece of the Berlin
Wall.’ My guest is not convinced. There are many so-called ‘pieces of the wall’ and he does not
think this one is the genuine item. I am interested in his reaction. We then enter the exhibition.
The range of items which have been brought together to tell the story of ‘German memory’ is
impressive. But as we walked through the rooms, we could not help but wonder whose memory
was being represented in these walls.
There was a flag in the German colours of black, red and gold with the words “Wir sind
ein Volk” (We are one people), labeled as if it was part of the opposition movement from
the revolutionary autumn. But this was not the rallying cry of the demonstrations before
November 9th; then the chant was “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people). Where was the
other flag, the flag with a slogan of empowerment, not this one, with its political statement in
support of unification with the West? Apart from the piece of the wall, and this flag, there is
little mention of East Germany. Sitting outside on the imposing steps of the British Museum,
my friend takes a long drag on his cigarette, turns to me and delivers his synopsis of the exhi-
bition: “It is as if the 40 years of the GDR never existed.” That afternoon, in the symposium,
another East German guest comments that the focus on the widely told tale about the peaceful
revolution is that the Berlin Wall was opened, and East Germans were given their freedom.
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Molly Andrews
“It’s the other way around”, he tells the audience. “East Germans took their freedom, and
opened the Berlin Wall.”
Now we cross time and place, going back to the 1940s to the heart of New Mexico’s North-
ern Chihuahuan Desert, a place that would come to be known as Los Alamos. By 1945, when
the first atomic bomb was exploded nearby, the town’s population was about 6000 scientists,
engineers, construction workers, and their families. This second story concerns this last group,
those who accompanied their husbands and fathers to New Mexico, to create a home together
while the secret work of the Manhattan Project proceeded.1 A number of the women who lived
in Los Alamos wrote accounts of their time there, providing vivid descriptions of the close-knit
communities in which they lived. Their lives were challenging, not only because of the lack of
comfort and access to provisions (particularly compared to the lives they had left behind) but
also because of the secrecy which pervaded the work which had brought their families to this
desert, namely the making of the atom bomb. One woman describes a party that was given by
Oppenheimer a few days after the first testing of the bomb, “‘for the bomb-makers and their
wives’ where they danced and played a little” (Wolkowitz, 2004, p. 113). Wolkowitz summarises
the accounts of the women of Los Alamos:
reading most of these Los Alamos narratives now, a particularly striking aspect is their
determinedly personal and local frame of reference. . . . the making of the bombs . . . is
rarely mentioned, functioning within the narratives mainly to infuse the details of daily
life with deeper, even heroic, significance . . . the usual equation of work with public life,
with what is open to view and discussed, and private family life with what is hidden or
secret, is effectively reversed.
( Wolkowitz, 2004, p. 108)
The critique which Wolkowitz offers is a very important one, warning of the perils of privi-
leging of personal narrative while paying scant attention to the context in which those stories
exist. Doubtless the women living in Los Alamos did work hard to create a bond with those
others who also found themselves decamped to the New Mexico desert, and their descriptions
of the lengths they went to in order to create a semblance of ordinary life is in its own way
very captivating. Wolkowitz describes the “restricted focus of the narratives” in which “We
are drawn into their local compass and experience mainly the camaraderie, mutual support
and high spirits of the writers” (p. 114). But it is extraordinary to think that virtually none of
these accounts address in any meaningful way what they were doing out there. While it is the
context of the making of the bomb which set these tales apart – these are after all not ordinary
lives, though they are portrayed as such – the bomb itself, its historical implications and the
unprecedented devastation which it caused, is not brought under scrutiny. The lens through
which these accounts are seen is very partial, as stories always are. What is striking here is that
what is missing is so very immense in its reach; the stories are marked by the ‘presence of the
absence’ which pervades them.
So why have I brought these two tales together? What does the story of the opening of
the Berlin Wall have to do with tales of domestic life in Los Alamos? Both accounts relate to
moments of great historical significance, and both are framed around a tension between personal
eye-witness accounts and the larger story of the phenomenon itself. But closer inspection leads
one to come away with quite different lessons, as it were. In the story of the opening of the wall,
epitomized by the way in which it was represented at the British Museum but by no means
limited to that platform, there is a rendering of political conflict in which not only the key actors
of that battle are missing, but indeed so is the very country which was the platform for that
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Political narratives and the study of lives
confrontation. East Germany is not only no longer in existence as a country, but it is also absent
in this version of German history. It simply isn’t there – except in its demise. The ‘corrective’
offered by the visiting East German dissidents challenges the boundaries of that narrative – the
story does not start on November 9th, culminating in reunification (Wir sind ein Volk); rather it
starts much earlier, with the seeds that led to the revolution. Only with this shift can one begin to
understand why the outcome has proven to be so disappointing, even tragic, in the eyes of many
of those who played a pivotal role in opening the wall.
But if these personal tales serve as an antidote to the triumphalist narrative of the victory
of capitalism over socialism, the accounts of the Los Alamos women serve a different function,
reminding us of the severe limitations of stories which focus on the personal at the neglect of the
wider context. Bringing together these tales illuminates two aspects of the relationship between
politics and life history 1) personal narratives can be an effective tool for countering dominant
narratives; and 2) the compass for investigating a life story must not be limited to the realm of
the personal.
Indeed, the more one ponders the relationship between life history and politics, the more appar-
ent it becomes, to me at least, why a handbook which purports to be about life history and narra-
tives needs to address the realm of the political. Life history and narrative have so much to bring
to our understanding of the political; equally, personal narratives which ignore the political context
in which a life is lived are unnecessarily limited in their scope. We want the forest and the trees.
This attempt to balance the biographical with the political has been something which has
characterized my own work for the last three decades, in a range of different settings. In my book
Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change which looks at the four key sites of my research, I
write “I am convinced that there is a profound sense in which the personal is political, and the
political is personal. It is through the minutiae of daily life that human beings access the political
ripples, and tidal waves, of their times” (Andrews, 2007, p. 2). Summarizing why I was compelled
to do the research I did, I wrote:
Talking to lifetime socialists in Britain during the height of Mrs. Thatcher’s reign
as Prime Minister, or to American anti-war activists who were willing to risk their
physical safety as they protested the US military engagement in the Gulf War, or to
East Germans in the wake of losing their country, or reading the transcripts of South
Africans who had testified before the truth commission – in each of these settings,
I was motivated to examine how politicized individuals understood the tumultuous
political times in which they were living. What was the wider story which they built
around the immediate headlines of their day? Where exactly did they locate themselves
in these political narratives? . . . While the narratives are produced by individuals, those
individuals are social beings who are helping to shape history.
(Andrews, 2007, pp. 8–12)
The ebb and flow between historical forces and individual lives – the fact that this dynamic has
occupied so many for so long – does not detract from its draw for me. In The Sociological Imagi-
nation, C. Wright Mills implores his reader to:
continually work out and revise your views of the problems of history, the problems
of biography, and the problems of social structure in which biography and history
intersect. Keep your eyes open to the varieties of individuality, and to the modes of
epochal change.
(Mills, 1959, p. 225)
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Molly Andrews
Balancing the problems of biography and the problems of social structure – William Blake’s
‘seeing a world in a grain of sand’, and seeing a grain of sand in the world.
One of the things which has fascinated me over the past few decades has been the increas-
ing interest in and acceptance of stories as a particularly well-suited lens for grappling with the
complexity of political experience and meaning-making. It is important for us to remember that
things have not always been so. Indeed, in the mid-eighties, at the end of the first year of my doc-
toral research, I was told that I should abandon my attachment to the personal tales of the activists
who would participate in my research: While these stories may have been the catalyst that had
moved me to pursue the project, it would be far more significant if I would put this to the side,
and instead develop a questionnaire which could then be administered to, perhaps, 500 or more
people. In this way, my research would be far more significant; indeed, fifty times more significant
than anything which could emerge from interviews with my intended ten respondents.
For me there were several problems with this suggestion: First, where in the world would I find 500
lifetime socialists who had been politically active for fifty years or longer? Even were I to overcome
this logistical challenge, what questions would I pose? After all, it was not information that I was
after, but rather an understanding of how they saw the world, what experiences they felt had been
pivotal in the making of themselves, how they interpreted those experiences and why, and how they
viewed these experiences and key relationships in retrospect. Was this really the stuff appropriate to a
questionnaire survey? I did not think so then, and I do not think so now. It was not that the stories
were the catalyst, leading me to a different and more scientifically valid form of exploration. No, it
was the stories that I was interested in; they were front and centre, and I wanted to keep them that way.
Having considered the feedback I received, I told my Director of Studies that I would sooner
give up on my PhD than to abandon my storied-centered approach. Fortunately for me, he agreed
to keep me on. As a PhD student pursuing this research, I was given entry into the lives of extraor-
dinary people. Spending hours, days and years in their presence has been a true gift of my life;
though they have all died now, they and the conversations we had together are very much part of
who I am. They saw in me someone who wanted to listen to them, and I saw in them people who
could teach me about how to lead a meaningful life. The lasting relationships we built with one
another – created in the process of this storytelling but also enabling it – were an unintended yet
integral part of the research. From an epistemological perspective, the rewards were even greater
than I had anticipated. Reviewing their life’s commitment to working for social change from the
vantage point of half a century after their initial engagement provided them with an opportunity
to revisit not only their past actions, but indeed their perception of history and their role within
it. Of course making sense of the political world is not something which is ever complete. One’s
life changes, the world changes, and thus it is that political narratives are always dynamic, the con-
structions of the past, present and future framed by and reflected in one another.
A narrative approach to the study of politics brings with it layers of meaning which are pos-
sibly unique to this method; it demands a level of reflexivity from the researcher which can at
times be rather daunting, combined with a temporal and moral framing which refuses to stand
still. Ultimately these make possible a new kind of exploration which leads to a new kind of
understanding. The chapters which follow in this part offer a rich assortment of examples of this
narrative way of knowing politics.
Themes in this part

This part of the Handbook includes chapters which use life history and narrative as a means
for exploring the world of politics, as it is lived and as it is imagined. The interest here is not
necessarily in the articulation of an explicit political viewpoint, but rather how the narration of
276
a life or lives can reveal power dynamics which often function as the unsaid ligaments that hold
stories together.
Broadly speaking, stories – both personal and communal – are pivotal to the way in which
politics operates, both in people’s minds (i.e. how they understand politics, and their place
within and outside of the formal political sphere) as well as to how politics is practiced. As
Selbin writes:
In every culture, every society, there are stories large and small, mythic though not nec-
essarily epic, that do everyday duty and are saved for special occasions. . . Such stories
are inevitably predicated upon relatively timeless concepts and are in a profound sense
tools, told and retold. . . a form, perhaps even the primary form, or socio-political
struggle.
(Selbin, 2010, p. 46)
Thus stories are not just within the domain of the individual, but are built upon the collective
memory of a group, just as they help to create how that memory is mobilised and for what
purposes. Hannah Arendt has argued that storytelling is the bridge by which we transform that
which is private and individual into that which is public, and in this capacity, it is one of the key
components of social life (Arendt, 1958). The chapters in this part demonstrate the potential of
political narratives and the life history approach to bridge the gap between individual lives and
seismic shifts of history.
Authors contributing to this part of the handbook were requested to think about several
questions as they pertained to their own research:
• What makes some stories more tell-able than others?

• How do people come to view their personal experience in a political framework?
• How do political narratives change over time?
• Is there a relationship between narrative and agency?
• What does a narrative orientation bring to the study of political lives? What are its strengths
and what are its weaknesses as a lens for exploration?
Clearly any one individual could not focus on all of the questions I raised in such a relatively short
space, but nonetheless, the pages that follow offer a wide range of scholarship which explore in
different ways and in different contexts the relationship between political stories and political lives.
In terms of geography, the chapters relate to research conducted in Northern Ireland, India, the Car-
ibbean, Poland, Canada, Germany, the United States and Britain. Sites of research include prisons,
political parades, health clinics, extermination camps, parliament, museums and places of memori-
alization. The tools used to extract the narratives which the researchers help to create are numerous
and varied, with interviews, love letters, and popular media being but a few. Some scholars are
exploring lives which have long since ended, while others are engaged in ongoing conversations
with those who participate in their research. Nonetheless, as threads which run across and through
these locations and times, one sees time and again that although individuals articulate stories, certain
stories are far more tell-able than others, and this changes over time. Plummer and Walters write
about the dramatic changes in the past two decades in terms of “telling sexual stories”. But who is
telling what to whom? How does a heteronormative society make sense of the “new stories” which
are emerging? What has led to this change? Does the act of telling a certain kind of story augment
a sense of agency, whereby the stuff of the narrative acts as something which can potentially bind
an individual with a community of others, transforming political consciousness?
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Molly Andrews
Two chapters address situations of political violence: in Northern Ireland (Ferguson) and the
death camp at Sobibor (Leydesdorff ). How are divergent accounts of political hotspots repre-
sented in individual lives, and what are the ethical challenges involved in the narration of vio-
lence? Do personal narratives which emerge from political conflict have a particular strategic
function which is different from those told in less overtly contested spheres?
Emin Milli, dissident from Azerbaijan, writes about the power of stories in the context of
social upheaval.
How do societies start to change? By the power of words and by the power of human
stories. You get inspired by a story, and then another story, until all these ideas build up
to shape your mind and your character. I don’t believe in this ethos of heroism. I don’t
think that people just suddenly decide they are going to act; it all builds up slowly until
they have to. Most people in closed systems are actually unaware dissidents.
(Milli, 2014, p. 48)
But which stories to tell? Are some more galvanizing than others? Milli refers to the impor-
tance of finding story which can still seem interesting when compared with the dramatic tales of
our time, like living in the systems of terror and mass killing of Pol Pot. The challenge is to find
a story which is both one’s own, but which resonates with other people.
The idea of being reduced to a number resonates with many stories across the world. I
remembered myself in jail, being given a number; people in concentration camps having
numbers; systems reducing people to numbers. And so, after all this it seems we should
discuss the importance of words, and their power over numbers . . .
(Milli, 2014, p. 48)
Finding commonality, or resonance, between apparently disparate groups forms the basis of
the research reported by Nesbitt-Larking and Kinnvall, writing about the Orangemen in Canada
and Hindu nationalists in India, respectively. Despite the 7000 miles which divides them and sig-
nificant cultural differences, they nonetheless share a “loyalty to imagined communities, strongly
delineated gender roles and chosen traumas and glories” (this volume, p. 331). Here again we see
how the micro and macro aspect of political storytelling flow into one another as individuals talk
about themselves and the causes they believe in – the forces which shape and give meaning to
their lives. Rai’s longitudinal work with female Indian Members of Parliament considers not only
the verbal but also the performative aspects of political narratives. This is the only chapter which
concerns itself with the narratives of politicians, who are nonetheless “embarrassed, worried and
reluctant to speak of themselves as leaders” (this volume, p. XX).
Some of the research reported here from situations of armed conflict and genocide demon-
strates in concrete ways that the political is personal. But political stories are not, however, always
about politics in any formal sense. This part also includes stories about families, illness, romance
and museums. Phoenix’s research on serial migration of Caribbean-born adults who migrated to
the UK raises the question of how some individuals are politicized by an experience which has a
very different effect on their siblings. In a world where serial migration is an increasingly com-
mon family experience, the research offers insight into the renegotiation of fluid identities over
time. Squire’s work with HIV positive individuals demonstrates a skilled deployment of particular
narratives on the part of her project participants, which they use to mobilise different levels of the
epidemic’s politics. Tamboukou’s work with the love letters of Rosa Luxemburg to her comrade
and lover Leo Jogiches leads her to argue that passion can “intensify rather an obscure the force
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of the political in re-imagining the future” (this volume, p. XX) – thus challenging the love/
politics dyad which often frames discussions of revolution and romance. Sandino’s research with
“red curators” demonstrates the role of politics, and of politicized individuals, creating exhibitions
in the hallowed halls of national museums.
All of these chapters lead us to contemplate the complexity of how we as individuals frame
the stories of our lives, what these stories do to those who tell and those who listen, how they are
socially produced and consumed, and the role they play in establishing and sometimes destabilis-
ing relationships between people and communities. Is there such a thing, we begin to wonder, as
‘just’ a personal narrative or life story? Hannah Arendt (1958, p. 50) argues:
Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest
forces of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights
of the senses – lead to an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they
are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them
for public appearance. The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling.
Therein lies the challenge: to de-individualise the personal, and to personalise the political –
lessons from Berlin and Los Alamos.
Note
1 The account that I relate here draws primarily from the work of Carol Wolkowitz (2004), whose father,
as a young American soldier, was stationed at Oak Ridge, another of the three sites which together com-
prised the Manhattan Project. Although Oak Ridge was very different from Los Alamos (40,000 people
were employed there) there were commonalities in the way in which the personal accounts of wives and
mothers produced a ‘domestication of the bomb’ (Wolkowitz, 2004, p. 104).
References
Andrews, M. (2007) Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Milli, E. (2014) The golden cage: The story of an activist. In M. Jenson & J. Margaretta (eds.) We Shall
Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights (pp. 48–52). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Grove Press.
Selbin, E. (2010) Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power of Story. London: Zed Books Ltd.
Wolkowitz, C. (2004) ‘Papa’s Bomb’: The local and the global in women’s Manhattan project personal narra-
tives. In M. Andrews, Shelley Day Sclater, C. Squire & A. Treacher (eds.) The Uses of Narrative: Explo-
rations in Sociology, Psychology, and Cultural Studies (pp. 104–16). London: Transaction Publishers.
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21
NARRATIVE POWER,
SEXUAL STORIES AND THE
POLITICS OF STORY TELLING
Ken Plummer
university of essex
You just have to look. People are telling stories everywhere to change the world.
(Solinger, Fox and Irani. Telling stories to change the world, 2008, p. 11)
Rickie Solinger has struck on a key theme of our times: the power of the story to change the
world. So when 9/11 shocked the ‘West’, many had to struggle to make sense of so-called Muslim
cultures, which were so readily presented to us by our political leaders and media through stories
of an ‘enemy other’. Sadly, politicians and media are often not to be trusted as leaders in these mat-
ters. They frequently tell very inadequate, and sometimes malevolent, stories. I was friends with a
few Muslims, knew a little about the diversity across some fifty Muslim nations, and had visited a
few. But I really knew very little. So I embarked upon a programme of reading ‘good stories’ about
them. Gradually, listening to the stories of ‘others’ afforded me real insight into the diversity and
complexity of Muslim sexualities and gender and hopefully prevented me from making strong
and silly judgments. Lila Abu-Lughod’s powerful and deeply humanistic writings ‘against cul-
ture’ introduced me to the world of women in a Bedouin tribe showing their struggle to uphold
‘honor’ (‘agl) and ‘modesty’ (hashaam) though poetry, resisting tribal hierarchy with rebellion in
myriad quiet ways. I learnt also that there were many pious Muslim women who resisted the
victim model that had been forced upon them by the ‘West’ (Abu-Lughod, 1986, 2013). In stark
contrast, Evelyn Blackwood (2010) guided me into a very different world of Muslim women in
Indonesia: the Tombois who, as masculine females, identified as men and desired women, while
their girlfriends viewed themselves as normal women who desired men. These contradictory
practices draw upon but subvert both conventional Islamic and international notions of men
and women. Meanwhile, I learnt from Marcia Inhorn’s (2012) research on infertility amongst
Arab men that many of these men are a long way from any violent and macho stereotype and
struggle sensitively and caringly with their loving wives over problems of infertility. Here was
the ‘New Arab Man’ who was developing new forms of masculinity in the face of a changing
world. I learnt too from Momin Rahman (2014) – an ‘English Pakistani Muslim Queer’ – about
active ‘gay and lesbian’ Muslims in the ‘West’ confronting both homophobia and Islamophobia
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Narrative power, sexual stories
simultaneously: under attack from two fronts. I learnt of the struggles with modernising sex-
ualities from many Muslim voices. Working through the power of empathy, each of these books
became part of a politics of storytelling for me. The world changes in both small and large ways
through stories like these, and ultimately political change depends on good storytelling. In
this article I plan to synoptically review a few of its recent forms, developments and polemics.
Power and sexual stories, again

When I was first approached to write this article, the editor suggested that I might like to revisit
my 1995 book Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (TSS hereafter). And this is
what I will do. But I also want to use this opportunity to go beyond that now rather old book and
raise some critical issues for contemporary research. TSS tried to do a number of things. It tried to
broaden out the analyses of stories to move well beyond texts to examine the origins and impacts
of storytelling processes – a sociology of stories (and the importance of what others have subsequently
called a ‘narrative reality’; Gubrium & Holstein, 2009). It claimed that stories were bound up with
contingency and change – all stories have their time. It examined more specifically three case stud-
ies – ‘gay’ coming out, ‘rape’ survivors and ‘abuse’ therapy – as instances of generic social processes. It
built a model of how stories emerge through political actions – how they moved through a flow
of storytelling. And it argued for a new form of citizenship and rights centered around the personal
– intimate citizenship. The book highlighted power from the outset, setting out its own symbolic
interactionist theory of power,1 and suggesting some major questions that needed asking:
What kinds of narratives work to empower people and which degrade, control and
dominate? What strategies enable stories to be told, how are spaces created for them,
and how are voices silenced? How do stories feed into the wider networks of routine
power? Who has access to stories? Where is the reader located in the political spectrum?
What cultural and economic resources – literacy, knowledge, money, time, space – are
needed to consume a story? How might various strategies of talk be implicated in this
story telling? How do stories sit with the wider frameworks of power?
(Plummer, 1995, pp. 29–31)
Just how a story is crafted and how it shapes the world politically, ethically and culturally depends
on many changing events, resting on a fivefold structure of when it is being told (time), where is
it being told (place and space), who is being told (audience), why it is being told (motivation), and
what is being told (contents). Different stories will be told in different times and places to differ-
ing audiences with different motivations and impacts. It helps to distinguish here between stories
and narratives. While stories direct us to what is being told, narratives tell us how stories are told.
Narrative theory is about the arts, philosophies and science of telling: the process and procedures
through which our stories are accomplished. But running through all this is the underlying and
unmistakeable force of power: narrative power.
A few conceptual matters are in order here. Power itself is a muddled area of enquiry.2 At
the broadest level, the key ideas in this article are narrative power and narrative empathy. Narrative
power speaks to the capacities of both (a) texts and (b) story tellers and listeners to influence, control
or regulate the voices and stories of self and others. The theory of narrative power asks how does power –
domination, subordination, authority and legitimacy, flourishing and autonomy – work its way through sto-
ries? And how do different narratives fit with different kinds of political systems? Several key ideas link to
this: macro-narratives and micro-narratives alongside both narrative processes and structures of narration.
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Ken Plummer
Macro-narratives link to wider political systems like totalitarianism (bringing the closure of all
stories?), authoritarianism (bringing the regulation of all stories?), or democratic (bringing the
opening of stories within certain limits and boundaries?), and ultimately to cosmopolitan socie-
ties (where we find narratives freely comingle and where we might find the most varied exchange
of multiple stories?). Micro-narratives, by contrast, descend from the heavens and get down to earth
and are grounded in local processes – asking questions about the processes through which stories
emerge – the situations, people and subjectivities that make it happen. Narrative processes refer to
a wide array of social actions that make stories and narratives work. Structures of narration speak
to the historical and cultural structural contexts in which these processes are embedded. With
these concepts in mind, storytelling becomes a creative political and symbolic strategy to bridge the macro
and micro, the process and the structures: it becomes a key human active way of transforming how we grasp,
connect to and change the world.
A closely linked idea is that of the Politics of Narrative Empathy. As I see it, the beating heart of
the politics of storytelling is empathy – the ability to ‘climb into the skin’ of another person and
see the world from their point of view as deeply as we can. And this also takes us to the heart of
what makes us human. Listening to the stories of others and engaging in dialogues with them
is both a key indicator of our humanity and a key strategy of this politics. It means an ingrained
habit of grasping and appreciating the differences of others (including enemies). Much has been
said about empathy,3 and it straddles many disciplines and approaches. It is the foundation of
social care, part of a ‘circuit’ of human cruelty and kindness, connected to a deliberative demo-
cratic reasoning, and linked to a developmental theory for social justice. In their bestselling block-
busters The Empathic Civilization (2009) and The Better Angels of our Nature (2012), Jeremy Rifkin
and Steven Pinker claim boldly that as societies move forward, they accelerate their empathic
potentials. And empathy comes with two close companions: dialogue and compassion. Together
they help in our humanization and civilizing. Stories are the key sources of this empathy as we
get glimpses of other worlds and start trying to live with them in various ways. The same is true,
of course, of our sexual lives: ‘empathic sexualities’ suggests that we grasp something of the sexual
life of those we engage with, we can see the sexual world from ‘within their skin’. Again this
helps humanize our sexualities. Stories and empathy help us to live with sexual variety: they help
us see a utopian vision of cosmopolitan sexualities.4
These ideas are the backdrop of what follows.
Revisiting sexual stories

TSS was written mainly back in the hopefulness of 1989 and the early 1990s, although it actually
had a longer gestation, back to the mid 1970s. The world has since become a lot darker. This
was all long before 9/11, the new wars and the rise of the new religious discourses of hate; it was
long before the 2008 global economic crisis and breakdown, or neo liberal economies. (It was
even before the widespread development of digital communications in everyday life; ‘multicul-
turalism’, and the widespread awareness of globalization.) The book was only published in 1995,
just twenty years ago – but that most surely was another century: even twenty years becomes a
very long time in speedy modernity. One generation, possibly two, have moved on. In this short
article I do not wish to look backwards but to briefly suggest instead a number of emergent
themes that have developed since then, all of which are important for the analysis of sexual stories
in the coming generation, and all of which highlight in various ways the importance of narrative
power. They suggest the need for both a politics of narrative flows and a politics of narrative structures.
This is much to cover in a short space and I see this article as simply suggestive and indicative of
directions ahead.
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Politics and narrative flows: The life story of stories

My interest in power in TSS is revealed most clearly in the fairly straightforward process model of
storytelling – ‘storytelling in the stream of power’ (Plummer, 1995, p. 26). The book developed a
political model of the contingencies of constructing stories which can be briefly summarised as:
• Imagining – visualizing – empathizing;

• Articulating – vocalizing – announcing;
• Inventing identities – becoming storytellers;
• Creating social worlds / communities of support;
• Creating a culture of public problems.
This is a ‘journey narrative’ – from narrative silence through story creation to public narrative. It
is this move from ‘inner worlds’ (of falteringly and inchoately telling stories to the self privately)
to an increasingly public one where the circle of discourse becomes wider that I think is most
important. As I say: ‘In the earliest moments, the story can hardly be imagined; it may be told pri-
vately as a tale to oneself. Later it gets told to a few people – a lover, a friend, a psychiatrist. Slowly
it can move out into a public domain where it comes to take on a life of its own. It becomes part
of a public discourse’ (Plummer, 1995, p. 126). This was perhaps also the concern that the great
Hannah Arendt (1958/1998) had when she suggested that stories are our key way for moving
from the subjective to the public, from the personal world to the political one.
In recent years I have been modifying this in a number of ways. Not seeing them as necessarily
linear – the world is rarely that orderly – I have added a few more critical ‘moments’ suggesting
the life story of stories, and the changing fates of our story makings. I am talking about the birth,
institutionalization, re-negotiation and ultimate entropy of stories. And in each moment we ask
questions about the role of narrative power and narrative empathy being transformed: how the
capacity to speak and develop dialogues and understanding are constantly transformed, alongside
how empathy is being developed. Put schematically, I now suggest the following ‘moments’ need
scrutiny:
1 Narrative Void: Narrative Absence, Narrative Silence and Putative Narratives: This starts with the
importance of the story not told. But this area, of all areas, is the least researched or under-
stood. We are trying to grasp a story before it becomes a story! This is the shadow ghost land
of ‘no stories’, an ‘uncertain, shadowy kind of existence’ that Arendt talks about (1958/1998,
p. 50). Here are murmurings and ambiguities floundering to be made sense of. In the sexual
world such muddles can be enormous – a widespread dimly articulated world of sexual
fantasy, passion, love and hate – that is rarely understood at all. And there are also forms of
stories we have hardly begun to speak about. Much of the poor world lives with what I have
elsewhere called pauperised sexualities, unhygienic sexualities, emaciated sexualities, home-
less sexualities, exiled and dispossessed sexualities (Plummer, 2005, 2015a). There are almost
no stories told about such matters yet surely there is much to say for a third of the world’s
population? This is a curious world, then, of untold stories that shadow us, so to speak. We
can’t find the words; maybe we can’t even think the experience. There is little empathy and
a lack of power in any of this to help the stories form. Indeed the power of other peoples’
power may prevent new imaginings. Here are powerless ‘putative’ stories, ‘waiting in the
wings’.
2 Narrative Birth: Narrative Creativity, Narrative Imagining and Narrative Visualizing: This is the
moment of birth: of natality, creativity, imagination, the unique moment of conception.
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Ken Plummer
How does an inchoate ‘putative’ story get a start in the head? How is something shaped from
an emotion, an embodiment, an act, an event, a fantasy turned into a unique, singular, per-
sonal subjectivity. This is the fascinating untold story of the narrative imagination in creating
stories, of how our unique differences start to get voiced. These so often are dependent upon
chance factors – contingencies. It suggests the question of how random moments of life lead
towards or away from self-empowerment: a self-power or self-willing that critically brings
them into being, or fails to. This moment of the ‘birth’ of new stories is much unstudied.
3 Narrative Voice: Narrative Articulating: This brings the first public utterances, though maybe
just to the self. It is the moment of first vocalizing. How does power shape these first utter-
ances and announcements? How does the story start to move into a web of relationships
and begin an articulated life of its own? Are there indeed relational worlds it can move into?
These days we can find a great deal of these opening stumblings on the Internet; and this is
transforming the process as it can enter new public arenas very speedily.
A gradual sense of empowerment or powerlessness is central to the movement through
all these three opening moments. We are asking questions about how people find their own
stories.
4 Narrative Identity: This brings the moment when the stories people tell become part of their
lives: fragile momentary contingencies have been transformed into more stable organising
essences. The stories become the person. When people become the holders of their own
stories, they often start to invent their identities around them and this becomes part of their
own narrative world and order.
5 Narrative Mobilization and Community Making. This is probably the most researched of all
the moments so far. People come to meet people who want to tell and share similar stories –
creating new social worlds, communities of support and, for many, new social movements.
The story becomes overtly and explicitly political. Many groups across the world in com-
munity groups, religious groups, welfare groups and social movements of all kinds tell stories
of political mobilization. Some of these deal with more conservative movements: there are
many pro-family, anti-feminist, anti-gay and right-wing movements here too. And these sto-
ries from all political directions have helped to fashion political identities, construct political
campaigns, foster imagined – even utopian- communities of past and future: to assemble
discourses of the ‘others’, and write the literature of human rights. We can see it in South
Africa, the Berlin Wall and Northern Ireland etc. where stories directly feature in bringing
about change. (Much research has been done on this. See, as examples, Andrews, 2007;
Davis, 2002; Jackson, 2002; Poletta, 2006; Schaffer & Sidonie, 2004; Selbin, 2010; Solinger
et al., 2008; Tilly, 2002.)
6 Public Narratives/ Private Narratives: This speaks to the ways stories enter public arenas –
governmental, media, digital – creating a culture of public problems. ‘Stories of political
change’ are now to be found in ‘political spectacles’ everywhere. They can be found in news
stories; in commissions, tribunals and government reports; in personal testimony and celeb-
rity stories; in historical and anthropological case studies; in documentary film and photo;
in journalistic reportage, interviews, blog activism; and indeed in much fiction writing, film
production, music making, poetic vision and art across the world: all those media which tell
us daily of a failing world we need to change.
7 Narrative Hegemony and Routinization: This speaks to the ways in which stories become
repetitive, stable and habitualised. They could be called ‘hegemonic’ in the sense that many
people now come to accept the key story lines unchallenged. (They could be connected to
Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus: we might talk of the habitus of stories.) In the simplest terms,
these are often the stories that become our habits and stereotypes: they feel comfortable and
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unchallenging, they become our routines. In their more sophisticated and complex forms
they can be identified as ‘genres’ or basic forms.
8 Narrative Negotiation: This suggests while many routine public stories – of child sexual abuse,
of honour crimes, of AIDS, of sex trafficking and so forth – circulate widely in the public
sphere and close down debate and restrict vision, others start to appear which resist and
modify this. Mainstream orthodox stories are renegotiated. Since the publication of TSS,
there has been a significant new writing about the development of counter narratives and
resistance narratives (e.g. Bamberg & Molly, 2004; Nelson, 2001; Woodiwiss, 2009).
9 Narrative Entropy and Death: And this is the moment – maybe the land- where the old stories
go to die? This is hardly ever discussed. We can ask, for example, where all the old ‘Western
stories’ of witchcraft hysteria went? Or what happened to the tales of ‘masturbation insanity’
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Or, more recently, the storied panics over unwed
mothers and premarital sex of the 1950s? How does narrative power shape the ending of
a story?
Politics and the structures of narration:

Resisting hegemonic narratives
So stories have lives and the question becomes: How are people empowered (and disempowered)
in telling their stories at different moments of this narrative flow? The ‘narrative flow’ model out-
lined above is valuable in showing how people gain strength from a collective process of working
with others and turning private issues into public and political ones. But its weakness is it that is
lacks a sense of the wider, historical structures of power and inequality in which this takes places.
We need to supplement accounts of these basic moments of the narrative flow and process with
a focus on the wider structures of narration in which we find power at work. TSS largely focused
on a wider gender structure; but the situation is more complex than this.
A politics of narrative inequality

At the outset this means recognition of the inequalities of the world, which reflect so deeply in
the organising and telling of stories. At the heart of my concerns is the idea that most people in the
world simply do not have a voice that is heard. Of course they tell stories all the time, but bigger more
powerful stories swamp them out. There is a profound inequality of storytelling. This should come
as no surprise: there is now a substantial documentation of the fact that our world is massively
unequal (Piketty, 2014; Therborn, 2013). The most extreme division across the globe is between
the rich 1% and the remaining 99% poor (Dorling, 2014). One study in 2014 showed that ‘the
richest 1% of people in the world owned 48% of global wealth’, and predicted that by 2016 ‘the
top 1% will have more wealth than the remaining 99% of people’ (Oxfam, 2015). This clearly
has major consequences both for narrative tellings – and sexual lives. While the rich dominate
in wealth, their stories may also dominate; and meanwhile a very large group of the destitute,
the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised – maybe the poorest 20 per cent of the world’s people –
struggle to survive, living damaged lives as refugees, the global poor, the ‘socially dead’. Their lives
fall in the cracks or are pushed beyond society, beyond care, beyond rights, beyond humanity.
Recent work on intersectionality suggests how structures of inequality (and oppression) are
organized through vectors of not just economic class but also ethnicity, age, disability, religion,
state, sexuality – as well as gender (e.g. Yuval-Davis, 2011). Stories are always bound up with
these wider structures of social division, social inequality and social power. There is an important
academic industry that studies both power and inequalities, but so far these big questions have
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only thinly been explored in narrative theory. We need to start asking questions about narrative
inclusion and narrative exclusion, narrative elites and narrative privilege, narrative underclasses
and the narrative dispossessed as we question issues of narrative resources and narrative justice. As we
become more and more sensitive to economic and intersectional inequalities, we will be able to
develop a deeper understanding of narrative inequalities. (And this in turn may help us to better
understand how hegemony works.)
A politics of digital narratives

Another key context for the story telling flow is that of the ‘new technologies’. In 1995, believe
it or not, ideas about digitalization were only just coming on to the agenda. This was a time
when I was still trying to persuade my more conservative colleagues that e-mail was here to stay
and the mobile phone would soon be in wide use! Nowadays, digitalisation and globalisation
have set significant new agendas for thinking about stories – and this includes sexual stories. For
at the heart of the new global worlds of storytelling now lies electronic connectivity. The global
convergence of info-technologies has brought a multiplicity of new sexual worlds of storytelling
being transformed through computers (cybersex), video (camsex), phones (phone sex), computer
games (gamesex), mobile phones (‘sexting’) and social networks (sexual networking). Taken together,
they signpost multiple new intimate relationships and sex practices that simply did not exist
before the late twentieth century. And they potentially bring complex new global stories of digital
sex, digital dating, digital queer, digital porn, digital stalking, digital bullying, digital grooming, digital rape,
digital victim, digital cottage, digital carnality.
And, in a major way, the new technologies also bring a key shift in narrative power. For
around the world, sites such as Avaaz, All Out, Amnesty International and many others are cre-
ating instant global responses to key issues of sexual politics as a new ‘networked advocacy’ of
horizontal, leaderless, ‘swarms’ mobilize on key issues (Castells, 2012; Gerbaudo, 2012). Nearly
always they do this through telling a story. Sexual stories of injustice and cruelty can flash now
round the world instantaneously: in Russia (the Pussy Riots; and All Out); in Nigeria (Jail the
Gays Bill); in Uganda (The hate laws); and in Delhi (Gang Rape) (Plummer, 2015a). New political
opportunity structures for women’s activism and queer change are rapidly in the making. New
political worlds of digital activism are becoming prominent.
Of course, in some countries, there are major Internet restrictions that make global commu-
nications less easy (e.g., Iran, China, Syria, and Uzbekistan). But in others, such as much of South
East Asia and parts of Africa, this changing communication also opens more and more avenues
to changing sexual stories and indeed rights activism.
A politics of world narratives

Central to this is globalization. TSS was published at the start of the widespread concern with
globalization, but it turns out I did not really incorporate its ideas. On rereading the book, I was
amazed to find I had little say about it for I was certainly aware of the significance of the global by
then (Plummer, 1992) and it has become a major preoccupation of my more recent work (Plum-
mer, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2015a, 2015b). But it really does not figure very much in TSS. Still, my
examples and debates then were overwhelmingly based on examples from the US and the UK.
Times have changed; and one of the central contexts in which stories have to be placed now
is surely ‘the world’ with its links between the global, the ‘glocal’ and ultimately the hybrid forms
that this takes (Robertson, 1992). Sexual stories now dwell in a world of globally mediated sex-
ualities and digital sexualities alongside an international circulation of new forms of erotica and
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pornography and new forms of regulation. We now have stories of migrating sexualities, tourist
sexualities, transnational friendships, long-distance relationships – ‘distant love’, global marriage,
gay global parties (the celebrated ‘white parties’), ‘cross-border marriage’, global sex commodi-
fication markets, international sex work, sex trafficking, mail-order brides, international markets
of pornography and the like. And as the multibillion global AIDS industry spreads across the
world, it develops new languages, laws, treatments and education – and, of course, more stories.
Ultimately, a new world of global sex politics narratives has emerged. Sexual stories are migrating,
transforming and moving across the world, creating the possibility for dialogues across the Dias-
poras of North and South (see Plummer, 2015a, Ch 2).
Part of this has seen the development of global moral panics around sexuality in which public
stories always play a critical role. In India, for example, the story of Jyoti Singh and the ‘Delhi
Bus Gang Rape’ led to an enormous global and local outcry, and to the One Billion Rising
campaign (Ensler, 2013). In many Muslim countries moral panics are deeply connected to ‘the
honour code’, highlighting the honour of being a man and a woman. In Africa such panics have
direct links to the Christian Right in the USA. In Uganda in 2011, the story of David Kato
(born 1964, murdered January 2011) became emblematic of Africa’s struggles over gay rights.
In 2009 the South African athlete Caster Semenya won the women’s 800 metre race at the 2009
International Association of Athletics World Championship in Berlin and was given ‘the gender
test’, raising the global issue of what it means to be a man or a woman. And in 2012, the story
of Malala Yousafazi (2014), who, most famously of all, was shot in the head in for campaigning
in Pakistan for women’s education at the age of 15, became a best seller, and brought the plight
of girls and education to millions. Moral panics, it seems, are going global. These, and many
others, have been raised as global stories to bring issues of sexuality and gender to the public
global arena.
A caution is needed. Such stories can now often be heard in Western media and whilst they
can be seen to bring prominent gender and sexual issues to global attention (like sexual violence,
homophobia, ‘sexual and gender rights’ and the situation of women), they do also raise political
issues reminiscent of the postcolonial debates of the 1980s: the ‘West’ is once again asserting its
moral superiority over the rest of the world. These stories raise new problems of misappropria-
tion as Western cultures use these stories for their own ends, often to stigmatise other religions,
groups and cultures. A range of commentators have made clear how much of this story writing
can infantilise Muslim women, turn them into victims in need of being rescued, and seek to
impose a tyranny of ‘Western rights’ that are not appropriate to different cultures (see, for exam-
ple, Abu-Lughod, 2013; Agustín, 2007; Doezema, 2010; Massad, 2002).
More positively, what can come ultimately of all this is a growing sensitivity to the complex-
ity of sexual cultures and their stories across the world. Sylvia Tamale’s African Sexualities, for
example, provides African voices that ‘seriously challenge Eurocentric approaches to African
sexualities’ (Tamale, 2011). With essays coming from sixteen of Africa’s fifty-four countries,
the book shows different sexualities speaking from within these diverse cultures and displaying
a new African scholarship that ‘defies categorization.’ Here we hear stories of polygamy rather
than monogamy; the widespread acceptance of intergenerational sexualities, and the omnipres-
ence of HIV in all lives but especially the young and women. Similar significant volumes have
also emerged that look at Latin America, Muslim Cultures, East Asia, Thailand and ‘The Global
South’.5 There is a growing abundance of sexual stories being told from within a wide range of
world sexual cultures.
And as more and more stories of human sexualities flow from places far removed from the
previous Western hegemony so both Western assumptions about gender, family, identity and
sexuality, and local ‘own’ cultures are challenged. The potential for political change grows.
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A politics of narrative states

Out of all this, a new area of storytelling analysis and politics is emerging (one only in its infancy),
that is starting to ask questions about the ways in which stories (including sexual stories) are
organized differently under different political systems. How do opportunities to tell stories differ across
politico-economic state formations? Stories are clearly being told in all cultures and in all political
systems throughout history and at all times: the human animal is the story telling animal. People
never stop telling their tales. But most surely, too, they are told in different ways under different
systems of power. We really know very little about this (cf. Jackson, 2002; Weiss & Bosia, 2013).
Let me sketch a few preliminary, basic and sensitising ideas here.
If we start with the systems of totalitarianism and authoritarianism, it is apparent that the
formal opportunities to tell stories become severely restricted. This means that much of what I
have discussed above as a flow of stories will surely be curtailed: public speech about many things
is prohibited, political mobilization is limited and many stories are not told. So public stories are
likely to be limited and narrow. But this will not stop stories developing – they will just be driven
underground and said more cautiously and with more pain. A world of subterranean narratives, of
creating alternative yet stigmatised and secretive stories may become abundant. Such worlds are
hard to research and grasp. The public telling of sexual stories in such societies will be limited.
By contrast, democratic systems may well cultivate multiple opportunities for storytelling.
There are wide ranging differences across world democracies and democratic processes. Yet
democracy, in itself, never guarantees a positive climate: many terrible things have happened
under democracies. Still, in these systems stories (including sexual stories) might get shaped by
ideas of ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’. Is it the case that more ‘sexual stories’ can indeed be told in dem-
ocratic states? On the surface this would seem likely and can be illustrated by looking at those
countries where diverse stories of rights and freedom have proliferated.
A third cluster of stories can be seen as transitional societies where former authoritarian states
have subsequently come to face an anomic upheaval with a search for a new order: a major
disruption has happened with visions of a better future. The strong case of this has been story-
telling in South Africa, where the breakdown of the discriminatory and anti-apartheid situation
has led to the replacement with an explosion of new story tellings alongside a new progressive
agenda of human rights, which includes gay rights. Likewise the fall of Franco in Spain, Galtieri
in Argentina and others elsewhere created opportunities for new, more democratic, story telling.
New sexual stories have indeed proliferated in these countries, even as they change and become
re-contested.
Another cluster of social orders might be called broken societies: societies that are in obvious
trouble and where opportunities for story telling are likely to be broken too. Often called ‘failed
states’, they experience chronic breakdown through genocide, civil war and strife, extreme pov-
erty and famine or natural disasters. These extreme situations, marked by trauma and damage,
must give rise to a different narrative shape. People often are traumatised and forced to live with
a deep sense of loss and wasted life, in fear and pain. These are usually countries engaged in
major conflicts (e.g. Syria, Colombia, Afghanistan); those that are frequently named ‘failed states’
(e.g. Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo); and those who have suffered
recent major ‘natural disasters’ (e.g. Haiti and now the Philippines). It includes large numbers of
people who become refugees and dislocated. Such damage may be short term or long term, but
it is clear that such nations currently provide a very different opportunity structure for story-
tellings. How can stories of all this be told? Even as many tales are told on the ground, they
have little impact on a public sphere. There may be few opportunities here for telling a wide
range of sexual stories.
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There are many other patterns. There are colonized societies. Here stories are shaped by histories
of subordination and repression by a former dominant state. In the long historical span, there
are very few countries this does not exclude! Here storytelling often centres on confronting the
traumas left by former dominating, colonising nations. Indeed, just as post-colonial nationalisms
are often defined in response to their former colonization, so colonised stories are shaped, often
traumatically, by these invasions of culture. And, as a final example, there are also societies where
religious fundamentalism has taken hold: These are counties where religious story telling becomes
the absolute story: others cannot be readily told. Often these are theocracies where absolutist
religious affiliations have taken hold, shape the stages of a life and provide limited stories. In
countries where fundamentalisms thrive – whether Muslim, Christian or whatever – crusades
against both women’s rights and gay rights and their storytellings are usually to be found. (A map
of the world shows these parts quite clearly: some are often highlighted as MENA, The Middle
Eastern and North African Region (cf ILGA, 2013 pp. 12–20); as well much of Central Africa
where often evangelicals from the USA are at work.) These are regions where political opportu-
nities for sexual story tellings are severely restricted.
The politics of narrative tactics and strategies: Intimate

citizenship, cosmopolitan sexualities and narratives of hope
This chapter has briefly raised some sensitising concepts and tools for thinking about narrative
power. I’d like to end with a sense of how this kind of analysis can work practically in politics.
Practically, we can think in terms of long-term narrative strategies and short-term narrative tac-
tics. In TSS, for example, I closed with a long-term political strategy of intimate citizenship; and in
a more recent study I speak of a political strategy of cosmopolitan sexualities (Plummer, 2015a). The
former focused on ways to bring about change to enhance the recognition of people’s rights and
responsibilities in the intimate and sexual sphere of life as the world rapidly changes. The latter
suggests ways of enhancing the ability of people to live with diversities of all kinds, but especially
sexual diversity. The arguments are complicated but in both cases I ended up with arguing for the
importance of grounded storytelling and narrative dialogue as critical political practices. The tactics
of this politics are hence the tools of storytelling: they are the quite profound shapers of how
we think and move politically. Narrative work is important because it is imbued with politics
through and through. We have long known that we need to be careful about the stories we tell:
for they most surely have consequences. They are the tools for changing hearts and minds. And
politics is partially about the management of these stories.
The iconoclastic Hannah Arendt once argued that ‘nobody is ever the same as anyone else
who ever lived, lives or will live’ (Arendt, 1958/1998, pp. 7–8) and out of this sense of each per-
son’s uniqueness, difference and ultimately vulnerability, she claimed that ‘politics rests on the fact
of human plurality’. While each personal narrative is unique and has to be recognized as such
(they challenge any strong generalisations), we can also build collective and public narratives to
be shared and which can exist independently. ‘Good’ governance is charged with being sensitive
to the unique story at the same time as it creates and oversees these public narratives that enable
citizens to have flourishing and better lives. They provide us with both a sense of our pasts and
our futures. Often, though, as we have seen, they are driven by inequalities. Most governance, of
course, is not ‘good’.
All this ultimately might just suggest a new vision of grounded ‘Real Utopias’ and a Politics
of Narrative Hope (cf Bloch, 1986; Levitas, 2014; Plummer, 2015a; Wright, 2010). These are very
dark political times but it is possible to sense a new world of global sexual stories that may be in
the making as new social movements tell stories that help shape new politics. I can sense in some
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of this storytelling the formation of a common humanity, a world aiming to give people their
dignity. It is a world in which stories help us to imagine better worlds where care and kindness,
dignity and rights, human wellbeing and social justice for all lie at the heart of our storytelling.
This can indeed be found in the global rights movement, the global education movement, the
global interfaith movement, the global music movement and across many other social movement
worlds where we can hear stories of everyday grounded utopian hope. At the highest level it
may even now be possible to speak of the reaching out for a common human global ethics on
which many have already started to agree. The politics of storytelling is ultimately charged with
producing better stories told in better ways for a better world for all.
Notes
1 The interactionist theory of power looks at symbols, contingency, emergence, process, interaction and
others. It sees the importance of the self in power and powerlessness. And it grounds politics in ‘social
worlds’, politics as arena and social world making – one social world is that state and its negotiation into
orders. See TSS, 1995, pages 26–31, on the ‘stream of power’. I remain a symbolic interactionist; but this
has become extended into a wider critical humanism (see Plummer, 2013).
2 Yet the very the nature of power itself is always contested. There is an extraordinary wide array of debates
about the nature of power. Keith Dowding’s Encyclopedia of Power (2011) provides for a very suggestive
series of accounts from many angles in a wide array of entries. Here I will take power to be empirical (we
can observe and study it), ontological (it speaks to matters of humanity such as our vulnerability, plurality
and differences) and normative (it prescribes ways of living). The ontological approach asks definitional,
conceptual and clarificatory questions about power. The empirical approach examines evidence on power
at work in governments, in polling booths, in social movements, in stories. And the normative asks about
which systems of power work better (often advocating a politics – green, feminist, conservative, radical,
queer, humanist). In this article I combine all three. We can add many other approaches (e.g., geographies
of power, histories of power, and the pragmatics or practicalities of power).
3 The term ‘empathy’ itself is a contested little mongrel word that does not seem to enter the English lan-
guage till the early twentieth century (when it was translated from the German “Einfuehlung”). But the
term sympathy, which is closely linked, has a longer life. We can find it being notably developed in the
Scottish Enlightenment (circa 1750) and given pride of place by both David Hume in A Treatise of Human
Nature (1739) and Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) in their theories of the moral senti-
ments. A century or so later this idea entered the languages of North American philosophy in the work
of the early pragmatists but especially the sociologist, Charles Horton Cooley, who highlighted the ways
in which we always ‘dwell in the minds of others without knowing it’. His compatriot in ideas, George
Herbert Mead, is often seen as a key turning point in the history of this idea. He spoke of the necessity
of the social self, of role taking and the capacity for ‘taking on the attitude of the other’. In Mind, Self and
Society, he states: ‘The individual experiences himself as such, not directly, but only indirectly, from the
particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group.’ George Herbert Mead too
was a dedicated internationalist, and he saw that over the past few centuries, the modern world had been
moving more and more towards an awareness of an international ‘other’.
4 I draw a little in this article from my book Cosmopolitan Sexualities, where a much fuller argument is
developed. See Plummer (2015a).
5 See, for example, the discussions in McLelland and Mackie (2014); Wieringa and Sívori (2013); and
Duangwises and Jackson (2013). All in their own ways act as landmark books, bringing together new
authors from different parts of the world to demonstrate the complexity of world global sexual story
telling.
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22
IMMUTABILITY BLUES
Stories of queer identity in an age of tolerance

northeastern university
Let’s begin with the obvious: it is indeed difficult for those of us who came of age in a world
of presumed and unremarked homophobia to imagine the world we live in now.1 The changes
have been well-documented: in the media world where Orange is the New Black reigns and queers
increasingly pop up in everyday dramas and award-winning comedies; in the political world
where more gays and lesbians than ever are in local and national office and anti-discrimination
laws are de rigueur for the Fortune 500 and (some) municipalities; in our intimate world where
earnest heterosexuals declare their support for gay rights and their fondness for their gay friends,
neighbors, family members. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ has been repealed and marriage equality
seems to have won the day, prompting more than one blogger to note that ‘supporting gay mar-
riage is fashionable.’2
I could go on. But that story is well told. A familiar narrative of inevitable progress, it wraps us
in a warm blanket of American exceptionalism. Indeed, it also allows those of the ‘liberal and tol-
erant’ West to displace homophobia onto others, whether Russian nationalists eager to demonize
queers in a consolidation of a religious plutocracy or African politicians who use draconian anti-
gay laws as a supposed bulwark against imperialist assimilation. It should be noted, of course, that
these ‘outside’ homophobias are often funded and supported by home-grown American religious
zealots who have moved on to more fertile pastures as explicit American homophobia becomes
less tenacious a force.
But US pundits and pollsters declare that, with more unanimity than typical in political prog-
nostications, the end of homophobia is just around the corner.3 Breathless tales of the triumph of
tolerance and self-satisfied encomiums on our ‘post-gay’ new world dominate US national dis-
course, with dissenting voices only to be found on the wary queer left and the furious Christian
right. For most, though, marriage + military inclusion + a few queers on TV = rainbow nirvana.
Like most progress narratives and happy endings, this story has more than a few holes. In the
midst of all this back patting, queers still regularly get bashed, queer youth are disproportion-
ately homeless and suicidal, and few avoid the harsh sting of everyday bigotry. Queers of color
garner little benefit from the marriage mania and trans-identities remain a site of violence and
ridicule, or leering fascination. Still, US activists are unable to pass a federal employment non-
discrimination act. Still, an openly gay athlete or a newly out minor celebrity is cause for over-
wrought news frenzy. Sometimes a trickle seems like a veritable downpour when you’ve been
in the desert so long: even the much-ballyhooed arena of popular culture remains largely a sea
293
of tokenized add-ons, bitchy gay best friends, and assimilated white dudes. Anti-gay efforts may
have been blunted, but the sharp knives of homophobia are seen in recent efforts in several US
states to pass draconian measures in the name of religious freedom, measures that would allow, for
example, religious exemptions for businesses that prefer NOT to serve gay and lesbian clientele.
What’s the matter with tolerance?

This progress narrative therefore depends on a very gaudy pair of rose-colored glasses, whereby
continuing discrimination and inequity are either ignored or seen as remnants of a past we are
about to put behind us. Now, this is not to say that there haven’t been real and substantive changes
that have had lasting effects on the everyday lives of many queers. To simply dismiss these shifts
as evanescent or as window dressing is to ignore the hard-won victories of the gay movement.
But the progress narrative not only overstates the case for substantive social transformation;
worse yet, the triumphalist story is tethered to tolerance as both the means and the end of gay
liberation. Now, what individual doesn’t want to be seen as tolerant? It heralds openness to
difference and a generally broad-minded disposition. Indeed, one of the primary definitions of
‘tolerance’ signifies sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting
with one’s own. But it is a word and a practice with a more complicated history and with real
limitations. The late Middle English origins of the word indicate the ability to bear pain and
hardship. In fact, some of the first uses of the word can be found in medieval pharmacology and
toxicology, dealing with how much poison a body can ‘tolerate’ before it succumbs to a foreign,
poisonous substance.
In more contemporary times, we speak of a tolerance to something as the capacity to endure
continued subjection to it (a plant, a drug, a minority group) without adverse reactions. We speak
of people who have a high tolerance for pain or worry about a generation developing a tolerance
for a certain type of antibiotic because of overuse. In more scientific usages, it refers to the allow-
able amount of variation of a specified quantity – the amount ‘let in’ before the thing itself alters
so fundamentally that it becomes something else and the experiment fails. So tolerance almost
always implies or assumes something negative or undesired or even a variation contained and
circumscribed.
It doesn’t make sense to say that we tolerate something unless we think that it’s wrong in some
way. To say you ‘tolerate’ homosexuality is to imply that homosexuality is bad or immoral or even
just benignly icky, like that exotic food you just can’t bring yourself to try. You are willing to put
up with (to tolerate) this nastiness, but the toleration proves the thing (the person, the sexuality,
the food) to be irredeemably nasty to begin with. But here’s the rub: if there is nothing prob-
lematic about something (say, homosexuality), then there is really nothing to ‘tolerate.’ We don’t
speak of tolerating great sex or a good book or a sunshine-filled day. We do, however, take pains
to let others know how brave we are when we tolerate the discomfort of a bad back or a nasty
cold. We tolerate the agony of a frustratingly banal movie that our partner insisted on watching
and are thought the better for it. We tolerate, in other words, that which we would rather avoid.
Tolerance is not an embrace but a resigned shrug or that air kiss of faux familiarity that barely
covers up the shiver of disgust.
Baby I was born this way

Worse yet, tolerance depends on an even more problematic discourse of immutability to give it
ballast and energy. Like a kudzu vine that keeps colonizing everything within its reach, the idea
that sexual desire and identity are hard-wired (through lavender DNA, or an endocrine system
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Immutability blues
that washes the infant in homo fantasies, or kinky hypothalamuses) reaches into legal argumen-
tations, familial conversions, political speeches, Broadway musicals, teen television, movement
websites, and, of course, pop songs. Just as we have come to take it for granted that right-thinking
people believe homosexuality is innate and hardwired (either through genetics or through some
broader combination of genes and hormones), we have also come to believe that wrong-thinking
people – either vicious homophobes or simply ill-informed onlookers – insist on gayness as
choice and volitional ‘lifestyle.’ US polls consistently demonstrate this: more people believe gay-
ness (no-one ever asks about the straight gene, of course) is somehow predetermined (47 percent
in Gallup’s May 2013 poll) and those people are more likely to support gay rights. This same poll
confirms that 87 percent of people who think homosexuality is ‘inborn’ support civil unions or
marriage equality, compared with 43 percent of those who believe it is caused by environment.
For those who believe that sexuality is a choice, 65 percent stated they think lesbian and gay
relations are morally wrong.4
We would be foolish, however, to believe the fantasy that somehow ‘proving’ immutability
would easily and automatically nullify anti-gay animus and homophobia and lead to tolerance.
On the contrary, biological arguments about immutable differences and inherent otherness have
long been used to demonize, discriminate, and otherwise victimize those who are deemed infe-
rior by ‘nature’ of their birth (Jews), skin color (African Americans), and sex (women). Not
surprisingly, women in general and lesbians and feminists in particular have approached the
biological stories much more cautiously than men have. This born-gay doctrine was certainly
not the mantra of ’60s gay radicals and liberationists, and scholars continue to take issue with
the determinist argument from any number of angles. But I’m always rather surprised at the
persistent and naive commitment to this fantasy, a commitment that seems to fly in the face of
most of world history, in which biological theories of difference have been marshaled not in the
service of liberation but rather in the service of categorization, medical experimentation, and
even annihilation.
Perhaps, as cultural critics Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini argue, the born-gay sentiment
‘is a way of describing this feeling of unchosenness, this sense that the “I” could not be any other
way.’5 Believing that one is born gay can also become a handy weapon against the harsh treat-
ment by family and society and an explanatory tool to combat internal self-loathing and doubt.
There is clearly some real comfort for gays – particularly those who have navigated the waters of
hatred – to come to land on the supposedly solid shores of biology. It is certainly true that very
few gays would claim that they chose to be gay (or heterosexuals that they chose to be straight,
for that matter – not that anyone is interested), in the way we imagine choice as a deliberate and
straightforward act, like choosing to eat lobster or buy a pair of Nike sneakers. So part of the
problem in this whole gay-gene discussion is that ‘choice’ is referenced in a narrow way, and most
of us do not think of our sexual desires or identities as akin to that almost consumerist notion of
choice. But it is a big leap from thinking that homosexuality is a deep part of one’s sense of self
to asserting that particular sexual formations and desires are biologically predetermined. This is a
leap made regularly by science writers, journalists, pundits, and indeed everyday folks.
Yet even constructionist and radical gay activists find themselves forced to rely on ‘nature’
when facing off against those who deem gays both unnatural and immoral. Particularly in the
sound-bite world of public discourse, it is almost impossible to articulate a notion of queer choice
or even just queer ‘being,’ because it is certainly the case that ‘the long-standing demand, made by
religious conservatives, distraught parents, and liberal helping professions alike, is but this: change
your unnatural desires. Time and again, the response is given: I can’t change them – they’re part of my
nature.’6 But for most of the scientists and, more to the point, science writers and popularizers
eager to sell the born-gay thesis, innate gayness is offered as the antidote to help ‘dispel the idea
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that gay behavior is a matter of fickle choice subject to “correction.”’7 The language here is
revealing. Choice is considered to be fickle (and obviously ‘lower’ somehow than its opposite –
the inevitability of biological determination), and the assumption is that if in fact it is a choice,
then it can be ‘corrected.’ Gay inevitability is therefore posited as the narrative of our lives; one
does not ‘become’ gay but rather either simply represses or alternatively accepts what is always
already there.
I think many heterosexuals fear a kind of homosexual replication, an insinuation into all areas
of life, a reproduction, a contagion. ‘Born this way’ counters these fears by making of gayness a
stable (and thus containable) minority. As literary theorist Valerie Rohy notes, ‘faced with antigay
paranoia, gay and lesbian activists have labored to disprove the idea of contagious or communi-
cated homosexuality’ and have taken a rhetorical strategy (‘born that way’) and turned it into a
truth claim to argue that ‘homosexuality . . . is not acquired, but innate and immutable, fixed at
birth, and impervious to influence.’8 This narrative strategy gives political heft to activists who
want to counter other (older, pernicious) narratives of gay contagion and conversion, but of
course the born this way storyline imposes another kind of (false) cohesion on a more compli-
cated story of desire and identity.
I want the world to know

Immutability arguments are often bolstered by coming out stories as the master narratives that
supposedly speak the ‘always already there’ truth of ineluctable gayness. As Joan Didion famously
wrote,‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live.’9 All lives are narrated – by ourselves and by others
eager to impose some coherence on the chaos of individual trajectory. For minority groups in
particular, narratives are constructed as lifelines to each other and as insinuation into the larger
stories of national identity and personal triumph. Often quite singular storylines are offered up
as both the explanation and the antidote for marginalization and disenfranchisement. The larger
social message now, however, is that coming out will promote tolerance. So the tolerance frame-
work depends on coming out but insists that it be done quietly and correctly so as not to stir up
or upset heterosexual equanimity. At the same time, and contradictorily, the fantasy of a newly
tolerant world downplays the persistence of the closet and therefore conceals the continued
strength of homophobia.
So one must be ‘known’ to be tolerated. But not all ways of being out are equally validated,
nor are all motivations for coming out similarly situated. In truth, we have different expectations
of the people we come out to. Sometimes all we want is to be heard. Sometimes we want to be
known. Sometimes we want affirmation of continued love. Sometimes we want to challenge
what we understand to be the homophobia of the listener. Sometimes we want to cultivate a new
ally. Coming out can be a confession or an assertion, a bold declaration of substantive difference
or a quiet acknowledgment that nothing has changed. It can be a nod to the already known and a
head-turning about-face. It can – especially in the media-saturated, nanosecond world of Twitter
and Facebook and the like – be a way of heading off the inevitable outing by gossip columnists
and bloggers. People can ‘receive’ the coming out of a friend or family member as life altering,
or they can hear it for a moment and then seemingly ignore its salience.
Certainly, it was not always this way. The coming-out story – which now seems (at least in the
West) almost synonymous with gayness itself – is actually of fairly recent vintage. Coming out
as a representational form – as a genre and a tellable tale – really only emerges with the develop-
ment of a movement for which coming out has salience. For example, the spate of coming-out
films in the post-Stonewall period is predicated on that ‘post-’ – on the assertion of a gay and
lesbian identity as distinct, as narratively interesting, as a story to be told. In earlier eras, characters
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Immutability blues
that were coded as gay might have been outed in the course of the film, but secrecy and misery
were considered the fate of queer characters and most queer actors as well. This is not to say
that a hidden life was the only life available in pre-Stonewall America; people lived in all kinds
of permutations of outness prior to the establishment of the coming-out story as the big gay
saga of pop culture. History is littered with the marvelous few who insistently lived their lives
openly, in the face of ridicule and censure, jail and death. But no one could really come out in
films, for example, when the closet wasn’t even an active metaphor. Certainly, internal struggles,
self-revelation, and emergence to others existed in pre-gay-movement literature, film, and art.
Iconic literary texts such as The Well of Loneliness from 1928 or the heartbreaking play and then
film The Children’s Hour or the ’50s pathos-filled film Tea and Sympathy or the myriad pulp novels
of the ’50s and ’60s spoke to such stories, even if elliptically.
But coming out as a singular process – and the closet as the paradigmatic metaphor for same-
sex life itself – depended on the establishment of a gay identity and a gay movement to make it
happen. In simple terms, one needed the very category of ‘the homosexual’ to produce the story
of coming out. As many historians and theorists have convincingly argued, the homosexual as a
distinct category, a demarcated identity (rather than, say, a set of possible sexual acts or preferences)
is a very modern invention, as is the heterosexual. Coming out may appear now as the transhis-
torical and transcultural story of gay life, but it actually was ‘invented’ as recently as the early part
of the last century. Like Google, it feels like it’s always been with us because it has so permeated
our understanding of gay identity.
Society girls and rattling bones

While it is not clear when, precisely, the phrase ‘coming out’ was first used, it certainly derives
from referencing – by analogy – the coming out of a debutante into society. This analogy is
interesting for many reasons, but what is most striking perhaps is that it prompts us to frame
coming out in deeply social terms. This is somewhat at odds with more contemporary versions
in which coming out is understood at least in part as an internal process of self-knowledge.
Further, in contemporary (really post-Stonewall) parlance, coming out is linked to the idea of
the closet, drawing now on a metaphor of ‘skeletons in the closet.’ So if the debutante analogy
implied entrance into a specifically social world, with no necessary assumptions about what one
was leaving (for the deb, she was making herself eligible for marriage and therefore, in that world,
signaling her adulthood), the addition of ‘the closet’ muddied the waters by imbuing this public
display with a much more troubled and troubling assumption of shame.
The double analogy (coming out and the closet) marks a shift from a metaphor of social
emergence to one of a deeply hidden personal trajectory at the same time that it reformulates
the cost of social exclusion (homophobia) on the individual so hidden. Now forever associated, the
closet frames coming out as a movement from a place of darkness, hiding, and duplicity. And
the closet, now framed as something one comes out of, is understood as imposition and burden, as
gay rights pioneer Donald Webster Cory (aka Edward Sagarin) poignantly noted when he wrote
as early as the 1950s, ‘Society has handed me a mask to wear . . . Everywhere I go, at all times and
before all sections of society, I pretend.’10 So the closet, in this rendering, is a place one is forced
into by the agents of what we now call homophobia. Leaving that place – coming out – must
then imply an acknowledgment and rejection of that whole rubric of discrimination. It is also
vital to remember that the closet was not and is not the only way to describe historical forms
of gay concealment. As historian George Chauncey and others have cautioned, we should be
wary of understanding all forms of sexual disguise and subcultural life within the narrow terms
of ‘the closet.’11 Other divisions (other than ‘in’ or ‘out’) can be more pertinent to an individual’s
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self-definition and movement in the world. In other words, coming out was always a located and
delimited phenomenon, reverberating differently across varying lines of identity, and not neces-
sarily the sine qua non of gay personhood.
While cultural theorists and historians ponder the fate of this persistent frame of reference,
many psychologists have also been critical of the developmental models that undergird the
coming-out story. The mainstream psychological frameworks often search for (and thus help
to produce) a linear model of authenticity that presumes a simple trajectory toward ‘truth’ and
self-knowledge and singular sexual identity. Feminist psychologist Lisa Diamond, for example,
has complained that many in her field too often seek to ‘uncover a true and generalizable trajec-
tory of development’ in which autobiographical consistency becomes the ‘marker of authenticity.’
These days, she claims, ‘researchers are increasingly challenging the notion that sexual identity
development is an inherently linear and internally coherent process.’12
Even further, coming out is transformed in an era of virtuality, further confounding the sto-
ryline that depends on physical and visible revelation. A 2011 advice column in the gay weekly
The Advocate reviews the protocol for online coming out. The young man seeking advice worries
about the etiquette of declaring a sexual preference to all and sundry so impersonally, but the
columnist assures him that his ‘one-click outing [is] as efficient as shopping on Amazon’13 even
as he urges a more intimate approach to close family and friends. After the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell,’ twenty-one-year-old soldier Randy Phillips, stationed in Iraq, films himself coming
out, tearfully, to his father. The video goes viral, and he gets his own Wikipedia page.14 You can
come out on Twitter in 140 characters, check out whenicameout.tumblr.com for niblets of
advice and images, and view thousands of coming-out videos from around the world posted on
YouTube and other social media sites.
Does anyone still sit mom and dad (or any combo of parental units) down with a stiff drink
and tremulously stammer away, hemming and hawing, until some semblance of a story of sexual
identity pushes through the excruciating metaphors and elliptical hints? My story and those of my
peers sound so retro, like using a manual typewriter to convey your words instead of a keyboard
or smartphone. Of course, lots of us non-celebrities do still come out the old-fashioned way since
we don’t have media platforms and, frankly, no one is interested but our family and friends.
But there is no doubt that the changing landscape of popular culture has itself shifted, with
twenty-four-hour news cycles and the growing centrality of newer media forms such as the
Internet and cellphone culture. Whether for rural youth in the US or urban adults in Iran, the
Internet allows for casual contact, acknowledgment if not creation of identities, sexual assig-
nations, and even political and social community when more embodied forms of communion
are difficult or dangerous. These are not, of course, mutually exclusive. In other words, virtual
coming out is not necessarily wholly distinct and separable from more embodied forms and is
not solely the province of isolated youth or egregiously oppressed communities.
Surely it is true that coming out as both narrative and lived practice changes in a world in
which one can Google ‘coming out’ and find endless stories, resources, references, and chat
rooms that provide a space not only to enact that ritual but also to locate it in a larger collective
framework. There are archives and resources, stories old and new, tales from rural teens and urban
elders, confessions from every possible region of the world in every conceivable language. These
are, of course, of mixed provenance, and to get substantive and usable info takes some amount of
work and familiarity with the Web. And it remains the case that not all kids – by any stretch of
the imagination – have easy access to computers. But, in a keystroke, the possibilities to know, to
hear from, to see, to talk, to touch ‘gayness’ in some way becomes instantly possible.
But older paradigms and frameworks don’t simply disappear when a new technology for
expressing them insinuates itself into the everyday. I was struck by how familiar many of these
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Immutability blues
coming-out stories on the Internet were to me. When you look at the endless compendiums of
narratives now on the Internet, what is striking is how much they sound like the older stories.
Of course, the sample is a skewed one, as we could surmise that many, if not most, of the kids
who post their coming-out stories do so to relay a sense of struggle or difficulty. In other words,
it would seem sort of beside the point, I guess, to write a coming-out story that basically said, ‘I
thought I might be gay. Then I was sure. Then I told my parents, who told me they loved me and
were happy. Then I told my classmates, who gave me a big group hug and marched with me in
the next gay pride parade. The end.’ No doubt some of those stories exist, but those who come
out with relative ease and assurance of continued support and love from friends and family don’t
often feel they even have a story to tell, although curiously that is the new story we are seeing
portrayed in much of the mainstream media, even as these more heartrending self-authored tales
populate the Web.
While not as transformative as one might imagine, these new stories on the Web are charac-
terized by an openness produced at least in part by the newly available technology that allows
people to be engaged yet anonymous. Indeed, because the coming out story has been so visible as
the (presumed) master narrative of gay life, a kind of narrative consistency exists in the telling of
this tale, not unlike the consistency of the formulaic romance novel or the classic bildungsroman.
Many stories reference other stories set either in school, in families, at work, or now in the very
virtual space in which they first utter the words ‘I am gay.’ Perhaps the profound sense of ‘I am
the only one’ is forever eradicated in a world of gay visibility. If that is the case, it is no small
step toward an easier life for millions of gay youth. But the internal struggles, the sense of fear in
telling parents, the harassment that shapes a life, the desire to be other than gay – these all crop
up in first-person narratives today much as they did thirty years ago, when intrepid gay writers
and editors started collecting such stories in volumes like One Teenager in Ten. Even the personal
accounts told on Coming Out Stories of gay cable channel Logo don’t seem light-years away from
earlier tales. In all of these accounts, young people share their deep fears of familial rejection. ‘I
don’t want to tell you,’ says one young woman; ‘you’re going to hate me.’ Another admits she feels
like she’s ‘living a double life.’ The recent (attenuated and not to mention seriously odd) coming
out of actor and director Jodie Foster at the Golden Globe Awards speaks to the persistent sense
of loneliness and fear that marks even those we imagine ‘above it all.’ Her trepidation to utter the
secret everyone already knew made the speech both bizarre and utterly poignant:
So while I’m here being all confessional, I guess I have a sudden urge to say something
that I’ve never really been able to air in public. So a declaration that I’m a little nervous
about but maybe not quite as nervous as my publicist right now. . . But I’m just going
to put it out there, right? Loud and proud, right? So I’m going to need your support
on this.15
The kicker, of course, is that she then goes on to say ‘I’m single’ instead of finally saying those
much more troublesome words, ‘I’m gay.’ I guess this was meant to be amusing, poking fun at
those who have pressured her for years to speak about her sexuality. But her fear and anxiety
seemed almost palpable. Why should she still, now, in the era of gay marriage and rainbow love,
need support and fear her publicist’s anxiety? A woman of her accomplishments and stature
and economic security? Even more worrisome is how these old/new coming-out stories merge
with the ‘born that way’ refrain of the medicalized moment and invoke a personal storyline that
conflates ‘I’ve always known’ with ‘it’s not a choice.’
So coming out as a personal process and as a political strategy has not been tossed out in this
supposedly new era. Even as it has receded from public view, it has not been made redundant.
299
But many queer academics seem to imagine that coming out – as both personal act and narrative
form – is largely a thing of the past, unnecessary in a world of gay visibility and new gender bend-
ing fluidity. If earlier dogma had it that coming out was the epitome of gay experience – both
the social marker of political coming of age and the psychological imprimatur of mature identity
formation – then the new queer dogmas perhaps invert that to champion not exactly coming
out’s opposite (the closet) but instead a more amorphous space of endless becoming or even a
more banal fluidity. There is, however, an important distinction to be made between a decline
of the coming-out plot as the master narrative of gay life and the broader thesis of the end of
the closet per se. Steven Seidman clarifies that what he sees as the increasing normalization and
‘routinization’ of homosexuality does not imply a new world wholly free of either self-doubt or
discrimination. While he does believe that many gays do in fact live lives ‘beyond the closet,’ he
seems to be implying not the disappearance of duplicity and self-management but the increasing
specificity of it. His argument is that ‘identity management’ still goes on, but the closet – as a
broad and all-inclusive term that seems to define a life wholly lived in a place of doubleness and
hiding – no longer rules the day. Gay identity, then, is understood as ‘more situation-specific than
patterning of a whole way of life, as is suggested by the concept of the closet.’16
But to what extent is this putative ‘beyond the closet’ space dependent on a performance of
homosexuality such that it doesn’t look any different from heterosexuality? Post-gay, beyond-the-
closet fantasies depend on sameness as one of the key underlying features of tolerance. Being seen
as ‘normal’ can only mean – in a world in which heterosexual identities are the norm – being
relatively invisible as a gay person. In a study on workers in supposedly ‘gay-friendly’ work envi-
ronments, Christine Williams and her coauthors find just such a phenomenon: that the sense of
‘acceptance’ and inclusion is dependent on being a particular kind of ‘gay,’ whereby ‘in addition
to [having] conservative politics, normal is equated with having a monogamous, long-term rela-
tionship.’17 One of the workers they interview, Max, says explicitly ‘that he wins over his straight
coworkers because he is “not the Queen of Sheba at work,” suggesting that he is not effeminate
in his manner. In all of these ways, Max does not look or act gay, which he thinks makes him
accepted as normal among his coworkers.’ Or, as another respondent claims,‘I present a case of the
things that the traditional, core group really like. I have a family. We have a house in the suburbs.
We drive an SUV (laughs). So everyone can really relax. I go to church. It’s just that my partner’s
a woman and that’s about it. In all other respects, I’m just like them.’18 The framework of ‘tol-
erance’ undoubtedly orients this discourse; this individual wouldn’t want to ‘flaunt it’ (whatever
that means) because the limits of tolerance are almost always located at one of three places: gender
nonnormativity, expressive sexuality, and political engagement.
Legal scholar Kenji Yoshino writes about this elegantly, recalling his early years as a law pro-
fessor at Yale, where he was told to be ‘a homosexual professional’ rather than a ‘professional
homosexual.’ He immediately gets what is meant here, for:
To be a ‘homosexual professional’ was to be a professor of constitutional law who ‘hap-

pened’ to be gay. To be a ‘professional homosexual’ was to be a gay professor who made
gay rights his work. Others echoed the sentiment in less elegant formulations. Be gay,
my world seemed to say. Be openly gay, if you want. But don’t flaunt it.19
For Yoshino, then, the closet doors had long been opened, but he found new impediments to
full expression.
Nevertheless, the decline of the coming-out story as the Hollywood story of gayness is of no
small significance. Positively, the decline of these narratives signals queerness as less traumatic and less
relational to heterosexuality. While coming-out stories are ostensibly about the gay person revealing
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‘the truth’ to him- or herself and then others, in practice (both in everyday life and in popular
media) these accounts often focused exclusively on the horror of the parent/co-worker/husband/
wife/friend who was told this ‘truth.’ In films and television and even popular literature, these earlier
coming-out stories gave us glimpses into the internal struggles of gays but even more gave us endless
depictions of heartbroken parents, bereft spouses, and confused co-workers. So, in this sense, the
decline of coming-out stories may signal a move away from that focus on heterosexual reaction
and – finally – allow us to imagine stories of gay life that aren’t always seen through the lens of
heartbroken and horrified heteros. Because ‘the focus on the closet, and the forms in which mean-
ings are conveyed – as declarations/acts of identity/ desire – has perhaps contributed to an under-
appreciation of the importance of what comes after coming out,’20 a shift away from this storyline
might provide entrée into the richness of gay lives. If narratives leave the familiar territory of
coming-out revelations, the possibilities for stories that are centered not on a single climactic moment
but that are drawn in and through the complex exigencies of queer life open up dramatically.
But I think we risk losing a vivid depiction of the reality of homophobia and heterosexism
if we ditch this framework altogether. The coming-out narrative, in both a personal and a more
social and cultural sense, forces an ‘audience’ to witness rejection and discrimination and the
effects of living a life not fully open. The new image of the fully formed fag may parry the slings
and arrows of outrageous homophobia occasionally but is largely shown as accepted, loved, and
embraced by both a benevolent family and a benign body politic. Alas, the body politic is not
quite that benign. In presenting a world of already-out and always ‘accepted’ gays, we might actu-
ally obscure or even cover up the persistence of both institutional and personal homophobia. For
example, in an episode of the 2012 sitcom The New Normal, the two lead characters – a gay male
couple starting a family with the help of a surrogate – find themselves the object of bigotry and
derision as they embrace in a department store.21 Kudos to the show for depicting the persistence
of homophobia, but shame on it for not once mentioning the word. Since the animus is treated
as a sort of generic bigotry, its specificity disappears. Of course, this cover-up is precisely what the
framework of tolerance depends on, as heterosexuals can pat themselves on the back for their
beneficent acceptance of their homosexual neighbors as homophobia itself goes unmentioned.
While simply invoking homophobia as the narrative linchpin is not necessarily more politically
challenging, making invisible the specificity of anti-gay animus through a generic storyline of
‘bigotry’ strips the story of the difference that sexual difference makes.
As oppressive as ‘the closet’ itself is and was, the discourse of ‘the closet’ also allowed for an explicit
engagement with self-hatred and shame, or what became called ‘internalized homophobia.’ Put
differently, the story of coming out, in its more political versions, does reckon head-on with the
costs of a life lived without recognition and with the everyday spectacle of misrecognition. It can
connect us with shame – not of ‘being gay’ but of being forced to not be gay. Or, again, with the
shame of homophobia itself. In this genre’s most moving forms, it depicts a coming out of some-
thing (denial, duplicity, the closet) but also a coming into something (gay community, self-identity,
sexuality). This is part of the story that the ground- breaking play Angels in America detailed: the
price of the closet (Roy Cohn) and the pleasures of leaving it (Joe Pitt).22 So the (modern) story
of the closet and coming out typically does speak of a rubric of discrimination that enforces the
closet and makes the emergence from it both difficult and necessary. Post-Stonewall, especially,
coming out is celebrated not simply as a personal declaration of self-understanding but as a recog-
nition of social solidarity in the face of both institutional and individual animus. Coming out was
the antidote to self-hatred, the cure, the exit from the closet and the lie. It was what made Harvey
Milk more than just a city supervisor and Stonewall not just an everyday riot.
There is also another quite interesting sense of coming out that may get lost in this new era,
and that is the twinned trope of coming out into a community and being ‘brought out’ sexually.
301
When one spoke of who ‘brought you out,’ it was a particularly queer sub-cultural version of
sexual initiation. Because it need not refer to one’s first sexual experience (often, of course, with
the opposite sex), the framework of being ‘brought out’ has within it that dual sense of sexuality
and community. One is ‘brought out’ by another queer person and simultaneously brought into
a queer community, or as historian George Chauncey notes,
Gay people in the pre-war years [pre–World War I] . . . did not speak of coming out of
what we call the gay closet but rather of coming out into what they called homosexual
society or the gay world, a world neither so small, nor so isolated, nor . . . so hidden as
closet implies.23
So coming out in these earlier and sometimes explicitly political iterations was understood as a
process both personal and social, both confessional and performative, narrating a ‘shared fate’ but
also an ‘imagined community.’
Coming out is always in a complicated tango with tolerance; how out we are allowed to be is
often set up as the line in the sand. If earlier ‘tolerance’ of gays depended on the force of the closet
to exist (the secret that everyone knows but no one utters), then our current tolerance mode still
holds the cards, insisting on outness but always in a form easily contained. Being ‘too out’ (too
noticeably, markedly queer) has long been the display of self that even liberal allies cannot tolerate.
Perhaps tolerance traps gays in a different kind of closet after all.
Queer futures
How did we go from gay pride to tolerance, immutability, acceptance? Such a far cry from the days
of ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.’ The tolerance trap murmurs instead,‘we’re here, we’re not
really queer but vaguely gayish, be nice to us.’ Tolerance is not just a low bar; it actively undercuts
robust integration and social belonging by allowing the warp and woof of anti-gay animus to go
unchallenged. Tolerance allows us to celebrate (hysterically) the coming-out of two professional
athletes as a triumphant sign of liberation rather than a sad commentary on the persistence of the
closet and the hold of masculinist ideals. Tolerance allows religious ‘objections’ to queer lives to
remain in place, even as it claims a civilized society leaves its homos alone. Tolerance pushes for
marriage equality, and simultaneously assures anxious allies that it won’t change their marriages
or their lives. And there’s the tolerance trap at work: if it doesn’t challenge your life, it’s not very
radical, and if it does challenge your life, we won’t get it. The marriage assurances are similar to gay
responses to right-wing attacks on queer parents; researchers and advocates argue that ‘no harm’ is
done to our kids, that there is no difference between gay and straight parenting. But couldn’t we
imagine the strong case? Shouldn’t we argue, instead, that our progeny would/could grow up with
more expansive and creative ways of living gender and sexuality? Shouldn’t we argue that same-sex
marriage might make us all think differently about the relationship between domestic life and gen-
der norms and push heterosexuals to examine their stubborn commitment to a gendered division
of labor? Difference does, well, make a difference. But when difference is erased in the quest to
make us more ‘tolerable’ to those heterosexuals who get to do the tolerating, when the messiness
and fluidity of sexual desire and identity is put into the straightjacket of biological inevitability,
when queer challenges to gender rules and regulations are morphed into nuptial sameness, and
when queer freedoms are reduced to the right to wed, we all lose out.
Challenging both the fear of homosexuality and the ideology of immutability that attempts
to refute that fear depends on a very different set of assumptions: that being gay is just fine, thank
you very much; that gayness is not a problem to be understood or solved or even tolerated; and,
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Immutability blues
more to the point, that there is a positive benefit to an expansive and open approach to human
sexuality and gender. In other words, the framing of ‘gayness’ as an issue of nature versus nurture
or destiny versus choice misses the point about sexuality and about civil rights. It’s not our genes
that matter here but rather our ethics.
Notes
1 While queer-positive changes have occurred throughout the world, this chapter will specifically refer-
ence US culture and society.
2 See Berkin (2012).
3 It’s actually quite interesting that this declaration of victory – and indeed many of the discourses that
surround it such as the born this way ideology and the centrality of marriage rights – are peculiarly and
perhaps uniquely American. This reflects, I think, an American preoccupation with progress narratives
and narratives of redemption and ‘improvement.’
4 See Jones (2011).
5 Jakobsen and Pellegrini (2003), p. 77.
6 Lancaster (2003), p. 22.
7 Ibid.
8 Rohy (2012), p. 112.
9 Didion (2006).
10 Cory (1951), p. 36.
11 Chauncey (1994).
12 Diamond (2006), p. 477.
13 Petrow (2011).
14 Valinsky (2012).
15 Foster (2013).
16 Seidman (1999), p. 21.
17 Williams, Giuffre, and Dellinger (2009), p. 36.
18 Ibid.
19 Yoshino (2006).
20 Herman (2005), p. 19.
21 The New Normal (2013).
22 Kushner (1993).
23 Chauncey (1994), p. 7.
References
Berkin, G. (2012) Fashionable People Support Gay Marriage. [Online] 11 May 2012. Available from: NJ Voices:
http://blog.nj.com/njv_george_berkin/2012/05/fashionable_people_support_gay.html (Accessed
19 November 2015).
Chauncey, G. (1994) Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940.
New York: Basic Books.
Cory, D. W. (1951) The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach. New York: Greenberg.
Diamond, L. (2006) Careful what you ask for: Reconsidering feminist epistemology and autobiographical
narrative in research on sexual identity development. Signs. 31. (2). pp. 471–91.
Didion, J. (2006) We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction. New York: Everyman’s Library.
Foster, J. (2013) Jodie Foster’s Golden Globe Speech: Full Transcript. [Online] January 2013. Available from:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainment/2013/01/full-transcript-jodie-fosters-golden-globes-
speech (Accessed 12 February 2015).
Gallup. (2013) Gay and Lesbian Rights. [Online] May 2013. Available from: http://www.gallup.com/
poll/1651/Gay-Lesbian-Rights.aspx (Accessed 12 February 2015)
Herman, D. (2005) ‘I’m gay’: Declarations, desire, and coming out on prime-time television. Sexualities. 8.
(1). pp. 7–29.
Jakobsen, J. R. & Pellegrini, A. (2003) Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance.
New York: NYU Press.
303
Jones, J. (2011) Support for legal gay relations hits new high. Gallup. 25 May. Available from: http://www.
gallup.com/poll/147785/Support-Legal-Gay-Relations-Hits-NewHigh.aspx (Accessed 12 February
2015).
Kushner, T. (1993) Angels in America. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
Lancaster, R. N. (2003) The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
New Normal, The. (2013) Shirtless surrogate stealer. NBC. 9 January.
Petrow, S. (2011) Is it bad manners to come out on facebook? The Advocate. 10 October. Available from:
http://www.advocate.com/politics/commentary/2011/10/10/advice-it-bad-manners-come-out-
facebook (Accessed 12 February 2015).
Rohy, V. (2012) On homosexual reproduction. Differences. 25. (1). pp. 101–30.
Seidman, S. (1999) Beyond the closet? The changing social meaning of homosexuality in the United States.
Sexualities. 2 (9). pp. 9–34.
Valinsky, J. (2012) Gay US airman reveals why he came out on YouTube. Huffington Post. 4 February.
Available from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/04/randy-phillips-gay-us-airman-youtube_
n_1254454.html (Accessed: 12 February 2015).
Williams, C., Giuffre, P. A. & Dellinger, K. (2009) The gay-friendly closet. Journal of Sexuality Research &
Social Policy. 6. (1). pp. 29–45.
Yoshino, K. (2006) The pressure to cover. The New York Times. 15 January. Available from: http://www.
nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15gays.html (Accessed 1 February 2015).
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23
NORTHERN IRISH NARRATIVES
OF PROTEST AND CONFLICT
Back and forth across the rubicon
Neil Ferguson
liverpool hope university
I was prepared to sacrifice myself quite truthfully. And I’m lucky. I’m one of the lucky
ones that survived it. I was shot twice, wounded twice and friends of mine were shot dead.
They’re in the cemetery. And, uh, God love them. And at least now, I’m glad of the Peace
Process. I’m glad the war is over, and it is over.
This quote is from a former member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) reflecting on his life as
a republican paramilitary and political activist and shares much in common with the other voices
this chapter will explore through the stories of Northern Irish people who were involved in
peaceful protest, violent insurrection and paramilitarism during the conflict in Northern Ireland.
The highly ‘tellable’ political stories were shared from 2003 to 2008 by people from both the
Protestant and Catholic communities reflecting on the conflict and their role within it, discussing
the impact it had on them, their families and others; and how the blossoming peace process had
begun to offer hope for a new more peaceful future for them, their families and the people of
Northern Ireland. Most of the interviewees began their journey into violence and protest in the
late 1960s or early 1970s, many of them spent years incarcerated in HMP Maze for their role
in the conflict and some had been significant figures within the history of the Troubles and the
agitation which led to the beginning of the conflict on Saturday 5th October 1968.
In terms of my story, I was born in Northern Ireland and could be viewed as a child of
the ‘Troubles’. Many of my first memories are related to the conflict that surrounded me as I
attempted to make sense of what I heard and saw. During the period of these interviews I was
living and lecturing in Liverpool, England, having left Northern Ireland in the winter of 1996,
like many other Irish men, to seek employment.
Reflecting back on these interviews, especially on the access we had to people from both
communities and the openness with which most of them offered us, I see these as almost hal-
cyon days. At the time, the fledgling peace process had made it possible for me to travel to parts
of Northern Ireland and go into homes in areas which would have been closed off or indeed
dangerous for me to have spent any time in just a few years previously. Since we recorded these
interviews, the opportunity to have such frank and open conversations with former combatants is
sadly diminished. The requisition of the Boston College tapes1 by the Police Service of Northern
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Neil Ferguson
Ireland (PSNI) and the subsequent arrest of Gerry Adams and others related to the disappearance
of Jean McConville and other historical crimes have made people nervous about what they tell
academics about the conflict and their role in it. With this in mind, I reflect back and harbour
regrets about the topics we didn’t discuss, the questions I should have asked and the people I never
managed to interview when I had such a golden opportunity.
For those unfamiliar with the conflict in Northern Ireland, I’d like to provide a short account.
The Troubles began in 1968, continuing until the paramilitary ceasefires in 1994 provided the
conditions for negotiations which led to the signing of the Good Friday (or Belfast) Agreement
on 10th April 1998. The conflict was a low intensity conflict between three sides, the British
Army supporting the militarized Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC); the IRA and other smaller
republican paramilitary groupings; and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), Ulster Defence Asso-
ciation (UDA) and other loyalist armed groups. However, as with most contemporary conflicts,
the majority of the casualties were uninvolved civilians (Mac Ginty et al., 2007). During the 30
years of inter-communal conflict, over 3600 people were killed and 40–50,000 suffered physical
injuries (Fay, Morrissey & Smyth, 1998). While the depth of psychological trauma is unknown,
recent research has suggested that has many as 39% of people experienced a conflict related event
(e.g., witnessing a death or serious injury, had been beaten or threatened with a weapon, etc.)
and that 8.8% of the population met the criteria for PTSD at some point in their life (Bunting
et al., 2013).
As a result of perpetrating these injuries and fatalities, it is estimated that 20,000 to 32,000
people were incarcerated for politically motivated offences (Conflict Transformation Papers,
2003; McEvoy, 2001) during the Troubles. Furthermore, Jameison et al. (2010) estimate that
former politically motivated prisoners now make up a sizable proportion (between 5.4% and
30.7%) of the Northern Irish men aged between 50 and 64. When these numbers of the dead,
wounded, traumatized and incarcerated perpetrators are pooled with the small geographical area
of 5,456 square miles and a population under 1.7 million, it is clear that the decades of violence
had a substantial impact on the population as a whole. Therefore, at some level every citizen of
Northern Ireland could be considered as both a victim of the conflict and as complicit in the
conflict to some degree (Bloomfield, 1998; Ferguson et al., 2010, Smyth, 1998).
The concepts of victim and perpetrator are still highly contested in Northern Ireland, as is
dealing with the past or narrating a ‘true’ or official past (Fay et al., 1998; Ferguson et al., 2010;
Knox, 2001; Smyth, 1998; Smyth & Hamilton, 2004). Indeed many of the interviewees talked
about the ‘writing of history’ and how some groups or individuals used the post-conflict space
to re-negotiate the historical narratives of the Troubles to present a picture which supported the
integrity of their ‘struggle’ over the competing narratives of the Troubles. Being from Northern
Ireland, I was familiar with some of these narratives and the two competing dominant narratives
in particular. These dominant narratives push the blame for the conflict onto either the Protes-
tant unionist elite in conjunction with their masters in Westminster or the IRA and wider Irish
republicanism. For most of my protagonists, their account of ‘why’ we had 30 years of violence
was certain, and it suggested the blame lay with the ‘other’.
This inter-communal competitive dynamic has led to the creation of hierarchies of victim-
hood in which ‘innocent’ victims of the conflict vie with ‘our’ combatants and ‘their’ combatants
for the legitimate status of victim (Ferguson et al., 2010; Mac Ginty & Du Toit, 2007). In turn,
these cultures of victimhood have implications for the Northern Ireland’s peace process (Devine-
Wright, 2003), as this competition is a way of continuing the war fighting into the peace process,
and as such can be seen as a threat to the creation of a peaceful and reconciled post conflict
society. For most, this is where the current narrative of Northern Ireland rests, with the people of
Northern Ireland still trying to move out from the shadow of decades of intercommunal conflict.
306
Northern Irish narratives
However, a minority of the interviewees provided accounts which challenged these compet-
ing hegemonies and provided a voice I was unfamiliar with. Instead of laying the blame on one
community or the other, they reflected back and challenged this ‘black’ vs. ‘white’ narrative and
instead blamed the acceptance of stereotypes, propaganda, myths and rumour, which created
enemy images, increased ethnocentrism, exaggerated differences and instilled fear which polar-
ised the communities and escalated the conflict.
Things got rough in Northern Ireland, but it was through ignorance, people were mis-
informed, people were told, say up in Londonderry, that they were burning Protestants
out in Belfast, or burning Catholics out in Belfast, so Catholics were burning Protes-
tants out in Londonderry, or they were told in Portadown that they were murdering
the Protestants down in the border area, so they were going out and killing people
down round there. A lot of it was down to ignorance as well, and propaganda, good
propaganda.
This is the starting point for the narrative accounts, with the participants positioning them-
selves on the streets of Belfast or Derry in the late 1960s or early 1970s against a backdrop of
escalating sectarian and political conflict. At this point the participants view themselves as ‘naïve’
and lacking political acumen; they are as confused as everyone else as to what is happening on
the streets around them and their political selves are not yet born. One participant who went on
to join the UVF sums this up:
Actually up until I was 30, I felt very immature in my outlook. I’d a very simplistic
outlook and thought Paisley was god, I thought whatever he said was true because he
wore a collar and everything like that.
Even when they engage in their initial political activity, protest or violence it is usually as the
result of local level reactions to events taking place around them and is without any coherent or
developed political strategy. It is a simple reaction to the perceived unjust action of others. For
many of our interviewees, this movement from apolitical life into active political participation
was the result of some incident that had a dramatic impact on their world view. For many of the
participants, this incident, such as witnessing the killing of a friend or a member of their ingroup,
led to their decision to engage in politically motivated violence and join paramilitary groups,
but for some it led them to seek peaceful solutions to the slaughter taking place around them.
For one participant, it was being on the scene of his sister’s murder that spurred him to try and
make a change:
There were shots fired, and I opened the door and someone said ‘somebody’s shot over
there’ and it was the sister of mine, she had a new coat on that day and I ran over and
turned her over, she’d been sent to the shop for cigarettes, and when I turned her over
I didn’t know it was her because I was married then and out of the house, so I didn’t
know she had this new red coat on. I turned her over and there was a hole in the back
of her head the size of a fist, you could have put your fist through. The army ambulance
came along, and the civilian ambulance came along, it happened just outside the hall
where the youth club was, and this guy said to me, who was a well-known figure (senior
IRA member) ‘your sister’s not going in that army ambulance’ and I said well, if it is the
first ambulance that’s here, be it an army ambulance, or a civilian ambulance, that’s the
ambulance she’s going in, and that’s the ambulance I’m putting her in, and if anybody
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Neil Ferguson
stands in front of me putting her in that ambulance, that was the first time ever that I
had really lost it. I was putting her in that ambulance and nobody’s going to stop me.
As with other interviewees, experiencing this critical event caused him to re-evaluate his life
and he embarked on a life focused on trying to bring about peaceful political change. This
new political life began after a period of post-incident reflection, or in his words, “that’s when
the hatred started then, I had this hatred, a hatred I didn’t like. The hatred went away, and I saw
things from a different angle, when I went away and thought about things after the funeral, when
everybody had gone away.” This period of reflection is important to note, as much of classic
and commonly accepted social psychological theory indicates the propensity for individuals to
conform and the prominence of situational factors in determining behaviour in relation to an
individual’s disposition (Haney et al., 1973; Milgram, 1974; Zimbardo, 2004). In contrast, these
periods illustrate the importance of decision making, agency and personal choice in embarking
on a new politicized life.
During the periods of reflection the interviewees reported consciously considering their
options for action and inaction. In these liminal reflections they bring personal history, current
circumstances, socialization experiences, socioeconomic considerations, education experiences
and prospects, socio-political context, etc. together as they try to make sense of the incident and
create a future path for themselves.
The philosopher Jaspers (1970) recognised the importance of the ‘grenzsituationen’ or bound-
ary situations created by having to deal with a situation that prior knowledge or rational objec-
tive reasoning cannot prepare a person to overcome. Jaspers believed having to deal with these
boundary situations (such as facing death, the death of a child, or an inevitable struggle) causes
a radical change in an individual’s thinking, rousing them from normal spontaneous instinctive
thinking, creating a radical change in personality and world view in which they take responsi-
bility for their new future, and that is confirmed by the experiences reported by the participants
in our study as they cross the Rubicon and leave their ‘old’ apolitical selves behind (see Salamun,
1988, 2006 for further discussion of Jaspers’ philosophical conceptions).
The search for a model of this transformational process, where the individual goes from a place
of non-engagement to one where he is committed to political life is not new and many sug-
gestions have been made regarding this process of political conversion or awakening. Although
some researchers have made suggestions about radicalisation and conversion to terrorism, much
of the research in this area comes from the arena of the psychology of religious conversion.
For example, Snow and Machalek (1984) suggest conversion is a ‘change in one’s universe of
discourse’ (p. 170) and draw on the work of Heirich (1977) and Kuhn (1962) to explain that
conversion does not only entail a change in an individual’s belief and identities, but also a shift in
the individual’s core fundamental grounding. As a result of this, Snow and Machalek assert that
conversion is, therefore, not restricted merely to the realms of religion, but also to any area of life
where a token belief becomes a genuine belief and where ideas and beliefs that were formerly
marginal become dominant. They continue that for a conversion to take place there is not the
necessity for the individual to adopt entirely new beliefs, rather, but to see a shift in beliefs from a
universe of discourse that was previously peripheral to one where this discourse becomes central.
Clearly, while there is psychological and philosophical evidential support for these transforma-
tive narratives, narratives are also clearly presented in this way to produce ‘tellable’ stories in which
the narrator constructs an account to make sense of it, and to make themselves ‘human’ and
understandable (Squire, 2013). Thus the transformative narratives are produced to an audience to
transmit the re-constructed ‘truth’ in hope others will understand why they did some unpalatable
future actions in their narrative account. Indeed, without authentication it is very challenging to
308
ascertain whether these incidents fuelled engagement or are justifications constructed to support
engagement in violence.
Similar to the recent religious converts (Lofland & Stark, 1965; Snow & Machalek, 1984) our
participants report changes in their behaviour, attitude, identity, and self-efficacy once they embark
on their new politicized life. For example, one of the few female interviewees who joined an
armed group spoke about her new circumstances; concentrating on the increased self-efficacy her
new role had conveyed to her and how it was bound up with her reinforced collective identity:
I felt, as many others at that particular time, at least if you were up and being active
and trying to do something, you were doing just that, trying to do something. I was
not prepared any longer to sit back in my chair, like my parents had to do, and their
parents. Yes, I was prepared to stand up and say, “Ok, you can knock me down, but I’m
not going to go away”. I’m going to be there and I’m going to try and do my best to
achieve what I set out to achieve.
Attached to this increased sense of collective identity and enhanced efficacy, the participants
reflected back and narrated a belief that their political activity, whether peaceful or violent, had
been effective and had played a role in pushing Northern Ireland towards the peace process
in the 1990s. For example, an interviewee who had engaged in politically motivated violence
thought ‘that every person who was injured or killed made a difference in the overall context of
the situation. I think every single person made a difference’, while another interviewee who had
utilized purely peaceful methods of protest also agreed that both violent and non-violent political
agitation had played a role in pushing Northern Ireland towards a peaceful settlement in 1998:
[the Agreement] is a direct result of a lot of the violent action as well as the more peace-
ful action. As far as the London government was concerned, I am damn sure it was the
violence, particularly the violence in London, that made them sit up and say, “hey, we
better do something about this.”
Clearly to maintain self-esteem and social and cognitive consistency, the protestor needs to believe
their actions are important and create change. Additionally, the protestor is also attempting to use
the narrative to create a political message for the interviewer and other audiences of the account
to hear or pass on, which may also slowly create change.
However, believing in the effectiveness of political violence to create positive social change
also comes with costs to the individual and wider society. Firstly, the narrative that violence is an
effective problem solving tool tends to make violent protest and armed resistance ‘very glamorous
and very newsworthy’, which leads to challenges in trying to deal with the legacy of the conflict
in Northern Ireland and breaking the cycle that leads young men to emulate their forefathers
and keep the conflict simmering.
There’s a lot of pressure. The pressure to some extent, I suppose, is inevitable and natural.
[The community here] celebrates and vindicates and recognizes it [the conflict] and
it’s passed on, so there’s an element of that. . . . But, as well as that there are political
elements and political tendencies that have a vested interest in maintaining a culture of
conflict in the community. They have an imperative to do it because how would they
go on existing unless they convince people of it [the historical victimization of their
community and legitimacy of their part in the conflict]. So, it’s imposed upon people
almost as a duty to support the struggle and see heroic figures.
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Neil Ferguson
Secondly, the call to arms leads to the employment of violence, which in turn pushed people
to kill or attempt to kill to bring about a political change. This led to the participants who had
used force, placing themselves in situations where they had witnessed and/or used extreme vio-
lence. This engagement in activities which they had previously viewed as immoral and improper
had significant negative impacts on their psychological well-being. On the one hand it led to
them use dehumanising and negative stereotypes to allow themselves to act in this way – for
example, many talked about ‘only shooting uniforms’ or how all members of the ‘other’ com-
munity were targets due to their group membership and some showed little or no remorse for
members of the other side who were killed or injured. One loyalist paramilitary illustrates this
dehumanization and detachment:
I never have cared about any man’s religion, the colour of their skin. If I see them as
an enemy, or in opposition to what I want, it doesn’t bother me what religion you are,
whether you’re Protestant, Catholic, black, Chinese or white, if you were jeopardizing
what my goal was, then you know, it didn’t bother me to take action against you. So I
can kill anybody, it doesn’t bother me.
As the interviewer, this illustration of dehumanization and moral disengagement poses chal-
lenges. Initially, you feel the increase in tension, and wonder what might follow, what will
he say next, and will I be able to remain focused on the interview and maintain rapport?
To assist with dealing with the emotional fall-out from these interviews I worked with a
small team of three researchers, and we provided a lot of support to each other, providing
opportunities to debrief after interviews and deal with some of the vicarious disturbance
that resulted from listening to and analysing stories of trauma and violence during the field-
work. While I conducted this particular interview on my own, we normally interviewed in
pairs as we are from different socioeconomic, national, political and religious backgrounds;
thus, at different times we were either ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’, depending on who we were
interviewing and where the interview was taking place. It also allowed us to cover the
interview topics and keep each other on track, and share the emotional and cognitive load
during and after the interviews.
In terms of the participant, it has been suggested that moral disengagement, detachment and
dissociation are symptoms of perpetration-induced traumatic stress (PITS) commonly experi-
enced by combat veterans (MacNair, 2002, 2005) or indicative of PTSD. Additionally, many
of the participants who had been involved in politically motivated violence expressed regret
and talked about the feelings of guilt and revulsion at their violent activities. This loyalist par-
amilitary’s refection illustrates the stress and guilt caused by perpetrating politically motivated
murder:
Put it to the back of your mind. You know what I mean; people say do you ever think
of anything. I said no. See, the more you think about it, it would do your head in. You
put something to the back of your head, you put it to the back of your head. There’s
sometimes like I’m sitting, and things come on TV from 30 years ago. We are sitting
watching TV and one minute we’re talking away, and next minute something comes
on, I just keep quiet. But my missus knows.
Grossman’s (1996) study of the taboo subject of humans killing humans sheds light on these
feelings; his research illustrated that humans have a powerful resistance to killing each other. This
310
is an inhibition which the military have spent centuries trying to overcome, so when individuals
engage in armed actions and kill at close range, particularly without combat training or being
conditioned to kill fellow human beings, they have a high propensity to suffer psychological
harm, which usually manifests as PTSD symptoms. Indeed, both loyalist and republican para-
military interviewees illustrated that engaging in politically motivated violence had caused them
pronounced feelings of guilt and revulsion at what they had to become to bring about political
change, with many describing themselves as ‘monsters’ or as unleashing their ‘dark side’. For
example, this ex-member of the IRA reflects on the impact joining an armed insurgent group
and engaging in politically motivated violence had on him:
I’m someone that’s living that lived in the past, that went through it and is able to
recount and tell them the horrors of it. And how much it can take lumps out of your
head. Because it has taken lumps out of mine, there’s no doubt about it. I have the rest of
my life to live thinking on things that I’ve done and maybe hurt people. And I’m very,
very, sorry for it. I never wanted to do it. I don’t want any young people to go through
that again. And I want them to appreciate life, you know, and get on and be happy and
love one another no matter what religion they are.
So while trauma is one of the antecedent factors reported by the participants in their politici-
zation process, it is also an almost certain outcome of engaging in violent extremism, and an
outcome that both outlasts the conflict and potentially plays a role in fuelling future violence.
Another cost for many of the participants was that their violent political activism led to their
incarceration for extensive sentences for scheduled or terrorist related offences related to murder
and attempted murder. These prison years had a profound impact on their political lives, with
their protests continuing in prison against the prison authorities. At the same time, unexpectedly,
prison also provided them with space to think and gave them the opportunity to develop their
political thinking to a degree that would have been impossible outside the prison walls. These
developments are succinctly expressed by a loyalist paramilitary:
I’ve been involved for something like thirty-five years and the next stage obviously
when you get involved in the conflict, the more operations you carry out, the more you
get involved, the bigger chance you’ve got of getting caught or killed. So I was caught,
and put in prison, so I had those prison years where, and it should be no surprise to any-
body, because some of the best leaders in the world developed their political thinking
in prisons, Nelson Mandela . . . so it should come as no surprise that people in prison
do develop because you’ve been removed from the conflict.
These prison years also allowed the prisoners to reformulate their ideas and see the conflict from
a fresh perspective while developing a longer term political strategy than was possible outside in
the action-reaction cycle of sectarian violence, so once released they found their thinking had
moved forward and they were on a different page in comparison to those continuing the conflict
outside the prison walls; as noted by another loyalist:
Prison just gives you an opportunity to be detached from the conflict, it’s a dubious
way to be detached but you’re detached from it and it gives you time to think, you
come out with pretty clear ideas in your head. It’s pretty difficult after that period of
time when you’re away and you go back and see your friends and colleagues from
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Neil Ferguson
before and some of them are thinking in exactly the same way as they did in the early
seventies. How’s this happening like? And then they think because you’ve been in
prison it’s softened you or broken you or whatever but that’s not the case it’s just com-
mon sense, pragmatism, you can’t go on killing each other forever, some time you’re
going to have to talk so why not do it now rather than go through another ten, twenty
or whatever years of conflict.
So this reformulation and re-education allowed them to leave prison prepared for the next stage
of their political lives, a stage which was exemplified by a move away from the employment of
violence to a desire to engage with their local community to create the conditions for com-
munity development and conflict transformation. This transformation brings their lives more
in line with the other peaceful protestors and political activists we interviewed, to the extent
that all the people we interviewed within the first ten or so years of the signing of the Bel-
fast Agreement had all experienced the benefits of peace and were all trying to build a better
peaceful future. For some this peace was, in part, their creation and they revelled in Northern
Ireland’s new circumstances.
It doesn’t matter if I say it to anybody else because nobody sees it this way, but to me,
I brought two sides together. I’m not sure what they are or who they are, but they’re
people and I’ve brought them together. That’s the personal satisfaction that I’ve got, you
know, I’ve brought two sides together.
Even the participants who had employed violence saw an opportunity to move away from
violence and to break the cycle of violence that had sucked in earlier generations of Northern
Irish men and women, in the words of a former IRA volunteer:
I say [to the young], “now, it’s because of people like myself and lots of others who
stood up, that will never happen again in your time. We have given you a life whereby
you can have third-level education; you can have a house, a job. Don’t mess it up. It
was very, very, dearly bought.” I’m passing that on to them. But, don’t use violence any
more. It worked for us, but it’ll not work anymore.
For most of the former combatants, one of the key reasons they came to disengage from political
violence after the paramilitary ceasefires in 1994 was the desire not to witness another generation
of children having the same experiences of political violence they had endured (Ferguson et al.,
2015).
The Belfast Agreement had a deep bearing on the political lives of our interviewees and
particularly on those who were members of armed groups, and/or had been imprisoned for
terrorism related offences, particularly, because the Agreement made provision for the release of
prisoners who were part of paramilitary groups on ceasefire within two years of the ratification
of the Agreement. There was also a change in securitized nature of Northern Ireland, with
the ‘normalization’ of security arrangements, which included the removal of military bases and
installations and a reduction in troop numbers to garrisoned peacetime levels. Additionally this
reform of the militarized police force and the removal of emergency powers legislation removed
many of the reasons for the continuation of the conflict. The Agreement also acknowledged
that the decommissioning of all paramilitary weapons was an ‘indispensable’ (1998, p. 20) part of
peace-building, which pushed paramilitary groups and their members to disarm and disengage
from violence.
312
After some initial confusion and soul searching about the implications of peace in Northern
Ireland among both the loyalist and republican activists we interviewed, these components of
release, normalisation and decommissioning were all significant drivers which pushed our par-
ticipants to turn away from violence and reroute their political energies into community and
conflict transformation work, for example:
Since 1994 when the ceasefire was called, it’s what do you do now mate? We’re redun-
dant aren’t we . . . How do paramilitaries justify their existence if there’s no conflict?
Interestingly, while the former combatants disengaged from using political violence, and left
the work of politics to the elected politicians, in many cases very begrudgingly, they did not
de-radicalise (see Ferguson, 2010). After the ceasefires many former prisoners became involved
in community and youth work as a form of community capacity building or conflict trans-
formation (Mika, 2006), with Hamber (2006) reporting that as many as 63% of ex-prisoners
in Derry had been involved in some form of political activity since their release. Likewise, the
majority of our interviewees were working on a variety of projects, such as truth recovery and
story-telling, co-ordinating restorative justice programmes, setting up mobile phone contacts to
diffuse interface tension, developing sports and community activities, promoting racial tolerance,
etc. during the period of the interviews. While having former combatants actively working in
conflict transformation seems counterintuitive, their “macho” and violent past offers them a
certain credibility when they are encouraging others to turn their backs on violence that can be
lacking in someone who has never experienced or engaged in violence first-hand. The quote
below from a former UVF prisoner illustrates both this credibility and the desire among former
prisoners to move away from the violence of the past.
We were talking about the conflict days [with a group of young men in a community
group] . . . and one of them or two or three of them eventually said “I would love to
live in those days”, and I just lost it. I said “do you have any idea, you know it seems
glamorous now”, I said “but wait till you’re carrying a coffin of your mother and father
dead in the street, or you’re carrying a coffin of your wife or your brother, or your best
mate down the street”, and it’s getting this message through that it wasn’t glamorous, it
wasn’t nice, it was ugly, it was rotten, and it’s people like myself and others, we have to
get this message out to the younger generation, that it wasn’t glamorous. You know it’s
easy sticking up murals glorifying [the violence of the past], but it wasn’t [glorious], you
know, which is why we are trying to get rid of them and replace them with other stuff.
By constantly glamorising you are attracting, and filling the minds of the kids with crap,
and it’s only people who, like myself, who came through it and who were involved in
the conflict and carried the coffins of their mates and seen the atrocities who can make
them see the horror of the conflict.
Thus, we have a paradox that the political agency of the participants fuelled decades of conflict
and political violence – violence that has left the peace process of Northern Ireland stagnating
under the shadow of the Troubles – yet they are also uniquely placed to initiate the attitudinal
and behavioural changes necessary to persuade the younger generations not to continue the
cycle of violence. Former political prisoners have been able to work together across community
boundaries in a way that is less apparent among mainstream political parties (Shirlow & McEvoy,
2008). Some researchers also believe that the leadership shown by former prisoners is key in
preventing the resumption of organised political and communal violence in Northern Ireland
313
Neil Ferguson
(Shirlow et al., 2005) rather than successful policing or elite political accommodations. This point
clearly articulated by one of the former loyalist prisoners we interviewed:
If anybody thinks that the PSNI [Police Service of Northern Ireland] are maintaining
the peace in the interfaces [between Catholic and Protestant areas], they are living in
cloud cuckoo land. The paramilitaries are maintaining the peace at the interfaces. But
that’s good news. Some people would say that’s terrible, it shows the power they have,
but given the year we had last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and
the year before that, it’s not bad that we have this degree of calm at this point in time.
So to some degree the poacher has become the gamekeeper, and for the vast majority of our
participants, their political lives were now focused on using non-violent means to bring future
political changes. So while the participants were politically naïve when their journeys begin in
the early days of the Troubles, after 30 years or more of being politically active, their journey con-
tinues. Though for many the direction of their journey has changed to match the wider changes
in Northern Irish society, still their political identity and radical beliefs have not waned. Indeed
while their political lives were filled with danger during the Troubles, their political activity in the
post-conflict space is still demanding and difficult, with each success hard fought. There was also
a realisation that to have a ‘normal’ peaceful society there would be a need for former combatants
to become reintegrated into mainstream society and shake off the labels and associated stigma
attached to being an ‘ex-prisoner’ or paramilitary.
I’ve got to a position, which you know it is a position within the community, doing a lot
of work the schools recognise, the police recognise, loads of things. I’ve dropped the tag
of ex-prisoner and all that stuff, dropped that a long time ago. You know, some people
feel that they still need to use that and we were saying, people like [David] Ervine2 were
saying, like there has to come a stage where you leave that behind . . . you have to move
beyond that and move forward.
However, many have found this difficult, especially as they feel rejected by mainstream soci-
ety and the political elite, which tend to blame them solely for the Troubles, while at the same
time, denying their own role in maintaining the conflict. This was particularly acutely felt by the
loyalist paramilitaries:
As someone who has worked towards trying to create a transition I realise all the dif-
ficulties involved in that and that again creates resentment . . . when you realise how
tirelessly a lot of people worked to try and make that happen these people [middle class
unionists] have really simplistic views of the way things work. You just don’t wind down
thirty years of militarism and paramilitarism just like that, you can’t turn it off.
For all the participants the Northern Irish peace process brought about a transformation of their
political lives, but it did not signal the end to them. During the interviews it was clear the nar-
ratives of political protest were still being written and many were still active in seeking truth and
justice for the wrongs perpetrated by all sides during the conflict. For others the war was over
and it was time to move on and give time back to their families and/or communities, as a means
of reparation for the time spent in prison. This enduring politicisation should not be surprising
as research in other settings has clearly demonstrated that while collective action is contingent
on holding a strong collective identity (Huddy, 2001), once people are spurred into action, it
314
is difficult to simply switch it off (van Stekelenburg & Klandermans, 2007). It is clear that the
accounts provided here demonstrate the dynamic role of identity in collective action. They also
illustrate that while the introduction of a peace accord and the resultant societal change are pow-
erful, they may not cause individuals to de-radicalise and de-politicise and simply reintegrate into
the masses. Instead we see continued radicalisation and a strong attachment to collective identity,
just channelled into a new direction, more fitting with the new socio-political context.
When I embarked on this series of interviews, I was naïve as what they might uncover;
previously most of my research had involved children and adolescents and quantitative para-
digms grounded in developmental psychology (see Ferguson, 2000; Ferguson & Cairns 2002;
McLernon et al., 1997). So one-to-one interviews with ‘players’ in the conflict was a move in
a new direction. Narrative research allowed me to develop a deeper understanding of personal
perspectives of the Troubles and the peace process and to explore competing and contradictory
positions which were hidden or muddled by quantitative studies (see Ferguson et al., 2010). The
use of a narrative approach also allowed a display of the interactions between the micro, meso,
macro and exo systems which are involved in political protest; the narrative accounts contextual-
ized the interviewee’s experiences and allowed their stories to humanize their actions.
However, the retrospective nature of the methodology is not without its weaknesses, and it
creates doubts amongst the audience about the authenticity of the account produced and the
role of hindsight in crafting a narrative to justify past actions (Freeman, 2010). Indeed gaining
acceptance for these findings has been one of the main challenges I have faced since conduct-
ing this research, but retrospective approaches to knowledge generation will always have their
doubters until new methodologies or mixed methodology approaches can tackle these perceived
weaknesses.
This series of interviews charts the political lives for a variety of political actors involved in the
conflict in Northern Ireland, demonstrating how events can cause people to embark on activism
and shape the nature of their activism as they react to events impacting on them and their wider
community. They also demonstrate how a person creates their narrative and life story to make
sense of themselves, the Northern Irish conflict, the peace process and to articulate a personal
version of Northern Ireland’s contested history. For me they demonstrate what is possible and
show how one man’s ‘terrorist’ can really become another man’s peace maker, offering hope that
political conflict is not necessarily intractable and that peaceful solutions can be found.
Notes
1 Boston College conducted an oral history project on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. During the
project they recorded interviews with loyalist and republican paramilitaries about their activities during
the conflict, on an understanding this material would not be released until after their death.
2 David Ervine was a UVF member and former prisoner who became leader of the Progressive Unionist
Party (PUP) and was elected to the Northern Irish Assembly. For a detailed biography see Sinnerton
(2003) or Moloney (2010).
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24
ALEKSANDR (SASHA) PECHERSKY
(1909–1990)
In search of a life story
Selma Leydesdorff
university of amsterdam
How my quest got under way1

It all began in Munich. When I interviewed survivors of the Sobibor death camp (“Vernichtung-
slager”) after the trial of John Demjanjuk (2009–2011),2 they all praised and loved Aleksandr
(“Sasha”) Pechersky, the Russian Jew who had led the revolt and escape that saved their lives.3
Pechersky, the uncontested leader of the revolt of October 14, 1943, was mentioned in every
individual story.
The interviews were the result of a decision taken by the Sobibor Foundation and myself
during the trial to create a website with interviews of survivors, co-plaintiffs (daughters and sons
of the victims) who, under German law, could speak up in court. Many members of this group
were present in Munich. We wanted to create a ‘document’ showing that although the war ended
in 1945, it did not end for children who had never known their murdered parents and felt lonely
and deserted, even if hiding had saved their lives. I myself was born after the war and had never
suffered like they had, but two of my grandparents were killed in Sobibor. So there were personal
reasons to take this on.
That the war was not over for the survivors became clear as soon as they started talking and
remembering. Indeed, ‘war’ and ‘peace’ are not mutually exclusive phenomena in history or
memory, but closely related episodes. As Michel Foucault suggested, peace frequently has to be
understood as the continuation of war by non-violent means.
There also was a historiographical issue at stake. The mainstream view still holds that there had
been little Jewish resistance and that the Jews were slaughtered like sheep. In that perspective,
the Sobibor insurrection could only figure as a contingent anomaly. In the 1970s, however, some
Israeli historians began to question this view of the Shoah, arguing that the old historiography
had simply ignored the witnesses and sources of Jewish resistance.4 Moreover, the dominant
memorial culture went along with mainstream historiography while the ‘personal knowledge’ of
survivors was not validated by a history and collective memory largely based on written sources
and court testimonials.
A further problem was that many survivors lived in the communist bloc. It soon became
clear to me that their narratives were struggling with an altogether different collective memory,
318
Aleksandr (Sasha) Pechersky
embedded in a system of totalitarian control, censored speech, and communist ‘newspeak.’ After
1945 communist ideologues created an amorphous category of war victims that did not acknowl-
edge the specificity of Jewish suffering under Nazism.5 All suffering had been homogenized
and interviewees were imprisoned in the discourse of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and the killing of
‘innocent Soviet citizens’ by the fascist invader.
Step 1: Interviewing the survivors

Immediately I proposed to interview all survivors who were still alive and to complement the
website with their stories. We believed it should be possible to identify them through our inter-
national network and through the contacts of Marek Bem, the present-day Polish custodian of
the site of Sobibor who was working on a book about the camp.6 It turned out that survivors
had moved to several continents, and it would take me nearly three years (2009–2012) to find and
interview all of them. To begin with I read and listened to as many extant interviews of former
Sobibor inmates as I could get access to, some of them dating back to the late forties.
These were interviews from different decades and stages of dealing with the past, for most of
the survivors were interviewed several times. To understand an interview one needs context and
often I had little idea of the various times and places in which the interviews were conducted.
What kind of witness account were they: did the interviewees speak to journalists, or would their
accounts be used in court proceedings? Next, were they part of the memorial culture in a par-
ticular country, or had the interviewees been on the move for a lifetime? What was the historical
status of all this material? And how was one to judge the heroic role assigned to Pechersky by
people who had apparently never known him? Over the years the interviewees’ closeness to him
seemed to increase, resulting in an emotional identification that I could only deconstruct as a
shifting balance of myth and reality.
The interviews with survivors took me all over the world. My trips went from Kiev to Ryazan
east of Moscow, to Tel Aviv, Warsaw, Washington and New York, and I ended it all interviewing
in 2012 an old lady called Regina Zelinksi in Adelaide. I was aware that we were talking about a
world that was gone and memories that had been sifted and transformed in a lifetime. The nar-
rators were all old and frail. For some long time they had been in contact with each other; they
had tried to visit commemorations, and competed with each other with their stories to the outer
world, and very often they disagreed with other survivors. But about Sasha there was consensus.
He was their ‘saviour’.
Reflection 1: In search of Sasha: Twenty-two days in Sobibor,

but a life is longer than that7
I began to wonder: who was this man, and why did we know so little about him? I wanted to
know how he could be such a leader: what kind of man was able to do this, and where did his
endurance come from? Why was he persecuted after the war? How did he survive the anti-
Semitic policies in the Soviet Union under Stalinism? What made him into the man he became?
Some information seemed obvious enough: after the escape from Sobibor he joined the
partisans and finally the Red Army. Pechersky was persecuted in the same manner Stalin dealt
with most Soviet military who had been POWs: they were all suspected of collaboration with
the Germans and their surrender was considered as treason. A good Red Army soldier defended
his country and fought to the death. When Pechersky reintegrated the Red Army in Belarus in
1944, it was not a moment of liberation; it was a time of punishment. Pechersky opted to be sent
to a penal battalion in order to avoid the Gulag. He was later wounded on the battlefield and
319
Selma Leydesdorff
after a long hospitalization he returned to Rostov on the Don where he married a nurse he had
met in hospital. Never recognized as a hero, Pechersky was falsely accused of corruption and lost
his position and social network during the Stalinist anti-cosmopolitan campaign (1948–1953).
In 1990 he died in poverty, social isolation, and despair.
After the war Pechersky never received the public recognition he deserved. In the decades
after the war, most public attention was directed to Auschwitz, although during the trial of Adolf
Eichmann in 1961, Moshe Bahir (formerly Moshe Shalek) testified about Sobibor and mentioned
the man who was his leader in the insurrection that saved his life. For a long time the camps in
Eastern Poland were not known to the larger public, though more than one and a half million
people were killed in the three camps (Treblinka, Sobibor & Belzec) of Aktion Reinhardt,8 which
was the German code for the extermination campaign in eastern Poland.
The Sobibor insurrection only got massive public attention with the movie Escape from Sobibor
(1987) where Pechersky was portrayed as a superhero hardly recognizable as an ordinary human
being or as a Jew. A lot of stories circulated, particularly on the web, suggesting that he was sent
to the Gulag. Some of these mentioned that he and his brother were imprisoned, and that his
brother died (or was killed) while they were in prison. The latter claim is untrue: the circum-
stances of his brother’s death are dubious, but it happened much later, in the Khrushchev era in
the late fifties.
An aging Pechersky appears in several documentaries, speaking almost always about Sobibor
and in a way telling always the same story. He did not like to talk about his past. Sobibor survivor
Jules Schelvis and the documentary filmmaker Dunya Breur interviewed Pechersky in 1984.
The non-edited transcript contains unique information about Pechersky’s adolescence, and the
story gives us a glimpse into why Pechersky chose not to speak or write about anything else than
what happened in Sobibor. Dunya Breur asked him to recall the events, and in the excerpt from
the interview below,9 Pechersky concedes that he can remember his family: “Of course I can
remember, but whether or not this needs to be told is an open question. I could say some words,
not because I am ashamed or feel embarrassed, but is there any point in tiring those who have to
listen?” He had built a wall in order not to have to talk about anything else.
Recently a documentary was made with the collaboration of his daughter which focused
on the fate of her father and his isolation. She talked about life before and after his heroic role
at Sobibor.10 I knew quite early during the research his family was alive, but not how to trace
them. Finally, in 2012, I did find his daughter’s address in Rostov on Don, but only after I went
to Moscow. Moscow activists aiming at recognition for Pechersky had contacts especially with his
former neighbor from Rostov on Don who now lived near Tel Aviv. They gave me the address
of Lazar Lubarski, who had loved him, tried to console him, and was forced to leave the Soviet
Union after years in the Gulag (his trial started in 1973 and he was finally released in 1976).
Pechersky’s life is a window on the world of Russian Jews and the ways they managed to cope
with the massive historical catastrophes of the twentieth century. By looking beyond the Sobibor
insurrection, one finally begins to understand the wellsprings of his leadership in 1943, as well
as the price he had to pay after the ‘victory’ of 1945 when his country punished him instead of
giving him his due.
Sacha Pechersky had been an average Russian man from an average, lower middle-class,
partly secularized Jewish family that tried to get ahead with the communist tide. Even so, they
remained ‘aliens’ in the eyes of most non-Jewish Russians and in the dominant mindset of com-
munist culture. In his youth, Sasha Pechersky profited from the new opportunities available to
Jews to acquire knowledge and professional skills in post-revolutionary Soviet society. When the
war came, like many millions of his countrymen he was swept along by the storm. In German
captivity his Jewish identity acquired a novel and sinister significance. Sobibor was meant to be
320
a final destination for all the Jews sent there, but Pechersky managed to escape the Nazi death
machinery.
While Hitler was losing, Stalin was winning. Pechersky promptly returned to the Red Army
after his escape from Sobibor. He suffered the consequences of having been a POW, once more
caught in a massive current of repression that engulfed hundreds of thousands of his countrymen.
For the remainder of his life, he was an unrecognized hero, admired and venerated only by a small
minority of Russian and West European Jews, but relegated to oblivion by the state for which he
had fought and risked his life. What makes his fate all the more tragic is his lifelong pride that
he had fought to defend his country.
Step 2: A friend in Ryazan

But Lazar was not the first acquaintance of Pechersky I met. In the company of historian Nanci
Adler, more familiar with Russia and travel in Russia than I could possibly be, I journeyed to
Ryazan, east of Moscow, through slowly melting and refreezing snow. Russian trains turned out
to be well-heated but dirty. One of the last survivors of Sobibor, Aleksei Waiczen, lived in Ryazan
and I wanted to interview him and ask him about Sacha. Apparently the Sobibor survivors had
been a close-knit group. Aleksei had been Pechersky’s confidant and had worked with him dur-
ing the preparations for the revolt. The first day of interviewing turned out to be difficult, partly
due to Aleksei’s brain injury some weeks earlier. But on the second day, after I told him that my
grandparents were killed in Sobibor, there was a sudden intimacy that made possible an unfor-
gettable narrative. For the first time I was immediately confronted with a narrative about the
fear to talk about the fate of Jews in communist times, something I knew about only in theory.
Aleksei told me how till the late nineties he had been unable to talk about his experiences.
As he expressed it: “I did not talk to anyone about it, not even to my wife. It was not okay to
talk about it. I had no one to talk to. My relatives were all killed. I really felt unable to talk about
it.” Talking would have been very dangerous given the unceasing KGB surveillance. Moreover,
Aleksei had remained in the army till the late seventies, and speaking about Sobibor would have
ruined his career. Mentioning the fate of Jews was dangerous in a time when many Jews wanted
to emigrate to Israel but were refused the permit to do so. Therefore the story of Jewish suffering
was closed, as Aleksei called it. He was not certain what would have happened if he had talked
about such forbidden subjects. I realized how lonely he must have been. From that moment the
story of the imposed silence surrounding Sobibor did not leave me. What had happened to the
memory of the massacre of the Jews in the former communist world made me rethink my entire
research project. I realized that I would have to tackle fundamental theoretical and methodolog-
ical problems if I wanted to pursue my research. The first and most important problem is that
history is framed in national terms.
Reflection 2: Changing histories and national framing

I had to deal with multiple locations and issues: German and Russian history, and the memorial
culture and politics of several countries that interact. Sobibor was in Poland, but many Russian
POWs were killed there; they had passed through concentration camps in Belarus and the former
Soviet Union, and in the case of Pechersky I was confronted with Stalin’s repressive policy towards
Jews after 1948, and with the communist loyalty of someone who was in 1944 forced to join
a penal battalion on the Western Front that had fought its way through Poland and Germany.
National and local histories can be contradictory when one crosses borders. Archives are
organized in radically different ways. I was looking for a Russian hero in a camp in Poland, which
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according to Russian historians was not Russian history. My decision to persevere in my quest
was a reflection of the post-communist revision of historiography that reconsiders the interaction
between Nazism and communism and seeks to comprehend how so many people have been
victims of both totalitarian systems.
Geographically this is the region that has been named ‘Bloodlands’ by American historian
Timothy Snyder,11 an area comprising present-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, western Russia, and
the Baltic states. In these lands the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, despite their conflicting goals,
caused between them a degree of suffering and bloodshed far greater than any seen in Western
Europe during the Second World War. I also include Rostov on Don, which is slightly more to
the east. Armies have marched through these lands, advancing and retreating in turn, and leaving
death and devastation in their wake.
After the interview with Aleksei in Ryazan, I realized that this widespread state- controlled
silence was probably only one example of what happened, not only to the handful of survivors
of Sobibor but to virtually all Shoah survivors in Russia.
Step 3: The beginning of a life story in Moscow (October 2012)

I decided to write Pechersky’s entire life story and to look for answers to the many questions I
now had. If I really wanted to understand him, I needed to look for traces of other parts of his
life. In Moscow I found the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center, whose generous
archivist Leonid Teruschkin had piles of material. Together with some of his colleagues he had
recently published a book about Sobibor.12
The archive held some early Russian publications about Sobibor, often written by Jewish
intellectuals, and it also contained memoirs and descriptions of other places where Pechersky
had been, like Minsk and a camp in the woods near Minsk. He had made a deposition about
crimes committed in Sobibor in 1944, which was edited by the NKGB and also preserved, along
with his unpublished memoirs of 1972. But his movements following his escape from Sobibor
presented a puzzle. Several partisan groups in Belarus claimed him as a member. I realized I
would need to visit Minsk as well as his family in his hometown of Rostov on the Don. It was
clear to me that most of those who had left records about Pechersky were not interested in his
whole life story but only in his leadership role in the Sobibor insurrection. At times it felt as if
I had been too optimistic when I embarked on my quest, not sufficiently realizing that tracing
the life of Pechersky would depend on the assistance and trust of others: archivists in former
communist countries, surviving relatives and others who had met or known him. I admired
those activists and historians who, like his daughter, had tried to break the silence after the fall
of the communist regime.
One afternoon I entered the Bolshaya Bronaya Synagogue in Moscow and saw to my surprise
that Pecherscky’s portrait occupied a prominent place. He was the centerpiece in an exhibition
designed to show the Jewish participation in the heroic struggle against the German invader.
Svetlana Bogdanova, in charge of the exhibition, advised me to approach Pechersky’s friends
who in the meantime had emigrated to Israel. They told a different story, filled with compassion
for this man who became sad and lonely. They had not been with him in Sobibor but they had
witnessed his slow decline in later years. Again I was lucky.
Step 4: Michael Lev and other friends of Pechersky in Israel

Svetlana from the Moscow synagogue had sent me to Lazar Lubarski in Israel, and Lazar was close
to another survivor, Simion Rosenfield, whom I had met before.13 He in turn was in contact
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with the kibbutz Lohamei ha-Getta’ot (The kibbutz of Resistance Fighters in Northern Israel)
and with a group that sought recognition for Pechersky, some of whom still lived in Moscow
and others who had become Israelis. One member of this kibbutz, Miriam Novitch, had in
1980 published the first book about Pechersky based on first-person memories. Born in White
Russia, Miriam Novitch travelled to France before the war where she later joined the resistance
against the Germans. In 1946, she migrated to Palestine. Her book of short excerpts marks the
early years of Israeli historiography in the eighties which sought to explode the myth of Jewish
non-resistance.14
Along with providing information about Pechersky’s later years, Lazar introduced me to
Michael Lev, the Yiddish author who had helped Pechersky in the seventies and eighties to answer
the many letters he received. I spoke with Lev only a few months before he died. Michael Lev has
published a book on Pechersky and Sobibor which is a mixture of history and fiction.15 He had
loved this cultivated artistic man who had felt so rejected. Lev explained that names in Russian
traditionally include a patronymic, so Pechersky was born Alekandr Aronowitch Pechersky, but
in public they left out the Jewish Aronowitch. Later on, in Poland, his public name had changed
into Aleksandr Ivanovitz Pechersky. Insofar as he became a known person, Pechersky was thus
Russified and de-Judaized. Michael Lev had sent his files of Pechersky’s correspondence to the
US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Reflection 3: Citizen Pechersky, Jew Pechersky

The more I studied the story of his life, the more I saw Sasha Pechersky as an example of how
two totalitarian systems had collided and deformed memory. The language he had to use to talk
about the past was the idiom of communist totalitarianism, and even Pechersky’s ego-documents
had not escaped from the grid of political control and newspeak. Recently the German historian
Franziska Bruder has written about this phenomenon. She studied the trajectory of the several
editions of his manuscript memories and their modifications and adaptations in later editions up
to his death in 1990 and beyond.16 Avoiding ‘dangerous’ ground and affirming the official version
of contemporary history had become normal for so many, and to be excluded or misrepresented
in official histories were part of everyday life under communism.
In 1945 Pechersky published his first little autobiographical book, based on a text written a
year earlier for his mother to let her know what had happened to him. These pages describe the
revolt, but the word ‘Jew’ was nowhere mentioned. Instead, the book referred to ‘Soviet Citizens’
who had been killed by the fascists. In retrospect victimhood was homogenized in conformance
with the standard language of the time.
Step 5: Washington (February 2013)

My next stop was Washington. The search was becoming more and more complicated and
expensive. In Washington I got a glimpse of Pechersky’s forlorn years after 1945. It turned out
there was a huge collection of letters, which often contained detailed descriptions of his later
life. For decades he had been trying to write about the fate of the inmates of Sobibor, but in his
feelings he failed. He wanted to tell his story about Jews, but he was not allowed to testify in
Nuremberg in 1948, nor at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. His first testimony after
the war was at a tribunal in Kiev (1962), which was of course stage-managed by the authorities.
Once more, Pechersky recounted events in Sobibor without mentioning the word ‘Jews’ a single
time. His attempts to maintain contact with the other Russian inmates of the camp were also
frustrated. At times he could not even get a permit to travel to Moscow.
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Selma Leydesdorff
In November 1980 he wrote: “I feel so weak, I don’t feel well,”17 mentioning the onset of the
diabetes that would upset his life. According to him he could only fight his illness by working,
which to him meant testifying. These were letters of despair; his only consolation was in the
letters he exchanged with the other Russian survivors of Sobibor and with prominent former
inmates of other camps. In 1982 he wrote in a letter to Michael Lev: “I am unable to write. I
feel weak, I am unable to think. You asked if I suffer from pain. My answer is: seldom. Twice a
month my heart aches.” He described how he was approached by film crews and journalists. He
did not want to collaborate because life was difficult enough. There was a shortage of food in
Rostov and prices on the market were staggering.18 He felt unable to seek publicity or otherwise
play an active role.
Reflection 4: Who was that man?

The documents in the archives were so vast and rich, especially in Moscow and Washington.
There were so many contradictions so many silences surrounding this man! Slowly I began to
understand how this complicated person had been so attractive to so many inmates in Sobibor
but had fallen silent after the war. To more fully comprehend his life we have to include the
story of Pechersky before he became identified with Sobibor. In several respects he exemplified
the changes brought about in Jewish life after the Bolshevik Revolution. He grew up as a young
communist in Rostov-on-Don, where his family had found shelter after fleeing their home in
Kremenchug, a smaller town. Compared with Kremenchug, Rostov-on-Don was a more tolerant
city, a major commercial hub with a large, more secularized Jewish community. The ‘modern’
Soviet society expected Jews to assimilate to its secularist culture, which meant minimizing or
hiding their Jewishness. Pechersky is clearly a species of this new breed of assimilated Jews.19
How much he suffered from prejudice before the outbreak of war in 1941 we will never know,
but certainly his fate during the war made him more Jewish than he himself probably ever
imagined.
As Leonid Teruschkin, the archivist at the Center for Holocaust Research in Moscow, wrote,
“Until his very death, Pechersky had to rationalize something. This prewar generation of Jews
who grew up during the Soviet era was Soviet through and through, accepting the spirit of inter-
nationalism that was propagated.”20 His Sovietized self-image begins to explain why Pechersky
found it so hard to cope with the silences and misrepresentations of the post-1945 era.
Step 6: Minsk (May 2013)

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Pechersky was convinced it was his moral duty to
defend the Soviet Union against the invaders. All his life, he remained proud of his contribution
to the war effort. He was a leader from the moment he entered Sobibor, surrounded by some
friends he had met in Minsk. The deep impression their arrival made in Sobibor is mentioned
in many testimonies. He had by then survived years of imprisonment, including an effort to kill
him with several others in a cellar outside Minsk.
Where was this cellar? I went to Minsk to find that out, and also to collect more information
about the partisans who had been fighting in 1943/44 in Belarus, and amongst whom Pechersky
spent some time after the escape from Sobibor. He described the cellar in Minsk ‘as a hellhole’
where only few prisoners managed to survive. Investigating the topography of the Minsk prison
system I finally identified Stalag 352, of which there are several descriptions, as the place of Pech-
ersky’s imprisonment. Much material I found in Minsk was unique and helped me solve my
search for knowledge about his trajectory before his deportation to Sobibor. How and why did
324
he land there and not for instance in the destruction camps of Belarus? Could the German need
for labour explain this?21 The Belarus archives are not easily accessible, even with the assistance
of the local archivists.
I tried to hear his voice, understand his language and his sadness. In several interviews Pech-
ersky had described how he left Minsk and was deported to Sobibor:
It was still dark. We had to appear at the Appellplatz for the roll call. In the dark of night
we were standing with our shabby belongings waiting for our ration of 300 grams of
bread for the trip. On the square people were swarming, no one dared to say anything,
frightened children clung to the skirts of their mothers. It was even more silent than
usual, though this time no one was flogged; no one was dowsed with boiling water;
there were no German shepherd dogs.
The Jews were told they were going to Germany to work. They would travel together with
their families. The column of the doomed passed the ghetto: “We heard shouts of farewell,
crying and wailing. Everyone knew what could happen to us in the near future. Seventy of us
were crammed, men, women, and children, into a boxcar. There were no plank beds or benches.
There was no question of sitting or lying down. Sometimes one could sit for a moment. It was
even hard to stand up”. This the beginning of a moving document which is both a lament and
a profound indictment of cruelty.22
When they arrived at Sobibor the Germans selected eighty men to work, but in keeping
these Russian POWs alive for work the Germans had made a huge mistake. They allowed
an extremely hostile group to enter the camp, a group of soldiers who were accustomed to
military discipline and knew how to handle arms. As Pechersky himself put it: “The arrival
at the camp made a great impression on the older prisoners; they knew well that the war was
going on, but they had never seen the men who were fighting in it. All these newcomers could
handle arms!”23
Pechersky organized the revolt in twenty-two days with the help of an already existing Polish
underground network and his Russian comrades. In his view, not giving in to the destruction of
one’s personal identity was a form of resistance: “By not killing all prisoners, and despite terror
and punishment, the SS did not kill humanity and the wish to resist in order to hope for victory . . .
Most awful was the atmosphere of psychological oppression, a nearly scientific system of individ-
ual pressure and the destruction of the human personality. The SS wanted to corrode all that was
human, they wanted to make all impulses beastly, instinctual like dogs.”24
Reflection 5: Mental survival

Little research has been done into the mechanism of survival in a world where life and death had
become totally arbitrary. It is a theme very much present in the survivor literature, where names
like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel stand out. That literature demonstrates that despite the con-
stant terror, some normal gestures and actions of mutual help, friendship, and even love kept the
camp inmates afloat. Those who survived were the ones who could resist the moral and physical
mechanisms of disintegration. The basis for this resistance was the ability to mobilize the positive
values of life against the fear of death.
The leading therapist who has studied the mechanisms of surviving a concentration camp
was Shamai Davidson, who died in 1992 and whose work was posthumously edited by Israel
W. Charny.25 In the 1980s Davidson made an extensive study of how prisoners of the Germans
managed to survive. Pechersky and his Russian comrades fit the pattern he describes very well.
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According to Davidson it was crucial to preserve awareness and a sense of self. This could be
stimulated by human reciprocity. As he puts it, “interpersonal bonding, reciprocity, and sharing
were an essential source of strength for ‘adaptation’ and survival of many of the victims.”26 But
above all the Russians had a circle of their own, an identity averse to fascism, a language, jokes,
pride and above all songs. They were ordered to sing Russian songs, and Pechersky’s friend Cibul-
ski asked what they should sing. He told him to sing an old patriotic song, “Yesli Zavtra Voyna”
(“If Tomorrow War Comes”), which was the only song they all knew.27 In his 1952 testimony,
Perchersky recalled, “It was like lightening in the spring.” The Russians sang in the evenings; it
held them together.
Reflection 6: And after the Revolt?

Where did he go? To which partisan unit? In Minsk I finally found his release papers. He
belonged to the Shors partisans. I knew he had returned to Rostov and married Olga, the nurse
he met in the hospital at the front. He had testified in Moscow in 1944, and I had a copy of his
testimony. But who was this man? Where did he get the energy to survive and to lead an insur-
rection? It was too easy to say there was no other option because that would be death.
In the first years after his return Pechersky was invited to speak at meetings of veterans and in
schools, on the condition that he would speak and act as a ‘normal’ soldier who had defended his
country. With the increase of anti-Semitism28 at the end of the forties he became isolated. His
efforts to have his memories published brought him into contact with the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee, an organization of writers, journalists and authors that was soon outlawed.
He became unemployed and lived in a small house with his wife, Olga, where he was some-
times joined by his daughter Ella and her family. He was not jailed, as some websites want us to
believe, nor sent to the Gulag. The lack of recognition and the fact he had no chance to tell his
story bothered him tremendously. Whoever reads his letters carefully will see a depressed man
desperately reaching out to those who can confirm his role. In 1973, he arranged a memorial
event in Rostov to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the uprising, but only Russian
survivors were allowed to attend. In later years, the Soviet authorities enforced an official silence
about his life and exploits, reducing him to isolation and compelling him to find work framing
pictures. Visits to him were often impossible. Poverty, illness and official harassment complicated
or prevented his traveling to other cities, such as Moscow. These were the times when many Jews
wanted to immigrate to Israel, and were forbidden from doing so. Pechersky, however, identified
himself as a Russian and chose to stay. Jewishness once more had become a hot issue in interna-
tional politics and a danger spot in the Soviet Union.
Step 7: Rostov on the Don

It was time to speak with his surviving family in Rostov. I met them in August 2013. Finally I
got the story from Ella, Sasha Pechersky’s daughter, and his granddaughter Natascha. There were
piles of letters from schoolchildren, a huge correspondence that had been going on for decades.
In most of them Pechersky retold the story of Sobibor. But the picture did not change, except that
Ella did not think her father was depressed. According to her he was physically in poor health,
but suffered psychologically only in 1987 when he was not allowed to attend the premiere of
the movie Escape from Sobibor in New York. After loud public protest he was allowed to go, but
it was too late. The refusal had been one blow too many. Three years later he died. As far as I
could understand, the family had high expectations of Vladimir Putin, whose help they expected
in obtaining a belated recognition of their Sasha.
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Reflection 7: Libraries in Jerusalem and New York

While looking for additional material in the libraries of the Yivo in New York and Yad Vashem
in Jerusalem, I found time to rethink what I had been doing. What does Pechersky’s life story
contribute to our understanding of Russian Jewish history during the cataclysmic era inaugu-
rated by World War I and the Russian Revolution, which culminated in Stalinism, World War II
and the Holocaust, and then ‘lived out’ in postwar communism? And what does it tell us about
the trajectories of Holocaust memory?
Of all those who remembered him during my interviews and in the vast literature, no one was
able to answer my question why Pechersky had become such an undisputed leader. At the same
time, it took decades before Sobibor emerged from the darkness of oblivion. The participation of
Jews in the Russian war effort is slowly gaining recognition, but this undeniable fact of history29
has taken much time to rise to the surface. The silence is not confined to the former communist
world. While some in the West have mythologized Pechersky, the existence of the death camps
in Eastern Poland was not acknowledged in the West for many years. Psychological studies about
survival appeared, but the sad story of Sobibor does not allow for such studies because there are so
very few survivors. Their stories are have been recorded, but no common narrative has emerged,
despite impressive efforts to publish as many autobiographies as possible. Inmates were assigned
to specific working roles in the camp, and though they interacted with each other, the perpetual
terror made them focus on their individual survival, and for this no one can blame them.
Reflection 8: Reshaping narratives

Memories of the revolt have been shaped and continuously re-articulated by the experiences
and political afterlife of Nazism and communism. Stories also change over time, as did the ways
people remember Pechersky. He had become the hero who was not recognized, and all of the
survivors regretted this. His life story shows us how Nazism and Communism interacted in an
individual life, and how disoriented people in a part of Europe that has been occupied by Ger-
mans and Russians became as national borders were modified and one totalitarian regime was
replaced by another.
Pechersky died in 1990, when the post-communist era had not really started. And one can
only wonder if he would have been officially recognized if the new regime had arrived sooner. It
is still difficult and politically unwelcome to talk about the fate of Jews in Russia. His life and the
mystery surrounding him provide a window on a politically imposed silence and its malignant
consequences during the bleak decades of Soviet society after Stalin. Pechersky’s bitter mood and
his dwindling hope for better times resonate with the broader cultural and psychological currents
of Russian life. But it also makes us aware of the value of retrieving and restoring individual the
stories of individual lives, even if refracted in the cruel mirror of Sobibor. Beyond that, it warns
us against reducing a human being to his heroic role in a ‘spectacular’ insurrection. To fully
understand a man like Pechersky the whole life story is indispensable and it teaches us so much
more than we only look at the hero of Sobibor. Through his life story we learn about the fate of
a Jewish soldier who happened to become a leader.
As the communist master narrative is unraveling as a result of the fall of communism, groups
in Russia and Israel have managed to draw attention to Pechersky. But the story of Sasha remains
focused on Sobibor and the crimes of the Nazis. Lately the Polish government awarded him with
a posthumous medal, but in the speeches only his role as a hero was mentioned. Never was he
mentioned as a Russian Jew. How he was victimized by two totalitarian systems was, again, not
remarked upon. Unlike the Sobibor insurrection, this story has no place in the heroic struggle
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Selma Leydesdorff
against Nazism. But only a complete life story can help us to understand who this mythologized
person really was – his life representing part of a story that could not be told.
Notes
1 1909 Kremanchuk, Ukraine, 1915 the family flees to Rostov on Don.
1917 Russian Revolution.
1941 Conscripted in Russian army, prisoner at the defense of Moscow near Smolensk.
1941–42 various camps around Minsk.
18 Sept 1943 arrival in Sobibor.
14 Oct 1943 revolt and escape.
1943–44 partisan, later soldier Red Army Penal Battailon.
1944 First deposition in Moscow, wounded, second marriage with Olga.
1945 Return to Rostov on D.
1948 false accusation of corruption.
1953 Stalin dies.
1953–70 slow destalinization.
1970–2003 protest movement of Jews who want to go to Israel, Pechersky wants to stay.
1970–1987 decline of health, depression, isolation and poverty.
1990 Death in Rostov o.D.
2 Demjanjuk was a Ukraine-born camp guard at Sobibor who was accused of participating in the murders
at the camp. See www.longshadowofsobibor.com.
3 Michael Lev, Sobibor, Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2007. This beautiful novel is based on Yiddish
writer Lev’s close acquaintance with Pechersky and his assistance with Pechersky’s international corre-
spondence. See also: Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Oxford and New York: Berg
Publishers, 2010.
4 Benjamin Ginsberg, How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of
Nazism, New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013. I don’t agree with this book entirely, but it
gives an oversight of the arguments.
5 Tony Judt, Postwar, A History of Europe Since 1945, London: Penguin Books, 2005, herein ‘From the
House of the Dead, an Essay on Modern European Memory’, pp. 803–831.
6 Bem, Marek (2015) Extermination Camp in Sobibór 1942–1943. Trans. Tomasz Karpiński and Natalia
Sarzyńska-Wójtowicz. Amsterdam: Stichting Sobibor, 10.
7 Much of the work on the biography was covered by a grant from the Jewish Claims Conference.
8 Belzec: 600,000
Sobibor: 250,000
Treblinka: 900,000
TOTAL. 1,750,000 Jewish victims
From: Wolfgang Benz, ed., Dimension der Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus,
München : Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991.
9 The interview was conducted in Russian and translated into Dutch. I have translated it into English.
10 The Russian movie with his daughter is called арифметика своводвы.
11 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books, 2010.
12 С. С. Виленский, Г. Б. Горбовицкий, Л. А. Терушкин]. Виленский, Семен Самуилович. Горбовицкий,
Г. Б. Терушкин, Леонид (Semen Samuilovich Vilenskii?; G B Gorbovit?s?kii?; Leonid Terushkin), Sobibor
(Собибор) [Moskva: Vozvrashchenie] 2008.
13 Simeon Rosenfield.
14 Miriam Novitch, Sobibor, Martyrdom and Revolt, New York: Holocaust Library, 1980.
15 Lev, Sobibor.
16 Franziska Bruder, Hunderte solcher Helden: Der Aufstand jüdischer Gefangener im NS-Vernichtungslager
Sobibor, Münster: Unrast, 2013.
17 Letter of 10 November 1980.
18 Letter of 16 March 1982.
19 Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence, The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988 (reprinted 2001).
20 Leonid Teruszkin, The History of Sobibor and the Fate of the Participants in the Uprising (materials from
Russian archives and museums), Warsaw: Holocaust Center for Research and Education (CBE), 2013.
328
21 In my search I was helped by Israeli historian Dan Zeits, and by the History Workshop of Minsk, in
particular by Kuzma Kozak.
22 Novitch, Sobibor, Martyrdom and Revolt, pp. 89–90.
23 Ibid., p. 91.
24 Memories of Aleksander Pechersky; several editions of these have been published. This quote is directly
translated from a typoscript in the Russian language. 1972.
25 Shamai Davidson, Holding on to Humanity, New York, London: NYU Press, 1992.
26 Ibid., p. 123.
27 If tomorrow war comes, if the enemy attacks
If dark forces come up,
All the Soviet people, like one man
Shall rise for the free Motherland.
28 Arno Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews: The Tragedy of the Soviet Jews and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,
New York: Enigma Books, 2003.
29 Yitzhak Arad, In the Shadow of the Red Banner, Soviet Jews in the War Against Nazi Germany, Jerusalem:
Gefen Publishing House, Yad Vashem Publications, 2010.
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25
SAFFRON AND ORANGE
Religion, nation and masculinity
in Canada and India
Paul Nesbitt-Larking
huron university college
Catarina Kinnvall
university of lund
Our chapter explores narratives of political belonging among Orangemen in Canada and Hindu
nationalists in India. Both the broader historical and constitutional settings of Canada and India as
well as the specific religious and national aspirations of Hindu nationalism and Orangeism estab-
lish a baseline for a series of comparative and contrasting settings. Through a series of interviews
that elicit fragments of life passages, we examine how ‘men make history’ (Marx, 1972/1852,
p. 10) or at least attempt to realize themselves in the flow of political events that they apprehend.
What becomes apparent is that the other half of Marx’s aphorism is also relevant: that men make
history under ‘circumstances transmitted from the past’.
We are examining the political life trajectories of the narratives of men separated by more
than 7000 miles and major cultural differences, but united in their loyalty to imagined commu-
nities, strongly delineated gender roles and chosen traumas and glories. Details of the political
lives of the participants facilitate a series of comparisons and contrasts around the possibilities
of politics as compromise and conflict in two settings. Our chapter presents elements of the
narratives of men who we interviewed for distinct purposes, but who we now choose to place
in an encounter in order to better illustrate aspects of how narratives work in the political lives
of these men and, and what they achieve. Nesbitt-Larking’s original point of entry into the
worlds of Canadian Orangemen was an attempt to understand the politics of a once-dominant
political and societal brotherhood, whose influence and status has undergone substantial diminu-
tion. Contemporary Orangeism in Canada can be described as marginal and, at best, a curious
anachronism, and its remaining membership is disproportionately old and traditional working
class. Nesbitt-Larking conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 mostly older Orangemen
in Southern Ontario from 2012 to 2014.1 Kinnvall’s interviews originate from an attempt to
understand the interrelationship between globalization, religious nationalism and the search for
ontological security, a security of being, in a changing India. The narratives displayed have been
chosen from more than ninety interviews conducted in the early 2000s as Hindu nationalists
331
became increasingly successful in providing simple answers to complex questions. The selected
narratives are those of Hindu men from various castes and classes in northern India.
Our chapter begins with a very brief account of the historical and institutional settings of
ethno-racial diversity in Canada and India. The regimes, structures and institutions of each set-
ting establish the taken-for-granted in the generation of cultural lives and furnish the dominant
meta-narratives. We then turn to three inter-related focuses that illuminate the comparative and
contrastive characteristics of political narratives as well as their relevance to evolving political
practices: the construction of imagined communities, conceptions of gender roles and identities,
and reference to chosen traumas and glories. Each of these focuses emerges from the encounter of
our theoretical expectations with the stories of those we interviewed, regarding the political lives
of men in fraternal religious organizations. As Anderson (2006) points out in his foundational
study of nationalism, the process of collective identity formation is characteristically built around
the social construction of imagined communities. As we shall see, substantial facets of the polit-
ical lives of Hindu nationalists and Orangemen are reflected in the ways in which they imagine
their communities and those who do or do not belong. The construction of national and ethnic
identities is a profoundly gendered process (Yuval-Davis, 1997) and narratives of ethno-national
belonging characteristically incorporate considerations of masculinity and femininity as well as
biologistic explanations and tropes. Orangemen and Hindu nationalists frame their religious and
political lives within the context of their understandings of gender. Vamik Volkan’s (1997) work
on ethno-national identities refers to shared memories of large-scale and critical events and cir-
cumstances of the past that come to serve as rallying points for a community’s collective identity.
These he refers to as chosen traumas and chosen glories. Psychodynamically, as communities
enter more deeply into perceived threat and instabilities and relations of enmity, so the tendency
to recall and commemorate chosen traumas and glories is enhanced. In contrasting the Orange-
men with the Hindu nationalists, the degree to which they refer to past traumas and glories is
indicative of their degree of community perceived threat and predisposition toward conflict.
Historical and institutional settings

In this section, we offer a brief description of the historical, institutional and ideational bases of
ethno-religious accommodation and inter-community cohesion that underscores the political
culture of English Canada and provides the setting for contemporary Orangeism in Canada.
In subsequent sections, we discover how meta-narratives of accommodation and cohesion find
expression in the personal narratives of Canadian Orangemen, who attempt to disavow bigotry
and uncompromising ideals, even as they express a pride in crown, faith and loyalty to nation.
By way of contrast, our account of the historical, institutional and ideational setting of India
reveals patterns of discord and divisiveness that have come to underscore the uncompromising
meta-narratives of Hindu nationalism and thereby sustain personal narratives of gender-based
exclusion, ethno-religious bigotry and essentialized accounts of chosen glories and traumas of the
past. Despite these contrasts, our narrative analyses also reveal certain comparisons. We explore
these in order to demonstrate how meta-narratives do not automatically determine personal
narratives. This is especially evident in the case of Canada, where the dominant meta-narratives
of diversity and multiculturalism shape popular discourse in ways that call into question certain
principles of Orangeism in which personal narratives adapt to their evolving settings, and are
framed in the contexts of what can or cannot be said. In India, in comparison, there appears
to be a closer relationship between meta-narratives and personal narratives as well as between
both these forms of narrative and agency. This can be seen in the vast amount of attacks against
332
Saffron and Orange
Muslim minorities at the hands of Hindu nationalist sympathizers and in tendencies to blame
Muslims (and the West) for all ills that have befallen Hindu society.
The Orange Order

As with other white-settler colonies, European Canada’s early settlement represents an extension
of empire. The British defeated the French in the Conquest of Québec in 1759 and there ensued
a struggle between the impulse to assimilate the French under a regime of Anglo-conformity
and the pragmatic necessity of ethno-cultural and religious accommodation (Gagnon & Iacov-
ino, 2010). Such a balance was to inform the growth of the highly influential Orange Order
in Canada throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries and is further evident in the words of
contemporary Orangemen as they endeavour to stay true to their faith and loyalism in a multi-
cultural, pluralist and integrated Canada.
Soon after the Orange Order was established in Ireland in 1795, it spread to Canada. There
were Orange lodges in Halifax and Montreal by 1800 (Houston & Smyth, 2007, p. 171) and
in 1830 the Grand Lodge of British America was founded in Brockville, Ontario. Between
1825 and 1845 over 250,000 Protestant Irish immigrants settled and many of them joined the
Orange Order (Houston & Smyth, 2007, p. 171). Clarke (2007, pp. 112–13) identifies three
dominant themes that characterized the speeches of Orange orators: First, the idealization of
Protestantism and the derogation of Catholicism; second, celebration of the Imperial connec-
tion to Britain; and third, a determination to defend and fight for the Protestant faith and the
British Empire.
Given the internal and external ethno-political characteristics of post-Conquest Canada,
Orangeism made sense. Both the crown and the Protestant faith were under threat from forces
outside of and within the emerging British North American colonies. As the United States went
through its revolutionary break, bonds to the British crown grew stronger through the settlement
of thousands of United Empire Loyalists, who had fled the United States following the revolution.
From within Canada, the presence of largely Catholic French and Irish populations posed a con-
stant threat to Protestant hegemony (Senior, 1972, p. 7). However, Kealey points out that while
the ideology of crown, empire, and the Protestant faith were abiding principles of Orangeism, it
‘had to be constantly reformulated in the Canadian context’ (1995, p. 163). This insight assists us
in understanding both the historical and contemporary place of Orangeism in Canada. Accom-
modations and alliances have always necessitated a broad and encompassing pragmatism on the
part of Orangeism in Canada.
From its beginnings in the early 19th century, the Orange Order in Canada peaked in mem-
bership and influence in the 1920s. In 1921, the population of Canada was just under 8,800,000.
At that time, the Orange Order consisted of at least 100,000 members, with many more who
had been through an Orange Lodge or were related to a member (Wilson, 2007, p. 21). By June
2013, there were only 2,536 men remaining in the Orange Order across Canada in a population
of 35,154,300. The Canada that surrounds the remaining Orangemen has become a liberal
pluralist and proudly multicultural country. Its immigration system was radically deracialized in
the passage of the 1976 Immigration Act. Within a decade the ethno-racial profile of Canada’s
immigrants went from predominantly white European to predominantly BME non-European.
The cultural and institutional context in which contemporary Orangeism operates is one of
widespread support for religious tolerance and recognition of minority community rights. As
we shall see, Canadian Orangemen have learned to adapt their deeply held loyalist beliefs to
contemporary values, practices and institutional structures.
333
Hindu Nationalism
The historical growth of the Orange Order in Canada shares certain similarities with our
Indian case in terms of viewing itself as a safeguard against the Catholic threat towards Prot-
estant Canada. As British India was coming to an end, this threat was increasingly related to
the growing perceived danger of Islam to Hindu (Saffron) India. However, in comparison to
the contemporary tolerance and acceptance of a multi-religious and multiethnic order among
Orangemen today, the Saffron order has grown to rely upon ‘tolerance’ as the essence of Hindu
spirituality understood as a discourse intended not only to unite different Hindu groups, but
also as an avenue of complaint about the intolerance of those who do not wish to be included,
such as the Muslims.
Hindu nationalism is not a new phenomenon but has long existed in various forms. It got its
name as early as 1925 through the creation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS – the Asso-
ciation of National Volunteers), but did not become influential until the struggle in 1947 to keep
Kashmir under Indian rule. The RSS later developed its political wing − the Jana Sangh (People’s
Society), which in 1977 became part of the Janata Party that came to power after Indira Gandhi’s
emergency rule. In 1980 the Jana Sangh group left the Janata Party and formed the Bharatiya
Janata Party as the political arm of the RSS. The BJP has close ties with Vishwa Hindu Parishad
(VHP or World Council of Hindus), a non-governmental organization that was formed in 1964
to spread ‘Hindu ethical spiritual values’ and to establish links with Hindus in other countries.
VHP attained national notoriety in the early 1980s when it organized an anti-Muslim campaign
following the conversion of over 1000 Dalits or untouchables to Islam (Kolodner, 1995; Patnaik &
Chalam, 1998, p. 271). The ‘family’ of organizations created by the RSS is often referred to as the
Sangh Parivar or just the Sangh (organization) or the Parivar (family).
The exclusive nationalism that developed and was instrumental for the creation of the RSS was
influenced by Western examples and is particularly apparent in the writings of V. D. Savarkar and
M.S. Golwalkar. Savarkar’s work, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? published in 1923, is a basic text for
nationalist ‘Hinduness’, and rests on the assumption that Hindus are vulnerable in comparison to
‘pan-isms’, such as pan-Islamism. Savarkar’s main argument in Hindutva is that the Aryans who
settled in India at the beginning of history constituted a nation now embodied in the Hindus.
Their Hindutva rested on three pillars: geographical unity, racial features and a common culture
(Jaffrelot, 1996, p. 51). But it was Golwalkar, rather than Savarkar, who in 1939 gave the RSS the
charter it had previously lacked. He did this in his book We, or our nationhood defined, in which
he drew on a number of German writers who argued that a nation points to birth and race and
that ‘the essence of a people lies in its civilisation (Kultur)’ (Jaffrelot, 1996, p. 53), rather than in
any voluntary social contracts. This led Golwalkar to look at the case of India in the light of five
criteria for understanding the nation: geographical unity, race, religion, culture and language. The
racial factor was by far the most important, according to Golwalkar, and the Muslim minority
posed the most severe threat by being a ‘foreign body’ lodged into the Hindu society, thus under-
mining the Hindu nation (Jaffrelot, 1996, p. 55; see also Bhatt & Mukta, 2000; Chakrabarty, 2000,
pp. 161–80; Kinnvall, 2006; Kinnvall & Svensson, 2010).
While Hindu nationalism possesses relatively deep roots in India, over the last decades the
movement has taken a very different form. Never before could Hindu nationalists have been
able to mobilize 300,000 Hindus to engage in religious activities as they did in Ayodhya in Uttar
Pradesh in 1992 when the Babri mosque was demolished and violence against Muslims rose
significantly. This constituted the beginning of a growth that has resulted in three BJP-led gov-
ernments – in 1996, 1998 and in 2014 – and a perpetuation of narratives of exclusive national
community.
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Saffron and Orange
The construction of imagined communities
Imagining the Orange Order

As with their counterparts in Northern Ireland, the primary bonds of affiliation and conceptions
of heritage among Canadian Orangemen are those associated with ‘Faith, Crown and State’
(McAuley & Tonge, 2007, 2008). In their own ways, each of the Orangemen we interviewed
expressed a sense of comfort and anchoring in their Protestant heritage, their loyalty to the Crown
and their pride in being a part of a British heritage that was central to the building of Canada.
These themes come together around the frequently referenced heritage of war heroes in Orange
history, and the central identity claim of being descended from those who ‘fought for our free-
doms’. There is a generalized ideological conservatism among the Orangemen, which represents
the political expression of a deeply personal sense of propriety, orderliness and ethical integrity.
Many Orangemen take pride in their British connections. Pride in British heritage is a strong
personal identity in prompting people to join the Orange Order, in particular since the British
connection is perceived to be under siege as an object of vilification in contemporary Canada.
Reference is made to the British origins of Canadian Orangeism, but also increasingly to the
Canadian crown as distinct from the British crown. Orangemen specifically express a prioriza-
tion of Canadian values and Canadian culture over any other, including the British.
While each Orangeman is a Protestant, their faith finds a wide range of expression. Many
Orangemen now spontaneously refer to themselves as Christians rather than Protestants and
their points of reference are frequently associated with a more general Christianity. While there
remains some anti-Catholic sentiment – in the case of a few members, vitriolic – there is a
generalized acceptance and even respect accorded to Catholics among the Orangemen. A num-
ber of participants draw contrastive parallels between the treatment accorded to Catholics and
Catholicism in Ulster as well as in the history of the Canadian Orange Order and conclude that
the contemporary Orange Order in Canada is far more enlightened. Orangemen are married
to Catholics, have Catholic children and in-laws, Catholic friends or casual acquaintances and
share some informal fraternal camaraderie with Catholic brotherhoods, notably the Knights of
Columbus. An Orangeman says:
The thing for me is that it’s a celebration of your Protestant heritage. It’s not anti anything
else. Like obviously we believe in the Protestant faith and I was raised in the church myself.
I’m still – regularly attend church with my family, and I think that’s where the media often
has it wrong . . . half the time just to create news. Because we’re Protestant does not mean
we’re anti-Catholic or anti – like they can say well you’re anti-Jewish or anti-Sikh just as
easily as they could say anti-Catholic . . . I had a friend say it, you know we walked in
Belfast on the 12th of July. There was a bit of a protest – what have you – and at the end
of it he said “really, did you think anything about them or were you just celebrating our
own culture?” and I said exactly right, we were celebrating our own culture.
(Interview with Orangeman, aerospace technician)
Orangemen are proud of the Protestant reformation and its associations with the rise of lib-
eralism, democracy and enlightened thinking, and for protecting the civil rights and religious
liberties of all, not just Protestants. Not only do Orangemen support the core values of the Rule
of Law and liberal democracy, they are – with certain reservations – also supportive of the core
elements of Canadian multiculturalism. While one Orangeman refers to multiculturalism as a
‘failure’ another simply affirms that ‘we [The Orange Order] are multicultural’. A former factory
335
worker and union member Orangeman makes specific reference to members of his trade union
making disparaging remarks about Sikhs:
You’re right to look after people – you try to – here’s what the Orange Order is, and
here’s the Sikhs. I mean whenever I was going through the education with the Union
up at Port Elgin, and people were saying “now these Sikhs, they stick the knife in you
and you’ve got to – .” They got a speaker there and he was Sikh and their values are
the same as ours. But what you get is “Turban head” and I hate that, you know? How
many do you know? They’re all God’s children. I found them to be very similar to be
honest. That was my experience.
(Interview with Orangeman, retired, former factory worker)
Another Orangeman makes reference to Muslims, portraying them as a community that insists
on having its culture respected and its share of entitlements. This extends even as far as ‘reverse
discrimination’. Other Orangemen argue that Muslims and people from ‘other countries’ bring
their issues to Canada and do not value the Crown and all that it stands for. One says: “Hey, if
you don’t want to swear allegiance to the Queen, don’t come over here – okay?” (Interview with
Orangeman, plumber).
This latter narrative corresponds more closely with those of many Hindu nationalists as they
are imagining a Saffron nation undisturbed by minorities, especially Muslim minorities, and their
claims for recognition and rights.
Imagining the Hindu nation

Hindu nationalists have been successful in making the term ‘Hindu’ into a category by projecting
some common myths or themes onto the other, in this case Muslims. For instance, Muslims are
held responsible for the partition of the ‘sacred’ Hindu homeland, because they in 1947 claimed
that they were a separate nation. Although Muslims (today) constitute only 14 per cent of the
population, India is the second largest Muslim country in the world – counting over 112 million
people. Hindu nationalists have hailed this number as a threat to the Hindu majority as Muslims
often tend to act as a vote bank (Kinnvall, 2006). In the construction of the Muslim ‘other’, Mus-
lims are always referred to as not truly Indian, but as dangerous foreign elements. By demonizing
the Muslim minority, Hindu nationalist leaders have aimed to unify a diverse set of Hindus and
solidify their political support. As one of our interviewees, a young Hindu, stated: ‘Hindus’, he
said, ‘are generally quite peace-loving and tolerant. It is among the Muslims we find more funda-
mentalists – which has to do with the aggressive nature of Islam – just look at the Arab nations!’
Viewing a rise in Muslim fundamentalism as being part of the ‘nature of Islam’ is not uncommon.
This is often contrasted with the ‘tolerant nature of Hindus’. There is also a general inclination
to connect fears of a ‘Muslim takeover’ to acts of transmigration and globalization. In the words
of a 54-year-old Hindu man from Ahmedabad:
There is a rise in Muslims in India. They are spreading and migrating from abroad
because of Gulf money, the breaking up of the Soviet Union, the Talibans. What is
happening is that while Hindus have small families, Muslims have large ones which
affect the rise in Muslims in this country.
Together the VHP, the BJP and the Sangh Parivar overall have promoted Hindutva (Hinduness)
and relied on a definition of a ‘Hindu’ as one who minimally accepts two things (Alam, 1999).
336
Saffron and Orange
At one level a Hindu is one who is ready to fight Muslims, who are seen as militantly, culturally
alien, threatening and a bestial presence in the country. At another level, a Hindu is one who
equates the immemorial nation of India with Hindu culture and religion – both of which are
being destroyed through Western influences.
Modernization is incorrect. Foreign companies come in, first as traders and then they
slowly take over the country – just like the British did. Westernization is affecting the
Indian culture negatively. There is at least 20 per cent’s difference in the way people
think now and then. The Indian people are adopting Western ideas; they watch Western
films; drugs are coming into the country, and people get confused as to what are their
own traditions, their own past.
(Interview with a male Brahmin Hindu store owner in Pushkar)
In looking for the nation, Indian nationalism thus needs to demonstrate that the nation it
wishes to create has always existed. The question thus becomes one of whether the majority does
not have a right to build a temple at Ayodhya. Communalism, in this majoritarian definition, is
projected as true nationalism: The nation belongs to the majority and is formed by their history,
culture and struggles. Nationalism and communalism are thus made synonymous, and Indian
nationalism is imputed with a Hindu religious character, a call for a Hindu Rashtra – a Hindu
nation (Panikkar, 1997). All other notions of nationalism, be they anti-colonial, Western or sec-
ular, are portrayed as irrelevant and even unhealthy.
TV has affected people in a bad way. We pick up the wrong things from the West like
fashion, sex, morality and ways of dressing. In Mahabharata it was a fight for truth. In
today’s television scenes women are always raped or abused – we learn the bad things
rather than the good things.
(Interview with a male Hindu driver in Jaipur)
The role of gender has been crucial to this process. Implicit in the struggle between the
pre-colonial and the colonial nation is the idea that the Hindu nation is also an amorphous female
(the Nation as Mother) who through her absorptive power is able to threaten both the aggres-
sive Muslim male and the rational Western male in the encounter (Inden, 2000, pp. 86–7). It is
noticeable, for instance, how so many of our male interviewees saw as one of the major threats
to Hindu nationhood and culture a changing dress code among Indian women: ‘What I mostly
dislike about foreign influences is Western fashion and how it has made Indian women starting
to wear Western clothes’ (interview with a 32-year-old Hindu salesman in Ahmedabad).
Conceptions of gender roles and identities
The Orange Order

As might be anticipated in a 200-year-old fraternal organization, grounded in the conservative
traditions of faith, crown and state, Canadian Orangemen are generally supportive of traditional
gender roles and assume distinct masculine and feminine identities.
While heteronormativity is pervasive, there are significant and important departures from
what might be anticipated in the responses of the Orangemen. Many of them refer with pride
to daughters and daughters-in-law who are independent and accomplished. A number of them
express frustration at a long-established rule that the Ladies’ Orange Benevolent Association
337
(LOBA) is the only body permitted to run a youth section. This rule is grounded in the belief
that only women can care for young people and that men should not get involved. Present day
members are acutely aware of the deadly combination of a dramatic decline in the membership
ranks of LOBA and the challenges of recruiting young Orangemen. One Orangeman recalls his
daughter’s brief encounter with the LOBA:
My daughter was a member of the Junior Orange Lodge in Toronto . . . she joined
briefly the Ladies Benevolent Association out in Kendall. She was 18 or 19 at the time
and showed up as 18- or 19-year-olds do, wearing a white dress and a white blouse,
with an inappropriate length according to one lady, and they told her not to come back
unless she wore the right clothing, and she never went back . . . I keep reminding them
[LOBA] that we do have the vote for ladies now, so you can lay aside those old style of
dresses and the attitudes that go with it . . . [adopting the voice of his daughter] “You
know my character, you know my family and stuff, and all of a sudden it’s not who I am,
it’s what I wear? I’m not interested in that”, and she walked away . . . she’s no interest
in being a member now.
(Interview with Orangeman, transportation worker)
Another Orangeman recalls an excellent woman flute player who was not allowed to join
the marching band. Both men state that their wives have no wish to join LOBA, but would
gladly join an integrated Orange Lodge as full members. Both argue that it is time for the
Lodge to modernize and grant women full and equal membership. As with other aspects
of contemporary Orangeism, personal narratives unfold against a backdrop of perceived
generational transformation, in which while there is certain respect and affection for lost
traditions, such as a rigid gendered division of labour or an unquestioning allegiance to the
British connection, there is an acknowledgment that contemporary Canada necessitates
certain adaptations.
Hindu nationalism
The gender dimension is very strong among Hindu nationalists. Not only is there preponder-
ance for gendered nationalism, as discussed previously, but narratives expressing concerns about
declining Hindu numbers and Hindus as a dying race have given voice to discourses around
Hindu impotence and weakness. The Muslim with his alleged ‘hyper fertility’ and ‘proclivity for
violence’ (Sethi, 2002, p. 1547) has come to occupy the position of the dominant other. This
discourse on Hindu impotence and Muslim fertility has been recreated in various versions of
Hindu nationalism. It has been taken as an excuse for a more aggressive and disciplined Hindu
male as voiced in RSS propaganda and camp activities.
The magazine Organiser, for instance, which can be seen as being the representative voice of
the RSS, frequently has stories about Muslim women wanting to marry Hindu men to become
part of the ‘liberal’ Hindu society (Sethi, 2002, p. 1547). Hence in the search for the Hindu
nation, it is the female that needs protection from the demonized hyper-sexual other – in this
case, Muslims. The female, as Tanika Sarkar (1999) has noted, is portrayed as the source of
authenticity, of nation-making and of freedom from repression by external others (i.e. Muslim,
Christian, and also Western forces). As expressed by one RSS representative:
Why is this country lagging behind, this India which was once hailed as the Golden
Bird before foreign invaders discovered her . . . Beggars, that is what we have been
338
Saffron and Orange
reduced to, because we are going with begging bowls before the affluent nations and
multinationals.
(R. Singh in Telegraph, 4 May 1995)
Hence, Hindu nationalists often praise the nature of Brahminical Hinduism, and it is common
to hear Hindu nationalists (women included) complain that Muslims may marry four wives in
accordance with Islam, while Hindus are not allowed to perform the ancient practice of sati
(widow sacrifice – a long celebrated, but now illegal, practice of female self-sacrifice within the
Hindu tradition) (Sarkar, 1999; Sethi, 2002).
Whatever happens in India today is the Muslims’ fault, like robbing, raping, blasts,
bombs, demolitions, etc. It is only the Hindus that are affected by family planning, not
the Muslims as they have their personal laws and are allowed to have four wives.
(Hindu merchant in Pushkar)
This gendered dimension of Hindu nationalism is not limited to men, however. The fact is
that communal forces have been able to mobilize women far easier when adopting the ideol-
ogy of the modern version of Kali or Durga than has been the case for women’s movements
in general (Agnes, 1999). In these narratives the emphasis is on service to the family and the
nation, defence of the self and of the religion and community. That women have found it easier
to externally direct violence against Muslim men and women than to protest against violent
husbands or rapists from their own community reflects a narrative through which women get
to represent the timeless quality of the status quo and of tradition, in the struggle between new
and old, between secularism and religion, between modernity and tradition and between the
global and the local.
Reference to chosen traumas and glories
The Orange Order

The lives of Canadian Orangemen are distinctly bland and mundane. There are few of the great
highs and lows that have accompanied the fate of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland. It is
to be expected that many of their chosen traumas and glories are borrowed, to the extent that
they exist at all. The construction of meta-narratives is made easier through the availability of
social representations that are definitive, dramatic and dynamic. Mythologizing the past through
the selective and partial uses of collective memory, chosen traumas and glories evoke and com-
memorate struggles, battles, wars, sieges, bold declarations and moments of liberation. A number
of Canadian participants invoke the borrowed memories of the Northern Irish troubles and
refer to people they have known who were embroiled in that far-away violence, thereby forging
bonds of brotherhood across the Atlantic Ocean. Their Canadian memories are also mytholo-
gized. Orangemen speak fondly of the great parades of the past, when there was no doubt as to
the power and the glory of Orangeism. There were decades when the Orange Order constituted
a vibrant and active community, when people bought their houses to be close to The Orange
Hall and when you could not get a job as a policeman or a fireman if you were not a member.
As with any fading organization, there are urgent disputes about what to do and the perception
among some that without a vibrant and continuing mandate, the Orange Order will continue to
be a well-funded but lifeless antiquity on life support. There is a kind of lamentation regarding
former glories and a sad resignation about the fate of the Orange Order.
339
Many Orangemen revisit the former glories of the movement in the nineteenth century, the
defeat of the Americans in 1812, the routing of the rebels in 1837 and the hanging of Louis Riel
in 1885. Each of these moments represents hard-won victories for the Crown and the British
Empire against the republicans and their allies. Then in the twentieth century, a series of mili-
tary encounters define the moments of greatness, with the battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917 set as
the defining moment of Orange honour and greatness. While the battle was a victory for the
Canadians, they endured tens of thousands of losses, many of them young Orangemen. The loss
of these young lives also enters Orange mythology as the reason for dramatic drops in the ranks
of Orange membership. The Orangemen exhibit enormous pride in the military and are highly
protective of the armed forces.
In general terms, Canadian Orangemen experience themselves as under siege from a society
that no longer respects its British heritage and traditions as a constitutional monarchy. The par-
ticipants make repeated reference to the social opprobrium accorded to those who stand up for
Christianity, the British heritage or traditional values. Reference is made to excessive political
correctness by a number of Orangemen, who believe that comments they regard as anodyne are
persistently misunderstood and that they are not trying to offend anyone. They feel inhibited
from freely expressing themselves.
For some Orangemen, Protestantism is under attack and people are afraid to celebrate their
faith: ‘I think it’s almost mocked, it’s almost seen as a sign of weakness, you know it’s seen as being
intolerant’ (Interview with Orangeman, aerospace technician). Others refer to the inhibitions
surrounding wishing people a ‘Merry Christmas’ and the stripping away of Protestant symbolism
in public spaces, attacking heritage and traditions:
From what our culture is now to what it was even ten years ago, I think it’s changed. I
see Canada as a kind of Christian-Judeo country and we’ve never had issues with Jews
celebrating Hannukah – they’ve never had issues with us celebrating Christmas. Now
if people work for a retailer and they wish a customer a Happy Christmas, they can be
fired . . . It’s not everything at one time, like we’re going to do away with the Protestant
faith all in one go. It’s brick by brick. You know we’ve lost scripture reading in school,
we’ve lost the singing of our national anthem in a lot of schools, you know, they don’t
pledge allegiance or anything like that anymore. It’s just slowly, like all our values are
slowly – our history as far as the military goes is almost unknown. Like I’ve heard people
on the radio say Canada has no military history. It’s like are you kidding me?
(Interview with Orangeman, plumber)
Some Orangemen are particularly aggrieved by Muslims, who they regard as receiving special
consideration and treatment – a theme that echoes the traumas and glories supposed to have
befallen the Hindus.
Hindu nationalism
The Moghul empire and the creation of Pakistan have been the most prominent recurring
chosen traumas in the hands of Hindu nationalists. Such traumas have been reinterpreted and
redefined in novel contexts involving ideas about a Hindu self and a Muslim other. Included
are, for instance, the wars against Pakistan, the Kargil conflict, the attacks against the Parliament
and the Mumbai bombings. The demolition of the Babri mosque with its intended purpose to
restore the temple of Rama by Hindu nationalists brought together a number of these traumas.
India, the BJP insists, is a Hindu nation and L.K. Advani, one of the former leaders of the BJP, has
340
Saffron and Orange
even suggested that Muslims, Christians and Sikhs living in India be referred to as ‘Mohammadi
Hindus’, ‘Christian Hindus’ and ‘Sikh Hindus’ in order to emphasize the ancient and persisting
character of the Indian nation-state (Smith, 1993). The story is that the Islamic ruler Babur had
destroyed the immemorial Hindu (Rama) temple and erected a mosque on its ruins and Hindu
nationalists have long insisted that the mosque should be destroyed and a Hindu temple built
there instead. By viewing history as linear, Hindu nationalists exhibit a time conception that is
highly consistent with a positivist empiricist narrative of what constitutes history. In the case
of Ayodhya, the Indian nation had been founded by Ram and undone by Babur. This histori-
cal ‘logic’ makes demands for the re-enactment of medieval politics seem ‘natural’. The Babri
mosque and similar sacred places are seen as symbols of Hindu subjection which makes their
destruction a necessary part of the liberation movement of the Hindus. The strategy is to deny
creativity to the Muslims (Bhattacharya, 1991, p. 128).
When the Babri mosque was destroyed, we celebrated. We let off fire-crackers and
danced in the streets. The stuff that was found there was all Hindu idols, Hindu
symbols – Babur had ignored all that and built a mosque there instead.
(Interview with a male Hindu merchant in Jaipur)
To reinvent the present, Hindu nationalists have been busy reinterpreting the past and have
been careful in cultivating both historians and archaeologists who provide official validation of
their claims. As a result, archaeological excavations have been performed at sites described in the
two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Excavations at the Ramayana sites,
such as Ayodhya, revealed that these sites existed earlier than the Mahabharata ones, which posed
a certain problem as Rama of the Ramayana is supposed to have been present later than Krishna
of Mahabharata. As one archaeologist commented, however,‘we will strive and strive with success
to make archaeology and tradition about Rama and Krishna meet on the same plane of time’
(B.B. Lal, as quoted in van der Veer, 1996, pp. 144–5). This search for evidence of what can easily
have been a fictional poem shows the elasticity of myths when combined with empiricist linear
fact-finding. As one Hindu male in Pushkar described it:
Muslims looted India, thereafter Britain looted India and now the Congress is destroy-
ing India. The Muslims demolished a lot of temples – what is wrong with the Hindus
demolishing one as well?
(Interview with a high-caste Hindu male in Pushkar)
Hence, by using a number of narrative strategies, such as concocted figures, dates and names, the
myths become authenticated and create an illusion of concreteness, ‘of setting the history right’
(Bhattacharya, 1991).
Conclusion
In this brief overview of narrative strategies we can see how the Saffron and Orange Order share
some common narratives of nationhood, gender and chosen traumas and glories. However, the
deep structured contextualization of their comparative histories and consequent meta-narratives
serves to underscore the impact of those circumstances transmitted form the past, making certain
personal narratives more or less tell-able. While members of the Orange Order have become
more receptive to a multicultural reality in which other religious or nationalist conceptions of
what constitutes Canada of today are co-existing with this Order, Hindu nationalists have quite
341
forcefully closed down such narratives in favour of essentialist nationalism. In both contexts, the
broader political settings have privileged and preferred certain meta-narratives that condition
both the foundations of personal experience as well as the regimes of signification that validate
and sustain some stories, but not others. Within the Hindu conceptualization of nationhood
there is little space for religious pluralism and inclusive narratives. Instead, personal narratives
serve as a foundation for violence and extremism against the Muslim minority. Although we can
see some signs of anti-Muslim hostility among the narratives of those Orangemen interviewed,
these show a much stronger sense of complexity and reflection in their views towards the inter-
nal other, grounded in daily practices of broad intercultural accommodation. Similarly we see
how gendered narratives are being slowly redefined among many Orangemen to allow for an
institutional structure of opening up to changing gender norms. This is far from being the case
among Hindu nationalists whose stories arise in the context of both the nation and the Muslim
other in gendered terms, further institutionalizing and rationalizing Hindu superiority. These are
evident in the narrative repetition of powerful chosen traumas that justify a linear historic order
in which Muslims and Islam are constantly being demonized. The Orangemen’s narratives are
more elusive and complex and we can see how the past traumas and glories are being redefined
in the present in order to sustain an agentive self that can negotiate sociocultural relations in
contemporary Canada.
Note
1 The interviews conducted are part of a larger project on the Canadian Orange Order with co-investigator
James W. McAuley.
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26
THE EXPERIENCE OF POLITICS
Narratives of women MPs in
the Indian parliament1
Shirin M. Rai
university of warwick
Introduction
Why do political narratives matter? I have been working on the issue of women’s presence in
political institutions such as parliaments for a while now; I found that the dominant political sci-
ence frameworks as well as the broad sociological ones did not allow me to answer the complex
questions about the routes women took to politics – why did they choose to enter politics? How
did they garner support for their decision? How did they negotiate the complex public and pri-
vate terrains to not only access politics but also sustain their participation? Below, I first outline
the two major explanatory frameworks used by feminist political scientists to understand political
recruitment of women and why I found them unsatisfactory, and then show how a narrative and
performative approach to politics allowed me to answer these questions better.
Political scientists tend to focus on specific methodologies in their study of politics. While
interviews are widely used, there is also a sense that these can only provide illustrative or sup-
porting material to more authoritative evidence in the form of quantitative indicators, discursive
markers or conceptual engagements. Interviews themselves, while seen as important, are often
framed by these other methodologies. Behavioural political science in particular privileges objec-
tivity of scientific enquiry, undermining methodologies and approaches that do not make such
claims. Feminist scholars have critiqued the ‘claims to truth’ that such mainstream, quantitative
approaches make and have opened up the study of politics to broader understanding of method –
standpoint theory being one of the important interventions in this debate. Feminists have largely
worked with qualitative methodologies, although increasing number of interventions in mixed-
method approaches is also visible.2 On specific issues, feminist scholars have crossed disciplinary
boundaries – political representation being one such area.
Feminist theorising on political representation has distinguished between descriptive (rep-
resentative of particular identities) and substantive (representative of interests) representation.
The issue of descriptive representation has largely been researched through studying political
recruitment – what are the state and party strategies for increasing the presence of women in
political institutions, and analyses of women’s participation once in these institutions. Norris
and Lovenduski (1995), for example, have suggested that recruitment of women depends on
demand and supply, where demand can be seen in terms of “available vacancies, perceptions
344
The experience of politics
of voter preferences and the attitudes of selectors. Supply is conditioned by the ambitions and
motivations of potential candidates and their perceptions of available opportunities” (Loven-
duski, 2005, p. 64). An increase in demand can expand supply and vice versa (Childs, 2004).
So, the focus of this model would be to better align the supply of women candidates with the
demand of the system. An increased demand might be influenced through campaigning for
gender parity, for example, which might lead political parties to pay more attention to recruiting
women. However, this model, while useful, doesn’t allow for the social histories of the individ-
uals involved in decision making and obfuscates the centrality of gendered power relations by
focusing on actors involved in individual or institutional (party) decision-making (Kenny, 2008;
Liddle & Michielsens, 2007). For critics, representative politics can be best understood through
the socially embedded nature of politics – of party organisations, legal systems and discourses –
which frame the constraints and opportunities encountered and negotiated by individual aspir-
ants. However, while this framework helps to explain the reasons for the low levels of women’s
recruitment, it has little to say about what concretely might be done to address the inequalities
that beset women in political life.
Bringing order to a complex landscape of social relations through meta-theoretical models
has been the impulse that seems to have driven both mainstream and critical approaches to pol-
itics. This impulse to order through both quantitative and qualitative research, to make broad
explanatory claims that can help us compare and contrast like and unlike case studies, is at the
heart of social science research. In her Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, Elinor Ostrom empha-
sised that explanatory complexity and chaos are not one and the same thing3 – that messy expla-
nations reflect complex situations and can allow us to go beyond top down, unconnected and
disembedded policies. My plea in this paper is somewhat similar – to jettison neat explanatory
models of my discipline in favour of narrative analysis (Andrews et al., 2008), through which
a more nuanced understanding of women’s political representation may emerge. As Plummer
writes in his chapter in this volume, listening closely and carefully (and that is no easy task) to
stories or narratives in the post 9/11 world, “hopefully prevented [him] from making strong and
silly judgments” about Muslims. Similarly, for me, listening to the narratives of Indian women
MPs meant not taking the received wisdom of political scientists as truth; the narratives that I
listened to disrupted the metanarratives about gender and politics, about class and gender and
about negotiating and bargaining within and between public and private spaces, institutions
and individuals.
In this paper, I suggest, building on the work of Charles Tilly (2002), that there are three
different ways in which narratives, or stories, as he calls them, prove helpful in explaining
social processes: “First, in the available evidence about social processes, which commonly
arrives in the form of stories people tell about themselves or others and therefore requires
unpacking. Second, in the social behaviour to be explained, which often features storytelling
and responses to it and third, in prevailing explanations by participants, observers and ana-
lysts, which likewise borrow the conventions of storytelling” (p. x).4 Narratives can either
be event-stories or stories of experience, which can represent as well as reconstruct stories
(Squire, 2008, pp. 44–5); the latter are the stories that I focus on in this paper. Of course, indi-
vidual narratives can be open to the problem of over-interpretation – of the gaps between the
individual’s self-projection and external scrutiny of their actions as well as our own biases. We
can address this only if we “pay attention to the microcontexts of research” through which
stories take shape and are read (Squire, 2008, p. 59). A second complexity I wish to introduce
here is one about how to further open up narrative studies to visual cultures. As Duncum has
suggested, “Meaning is made through an interaction of music, the spoken voice, sound effects,
language, and pictures” (2004, p. 252); if visual culture isn’t just visual as Duncum argues,
345
Shirin M. Rai
narrative cultures are also not just narrative. I will make a case for a performative approach to
making sense of politics, which includes the narrative orientation but also creates meanings
through the ‘readings’ of the body, the stage, the script and the labour that goes into crafting
the performance for a specific audience; “meanings are produced”, as Stuart Hall argues, “at
several different sites and circulated through several different processes or practices . . . Mean-
ing is consistently being produced and exchanged in every personal interaction in which we
take part” (1997, p. 3).
Politics of access: Analysing narratives of Indian women MPs

The arguments presented in this article are based on a study of twenty three women MPs5 in
the Indian parliament, conducted over a ten year period in two parliaments – 1994 (the 10th
Lok Sabha) and 2004 (the 14th Lok Sabha); a third of these MPs were interviewed at least twice,
which allowed for a deeper exploration of their worlds over time, but also challenged them to
remember the stories they told in the first instance and narrate the difference if any between then
and now. The selection criteria for this sample was based on party political affiliations, religious
and regional diversity, class and professional background and the generational span, both in terms
of age and the time served in parliament. Most of the interviews were conducted at the MPs’
homes – the senior MPs have an office attached to their government provided bungalows – thus
blurring the spatial politics of my research. The public and the private often overlapped when I
talked to these women in their domestic space as they went about their daily lives – answering
endless mobile phone calls, telling constituents to wait while they spoke to me at length, giving
orders to servants for dinner – while at the same time often presenting a decidedly thought out
political response to my questions. Visual impressions of these homes and the bodies in spaces
both public and private thus impinge on my analysis. Only two MPs asked me to meet them at
the party office – one from the right-wing BJP and the other from the left-wing CPM, both
cadre-based parties. I interviewed the MPs in the language they were comfortable in (and which
I could speak) – English, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi.
Not all stories are heard, or even recognised as stories; power and social relations are at work
here – who tells stories and who listens to these? How are stories told? Over what periods of
time? In what language? As Plummer writes in this volume, “While stories direct us to what is
being told, narratives tell us how stories are told”. In other words, it is important to explore how
individual stories are social, and how do they stand in for the social? Issue of intersectionality of
social axes are important here – caste, class and region, language and religion all leave traces that
can be seen in the stories told and listened to. In this paper I recount stories of women MPs told to
me in response to questions I posed; I reflect on what these stories tell me about their lives, work
and political institutions. These stories span three themes – family, service and quotas – that are
important for me: not only because of the importance of political parties of which these women
MPs were members, nor only because of their class positioning, but because they challenged my
thinking about women’s representation and the discourses and debates surrounding these impor-
tant issue. Over a period of reflecting on narratives of these women MPs, I began to ask different
questions about political recruitment of women in Indian politics. The stories were interesting,
descriptive, narrative and reflective in themselves, but it was the process of listening to these stories
over a period of time, of auditory osmosis, that helped me understand the gendered politics of
political recruitment better. Thus, I would suggest, examining closely the stories of subjects has
allowed me to build a bridge between the macro-level theorising on recruitment and the micro-
level analysis of the politics of location and negotiation.
346
Family stories
Many of the women in the Indian parliament are from what are called ‘political families’, which
is seen to explain not only their access to political life but also their sustained presence in it. This
has been called ‘male equivalence’ and is discursively used to undermine the presence of those
women who do gain access to political institutions such as parliament. For example, the outcome
of elections to the 15th Lok Sabha (Lower house) was reported thus:
Out of the 58 women MPs who have made it to the new [2009 parliament] . . . [a]t
least 36 of them – that’s close to a depressing two-thirds – are close relatives of male
politicians ranging from national leaders and chief ministers to lower-level politicos like
MLAs and RSS pracharaks.
(Puri, 2009)
In a well-argued critique of the ‘male equivalence’ argument, Wolkowitz points out that this
is an inadequate conceptual framework (Wolkowitz, 1987). This is because first, even with the
family’s support, it is the public sphere – state institutions, political parties, the press, and political
discourse – that has to be negotiated if the family decision to put forward a woman in politics is to
succeed; it is not a private, but a public matter (Wolkowitz, 1987, p. 208). Secondly, in many cases
the fathers, husbands and brothers in fact do not support the candidature of the wife at all – they
want to be the candidates for political office themselves. It is the pressure of party political bosses
that forces the issue in many cases – and women take advantage of that window of opportunity.
A first time BJP MP I interviewed in 1994, for example, chose to stand for elections despite
opposition from both her natal and marital family.6
Often women are encouraged or persuaded to join politics when the father or husband can-
not fight an election for some reason – internal party politics, which might require a division
of labour between family members representing constituencies at different levels – state and
national, death or legal barriers to their continuance as MPs. There is no denying that the family
continues to be an important factor in routes of women’s access to national politics in India:
“Family support is essential [to the woman], otherwise she is tense and she breaks the family”
(MP17, 01.02.94).
[My] father decided to serve in the State government; his parliamentary seat then fell
vacant. Because this was my father’s constituency, we could not put up any ABCD . . .
so somebody suggested . . . first they suggested my brother’s name. He wasn’t
interested . . . he is more artistic. So, someone said why not me; you can say I was the
second choice . . . I was by then divorced. I moved in with my father 1989 with my
two daughters . . . My father asked me; I wanted to please him. So I said yes. But I had
no idea about what would it be like.
(MP4, 28.02.06)
What remains unexplored, and what I was able to identify by analysing the narratives of
women MPs is how families are important, why other routes into political life remain limited
and what needs to be done to engage political parties such that the gender inequalities within
parliament are addressed.
My big sister has helped me a lot. Her sons are studying in Delhi and live with me. My
daughter was seven months old when I fought my election; my sister was like a mother
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Shirin M. Rai
to her . . . I have a full time maid, of course, who looks after my baby, but without my
sister I couldn’t have managed.
(MP5, 01.03.06)
Husbands play a key role in supporting women both materially and emotionally and
mothers/-in-law and other family members (sisters, mothers) seem to play a key role in encour-
aging and validating women’s career in politics with providing practical support in looking after
the household: “first thing I did [when I was offered a parliamentary seat] was to ask my mother-
in-law [‘s permission]. She supported me when I worked for the party, even late at night” (MP8,
06.02.06). Advising younger women wishing to join politics, one senior MP suggested:
After marriage – 5–10 years – the woman should stay at home, look after the children,
make a place for yourself within your new family; serve the family . . . this way the
woman also gains maturity in ideas and soberness of character. It is very difficult to
join politics, to come out to be exposed – she will be able to deal with this; she will be
more steady [if she waits]
(MP2, 06.12.05)
Gender roles within and outside the family are carefully negotiated for continued support of
the family – ‘so that they don’t feel I am neglecting them for politics’ (MP8, 06.02.06); social class
and political ideologies also mediate these negotiations. This support is particularly important in
traditional families, and among women MPs who are members of socially conservative political
parties; politics matters.
Support of their natal family, at times, doesn’t compensate for the demands of their marital
roles:
I was the principal of a high school . . . I was asked to stand for election by the party
of my father. I was reluctant to stand because I had two young daughters who needed
me. My husband is a judge and I didn’t want his promotion to the Supreme Court to
be adversely affected by my joining politics. It was only in 2004 that I finally agreed
to stand for elections – after my daughters had grown up and my husband had been
promoted.
(MP23, 19.12.06)
Even though this MP didn’t say that she felt unable to stand for election before this time, her
story clearly suggests that she had had to carefully negotiate the familial space and to put her
husband’s career before her own. Because of this, she was eventually able to join politics (in
part because of her father’s position in the party) without challenging gendered family hierar-
chies. In many cases the fathers, husbands and brothers in fact do not support the decision of
the woman to join political life – they can either oppose the decision to join politics or indeed
to join a particular party. Also, women are often supported by their natal family but not their
marital family – these negotiations are difficult and are often resolved by either negotiations
between the two families or, as in the case of another MP, because of the breakdown of relations
between husband and wife; her estranged husband contested a number of elections against her
(MP4: 28.04.06).
Some women MPs have decided not to marry (MP6; MP16; MP15). One spoke of this deci-
sion in part as her way of negotiating to join politics or to serve their constituency:
348
I am not married. Many of my friends [in political life] are single. We are ok with each
other. I am accepted now. Some would say [to my mother] why is she not married; but
that was out of affection. I am happy now – there is so much else to do. I am happy
with my work, friends and my life.
(MP6, 02.12.05)
Accessing politics is, of course, not the same as sustaining that participation over a period of time.
Women from political families are better supported in parliament too:
I have got a lot of support from my party because I was the only woman MP from my
party . . . I know some MPs already because of my father being in politics. I was like a
daughter or sister to most of them; they always supported me . . .
(MP1, 29.11.05)
For many women, family based access was a launch pad for strong and long careers in politics
(MP2, MP1, MP6); others failed to capitalise on the advantages that their political families pro-
vided and indeed suffered a backlash because of their affiliation to particular political parties
(MP5, MP8, MP18).
Families are therefore socially differentiated, with varied resources that they invest in support-
ing its female members. Sometimes elite background is important in translating aspirations to
candidacy, while for others it is caste – reserved seats for lowest castes – that allows them to make
claims on the party hierarchy and for still others it is long service to the party. Families are also
important in supporting the woman in their everyday work – through the process of campaign-
ing, constituency work and absences from home during parliamentary sessions, all of which are
important in the sustainability of a woman’s position as an MP: “some traditional people objected
to my not wearing a burka [veil], but my father was very progressive” (MP18, 16.12.06).
Finally, ideologies and membership of political parties define families – some have long his-
tories of supporting the local branch of the Communist Party while others support the VHP or
the BJP and their social organisations. Women from families supporting left-wing parties might
access politics on different terms than those from right-wing backgrounds. For example, the
Hindutva ideology of Mahila Morcha, the Rashtriya Sevika Sangh and the RSS sustains a clear
understanding of the woman’s role in the family and in political life:
In the family the brother has his position, role and work and this sister doesn’t interfere;
she has her own role. But it is the same family values that guide them both. That is how
the RSS and Rashtriya Sevika Sangh work – with different roles for men and women
and for the two organisations.
Said one MP, sharply eliding the personal (family) with the political (the party organisations).
Reflecting upon the narratives of women MPs on the family, I am struck by the fact that
almost all of them get and value the support of their families. This observation raises the question,
what happens when women wanting to join politics are not supported by their families? Do
they have alternative routes to parliament? Categories of class, caste and political elites operative
in party politics is important here – those women who do not get the protection and support
of their families are vulnerable to reputational damage and find it difficult to make it in political
life. What the analysis of the MPs’ narratives also allows me to examine is how different fami-
lies impact on women’s chances to access parliamentary politics – not only through providing
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Shirin M. Rai
political connections but also through supporting women MPs in their everyday life and work –
during parliamentary sessions far from their natal/marital homes.
Doing politics: Stories of service

Most of the women MPs I interviewed did not describe what they did as politics at all. They
defined their work as ‘social service’ – helping the poor and the needy, helping the janata or the
people. The unease felt by women MPs in defining their work as politics, or as political, reflected
a wider unease about the nature of politics and their own positions within its ambit. As Margaret
Alva, a seasoned and highly educated politician told me:
In India what appeals to people is tyag – forgetting oneself to serve the people . . . This
is where we are losing out – politics has become self-centered, not issue-based. So, to
me leadership is about changing lives, about service.
I interviewed a Sikh woman MP who joined politics to ‘protect the reputation of her husband’.
The husband is from Bihar (one of India’s poorest states) and was indicted on murder charges
and imprisoned. I interviewed her in her official bungalow, the front garden of which had been
converted into a tennis court. She had just been practicing with her ‘mark’ (someone paid to
play against the player) when I got there; she was in jogging pants and t-shirt and out of breath.
Her answer to a later question about what her ambitions were for the next five years was to play
tennis – well enough to meet Sanya Mirza the Indian tennis star, on court. As her story unfolded
it became evident that cultural and religious borders were crossed in her marriage, which allowed
her to use a different discursive framework to speak to/about her constituents, reflecting in her
terms a different cultural history, while at the same time retaining the gendered roles within the
family that her constituents would be familiar with:
I was totally ignorant of politics. The first time I went to my husband’s constituency
I never felt it was a constituency; I always felt it was my home . . . where there is love
then cultural differences don’t matter . . . I joined politics because of my husband’s
[wrongful] incarceration . . . I said, I will fight both my own and his election and we
will win – I came with this determination . . . Of course women should join politics –
if good ladies join we will have less corruption . . . [they have] mamta (mother love).
While her domestication of politics resonates with other narratives, her cultural history and mores
make for both a rupture in the discourse of gendered roles as well as a continuum of motherly
concern and admonishment: “to inspire women I have taken NGOs to start Self-Help Groups . . .
I am determined to make them economically strong. There is a problem of alcoholism among
the men and they beat their wives when drunk. I tell the women ‘don’t accept this’ – beat the
men if you have to!” She invokes the spirit of the Punjabi people – often represented as practical,
entrepreneurial and self-reliant – to suggest that both men and women are able to stand up for
themselves, to empower themselves:
Biharis need to change themselves. They don’t take initiatives. I tell them, ‘why do
you look to others to solve their problems?’ They don’t want to work for a solution
but always look for bhikh (charity). Punjab is different. The Biharis can be changed
through kaar seva (community service) – Sikhs cooperate to build their community and
the gurudwara (Sikh temple); why can’t the Biharis do the same? We have now a target
350
for kaar seva in my constituency – a kilometre of road. I said I will run the bhandara
(communal kitchen) and everyone who can, will contribute rice. People appreciate this
and feel satisfaction.
What do these stories tell us about the narratives of politics that women MPs construct to
justify their presence in the public sphere? What are the narratives of citizenship that we can
hear in their words – of service not in terms of the defence of the country but of its uplift-
ment? Defining their work as service allows them the space to define themselves in particu-
lar ways – as not ambitious, as workers rather than leaders in their parties, and also as social
workers within their communities rather than competitors in the political arena and finally, as
‘problem solvers’ rather than political leaders. On the one hand, their subjectivities are crafted
to present themselves on a continuum which takes them from their hearths and homes to the
homes of others who need their help – the discourse of service within the home continues
to define their work outside it. This discourse is particularly audible in the interviews with
right-wing women MPs from the BJP who combine a radicalism without resistance when
addressing political issues. Because of defining politics in the first instance as social service
articulations of leadership qualities by women MPs also reflect a ‘modesty’ of ambition – they
are generally uncomfortable to be asked a question about what they think makes for a good
leader, almost always begin by disclaiming any status of leadership for themselves and often
are happiest discussing leadership qualities in relation to a party/government leader, who is
often male. On the other hand, their articulation allows their work to be ‘de-politicised’ – it
becomes more about the delivery of public goods and social choice than about competition
over scarce resources that define traditional understandings of politics. I read these narratives
not simply as those of gendered oppression (which they might also reflect) or of empty rhet-
oric (which many times they were), but fundamentally as stories of negotiations and struggle;
indeed, these stories are reflective of the agency of these women MPs as they pick their way
through a complex socio-cultural landscape to ensure their access to the political sphere and
to sustain their place within it.
A question that I have often asked myself is whether these privileged voices can be heard in
this way – surely the struggles of these women are nothing compared to those who are poor
and marginalised? However, I also think that if these women face such complex challenges how
can we expect the poorest women to access politics at all? So, that might raise different issues of
feminist explorations about the sources of resistance and avenues of access that we have not yet
considered. This interrogation might also lead us to review the opposition to quotas as a strat-
egy to address the exclusion of women from the Indian parliament. In my study of these Indian
women MPs over a period of ten years, I have been able to detect a remarkable shift in the nar-
ratives about the importance of women’s presence in politics. The clearest example of this was
the debate on Women’s Reservation Bill (quotas for women in the national parliament and the
State (provincial) Assemblies) – from a position of antagonism to any suggestion that quotas were
needed to increase the presence of women in parliament, to a near unanimous support for it –
which was a startling and positive narrative shift that I will explore further. One of the interesting
methodological issues when studying politicians is how to explain changing narratives over time.
Can we hear these narratives of change as lies? As opportunistic and populist shifts? As pragmatic
moves to secure political positions? Or simply as honest acknowledgements of a change of heart,
of a political position in the face of alternative or persistent evidence? Can a narrative method
give us clues to why people change their views – which is surely an important political puzzle? I
address this issue below, through outlining the shifts in narrative positions of women MPs on the
important issue of quotas for women in the Indian parliament.
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Shirin M. Rai
The quota debates in India

There is an extensive literature and political interest in the validity of quotas as a ‘fast track’ (Dahl-
erup, 2005) to gender equality. While some worry about the normative issues of group over indi-
vidual interests and issues of equal opportunities (Hassim, 2006), most feminist scholarship has
focused on “virtuous circle of representation” wherein higher numbers of women in parliaments
allow for a better convergence of descriptive and substantive representation (Hassim, 2004). In
the Indian context, much has also been written about the quotas for women in local government
(Basu, 2008; Baviskar & Mathew, 2009; Kudva & Kajri, 2008; Rai, 2007; Raman, 2002;), which
set the precedent for the introduction of the Women’s Reservation Bill in the Indian parliament
in 1996 (Gopal Jayal, 2006). The Women’s Reservation Bill, which was first introduced in the
Lok Sabha by the Deve Gowda government on September 12, 1996, was introduced in the upper
house in 20107 and passed amid extraordinary scenes of parliamentary disruption and jubilation
on March 9, 2010, a day after International Women’s Day. When I conducted my first round of
interviews with women MPs in 1994, most of them were either hesitant in their support for or
outright hostile to any reservations for women in parliament;8 one MP pointed out: “I do not
want the quota system – there will be a lot of heartburning among male colleagues, and they
will not respect you, thinking you are a ‘quota-candidate’, and question your ability. But if you
achieve your place on merit then they will accept you as one of them” (MP17, 01.02.1994). The
arguments that she rehearsed were predictable – she placed her own achievements in gaining
access to politics centre stage and suggested that as ‘quota woman’ she would not have been able
to gain the respect of her peers in parliament or legitimacy in the eyes of their constituents.
Another issue that was raised against quotas was one of caste discrimination: one MP articulated
her party’s (RJD) view:
Reservation is important but our concern is that OBC [lower caste] women will not get
to parliament through this . . . just because they are not educated doesn’t mean they are
not clever and without ideas . . . unless we have a quota within the quota these women
will not come to parliament.
(MP19: 20.12.06)
And yet, there was an interesting liminal moment in 1997, when in protest against the Bill not
being discussed in parliament Geeta Mukherjee, a woman MP from the Communist Party of
India led a cross-party group of women to leave the parliamentary session with the words: “We
walk out in protest of the Eighty-First Constitution (Amendment) Bill not being taken up”
(Lok Sabha Debates, 1997).
When I interviewed many of the same women MPs who had opposed the Bill in 1996, in
2005–2006, most of them – cutting across the Right-Left spectrum – supported reservations for
women: one said “We are fifty per cent of the population . . . (they) should at least get a chance
[to enter politics], to be empowered” (MP1: 29.11.05). What they were also clear about was the
reason why it has taken so long for the Women’s Reservation Bill (the quota bill) to be passed:
“the men are worried that they will lose seats”, many of them said. (MP17: 02.12.05).
What explains this change of attitude towards reservations? Party politics has inevitably been
central to this shift. No party wanted to pass off the chance to appear as the champion of women’s
representation in parliament, even though they approached women’s role in politics from very
different ideological perspectives. Party leaders have also been a factor as they have publicly taken
a position in support of this Bill. Sonia Gandhi, for example, invested considerable political capital
in seeing its passage through parliament and all political parties supporting the Bill laid claim
352
to the credit for enabling it. The continuing pressure of the autonomous women’s movements
also created a discursive shift in the media and finally, the history of addressing social exclusion
through formal quota strategies (the 9th Schedule of the Indian constitution) provided a template
for legislation. Despite rhetorical support by many political parties, however, the Bill met with
stiff opposition. The WRB is still not an Act – but it was passed by the Rajya Sabha (the Upper
House); the shift in narratives on quota is significant. Will this shift in the end lead to substantive
change in women’s access to the Indian parliament is difficult to predict. But this narrative shift
alerts us to how the experiential in politics does leave a mark – and that mark is often revealed
in stories that people tell about themselves and about their politics.
Narrative works
Stories matter. They matter because they allow us to probe beneath macro-level political expla-
nation to access the textured complexities of political life. Through the analysis of narratives of
women MPs in India, I have shown how not only the structural challenges that they face but also
the everyday negotiations that they make in order to access and then stay and work in parliament
are important to accounting for the gendered politics of the Indian parliament.
And yet, as noted above, narratives are only one form of telling stories. Can the narrative form
contain communicative modes that do not use language or speech? Or can narrative form be
integrated into a performative one? For example, I think about the MP who plays tennis speaking
with me in track suit bottoms, or the MP who wears traditional Hindu bindi (vermilion on the
forehead) and dresses in a sari – am I reading these marks too? Do non-narrative modes of com-
munication help people to hide their privilege in plain sight? Does the marginal become visible
even before she opens her mouth to speak? As we have seen, issues of identity and representation
and authenticity are important to political claims that women MPs make. I have argued elsewhere
that we can study these claims along two axes (Rai, 2015). Along one we can map the markers
of representation – the body, the space/place, words/ script/speech and enacting or performative
labour. Together, these four markers encapsulate political performance. Along the second axis we
can map the effects of performance – authenticity, mode of representation, liminality and resistance
(of and to) representation. We can also analyse how performance presumes an audience (in and out
of view of the performers) – actors anticipate an audience, bring it into play, respond to its reaction,
shape and reshape the performance in the light of their reading of the audience – itself a complex
and power laden group – and many times make the audience part of the performance. I have
suggested that while actors perform representation, they do not do so in a vacuum – social rela-
tions embed them as cultural histories, political economy, norms and rituals. These social relations
fundamentally affect performance, which in turn re-presents these social relations to culturally
produced “subjects capable of ‘hearing’ such utterances” (Brassett & Clarke, 2012, p. 4). Listening
too takes place not in a vacuum but in contexts of power. So, social relations are mediated in and
through performance – understood, imbibed, interpreted, made visible, resisted or alternatively,
taken for granted, as read. Through speech/script then narrative/stories are an important part of
this framework of analysis, but not the only one; rather, we also ‘read’ and ‘hear’‘view’ and ‘feel’ how
bodies labour to occupy spaces, to make their voices heard and to learn scripts or modify them and
what affect does this have. This expansiveness allows us to knit the strengths of narrative studies
with those of political aesthetics and performance. Politics can thus, I would suggest, be best be
analyzed through a performative lens, which includes a narrative approach as well.
To end where I started: if we are to understand politics in its rich variety and if we are to
connect the macro-meso-micro layers of political processes, then I would suggest, a narrative/
performative approach can be particularly helpful. By listening closely to stories of individuals
353
Shirin M. Rai
and situating them in their social and political contexts we can generate important new questions
and strands of research. Without listening to stories we would be poorer in our research and our
understanding of politics.
Notes
1 Much of the empirical material in this paper is from my published article (see Rai, 2014).
2 For an excellent overview and discussion of some of these issues, see Anne Phillips (ed) Feminism and
Politics, OUP.
3 Ostrom (2009) lecture available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/
ostrom-lecture-slides.pdf.
4 Tilly has also made a distinction between standard stories and technical accounts (Tilly, 2006), the first
a sequential recounting and the second, a descriptive and explanatory narration of events in a non-story
mode. In my work, this distinction doesn’t occur as the stories that my interviewees told me about their
lives were not juxtaposed with narratives about their party organisations.
5 I am, of course, aware that this study does not analyse the narratives of those who have not made it to
parliament. However, through a close reading of the testimonies of the successful women MPs we can
read off some of the obstacles that keep many other women out of political life.
6 Interview, 1994
7 “Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA government re-introduced the bill in the 12th Lok Sabha in 1998 . . . The
NDA government re-introduced the bill in the 13th Lok Sabha in 1999 . . . It moved the Bill again amid
pandemonium in 2002 . . . The Bill was introduced twice in Parliament in 2003 . . . The Parliamentary
Standing Committee on Law and Justice, and Personnel recommended passage of the Bill in Dec 2009.”
The Hindu, ‘The 14 years journey of Women’s Reservation Bill’; Available from: http://beta.thehindu.
com/news/national/article223383.ece (Accessed 23 June 2010).
8 One clearly supportive voice then was that of the Late Geeta MP22, MP.
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27
MAKING FAMILY STORIES
POLITICAL? TELLING VARIED
NARRATIVES OF SERIAL
MIGRATION
Ann Phoenix
institute of education, university of london, uk
Background
SOJOURNER: . . . growing up in Jamaica and being left behind, you know, by my

mother there was also a time when there was lots of excitement, because I remember,
um, when we got independence in 1962. I think I must have been about (.) six, or
seven . . . lots of flurry going around in the community, lot of people leaving (coughs)
so for me there was an element of excitement, you know, where people work very, very
collectively together . . . people would put together to support others to actually leave
effectively, you know. Say if somebody didn’t have a shirt, somebody would give them
a shirt . . . or a suitcase, somebody would give them a suitcase . . . that whole collective
way of being in a community was very strong, you know, which I really enjoyed to
see how people worked together . . . as you get older, of course, you, you reflect on all
the things that was happening. And that sense of working together still maintain me
today . . . Always understanding how to tap into people to ask for help. Also under-
standing that there’s always somebody out there to help you, you know. That’s the way I
was brought up, you know . . . So there was a feeling about you holding onto a piece of
your history, to actually see Jamaica become um, very independent, you know, So there’s
a nationhood, there’s nation building there’s an element of identity for me which, you
know, no one can actually take away from me because, you know, I was there . . . My
mother left me when I was four and um, she left me with my grandmother which is
my father’s um, mother. I lived with her until I wasss, um, eight.
The above extract comes from an interview with a woman participant in the study of serial
migration discussed in this chapter. Asked at the start of her interview to tell the story of her
serial migration, where she was left by her mother in the Caribbean and then joined her later,
she briefly tops and tails her response with being left behind and when her mother left, how
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Making family stories political?
long she stayed with her grandmother. She spends much more time, however, in contextualising
her story with a narrative of the exciting and collective community feeling produced at the time
by Jamaica’s independence celebrations and the collective ‘looking to the future’ as a time of
possibilities; a period that she views retrospectively as one of new beginnings and ‘a feeling about
you holding onto a piece of your history’ that incorporated migration.
One of the striking points from the above extract is that Sojourner focuses on the coinci-
dence of a particular political period through which she lived that she identifies as formative for
her life story. She seems to have selected this story because she wants to communicate both her
political worldview and that her personal story is part of that politics and cannot be understood
outside the collective story and the macro politics of the period (Jamaican independence) that
she identifies as a primary force in her life history. The stories that she tells throughout her inter-
view are consistent with this. She positions herself as someone who has always been political and
brought up to do hard work in order to succeed, whatever the challenges she faced. In her case,
the challenges she identified include racism in the UK after she migrated to join her mother.
Her narrative of how she deals with this includes developing, and drawing on, a strong collective
political identity as a black woman and making a strong black identity a source of possibilities for
action and work. Her opening account thus presents an interpretation of herself as positioned in
historical events in ways that give her senses of optimism and belonging to a strong community
in positive ways that allow possibilities both for political and personal change. Her narrative of
her individual story, past present and future, is inextricably linked to her interpretation of political
histories (c.f. Andrews, 2007).
Sojourner’s narrative is unusual in so clearly and explicitly orienting to the political context as
central to the making of her story as a child serial migrant. It fits with Rice’s (2002) suggestion
that the story of an individual life is understood in relation to, and produced from, the collective
stories that constitute a culture and produce narrative histories and ideals. Even those stories,
that are less explicitly political, however, implicitly communicate political worldviews (Andrews,
2007). The question thus arises of how people come to their particular political worldviews. This
chapter aims to throw some light on these issues by examining narratives from a brother and sister
who were, like Sojourner above, serial migrants from Jamaica, but who tell different stories from
Sojourner when asked about the story of their serial migration and construct different political
worldviews from each other. The chapter suggests that an understanding of their political narra-
tives requires an understanding of how serial migration impacted on their relationships with their
family, particularly the mother they rejoined after a period of separation.
Introduction
Over the last fifty years, marked transformations in gender relations and in constructions of chil-
dren and childhood have shown that families can only fully be understood within the political
contexts in which they are produced and located. The ways in which family members narrate
family lives and communicate with each other both communicate political worldviews and
contribute to the production of political change (Ochs & Taylor, 1992). The chapter discusses
some of the ways in which family practices and experiences can be drawn on in different ways to
produce different worldviews and how these can be analysed and understood through narratives.
It focuses on the retrospective accounts of adults who, in childhood, have been separated from,
then reunited, with their parents in the process of ‘serial migration’. It considers how the family
transformations involved in serial migration lead the children who experience them to under-
stand and shape their political environments. It examines why some childhood serial migrants
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Ann Phoenix
consider that serial migration does not constitute a ‘tellable story’, while for others, this family
story is both tellable and part of a political narrative.
Ochs and Capps (2001) suggest that, in everyday interaction, narratives only become ‘tella-
ble’ if they are new, reportable, unusual, funny or shared stories. Arguably, serial migration,
since it is not widely discussed, reaches the ‘lower bounds of tellability’ because it is unusual.
However, as Norrick (2005, p. 323) suggests, there is also an ‘upper boundary’ of tellability in
which ‘some stories, though eminently tellable in their extra-ordinary content, are not tellable
for many tellers under most circumstances, because they are too personal, too embarrassing or
obscene.’ As a result, narrators avoid or hedge risky story topics ‘to preserve their own reputa-
tion as well as to avoid offending listeners . . . [And] to avoid transgressing norms of propriety,
embarrassing their listeners and losing face’ (Norrick, 2005, p. 329). Thus what is tellable is
co-constructed in that it is constituted from speakers’ identities together with their reading of
what their listeners expect and will find acceptable (Bamberg, 2004) and what they themselves
consider worthwhile. The analysis of what research participants consider tellable, therefore,
helps to illuminate the ways in which they are positioning themselves in power relations and
political contexts over time as they tell their retrospective stories. The chapter focuses on the
ways in which apparently similar childhoods are drawn on in different ways to account for
adult habitual practices and worldviews. It considers the narratives of one pair of siblings who
shared the experience of serial migration, but do not share political worldviews. The first
section of the chapter briefly considers the context within which the siblings told their stories
in terms of serial migration, autobiographical narratives and current theorisations of sibling
environments and experiences as non-shared. The second section analyses the narratives of a
brother and sister with apparently similar experiences of serial migration who have come to
different political worldviews.
Childhood serial migration, autobiographical narratives and

non-shared sibling environments
Theories of, and research on, child development and family relationships in the global north
generally takes for granted that parents (particularly mothers) and their children will be
co-resident throughout the children’s childhoods. Yet, globally, many family members spend
periods separated from each other, sometimes across national borders. In some countries (e.g.
in the Caribbean, China; Eastern Europe; Latin America and the African continent) separations
of children and parents are common (Suárez-Orozcoet al., 2002). Many children, therefore,
experience being looked after by kin other than parents and friends while parents (particularly
mothers) are employed away from their children. Children are also often sent to live with adults
who can help to increase their life chances (Brodber, 1974; Rodman, 1971). Serial migration,
where family members migrate at different times, constitutes one example of the separation of
mothers and children that is globally common for families who do not have the power and/
or resources to migrate together and so where parents migrate singly or together and send for
other family members, including children, at a later date (Crawford-Brown & Rattray, 2002;
Jokhan, 2007; Pottinger & Brown, 2006). This form of serial migration thus entails the sepa-
ration of children from their parents, and then their reunification in the new country (Smith
et al., 2004).
With recognition that the particularities of ‘transnational families’ are poorly understood
(Glick Schiller & Fouron, 1990; Goulbourne et al., 2010; Skrbiš, 2008), there has been an increase
in publications on ‘multi-sited’ family lives (Grillo, 2010), gender in cross national family lives
(Levitt & Glick-Schiller, 2004) and ‘transnational motherhood’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila,
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2003). The psychosocial implications of serial migration for the negotiation of parent-child
relationships, subjectivities and intergenerational relations have, however, been under-researched,
as has its effects on children and across generations (Foner, 2009; Parreñas, 2001, 2005).
What is known about children who have experienced serial migration, however, is that the
process of separation and reunion has often been found to be linked with negative consequences
for the children’s self-esteem, schooling, emotional adjustment and relationships with parents and
siblings. Reunions are less likely to be successful if separations have been several years long and
if the children reunited have to meet new siblings as well as their parents (Smith et al., 2004).
Children’s experiences before migration, including the relationships they leave behind and the
conditions they encounter, all have an impact on their feelings and experiences after migration
(Foner, 2009; Pottinger & Brown, 2006; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Any general
findings, whether negative or positive, gloss the complexity of processes by which findings are
produced and differences between those who share experiences. This chapter draws on narrative
to contribute to the understanding of differences between children who share experiences of
serial migration.
Narrative analysis has proliferated and, as a result, become more diverse and differentiated than
was the case a decade ago. Nonetheless sequence remains central to the construction of narratives
(Salmon & Riessman, 2013). Adults commonly tell stories about their personal histories, includ-
ing their childhoods, drawing on ‘hindsight’ (Freeman, 2010) and narrating a mixture of ‘well
worn’ and new canonical and personal narratives (Bruner, 2002). In this way, narrative practices
produce resilience in that, as McAdams (2006) reports for the USA, people in midlife frequently
produce what can be viewed as ‘redemptive narratives’, personal stories that enable them to
transform pain and suffering and create meaning and purpose in their lives. Autobiographical
narratives can, therefore, helpfully be viewed as enabling people to claim ‘liveable lives’ in Butler’s
(2004) terms. These ways of understanding temporality in adults’ accounts are particularly salient
for adults looking back on childhood experiences of serial migration since these are constructed
as outside normative family lives and practices. From her extensive research, Riessman (2002,
2008) suggests that narratives are often constructed when lives are ‘interrupted’, to account for
contradictions between the constructed ‘ideal’ and what people experience as ‘real’. This makes
narrative analysis particularly suited to the study of ‘non-normative lives’ and to the analysis of
canonical narratives about the way life ought to be lived and the narrative identities that are nor-
mative for a generation (McAdams, 2006). It might be expected, therefore, that those who have
experienced serial migration will be likely to have developed narratives to account for themselves
and their experiences. The study that informs this chapter was designed to explore whether
adults draw on childhood memories to transform their non-normative childhood experiences
over time.
One of the major shifts in work on siblings over the last three decades concerns the theori-
sation of sibling environments as ‘non-shared’. While it used to be assumed that siblings grew
up in the same environments, it is now recognised that they encounter and experience different
environments. Gender is central to sibling relationships (e.g. Edwards et al., 2005) and, because
gendered sibling configurations are patterned in a variety of ways and intersect with age, social
class, ethnicisation and racialisation, there are multiple cross-cutting commonalities and differ-
ences in sibling experiences (Edwards et al. 2006). These are complicated when there are experi-
ences of serial migration. For while it is often assumed that children know the immediate family
members with whom they live really well, serial migration frequently differentiates siblings in
terms of how well they know their parents and each other. In consequence, how children ‘do’
gender in relation to their mothers, fathers and siblings partly depends on familiarity. Gender is
relevant, but is continually decentred by other social positions.
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Sibling narratives of serial migration and political worldviews
The study
The narrative accounts analysed below come from a UK Economic and Social Research Council
Professorial Fellowship programme of work called ‘Transforming Experiences: Re-Conceptualising
Identities and ‘Non-Normative’ Childhoods’.1 The fellowship was concerned with the ways in
which adults from different family backgrounds re-evaluate their earlier experiences over time.
It aimed to help understand the factors that produce adult citizens who lead ‘normal’ lives despite
having childhood experiences that are often not recognized because they do not fit expected
patterns. It focused on adults from varied ethnicised groupings who grew up in three kinds of
‘non-normative’ contexts, one of which is serial migration, where the adults came as children
from the Caribbean to Britain to rejoin parents (N = 54).
The brother and sister who are discussed below were both interviewed by me. They were
left with their grandparents when their mother left their home in Jamaica for the UK when
they were of preschool age. The sister joined their mother when she was almost 16 years old
and her brother joined them both a few months later. I interviewed them when they were in
their 50s. They have been selected for this chapter because, in adulthood when interviewed, they
each spontaneously spoke of having divergent political and worldviews. The major difference
they reported is that the sister is active in black politics and has a racialised worldview while her
brother recognises and acknowledges the existence of racism, but dismisses it. In Andrews’ (2007)
terms, he did not treat racism as requiring societal struggles, but as something to be dealt with and
left behind. In contrast, his sister viewed it as necessitating collective struggles for power. They
had come to position their identities very differently. An important methodological question is,
therefore, whether it is possible to see the reasons for this in the individual narratives they tell.
An analysis of ‘Nanny’s’ and ‘Gideon’s’ narratives showed that there were three main ways
in which they made family stories political or personally insignificant. These could be seen as
intersecting continua that could be characterised as: personalising/generalising histories;
(de)racialising experiences and (re)working the past as insignificant/painful.
Personalising/generalising histories
personalising histories
It is striking that both Nanny and Gideon personalize their histories. This is, of course, not sur-
prising. However, they each do so in ways that draw distinctions between themselves and their
sibling. The example below from Nanny comes from her response when asked about when her
mother left the Caribbean for the UK when Nanny was a preschooler.
Ann: Okay, and do you have any memory of talking to your brother about it? Or how your
brother felt?
Nanny: I have talked to him about it, right, my brother has a compleeetely different take on all of
this to me. And that fascinates me.
Ann: Oh how interesting.
Nanny: Because we grew up in the same household and I’ve said this to people right, we grew
up in the same household er – subject to the same experiences and yet our expression
of it, our internalising of it is so different. His memories are sharp sharp sharp . . . he
remembers dates, he remembers people. And when we meet up and we’re talking
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sometimes I sit there fascinated and I’ve said to him, but you recall all of that. I struggle,
you tell me things right and you have to peel back some layers for me before I get to it.
Nanny’s narrative practices (Bamberg, 2012) accomplish a number of psychological tasks. She
emphasises that she and her brother have completely different understandings, despite having
had the same upbringing. She does not, however, problematise this, instead showing herself to be
reflexive and analytic in being ‘fascinated’ and bringing it to other people’s attention. This extract
follows a repeated statement from her that she blocks out traumatic events (‘You know, it’s like
Maya Angelou says, “I stopped talking”, I stopped remembering, I don’t want to.’). Implicitly,
then, Nanny underlines that her internalising of her mother’s leaving and then her own leaving
of her beloved brother and grandmother was traumatic, but that her brother does not suffer the
same trauma. Her fascination appears to be tinged with fondness and gratitude for his ‘peeling
back some layers’ for her. What I did not notice during the interview is that she does not answer
the question of how her brother felt.
In the extract below, Gideon similarly does not criticise his sibling but, instead, shows some
admiration and fondness for her while also constructing himself positively as ‘easy going’.
Ann: And what about with your sister . . . Did you have a good relationship with her?
Gideon: Yeah, she’s alright. (Laughing) She just got different ideas from me that’s all. She thinks
differently from me, she’s a more, she’s a rebel my sister and she doesn’t, she’s one thing
she doesn’t put up with stupidity. And you can’t walk over her whereas me I’m easy
going and I let a lot of things slide, she doesn’t. You know she will just, you know she
will just fight. She’s not a person to mess with.
Ann: Was she like that when you were children together?
Gideon: Oh yes, she’s always been the same, you know. She’s alright I mean. Yeah. Because she
left, she’s very brainy as well, very brainy . . .
Gideon and Nanny both agree that their sibling thinks differently from themselves. How-
ever, they pick different characteristics on which to base those differences. The pugilistic, clever
Nanny constructed in Gideon’s account is not the traumatised child she constructs herself to be
and the clarity of memory she identifies for Gideon may accord with his vision of himself as
easy going, but is not what he emphasises. Equally, the reactions of the traumatised child Nanny
paints may account for what Gideon views as rebellious behaviour. They also have different
educational histories in that, while Gideon is clearly well read and frequently invokes books in
his account, Nanny has attained a degree, while Gideon has not, something that reproduces the
continuing gendered differences in educational attainment for African Caribbean children in the
UK (Runnymede Trust, 2012).
Both siblings explain that they were very close as children.
Ann: So when you were children together in Jamaica, did you play together a lot?
Gideon: Oh yeah we were close, we’re quite close me and my sister. We was alright together. We
sort of looked after one another . . . We stick together against any other, not necessarily
intruder but if it comes down to it we will stick together. (.) If it comes down to it we
stick together. But then we (inaudible) and she went one way and I went another, so
but we still keep in touch now and then.
Nanny: [In response to the request to tell the story of her serial migration, after about six minutes
of telling her story] . . . And I was compleetely at a loss I felt, weird and abandoned and
strange in this strange place. Because I’d never left my brother before, I feel emotional
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Ann Phoenix
now talking about it. We’d never been separated before so that was hugely traumatic.
He wasn’t coming and I didn’t know when he was going to come so that was, that was
massive. And I feel weepy actually talking about that. (.) I feel distressed. Erm. . .
There is a high degree of concordance in the siblings’ stories, in that both say that they could
rely on each other in a crisis and Nanny says that she does not need to see her brother all the
time to feel close to him. The personalising of their histories thus seems to indicate difference
and voluntary physical separation of a kind that Nanny says she could not bear when she was
15 years old, while Gideon says that he did not miss her for the few months that they were
separated when she went to UK before he did. The differences between them appear to have
intensified after they were reunited in the UK, because they related to their mother in different
ways. The extract below from Nanny comes about ten minutes into a twenty minute turn at the
beginning of the interview.
Nanny: I don’t know how to talk to, I can’t, I don’t know what name to call her. And for the
first few weeks I didn’t call her anything. More than that, more than that, for the first
couple of months. If I wanted to speak to her I’d physically position myself in front of
her and say something, cos the word couldn’t come out, mum could just not come out
it had no meaning for me. And er, I was pining because my brother wasn’t there, he
was pining at the other end.
Ann: And then can you remember first meeting your mum again when you got to the house?
Gideon: Well it’s like meeting somebody new for the first time ‘cos the thing is you can’t
remember . . . Instead of calling somebody mummy you’re thinking (.) I haven’t seen you
for many years, it was a strange, it’s like being in another relationship again, so it was strange.
Ann: So did you call her mummy?
Gideon: Yeah, mum, so it’s, but you couldn’t call her anything else could you? Couldn’t call her
(by name), you know it doesn’t sound right (laughing).
Ann: So did you get on with her well?
Gideon: Oh yeah . . . there was no conflict there, there was no conflict. We just carried on, you
know.
Although life histories contain highly personalised and individual accounts such as those told
by Gideon and Nanny, the context in which they come to be taken for granted are framed by
sociohistorical and political policies (Andrews, 2007; Kothari 2001). Not surprisingly then, the
political accounts of the serial migrants did not include the post-slavery, colonial contexts in which
Caribbean labour was requested by the ‘motherland’, but workers’ children were not catered for
and accommodation and wages did not facilitate early sending for children in many cases. The
personalising of their histories, however, did not mean that Gideon and Nanny did not produce
political narratives. This was apparent, for example, in the way that Nanny also generalised histories.
generalising histories
While both siblings personalised their histories, it is Nanny who politicises her history by gener-
alising aspects of it. In particular, she racialises her history and puts it in the context of oppressive
power relations.
Ann: Right okay, so do you think that coming to Britain . . . as a serial migrant had an impact
on your life?
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Nanny: I think it has but it would be hard to tell what the impact would have been if I’d have stayed
there . . . Because living in a society which is so different from the society in Jamaica and
one in which erm people of African descent isn’t as valued. That’s an influence, a powerful
influence. Er, and bound to have an effect. But how strong is that effect? . . . So once you
know that . . . the question is for you how are you going to navigate this environment
that you live in. Not that this environment oppresses you. But in the face of oppression
how do you survive and thrive? And it’s the same question, coming here in this different
environment. I believe that the foundation that I got from being in (Caribbean country)
up until 15 . . . has helped with the understanding of the environment and surviving and
thriving through it. Cos it’s not sufficient to survive. If you don’t thrive and flourish then
why survive?
As she frequently does, Nanny responds in a different way from what might have been
expected. She explains that a before-after comparison is difficult given that it is not possible to
know what her life would have been like if she had stayed in the Caribbean. She then situates
the personal in the political by making it clear that she considers the relevant issue to be that
the society that does not value and oppresses people of African descent. The question that I
have asked becomes irrelevant in that she suggests that ‘the foundation’ she got from being in
the Caribbean until 15 years helped her to understand how to survive, and even to thrive in the
UK. The fact that the evaluative question elicits this answer that generalises the impact of being
in the UK to all people of African descent is particularly significant because Nanny has already
explained that serial migration was traumatic for her. With this answer, she renders the personal
political and positions herself within a racialised group that is subject to oppression. As with her
earlier answers, she constructs an identity for herself as someone who is analytical, evaluative and,
despite her earlier discussion of trauma, someone who is doing better than surviving.
(De)racialising experiences
For Gideon, the general story of racialised oppression is not ‘tellable’. This is an important dif-
ference between the siblings. Gideon does not locate himself within the wider social, racialised
context. Nanny locates herself within black politics, but Gideon eschews this. This does not
mean, however, that he had never encountered racism or failed to recognise it. Instead, his narra-
tive deracialises it and, in so doing, avoids (in contradistinction from Nanny’s racialising narrative)
a conflictual narrative of society as a site that requires struggle to change it.
Ann: Right okay. So tell me about when you first knew that you’d be coming to Britain?
Gideon: 1967 . . . And looking back on it I mean it’s very strange. I call it, coming to Britain was,
I call it shattered expectations. Because it’s not what you think. You see, and the first thing
that hit me was, (.) when I came and I went to school and the first thing that hit me
that really strikes me was that because I was black I was treated differently. Because in
(Caribbean country) at the time although it was changing, I mean you get white people
come over there and you use to, ‘yes sir no sir’. And then you come here, no hang on
a minute it’s not like that . . . and the first thing people didn’t like you because you’re
black. And I mean, calling you names, and it was shocking but it didn’t, I didn’t let it
bother me [Some of the extract from the same turn has been omitted here] . . . He just
called you names. I didn’t hate him or anything, it’s not in me to hate people. And as I
grow older I look at people and said to the, I sort of look at people and say ‘why are you
doing this? Because it makes you less of a human being than you really are.’ So most of
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Ann Phoenix
it you know, not say ignore but, you get to a point sometime you have to take action
and fortunately I’ve never had to.
The above extracts are dramatic, invoking or negating strong emotions of shock and hate.
Gideon repeats that the ‘first thing that hit’ him when he came to the UK and went to school
was that he was discriminated against because he is black and that this disrupted his expectations,
based on his experiences in the Caribbean. He deracialises, and so depoliticises, these experiences
of racist name calling by explaining that he ‘didn’t let it bother’ him. In shifting from ‘it didn’t . . .’
to the more agentic ‘I didn’t let it bother me’, he indicates that he accepts that racist name calling
is upsetting, but that he, personally, divests such episodes of their potential pain. Gideon takes
a humanist view, suggesting that he explains to those who call him names that it dehumanises
them. By making it clear that he deals with episodes of racism on an individual moral basis,
Gideon individualises racism and deracialises it.
In contrast, Nanny interlinks her personal story and her work with black organisations, mak-
ing it clear that she wants to work with black organisations and that this allows her to explore
herself.
Nanny: . . . I came here [to work at the] Racial Equality Council . . . And to work with black organ-
isations which is what I want to do as well. So it’s allowing me to explore myself as well.
Nanny constructs herself as a ‘knowing political actor’ (Squire et al., 2014) who has chosen to
be engaged in political struggle for racialised equality. Her narrative constructs a biography that
she has intertwined with racialised politics while her brother has taken pains to separate biogra-
phy and racialisation in his narrative and hence to depoliticise racist incidents. Nanny says that
sometimes when she speaks to him, she thinks of him as a white man, who is ‘lost’, although she
realises that he isn’t ‘really’ lost.
(Re)working the past as insignificant or painful

The previous sections have indicated that the differences between Nanny and Gideon in the
politicising of racialised worldviews opened up after they came to the UK in the process of serial
migration. It is also clear that both siblings found aspects of serial migration difficult, but reacted
to them in different ways, producing different narratives. One of the marked benefits of narrative
analysis of these processes is that it can give insights into how people reconceptualise the past
to fit with their current situations and future projections (Freeman, 2010; McAdams, 2006). For
Nanny and Gideon a further insight into why they have come to different positions in relation
to politics comes from the ways in which they transform their family stories.
Nanny: . . . You know earlier I said I go into shut down mode when things become difficult,
er I think maybe I learnt it from back then. Because when . . . I first came, part of the
difficulty in the relationship with my mum is that, I don’t want to remember, and I don’t
remember. But what I do have is a strong feeling and that was with me right up until my
20s and 30s. I have this feeling of loss . . . And I’m stuck in that moment . . . It is this
feeling that something has gone wrong . . . It’s not as powerful as it used to be but it used
to be very powerful, almost overwhelming that feeling.
In the above extract, Nanny is evaluating her arrival in the UK, her relationship with her
mother and her emotional reactions over time. She reiterates that she has a mode of emotional
364
responding that she terms here ‘shut down’ and earlier called ‘blocking’, giving an indication
that she is aware of psychological processes. She also re-emphasises that her relationship with her
mother was difficult and that serial migration produced an extreme sense of loss and difficulty
for her. Over time, she suggests that these feelings have become less powerful and are no longer
‘overwhelming’ for her. The retrospective evaluation Nanny offers here is thus of serial migration
as a traumatic, iconic period that has had a long lasting, negative impact on her. Once again, this
contrasts with her brother’s narrative of the same issues.
Ann: Right and what did your mum do over here . . .?

Gideon: She was a nurse, well she worked, she worked in er . . . a . . . factory. Not when I was
here, but then she decided to do nursing. And she went all the way . . . And now she’s
retired and cantankerous (laughing). She is she’s, she does (laughing) She’s alright she’s me
mam so what the hell. You know. I mean, at the end of the day she hasn’t done bad by us.
She did her best in the circumstances, that’s all, at the end of the day as a parent, that’s all
you can do . . . I can’t say she left me or she abandoned me, ‘cos she didn’t really you know.
It was just circumstances and she did her best . . . I don’t blame for anything. Because at
the end of the day if you go around blaming people for doing, for doing other things you
never do anything yourself. Because as you grow up you can think for yourself, you can
reason. So therefore blaming other people for your failings and mistakes it’s not on. What’s
the point you know? A lot of people, ‘me mum didn’t love me,’ come on you’re now old
enough to reason for yourself and know what is right or wrong, regardless of . . . you can,
get your own life do the things that suits you and (.) make your own decisions . . . Alright,
(laughing) I’m very easy going, nothing bothers me. Its, (.) bringing up things you think
you forget, and then you think oh yeah. It’s a long time, you know . . . 40 odd years ago.
While Nanny’s narrative presents an understanding of herself, her identities and reactions,
Gideon presents a narrative of forgiveness of his mother, a rational response to his circumstances
as he has got older and a characteristic ‘easy going’ way of dealing with circumstances so that
nothing ‘bothers him’. In presenting this characteristic way of dealing with the world, Gideon’s
narrative implies that he is at ease with himself, understands the challenging context with which
his mother had to deal and is proud of her achievements, made in difficult circumstances. While
he does not say so, his view of himself as not ‘bothered’ by things seems to go hand in hand with
his lack of desire to make political change and so his lack of commitment to any political col-
lectivities or to political struggle. His commitments are to the family he has created and his male
friends in the social clubs to which he belongs. Nanny, on the other hand, constructs herself as
uneasy with her serial migrant past and her relationship with her mother. It would appear that, in
consequence, her feelings of alienation open a space for her to engage in the ‘politics of belong-
ing’ with other black people and to see her identities and political struggles as coterminous. In
Andrews’ (2007) terms, she places herself within the political world that she identifies and seeks
to make political change as part of a collectivity. She makes her personal narratives political.
Researcher narratives: Accounting for differences

Narrative analysis of these siblings’ retrospective accounts and the ways in which they report trans-
formations in them go some way to explaining why these adults have come to different political
positions over time. Their own understandings of themselves and being able to place their accounts
next to one another are both helpful in this process. Looking across their accounts and what we
know of the socio-political contexts in which they live, four intersecting issues appear central to
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the differences between them. First, while these siblings are close in age and were close to one
another for most of their childhoods, gender partly divides their experiences, although neither ori-
ented to this as a site of difference between them. For example, once Nanny had left home because
of her difficulties with her mother, Gideon left to join a male-dominated profession and, hence,
has well developed homosocial networks whose politics run counter to those his sister espouses
and with whom he continues to spend time when not with his marital family. It is his immersion
in this profession that was partly responsible for the siblings’ infrequent contact.
Second, the order in which the children left the Caribbean and arrived in the UK meant that
Nanny had to forge ways of dealing with society and school by herself. While Gideon’s coming
made things easier for Nanny, his arrival and insertion into familial and social practices is likely
to have been smoothed by what Nanny had already learned and communicated about what she
felt. Third, while Gideon is well read and thoughtful, the siblings showed a different orientation
to academic work that is likely to be related to their time of coming to Britain (since Gideon had
a shorter period in a British school before public examinations) and gender in that African Car-
ibbean children, particularly boys, still tend to do extremely poorly in UK schools and attained
even more poorly in the 1960s and 1970s when Gideon and Nanny arrived in the UK (Gillborn,
2008). Fourth, they each had particular and specific experiences that will have fed their narrative
imaginations and aspirations. As Andrews (2014, p. 114) puts it:
Our situated imaginations are the mechanism by which we connect our story to wider
stories, the ligaments which run between the micro detail of our daily existence and the
macro narrative of the movement of history. Through our narrative imagination, we are
not alone, even when there is no one with us. It connects us always to others who are
not there, including our past and future selves.
As a result of the different ways in which they construct and control the past and their differ-
ent constructions of their mother and of the impact of racism, Gideon and Nanny also differ
on whether they privilege narratives of self-reliance and individualised explanations or social
explanations and racialised political worldviews and whether they personalise or politicise their
identities and racialised worldviews.
Neither of the siblings discussed their families of origin as having discussed politics or drawn
politics to their attention. This must partly account for the fact that, unlike Sojourner, neither men-
tioned the major political shift that occurred in their childhood when Jamaica gained its national
independence and stopped being a colony of the UK. While this was what Sojourner identified as
the backdrop to her life, relations, character and future possibilities, the siblings foregrounded their
personal histories as formative. The different political narratives they tell, therefore, relate to their
different interpretations of their individual histories as the result of serial migration (c.f. Andrews,
2007). While collective stories about Jamaican independence are generally available within the cul-
ture, there are no such readily available cultural stories about serial migration and its effects. In that
context it is not surprising that the siblings had to forge their own stories about serial migration and
that their different feelings and interpretations led them to different political and political narratives.
Note
1 ESRC Professorial Fellowship, Award number: RES-051–27–0181. Ann Phoenix was the Professorial
Fellow and Elaine Bauer and Stephanie Davis-Gill were research fellows on the project. The three studies
in the research programme are of those who: (i) came from the Caribbean to Britain to rejoin parents in
serial migration (N = 54; 38 ♀, 16 ♂) & 2 mothers; (ii) grew up in families of mixed ethnicity (N = 41;
28 ♀, 13 ♂) and were (iii) sometimes ‘language brokers’ (N = 40; 23 ♀, 17 ♂).
366
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Bamberg, M. (2012) Why narrative? Narrative Inquiry. 22. (1). pp. 202–10.
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28
THE POLITICS OF PERSONAL
HIV STORIES
Corinne Squire
Silence = Death
(ACT UP slogan, late 1980s)
Introduction
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) causes illness and is fatal if not treated. In what
sense might stories about HIV be not just stories about illness, but ‘political’ stories? This chapter
delineates the ways in which personal HIV stories both express and frame the epidemic’s political
field. It explores the limits as well as the enabling effects of personal narratives in this field.
HIV and politics

In what follows, I will be assuming that the field of ‘politics’ includes all discourses and practices
that affect others. Such ‘political’ effects can happen variously, via influence, persuasion, negotia-
tion, evaluation, management, control, violence, love and care. They can also happen at multiple
levels: international, national, local, social interpersonal, and intrapersonal. They operate at the
intersections of social positions, rather than via distinct categories such as ‘class’ or ‘ethnicity’
(Yuval-Davis, 2006). Politics is, too, not a matter of equal-status negotiation, but is, rather, oppo-
sitional or agonistic, highly structured by the amount and type of power available to different
positions (Mouffe, 2006). Finally, all political discourses and practices have important but often
overlooked embodied and emotionalized aspects (Ahmed, 2004; Goodwin et al., 2001).
So how does HIV fit into this political picture? HIV has always been recognized not just as
an illness, but as a condition embedded in political matrices of human influence. Even within
medicine, it is seen as a ‘behavioural’ or ‘psychosocial’ as well as a physiological condition, because
it is transmitted by human actions. It is acknowledged to be strongly inflected with social stigma,
especially around ‘transgressive’ sexualities and drug use. It is also more broadly and intersec-
tionally intertwined with people’s social lives and cultural formations, for instance, those around
gender and faith. It is subject to patterns of local, national and international governance. It is
highly economically implicated, because it both reduces available labour and social resources, and
requires a great deal of resources for treatment, prevention and care. Moreover, HIV is clearly and
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deeply imbricated in contested power relations, from those of interpersonal relationships, through
those in play between biomedicine and its subjects, to those differentiating low, middle and high
income countries affected by the epidemic, and the socioeconomic inequalities existing within
all of those countries. Lastly, HIV alerts us continually to the embodiment and emotionality of
politics, through the intense physicality of viral and drug effects, and through the strong affects
attached to living with HIV, being affected by HIV, or simply imagining the condition in one’s
own and others’ lives.
Contemporarily, the ‘end of AIDS’ is sometimes said to be in sight, if pursued through a
combination of rapid treatment scale-up and widened prevention and education programmes
(UNAIDS, 2014). However, the large medical and social interventions such a goal requires are
very costly, both for the most-affected low and middle-income countries and for high-income
donor countries, especially in the post-financial crisis climate of austerity. These interventions
must compete politically, at all levels, with other health requirements, and with important other
fields, for instance, those of education and the environment. Moreover, the political claims that
HIV treatment, prevention and education will bring about the end of the epidemic are them-
selves contested by those who advocate broader programmes to contest inequality, involving,
for instance, food security, sanitation, employment, and a basic income (Doyal & Doyal, 2013).
Health, and even the viability of subjects, is now an independent and important ground for
political claims and other actions. The health claims actions of biomedical citizens are particularly
effective at international levels, when nation states fail to deliver health services (Rose, 2007). In
South Africa, for instance, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its allies won the right to
generic medications for HIV, acting in concert with the government in the courts. TAC and its
allies also won the right to prophylactic treatment for pregnant HIV positive women, to prevent
vertical transmission to their babies, and the right to treatment for all HIV positive people, by act-
ing against the government, but in concert with international agreements on the right to health
(Farmer et al., 2013; Robins, 2008). This use of ‘rights’ discourse by activists is often strategic.
Here, it occurred in the context of a broader, non-individualised political analysis of the place of
health in a progressive society, as guaranteed by the South African Constitution (Mbali, 2013). In
such progressive political traditions, health campaigning also has a longstanding place.
The HIV epidemic, though, has some particular characteristics of its own that generate spe-
cific features of HIV health politics. It is a global epidemic – like Ebola, only with long-wave
features (Barnett & Whiteside, 2006). Like Ebola, it requires high, ‘first world’ standards of care
for survival, while affecting predominantly low- and middle-income countries that cannot pro-
vide such care for all who need it. The HIV epidemic is also attended by a sexualized stigma-
tization that goes beyond the stigma frequently associated with illness and death. Though it is
no longer linked to a ‘politics of death’ (Muske, 1989), death, which shifts politics into another
register, remains a part of it. Who dies, where and how, remain, as they were from the beginning,
important political questions around the epidemic, as well as those questions attending the more
naturalized, commonplace nature of the epidemic today, like who lives with HIV, and who lives
well or badly with it.
HIV and personal stories

How do personal stories work politically in the HIV epidemic? In the field of health generally,
personal narratives, and research and activism that deploy them, have had considerable political
impact, helping to reframe medicalised discourses and practices through the perspectives of peo-
ple living with health and illness, linking local to broader political articulations of health, and
foregrounding cultural and psychosocial, alongside physiological, factors (Bell, 2009; Frank, 1997;
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The politics of personal HIV stories
Kleinman, 1989). Narratives and narrative research have contributed to a patient-centred politics
of health, but also to a politicised understanding of the individual subject of health.
Narrative responses to HIV, and research about them, often seem to emblematise the shifts
described above, partly because they express and allow access to the cultural panics and social
stigmatisation around this medical condition; partly also because they pay attention to the large
and international medical, economic and political demands that an adequate address to the pan-
demic requires (Jain, 2013; Rose, 2007).
Personal narratives have been a consistently significant – though not always progressive – part
of HIV politics. Personal accounts operated as the foundations for breaking the silence about
HIV in many activist movements such as ACT UP and TAC (Crimp, 1989). They have been
the basis for a great deal of individual empowerment and change (Maane, 2009).They gather
people together in support groups that often then move into advocacy (Plummer, 2001). Key
tropes within them often operate more specifically, too, to catalyse changes in thought and action
(Polletta, 2006; Squire, 2012). They are now key aspects of NGO presentations of their work.
Across a variety of forms – visual images, fiction, poetry, music – they express the most power-
ful and difficult-to- articulate elements of living with HIV in striking ways (Mendel, 2015;
Schulman & Pendleton, 2014; Squire, forthcoming).
At the same time, personal stories can become coercive within HIV politics, patterning a story
about ‘living positively’, for instance, that can move too quickly through ambiguity, sadness, and
continuing serious HIV illness, to end up with health, adjustment and wellbeing. Certain kinds
of personal stories can operate as requirements within treatment programmes (Nguyen, 2010).
Personal stories are not an adequate politics all by themselves, but they may be read as surrogates
for other, more difficult forms of political action. They may also be read as saying everything
about HIV, when there are always elements of living with the virus that are absent from the story,
unsayable within it, or present only as an uncertain trace. Affect and embodiment, for instance,
are marked, but often difficult to analyse, within verbal narratives.
All these difficulties, as well as the considerable possibilities offered to the political field by per-
sonal narratives, can fruitfully be explored through the personal HIV stories to which I now turn.
Researching HIV support

My UK HIV research focuses on the personal stories told by people living with HIV. Although
its explicit address is to the forms of support participants experience and want, this address is
inseparable from concerns about how that support affects the participants, and how they in turn
affect forms of support – that is, from the entanglements of HIV support and politics.
This chapter draws on stories told by 47 research participants living with HIV in the United
Kingdom, in a 2011 semi-structured interview study of the forms of support that they used and
wanted. Fifteen participants had been interviewed in previous rounds of the study, which began
in 1993, asking similar questions about support; this was the fifth interview round. As a result,
these participants, as well as some others recruited specifically for this round, had considerable
experience of earlier political contexts of the epidemic, which often appeared retrospectively in
their stories.
Around half of the study participants were men who defined themselves as gay or bisexual.
The other half were roughly equally apportioned between women and men who defined them-
selves as heterosexual. Three women participants defined themselves as lesbian or bisexual. Eight-
een participants were of African or African Caribbean origin. Eight others were of non-UK
European, Asian, or North or South American origin. These declared sexual and national iden-
tities had considerable impact on the politics of participants’ personal stories. This was especially
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the case stories of gay men’s entwined relations to their sexuality and to HIV in the context of
the ‘degayed’ (King, 1994) history of the epidemic, and within stories of being a legal migrant,
undocumented migrant, or asylum seeker, within which these positions often competed for
resources with HIV positivity (for more details of the study, see Squire, 2013).
Within the interviews, participants very often told stories, though that was not something that
was asked for. Perhaps this frequency was itself an indication of both the personal and cultural
salience of narrative ways of articulating privatized suffering within a collective domain (Plum-
mer, 2001). Frequently, the stories were of a kind that is easy to define, focusing on the causal
progressions around happenings such as HIV diagnosis, or tracing the chronology of partners’
or families’ acceptance of the participants’ HIV status. However, it was useful to adopt a broader,
minimal definition of ‘narrative’ as progressions of signs that build up human sense, across spa-
tialized as well as causal and temporal progressions, for instance (Squire et al., 2014). This weak
definition took account of language in the interviews that was patterned and meaning-building
but that did not ‘fit’ accounts of narrative derived from some literary narratological work, from
psycho- or sociolinguistics, or from cognitive or developmental psychology. Such patterns were,
though, consistent with many broader accounts of narrative within literary, media and cultural
studies (see, for instance, Bakhtin, 1982; Barthes, 1975; Butler, 2005; Mulvey, 1975).
It was also necessary to think about narratives working at different levels (Murray, 2000) in
order to show how those narratives contribute to understanding and action at different levels of
the epidemic’s politics. Sometimes, HIV stories are spoken as highly personal narratives; some-
times as collective, social narratives; sometimes as stories culturally inflected by other genres, or
as stories of larger conjunctures, at some distance from the personal and the social (Crimp, 1989;
Mbali, 2013; Squire, forthcoming). The stories may not always sound ‘political’, and they may be
incomplete, uncertain and opaque to the teller and the listener alike.
In what follows, I examine what makes personal HIV narratives both tellable and political;
how people come to narrate HIV within a political framework, rather than a framework of
agentic experience; how political HIV narratives change; and what are the contributions and the
limitations of addressing political lives through personal narratives.
First, I examine the question of what makes personal HIV stories ‘tellable’, which turns out to
be intimately linked to questions about their politics.
‘Telling’ stories
The most fundamental requirement of HIV stories, if they are to be political – which for our
purposes means, to have effects – is they must be tellable. Tellability is, indeed, a frequently
mentioned criterion for narratives. It is often glossed as meaning that narratives should have
something ‘new’ to say, that breaks with the canons of what is known, assumed, and habitual.
Such breaks are obviously political, in the sense that they have effects on existing, sedimented
traditions. It might seem that HIV stories, initially at least, made such breaks dramatically, as they
told of a little-known, fatal, medically hard-to-manage, and socially stigmatized, indeed silenced,
condition. Just mentioning HIV, let alone telling a personal story about it, could be a political act:
one, by implicating the speaker in the epidemic, that breaks the silence about it. In such instances,
the other meaning of ‘telling’ also appears clearly. A story is ‘telling’ if it is significant, and thus
capable of making a difference – if is again, political. If a story is ‘tellable’ in either or both sense,
then, it is, inevitably, political at the same time.
However, the notion of tellability as involving narrative canon-breaking is not as simple as it
might look. What counts as a break depends on who is telling, when, where, and to whom – that
is, on the positionality of the story (Esin et al., 2013; Phoenix, 2013), and more broadly on what
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Stuart Hall, following Gramsci (1987) called the conjuncture at which the story works. Moreover,
a story that signals an especially striking break may not be tellable, or susceptible to being heard.
Personal stories of HIV have often been and still sometimes are unspeakable for those whose lives
they might express, and unhearable for those to whom they were and are addressed, who may
ignore, minimize, or combat them. Such silences and silencings have political effects themselves.
They may lead, as in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) slogan at the beginning
of this chapter, to death – to individual inability to get tested, treatment, or support; to cultural
limitations in representing HIV; and to sociopolitical failure to formulate helpful responses to the
epidemic (Crimp, 1989).
Contemporarily, personal HIV stories appear within an HIV epidemic that is strongly nat-
uralized in health and policy discourse and practice – that is, it is rendered as a regular part of
life. The dominant policy narrative presents the epidemic as heading towards low, well-managed
levels, successfully medicalised, socially normalized when treated, and contained by market forces.
At the same time, HIV remains othered, even criminalized, in many social, cultural and legal
narratives. Moreover, within everyday stories of the epidemic, HIV’s medical control remains pre-
carious; stigma is an ongoing concern; and HIV is an object lesson in the failures of the market to
manage local, national and international dimensions of health crisis (Squire, 2013). The contests
between these two different stories mean that both of them remain tellable, effective, and in play.
In my 2011 research, stories’ tellability followed these two narrative and political lines in
almost all the interviews. First, stories were tellable to the extent that they traced a path of nat-
uralization: towards good health, low infectiousness, normal family life, good relationships, and
fulfilling work and leisure. This is a story still unrecognized within many popular and everyday
understandings of HIV. Second, HIV stories, again in almost all interviews, were tellable to the
extent that they traced another, parallel, denaturalizing path, of continuing medical uncertainty,
stigmatization, resource constraints, anxiety and depression. These stories are often ‘left behind’ in
medical and policy discourses and practices. The stories thus had to perform two kinds of politics
at the same time, and many participants did indeed achieve this delicate and powerful narrative
manoeuvre (see Squire, 2013, chapter 8).
An interview with Olive, for instance, a heterosexual Black woman of African origin in
her 50s, was typical of the interview stories in the way it combined both kinds of tellability. It
included ‘tellable’ stories of physical and social emancipation at the beginning, before moving on
to later, differently ‘tellable’ stories of her and others’ physical difficulty, social stigma and resource
constraints, and her own positive, if partial responses. Like a number of interviewees, Olive also
started her interview with a story of HIV resource constraints, something that would likely be an
even more common narrative strategy today, three years of social welfare cuts on:
Olive: Even the support groups (used to help), but now very few are running . . . And just
going there for a chat or eating, oh yeah. And then you share your experiences, yeah, and
advise each other. But with me now, I feel like I’m empowered now. I always do coun-
selling (on my own yes) especially with other newly diagnosed, yeah, helping them . . .
Yeah, for me, [the medication] was OK for me. But . . . in the blood, it was showing that
the dosage was very high for me. Because I was feeling dizzy, tired (that is when [the
doctor] changed me to sort of a lower dose) It (is still) affecting me . . . so I don’t know.
I will talk to him and find out what he can do. Yeah, the side-effects are, neuropathy.
One day, sometimes I am OK. Sometimes, oh, I can’t even walk . . . Yeah, it is very hard,
because you don’t know what to say to someone about their problems, what they are
going through. Because some have got relatives who are dying, children who are dying,
they can’t go home [because this is not possible during the asylum-seeking process], they
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are still grieving here. They are dealing with people’s issues, it is difficult, it is difficult. I
can put myself in that position. I’ve got a friend who is dealing with that same issue. She
went through, she is going through a lot, she is now depressed, yeah. Sometimes I will
go their house, sleep over, two days or three days, yeah. I will sleep over then I will invite
her, I have told her ‘you are welcome to my house, come anytime, if I am not there then
my children are there . . . come I will cook for you, if you want to cook anything, (or)
sleep on my bed.’ (laughs) yeah, because I know what she is going through, unfortunately,
it’s difficult.
Olive said she felt ‘empowered’, and this emancipation narrative of her growing medical and social
understandings of HIV was told against popular and still-persisting narratives of HIV’s physical
fatality and social isolation. However, this narrative was not only related to HIV: her HIV positive
identity intersected with her familial and migration identities. She had moved from being an
asylum-seeker to having exceptional leave to remain, and she had her children with her, rather
than having to deal, as she had earlier, with precarious citizenship status and family members ‘left
behind’ in untreated epidemics in resource-constrained, conflict-riven countries. At the same
time, the interview was occupied by a narrative told against HIV’s naturalization. This narrative
charted the HIV and other difficulties of Olive’s friends; she described taking extensive actions to
help them. Moreover, the medicines were ‘ok’ for her, not bad, as for others, yet at times this still
meant, she said later, that she could only ‘crawl’; she planned to try again to find alternatives with
her doctor.
The longer the interview, the more enmeshed these two ‘tellable’ storylines of emancipation
and difficulty became, working together to redefine the field of HIV politics. This was a very
common pattern within the interviews, few of which delineated the politics of HIV in uncon-
tested ways.
Moving from the ‘personal’ to the ‘political’

How does what seems like an initially ‘personal’ involvement with HIV, as an individual body’s
illness, become ‘political’? Here, I shall argue that this distinction is a palimpsest for other kinds of
shifts, and that associated concerns around ‘agency’ can also be more productively thought about
in relation to those other shifts.
In my study, the stories that were most apparently ‘political’, concerned with trying to change
the HIV field, either through voluntary or paid work, often narrated this politics as the end point
of local or ‘personal’ HIV involvements that the participants now saw in a wider context. Olive,
for example, ended a description of her support group engagements with the statement, ‘I am
empowered’, something that she repeated in a subsequent iteration of the story later in the inter-
view. Like Bongekile Ntuli, at the start of this chapter, she told stories that asserted in various
ways her ‘time to shine’. These moves led into habitual narratives of Olive’s understanding of the
political field of HIV and migration, and the help she was consequently able to give to people
going through the experiences she had already had: ‘I can put myself in that position . . . unfor-
tunately, it’s difficult’. Rather than seeing this process as narrative allowing for the expression and
expansion of human agency, an individual-centred account, we can, rather, see narrative as having
different levels of effects here.
About ten interviewees, largely gay men and African migrants to the UK who were diagnosed
during the 1980s or 1990s, had a long history of political involvement around HIV, on which
their current stories of HIV drew. Gerry, for instance, a gay white man of North American origin,
in his 50s, described those ‘left behind’ by the contemporary apparent normalisation of HIV, and
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then imagined a future of HIV service provision retrospectively informed by his past experiences
of HIV community organisations:
Gerry: I think that the people that get left behind are really the people who are medically well
enough to not really need that much support but emotionally may be not quite so secure,
um and again it comes down to the fact that they have to design our programmes around
this target, um, you know fair enough reason to limit the supply of money and you I
mean, you can maybe have a drop-in centre, I don’t think that there are drop-in centres
any more (laughs), years ago kind of thing that’s kind of, I know if I would if I got a
leaflet in the post tomorrow I would see that a new drop-in centre, I would be there on
day one , I would be there making cup cakes (laugh)/ (laugh)/a day centre kind of thing.
That was the beauty of the [local organisation name]. I can walk there and do some
exercise, I would go there and come back home, I would talk to my new friends, just feel
good about myself for the day . . . when you’re home you feel very tired. Because it was
a drop-in centre, it attends to without forgetting about HIV positive, kind of put it in
perspective and not dominate kind of thing.
In this ‘what-if ’ story of what could happen, Gerry formulates HIV politics differently – indeed,
more personally – from how he might have done earlier. HIV politics is not framed as collective
action, more as a voluntaristic contribution to well-being ; there is a frequent use of personal
pronouns that emphasise the ‘personal’ nature of the story. Political action has not given way to
personal ‘agency’ in this story, though. Rather, within the current epidemic’s context of HIV’s
treatability, the story translates 1980s and 1990s HIV activist politics into a contemporary possi-
bility of low-cost, possibly voluntary, community resource provision.
More generally, it can be argued that ‘personal’ narratives are of course political anyway, even
if they make no moves of the kinds above. To deny this possibility by separating off the purely
‘personal’ is, itself, to adopt a politics that erases some forms of resistance.
The political possibilities of the hermetically ‘personal’ appeared rather closely in the case of
some longer-diagnosed participants in the study, participants with intense experience of HIV
illness, and participants in other difficult illness and social situations, particularly around citizen-
ship status, who told stories that articulated highly idiosyncratic emotions (overall, this group
constituted, again, about ten participants). Such stories did not seem to allow for the collective
engagement and action (Hanisch, 1970) often associated, since second wave feminism, with the
phrase, ‘the personal is political’. Peter, for example, a white British gay man in his 50s, told,
several times over the course of the interview, of the losses incurred through his HIV status and
his resultant anger, with the story once reaching a contemplated suicidal end. This articulation
could, though, itself be read as a form of politics, one in which ‘emotion’ has a politically dis-
ruptive effect:
Peter: [HIV] has totally dominated and ruined my life overall . . . I’ve had a very good rela-
tionship, had a very good sex life, had a very good social life, we did loads and loads
of different things, um, and I had an income, which was very high, er, and I had job
satisfaction . . . and then you see there was a whole cluster of things. I don’t have a boy-
friend. I don’t have a job. I don’t have a, I’d love to have a civil partnership, chances of
that are zero, um, I don’t have a sex life, I don’t have a social life . . . my savings are being
used up, and I’m very healthy . . . I’m totally and utterly frustrated . . . (Being cynical)’s
what keeps me going/yeah/I mean cynicism is not accepting the, um being sceptical
of the accepted norm, I believe. Although other people just, you know, just (think I’m)
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bad mouthing, but it’s because I see things and they annoy me, and that seems to keep
me going . . . (Doctor name) says, ‘You’re not going to die of HIV’, yes, I know that . . .
I mean I’m more likely to you know, I don’t know, what am I likely to do, crash my
car into a crash barrier/yeah/I’m more likely to do that and die, and everyone will say
‘oh are the brakes alright’, and no-one will ever know . . . I’ll let them think that, what
difference does it make . . . I’m not really depressed, I’m just angry, at the situation I’ve
found myself in.
In The pastoral clinic, Garcia (2010) describes the ‘accidental’ overdoses of Latino drug users in
northern New Mexico as ‘political’ suicides that resist dispossession by their declaration of it,
something well-recognized by those with whom they live, even though never stated. Not taking
this route, but living on, in that case with the melancholic knowledge of ‘uncertainty and danger
in the world’ (Kleinman in Garcia, 2010, p. 100), and in Peter’s case, with anger about all that has
been lost by illness, age, and market settlements that have marginalized and casualised his field of
work, can also be a form of politics, occasioned by ‘just feeling . . . anything at all’ as Monette
puts it at the beginning of the chapter, in this difficult situation. Such narrations of emotion are
also moral stories, with potentially strong effects. We could read them as last-ditch assertions of
agency; again, this would be to take too individual-centred an approach. Peter’s angry stories, and
a number of other participants’ similarly angry, sad or anxious narratives, did not seem to head in
‘political’ directions, but they repeatedly and irrefutably unsettled the naturalized politics of the
contemporary epidemic.
The shift from ‘personal’ to ‘political’ HIV narratives has been parsed here as shifts from local
to broader stories, present-focused to more historically inflected stories, and emotion-excluding
to emotion-focused stories. Within this account, ‘agency’ becomes less useful as a term to con-
sider political HIV stories across their whole range than ‘effects’.
I want now to turn to other possible shifts in the politics of HIV narratives, those that occur
over time.
The ‘depoliticisation’ and ‘repoliticisation’ of HIV stories

Changes in the politics of the HIV epidemic have been noted by many. Frequently, these changes
could be glossed as depoliticisation and resistance to it (Epstein, 1996): a ‘degaying’ of HIV as
well as attempts to ‘regay’ it during the 1990s (King, 1994); an othering ‘Africanisation’ of HIV,
again in the 1990s (Watney, 1994); medicalisations and normalisations of the condition (Nguyen
et al., 2011; Squire, 2013); and technicisations of the epidemic that align it with global moves
towards market-oriented social and cultural formations, often summarised as ‘neoliberalism’.
These shifts cannot be accounted for simply by ‘time passing’. Rather, they indicate changes in
the epidemic’s positioning that have occurred as the result of political contests and settlements
over the past 30-some years.
These political shifts were noted within the interview stories to some extent by almost all
participants, even those who were too young to remember the early days of the pandemic. Those
who had lived through the HIV politics of the 1980s and 1990s, though, articulated the changes
narratively with a fine grain that was extremely useful for understanding the changes’ possibili-
ties and limitations. Olive, for example, was one of around five older women interviewees who
described a historical reduction in psychosocial support, but also a growth of informal support
networks, of an emotionalised, empathetic, often female-dominated kind, that went considerably
beyond the kinds of support offered by social services or the voluntary sector: ‘I have told (my
friend) “you are welcome to my house, come anytime” . . . yeah, because I know what she is
376
going through’. This micro-politics of care might recall aspects of UK government Big Society
stories, prevalent at the time of the interviews, calling for freely given community support. How-
ever, it has an intimacy (‘“come I will cook for you, if you want to cook anything, (or) sleep on
my bed”’) and collectivity (‘“if I am not there then my children are there”’) distinct from Big
Society narrative. Moreover, this narrative of intimate care clearly marked its own contemporary
limits. Olive, like other interviewees providing such support, had illnesses and drug side-effects
that limited what she could offer, and no resources to extend her support. In addition, her story
of how she wanted her work to develop, called for help with constituting her services as a charity
and gaining local authority finance, moves that are extremely difficult within the contemporary
social welfare climate. Again, this indicates a repositioning of politics, here within the context of
current ‘austerity’ policies and the translated political and interpersonal skills of migrants, rather
than politics’s loss.
This brings us back to Gerry, who, as already noted, drew on the epidemic’s past in order to
formulate a broad contemporary politics of HIV. To do this, he, like Olive, used a story ‘tellable’
within contemporary political discourse, deploying tropes of individual action (the synecdocal,
‘I would be there (at a day centre) on day one, I would be there making cupcakes’) and explicit
recognition of financial limits; ‘fair enough reason to limit the supply of money’. However,
what Gerry is speaking of here is something invoked by the large majority of the interviewees: a
non-market-justified service, albeit psychosocially justifiable for people ‘who are medically well
enough to not really need that much support but emotionally may be not quite so secure’ – in this
case, a day centre, open to all, all of the time. As in all such counter-stories to the market within
the study, the story deploys a political discourse that abdicates earlier rights and entitlement lan-
guage for a contemporary language of fairness and equity for ‘the people that get left behind’.
The politics of emotional disruption that emerged from Peter’s narratives and from those of
other interviewees living in similar contexts is less changed from earlier days of the epidemic.
Peter is a kind of angry ACT UP all by himself, seeming to say, like David Wojnarowitz, the
writer and activist, who had this sentence emblazoned on his leather jacket, ‘If I die of AIDS –
forget burial – just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.’ (Carr, 2012). ACT UP is resurgent in
the US. In the UK, Peter was not part of such a collectivity. However, what he called his insistent
‘cynicism’ was, it seemed, heard by many to whom he spoke outside of the interview situation,
those ‘other people’ (who) just, you know, just (think I’m) bad mouthing’. Alongside HIV’s dom-
inant naturalization story and its minor-key narrative of ‘being left behind’, this clashing, angry
narrative gathered little volume, but it certainly broke into those stories, as it has done with earlier
HIV discourses and practices.
The strengths and constraints of reading HIV politics

through personal stories
Looking at politics through personal life stories brings complexity, nuance, the awareness of
difficulties and elisions. In the stories cited above, the agonistic politics of ‘positive’ HIV stories
of progress, always counterposed to stories of ‘being left behind’; the articulation of the different
levels that make up the political; and the intersectionalities of the apparently ‘single-issue’ politics
of the HIV epidemic, all become tellable and telling through the expansiveness and heterogeneity
of personal stories. It also becomes apparent in these examples that the politics of ‘personal’ stories
relies not on redefining the personal as political, but on denaturalizing the commonsensically
‘non-political’ nature of the personal in order to read out from it its erased politics. Changes in
the politics of personal HIV stories manifest not temporally, but via shifting positions from which
the stories operate. Narratives transmute, in some of the cases I have considered, from a politics
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Corinne Squire
of movements, coalitions, and social justice, towards a politics of community and affect, intimate
care and fairness.
There remain aspects of personal stories that may not, at a specific conjuncture, work polit-
ically within the HIV epidemic. Perhaps this is an inevitable correlate of personal narratives’
particularity. Sometimes, for example, they are framed in a way that does not fit easily within
the current context. Sometimes, their specificity spills into affects that lie over words, marked
in non-verbal language, through the body, or in silences or repetitions. To conclude, I want to
show two singular examples from the interview study: one of a young man talking about a form
of activism that no longer seemed hearable in relation to HIV; the other, of an older woman for
whom verbal personal stories, at least, appeared not to say everything about the political diffi-
culties of her life.
Zack, a non-UK European white gay man in his 30s, told a story of what he would like to be
happening within the UK epidemic, and the rejection of this ‘what-if ’ story itself by the people
to whom he had told it:
Corinne: Are there any other things that we haven’t talked about /um/ or maybe that (you’ve
not had), what would help people (), what would you change?
Zack: Ah, what would I change? Erm, well, that HIV positive people should come out of
the closet, basically. I was thinking of the, um, I mean I commented online and quite
a few people found that really stupid, but, I mean, there was Annie Lennox, she has a
campaign, so she wears a t-shirt and it says ‘I’m HIV positive’ and then on the back it
says, ‘Fight the stigma, fight AIDS, fight the stigma’. So, you have to fight the stigma,
and I thought, perhaps we could create a flash mob or, you know, or like, or a jogging
group, and we go running with that t-shirt . . . I started writing in the [HIV online]
forum . . . I wrote, like, ‘are the other HIV people who would like to do the same
thing?’ And, people, they laughed at me. You know, they were writing, like, ‘Oh that’s
the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard’. But how can people be so dumb, so idiotic and
so disrespectful?
This is a story that still has active and engaged listeners elsewhere. It continues to be one that is
told and enacted by South African HIV activists, for example. ACT UP has renewed its cam-
paigning in the US, too; but its ‘Fight back, fight AIDS’ politics, while close to that in the story,
now works in deep coalition with, for instance, housing activists and Occupy New York. In these
contemporary circumstances, it seems, Zack’s story lacks political purchase.
For Penelope, a Black African woman who was an asylum seeker, and in her 50s, the failures
of personal narrative in relation to this highly politicised situation were not so much not heard
as not fully speakable. Penelope had no idea when her 10 year asylum case would be settled; she
might be deported to her country of origin, where treatment was restricted; she had already been
in detention, and might be again; she lived with her small voucher entitlement and occasional
illegal work and tried to pay her daughter’s care and education in her country of origin with
them; since she had come to the UK, initially on a visit, her daughter had been abused and her
son had died; she had told no-one why it was, literally, vital for her to stay and pursue her case. In
telling this story, many sighs and silences, gestures of futility, and the frequent negations, ‘I don’t’,
‘I’m not’, and ‘I can’t’ marked, in many places, the stretched precarity of her life:
Penelope: I don’t want anything I just want to live a normal life and er, I’m not after benefits,
where I come from, nobody gives you anything you have to work for everything . . .
and if I could I would really want to pay back you know, just do something just help
378
somebody . . . I don’t want, I don’t want any payment I just want to help somebody
you know because to be where I am now if I was in my country I would of been
dead . . . yes, I don’t know what else to do, you know who to turn to, can’t do any-
thing can’t plan can’t do nothing just doing the same thing every day, go out come
back sit watch TV go to bed wake up same thing.
Penelope’s story articulates the political difficulties of her situation, but it is hard to read the full
emotionality of the story without listening to the flattened sound of her voice and following
the downward, inward turnings of her head and body. These aspects of affective politics are not
transmittable by the regular conduits of personal stories into public view; perhaps they would
hardly be bearable for audiences, if they were.
It is notable, I think, that these examples of the partial failures of personal narratives within
the field of HIV politics come from interviews with a young, supposedly entirely naturalized
HIV positive person, healthy and well-educated, employed and successful; and with a literally
non-naturalised, in the citizenship sense, older woman, with many health problems, economically
impoverished, socially isolated, and marginal, in many ways, to HIV politics. Perhaps the political
effectiveness of personal HIV stories is indeed most difficult in these positions, where the politics
of HIV is either naturalized away, or so intersectionally intensified as to be overwhelming.
The participants in this research produced many personal stories that explicitly and implicitly
criticised and presented alternatives to contemporary naturalising discourses and practices of HIV.
It was important to recognise such elements of their narratives, without over-romanticising them,
or treating them as substitutes for other forms of politics. I have tried to suggest here that such
stories can be important grounds of political citizenship. They give narrators and their audiences
accounts of the world that entangle and extend simpler stories of ‘self ’ and ‘politics’. And they are
stories that both express and help generate new discourses and practices of HIV’s political field,
as the epidemic’s contexts change.
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29
EPISTOLARY ENTANGLEMENTS
OF LOVE AND POLITICS
Reading Rosa Luxemburg’s letters
Maria Tamboukou
‘No, I can’t work any more. I can’t stop thinking of you. I must write to you.’1 This is the open-
ing phrase of a love letter that starts agonistically: the urge to write to the beloved is posited as
a dire need. The thought of the lover is juxtaposed to the imperative of work, but the latter,
important as it is, seems to recede. After all the letter writer is Rosa Luxemburg, a revolutionary,
a Marxist, a leading figure of the socialist movement of her times, but also a woman in love.
Luxemburg has been a controversial figure for many reasons and on many grounds.2 But for
many of us, who came of age in the wake of the European social movements of the 70s, ‘when
hopes were green [and] the revolution around the corner’ (Arendt, 1968, p. 37), Luxemburg
was mostly an inspiring figure, a living example of the strength of politics not just in changing
the world but also and perhaps more importantly in revolutionising the ways we lived and the
ways we loved.
But what is the meaning of love and how is it related to politics and narratives? These are some
of the questions that I want to explore in this chapter by following lines of Luxemburg’s letters
to her lover and comrade Leo Jogiches. Despite their personal character, Luxemburg’s letters to
Jogiches are political narratives par excellence; and yet it took years for these letters to be read
and recognised as such. Luxemburg was demonised after her murder both by her former social-
ist comrades as well as by the black forces that dominated the European political terrain in the
interwar and post-war periods. But while the anti-Luxemburg campaign was in full swing, the
publication of her prison letters created ‘an event’ that was to break the silence and oblivion that
had followed her murder (Cedar & Cedar, 1923). Arendt has argued that the poetic beauty of
these letters was catalytic in destroying ‘the propaganda image of bloodthirsty Red Rosa’ (1968,
p. 36). But these letters also gave rise to a similarly problematic discourse of Luxemburg as ‘a
bird-watcher and lover of flowers, a woman whose guards said good-by to her with tears in their
eyes when she left prison’ (1968, pp. 36–7). This is the nature of political narratives after all:
they are always in an agonistic relation with their times, they always carry ambiguous meanings
and set in motion effects that can never be predicted or controlled. Reading political narratives
thus involves an understanding of their conditions of possibility, which is what I want to do next
by looking at biographical traces of the Luxemburg-Jogiches relationship, ‘one of the great and
tragic love stories of Socialism’ according to her biographer (Nettl, cited in Arendt, 1968, p. 45).
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Maria Tamboukou
Luxemburg was twenty years old when she met Jogiches in Zurich in 1890 and he was
three years older than her. They had fled their birth countries, Poland and Lithuania respectively –
both under Russian rule at the time – and were heavily involved in socialist politics. There were
strong links but also significant differences between them. Apart from being young, Jewish,
exiled from their countries and working in the same political circles,3 they were also both stud-
ying at the University of Zurich between 1890 and 1897. Luxemburg published her doctoral
thesis The Industrial Development of Poland in 1898, but Jogiches never completed his own, despite
Luxemburg’s fervent endeavours to persuade him to do so. On top of being a tireless political
activist, Luxemburg was an inspiring theorist and an eloquent writer; but she would always send
her speeches, essays and books to Jogiches, whose judgement she would trust in evaluating both
her theoretical and political ideas and writings: ‘you don’t know that everything I do is with you
in mind. Always when I write an article, my first thought is you’ll be thrilled by it’4 she wrote
on 6 March 1899 from Berlin.
Jogiches was not just a critical reader but also an excellent political organizer; coming from a
wealthy family, he was also a constant source of funding both for ‘the cause’ and the relationship.
Although they stayed together for fifteen years, Luxemburg and Jogiches only spent short times
living together and even when they did, they never really cohabited, keeping different albeit
neighbouring apartments where they could avoid social criticism, but also work in peace. In this
light, their letters, like all letters, were bridges between presence and absence, filling the gaps of a
long distance relationship, but also opening up channels of communication that sustained polit-
ical action in concert. ‘[D]uring the Schippel campaign your letters stimulated my thinking day
by day’5 Luxemburg wrote to Jogiches from Berlin on her birthday, 6 March 1899. Her birthday
present was a book and she was thrilled about it:‘you can’t imagine how happy your present made
me. Rodbertus is my favorite economist. I can read him over and over again for sheer intellectual
pleasure. I feel it’s not a book I got but an estate, a house or a piece of land.’6 Politics and love are
thus intertwined in their real and epistolary relationship; what also emerges from these letters is
the frustration of not living together:
I felt happiest about the part of your letter in which you wrote that we are both still
young and able to arrange our personal life. Oh, Dyodyo, my golden one, if only you
keep your promise! . . . Our own small apartment, our own nice furniture, our own
library; quiet and regular work, walks together, an opera from time to time, a small, very
small, circle of friends who can sometimes be invited for dinner; every year a summer
vacation in the country, one month with absolutely no work! . . . And perhaps even a
little, a very little baby? Will this never be allowed? Never?7
There is a range of very interesting themes in the above epistolary extract, which I will discuss
later in the chapter. What I want to highlight here is the forceful way that the letter above por-
trays a relationship bursting with tensions, not just in terms of the political struggles Luxemburg
and Jogiches were actively involved in, but also in terms of different life orientations that went
on till the very end in 1907 when they finally broke up, although their political relationship con-
tinued till the end of their lives. In 1914 they established an underground political organization,
The Spartakus Lead, wrote articles and organized activities against the war. While Luxemburg
was in prison between 1915 and 1918, Jogiches looked after her ‘and was constantly at her side’
(Ettinger, 1988, p. 191). After the crash of the Spartakist Rising in Berlin and Luxemburg’s mur-
der in January 1919, Jogiches ignored warnings and stayed on determined to reveal the crime of
the Freicorps forces; he was murdered three months later in March 1919.
382
Epistolary entanglements
Luxemburg’s ur-epistolaria: Lost in translation?

Having outlined a rough sketch of the historical and socio-political milieu of the Luxemburg-
Jogiches correspondence, I now want to look into the methodological limitations of its narrative
analysis, which draws on Elżbieta Ettinger’s (1979) edited and translated collection of Luxem-
burg’s letters. There are two issues to be considered here: first the limitations of an edited publi-
cation where ‘the selection of some letters entails the deselection of many more’ (Stanley, 2004,
p. 205); and second the thorny issue of being ‘lost in translation’ (Hoffman, 1998). Careful and
attentive as it is, Ettinger’s collection is the inevitable effect of certain editorial decisions since it
only includes a hundred and three letters out of the one thousand extant letters from Luxemburg
to Jogiches, published in Polish in three volumes. To make things worse, Jogiches’ letters to Lux-
emburg have not been preserved or found, so in any case it is only one side of the correspondence
that any analysis can draw upon.8
Without downplaying this important limitation in analysing Luxemburg’s letters, which have
been translated and published in English, I have to note that ‘wholeness’ is never achievable even
when working with unpublished archival documents. ‘You find nothing in the Archive but sto-
ries caught half way through: the middle of things: discontinuities’, Carolyn Steedman has influ-
entially written (2001, p. 45). In this light the letter that was kept in the archive, should always
be read with the letter that was lost or destroyed in mind and in the same way that we interpret
voices, we should perhaps start interpreting silences or somehow include them in our archives.
Liz Stanley has further proposed the notion of the ‘epistolarium’ to address questions around
the already, always ‘incomplete state’ of different collections of letters and correspondences. In
Stanley’s configuration there are three ways that an epistolarium can be defined: ‘as an episto-
lary record that remains for post hoc scrutiny; as “a collection” of the entirety of the surviving
correspondences that a particular letter writer was involved in; and as the “ur-letters” produced
in transcribing, editing and publishing actual letters (or rather versions of them)’ (2004, p. 218).
Clearly, it is Luxemburg’s ‘ur-letters’ that this chapter is dealing with.
As already noted above, the problem of translation is the second serious limitation of this
chapter, since as Ettinger carefully notes ‘the Polish language of love with its wealth of tender,
intimate words, and the possibility of creating words, inimitable words, private, yet understandable
to an outsider, cannot be adequately translated into English’ (1979, p. ix). Indeed the problem
of translation poses significant challenges to the whole field of narrative research and there is a
growing body of literature and scholarship activity addressing these issues.9 Amongst the many
interesting themes that this burgeoning body of scholarship has revolved around, I will take
up the notion of ‘the author’s function’ that Foucault (1998) has most influentially theorised,
namely the way the status of the author creates entanglements of power/knowledge discourses
and practices that condition the reception of his/her work. What I want to suggest in this light
is that Luxemburg’s letters are always, already read in the discursive context of her political and
scientific writings: the readers of her letters are more likely to be informed by the controversial
discourses surrounding her theories about capitalism and the revolution than by the translator’s
recontextualisation practices. As Annelies Laschitza has pithily noted in the introduction of the
German edition of Luxemburg’s letters: ‘the process by which the letters were tracked down,
gathered together, and published is a turbulent and eventful story in its own right’ (Adler, et al.,
2011, p. xxii). What Foucault theorised then as ‘the author’s function’ can here be extended to
‘the editors’ function’; indeed the publication, translation and interpretation of Luxemburg’s let-
ters need to be considered in the light of a sociology of publishing, translating and interpreting, a
field that has been greatly influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) insights in the social conditions
of the international circulation of cultural goods.
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Maria Tamboukou
What should further be considered vis-à-vis Luxemburg’s edited letters is the fact that Ettinger
is not just a critical translator, but also Luxemburg’s biographer, whose feminist interpretation
of Luxemburg’s life (Ettinger, 1988) has created its own circle of turbulence around the validity
of personal and intimate details in the writing of political and intellectual biographies. As the
historian of the Second International, James Joll put it in his review of Ettinger’s biography: ‘it is
both pathetic and ironic to see the famous Marxist revolutionary writing to her love, “I’ve two
vases with violets on the table and a pink lampshade . . . and new gloves, and a new hairbrush
and I am pretty”’ (cited in Dabakis, 1988, p. 20). Ettinger has thus been criticised for allowing
‘a rosy’ or maybe ‘violet’ Rosa to emerge, a vulnerable woman who liked pink lampshades and
wanted ‘a little baby’, while writing and fighting for the revolution. In the same vein of rejecting
the personal as insignificant to the political, Stephen Bronner, Professor of Political Science at
Rutgers, has introduced his volume of Luxemburg’s letters by noting that:
choosing the letters was no easy task . . . much of Luxemburg’s correspondence is

purely personal in character or concerns itself with the details of everyday life and the
petty infighting of party politics; these letters I also chose to exclude.
(1993, p. x)
In thus editing Luxemburg’s letters, Bronner chose to exclude what would be most interesting
for a narrative analyst: narratives of everyday life in their forceful interrelation with the master
political narratives of their times. Why is that? It is in the minutiae of personal narratives that the
political is fleshed out and enacted, while theoretical ideas are grounded and become specific. As
Arendt has aptly put it:
I have always believed that, no matter how abstract our theories may sound or how
consistent our arguments appear, there are incidents and stories behind them, which . . .
contain as in a nutshell the full meaning of whatever we have to say.
(1960, p. 1)
What I have tried to show so far is that the problem of translation is always complicated
and embedded in material and discursive situations that have to be considered in relation to a
specific research problem. In this light, the restrictions of translation notwithstanding, my anal-
ysis is not placed in the field of literary criticism and it is not so much focused on the form of
Luxemburg’s letters but rather on the discourses, power relations and forces of desire that traverse
the themes that I analyse. In presenting and discussing some of the epistemological limitations
in the analysis of political narratives in general and Luxemburg’s letters in particular, I still think
that Luxemburg’s edited and translated letters constitute a rich ‘narrative assemblage’.10 Seen as
an assemblage, Luxemburg’s edited and translated letters illuminate and concretize intrinsic and
subtle relations between politics and love within the web of human relations. Rethinking these
relations in the light of possibilities for communication that letter writing enacts is a relatively
neglected area, which I will further discuss in the final section of this chapter. What I want to
do now is to look into the Arendt/Luxemburg encounter in the light of love as an existential
concept linked to memory, natality and plurality.
Love, memory, politics

There were only two women amongst eight men in Arendt’s (1968) influential work Men in
Dark Times: the legendary storyteller Isak Dinesen and the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.
384
In the preface of this influential work, Arendt has clearly explained her choice of the lives
included in this collection:
That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and
that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the
uncertain, flickering and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and
their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that
was given them on earth – this conviction is the inarticulate background against which
these profiles were drawn.
(Arendt, 1968, p. ix)
Arendt thus chose Luxemburg as a woman whole life illuminated ‘dark times’. Apart from read-
ing Luxemburg’s theoretical work, Arendt had admired the poetry and lyricism of her letters,
but she had also developed visceral connections with Luxemburg, who was her mother’s hero-
ine, according to her biographer (Young-Bruehl, 1982, p. 239). As the latter notes, Arendt was
eleven years old ‘when her mother took her to the Königsberg demonstrations in support of the
Spartacists’ (p. 124). What she did not know at the time was that her future husband Heinrich
Blücher – twenty years old at the time – was amongst the young Spartacists marching against the
First World War in Berlin (p. 125).
Arendt had thus heard many anecdotes about Luxemburg not only through the social dem-
ocratic circles that her mother was involved in, but also later in life from Blücher himself, who
had read and admired Luxemburg’s political writings. In thus reflecting upon the light of Lux-
emburg’s life, Arendt has particularly considered and discussed her relationship with Jogiches, ‘a
man of action and passion [who] knew how to do and how to suffer’ (p. 45). As Young-Bruehl
has noted, in discussing both the amorous and the political part of the Luxemburg-Jogiches
relationship, Arendt was somehow reflecting on her own experiences. When she wrote that ‘in
marriage it is not always easy to tell the partners’ ’ (1968, p. 46) thoughts apart, Arendt inevitably
drew upon her own intellectual and marital relationship with Blücher;11 when she commented
that ‘this generation still believed firmly that love strikes only once’ (p. 45) she must have had her
mother’s generation in mind.
Love was indeed at the heart of Arendt’s interest, the topic of her doctoral thesis having been
the concept of love in St Augustine’s thought (Arendt, 1996), while Rachel Varnhagen’s life
(Arendt, 2000), the topic of her habilitation, particularly considered and discussed Varnhagen’s
failure in ‘matters of love’. But why was love so important in the thought of such a distinguished
political theorist? Leaving aside Arendt’s personal ties with Martin Heidegger,12 I want to exam-
ine here love as a crucial concept in her existential philosophy and her political theories.
Arendt’s thesis ‘Love and St Augustine’ was her last book-length manuscript to be published in
English in 1996. This publication came twenty-one years after her death, although a synopsis of
the dissertation in English was included as an appendix of Young-Bruehl’s intellectual biography,
Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World in 1982. The thesis was first translated in English by E.B.
Ashton in 1960 and although Arendt worked on the draft translation with a publication in mind,
the idea was put on hold in 1965 as she was involved in other projects. Although never realised,
what Arendt’s editorial intention indicates according to the editors of the posthumous publication,
is that her thesis on Augustine remained central in the development of her political theories and
that there should be no separation between the early writer of a philosophical thesis on love and the
political writings of her maturity. ‘The return to Augustine directly infused her revisions of the Ori-
gins of Totalitarianism, her new study On Revolution, the essays collected in Between Past and Future and
Eichman in Jerusalem with explicit and implicit Augustinian references’ (Scott & Stark, 1996, p. x).
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Maria Tamboukou
Moreover Augustine’s thought is critical in how Arendt (1978) develops her section on ‘the
faculty of the Will and by implication to the problem of Freedom’ (1978, p. 3) in her posthu-
mously published work The Life of the Mind. Love in Arendt’s configuration binds together the
three faculties of the mind, namely thinking, willing and judging. As Young-Bruehl has noted, we
think since we love meaning and the search for truth, we will the pleasure that the continuation
of things can offer and we judge within the disinterested love that the image of the beautiful
can offer us. In referring to the ‘disinterested love’ Arendt drew on Kant’s notion of the ‘enlarged
mentality’: ‘an image of judging as a disinterested love . . . put together with the image of think-
ing as an Eros for meaning and the image of willing, transformed into love, willing objects to
continue being’ (Young-Bruehl, 1994, p. 356, emphasis in the text). But this recurrence of love as
a concept binding the three faculties of the mind derives from the emergence of love as an effect
of the Augustinian journey of memory, which I will now discuss.
In the quest of meaning for ourselves and our relationship to the world, the future cannot offer
us any hope since it is directed to death a certain point that defines the temporality of human
existence, as influentially theorised by Heidegger (2003). Thus, Arendt’s turn to Augustine’s
philosophy of time, also marked her departure from Heidegger’s orientation to death, a rupture
that she wrote explicitly about:
Since our expectations and desires are prompted by what we remember and guided by a
previous knowledge, it is memory and not expectation (for instance the expectation of
death as in Heidegger’s approach) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence.
(Arendt, 1996, p. 56)
In seeking fearlessness through love, Augustine’s philosophy offers a different image of time,
which comes from the future and is directed towards the past, the moment of the beginning of
the world, which is also related to our own beginning, namely our birth. This image of time can
be humanly conceptualized through memory: ‘Time exists only insofar as it can be measured,
and the yardstick by which we measure it is space’ (Arendt, 1996, p. 15). For Augustine then,
memory is the space wherein we measure time, but what we can measure is only what remains
fixed in memory from the ‘no more’ and what exists as expectation from the ‘not yet’. As Arendt
eloquently puts it: ‘It is only by calling past and future into the presence of remembrance and
expectation that time exists at all’ (1996, p. 15).
Love is crucial in the experience of the timeless Now: while for Augustine it is the love for God
that can make humans forget their temporal existence over eternity, forgetfulness Arendt notes ‘is
by no means only characteristic of the love of God’ (1996, p. 28). In loving
[man] not only forgets himself, but in a way [he] ceases to be [himself], that is this
particular place in time and space. [He] loses the human mode of existence, which is
mortality, without exchanging for the divine mode of existence, which is eternity.
(Arendt, 1996, p. 28)
By illuminating the present, the timeless space between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’,
Arendt highlights natality as the defining aspect of human temporality and is concerned with
politics as an arena where new beginnings are always possible as history has so forcefully shown:
‘the essence of all, and in particular of political action is to make a new beginning’ (1994, p. 321).
Thus, while the final destination of Augustine’s memory journey is God, Arendt’s chosen des-
tination is humanity, the remembrance of what binds us together, namely our birth in the world,
‘for the sake of novitas’ (1996, p. 55) and therefore freedom. Having retreated from the world in
386
the quest for meaning, we thus follow an Augustinian journey of memory from the future into
the past and by reaching our birth as a common experience that binds us as humans we reconcile
ourselves with the world and through the experience of neighbourly love, ‘as an expression of
interdependence’ (Arendt, 1996, p. 104), we reposition ourselves in-the-world-with-others. Love
is thus an existential concept in Arendt’s political thought that binds together the two crucial
components of her philosophy: uniqueness and plurality. In the conclusion of her important essay,
‘What is Existential Philosophy’, she famously notes:
Existence itself is by nature never isolated. It exists only in communication and in

awareness of others’ existence. Our fellow-men are not (as in Heidegger) an element of
existence that is structurally necessary but at the same time an impediment to the Being
of Self. Just the contrary: Existence can develop only in the shared life of human beings
inhabiting a given world common to them all.
(1994, p. 186)
It was the image of ‘a given world common to all’ that Arendt was visualizing when she wrote
Rachel Varnhagen’s life; in doing this she was able to flesh out the existential concept of love
through writing Varnhagen’s life ‘from within’, reading her diaries and following her corre-
spondence. But what does it mean ‘to write from within’? Since every human being is unique
in Arendt’s philosophy, all lives can inspire stories that will generate meaning and trigger fur-
ther action, enthusing human beings to actually live their lives as a story. In reflecting on Isak
Dinesen’s13 philosophy of storytelling, Arendt therefore asks:
If it is true . . . that no one has a life worth thinking about whose lifestory cannot be
told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that
what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?
(1968, p. 105)
Arendt’s idea that lives should be lived as stories is indeed a unique and strong political argu-
ment, bringing agency and the possibility of intervening in the politics of life to the fore. But
here again she was very careful to clarify that living life as a story should not mean that one cre-
ates a normative pattern that has to be followed. The Arendtian imaginary of ‘life as a narrative’
(Kristeva, 2001) is about creating conditions of possibility that will eventually allow the story
to emerge. And although everybody can or should live their life as a story, Arendt notes that
‘certain people are so exposed in their own lives that they become junction points and concrete
objectifications of life’ (Weissberg, 2000, p. 31). In this light, biographical subjects can become
inspiring examples that move beyond their actuality and transcend their historicity. It is therefore
the responsibility of the biographer to write about a life, creating forceful connections between
life histories and the discourse of history. As Weissberg has commented, ‘biography reflects on
an individual life, but this life becomes public for history’ (2000, p. 18). This is how ‘writing
from within’ becomes Arendt’s biographical mode. By following Varnhagen’s letters and diaries
Arendt could participate in her biographical subject’s actions and thoughts without the need to
psychologize her. In thus writing Varnhagen’s biography, Arendt looked at the shape of a life that
had been completed and responded to it with intellectual rigour and unbounded passion: as her
biographical subject, Varnhagen would ultimately become for Arendt, ‘my closest friend, though
she has been dead for some hundred years’ (in Weissberg, 2000, p. 5). It is this biographical mode
of ‘writing from within’ that brings the discussion back to Luxemburg’s letters and the possibil-
ities they open up for love and politics to be theorized in concert.
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Maria Tamboukou
Dear Dyodyo
Dyodyo, if only you’d settle your citizenship, finish your doctorate, live with me
openly in our own home. We will both work and our life will be perfect!! . . . we
will be happy, we must. Weren’t we happy when just the two of us lived and worked
together? . . . Remember when we are alone in harmony, we can do without the whole
world? . . . Remember, last time in Weggis when I was writing ‘Step by Step’ . . . I was
sick writing in bed, all upset, and you were so gentle, so good, sweet. . . . I will never
forget it. Or do you remember the afternoons at Melida, after lunch, when you sat on
the porch, drinking black thick coffee . . . Or do you remember, how once a band
of musicians came on a Sunday to the garden . . . and we went on foot to Maroggia
and we came back on foot, and the moon was rising . . . and we had just been talking
about my going to Germany. We stopped, held each other on the road in the darkness
and looked at the crescent moon over the mountains. Do you remember? I still smell
the night’s air . . . Or, do you remember how you used to come back from Lugano at
8:20 at night, with the groceries . . . then I unpacked them and put the oranges, the
cheese, salami, the cake on the table. Oh, you know, we have probably never had such
magnificent dinners as those, on the little table in that bare room, the door to the porch
open, the fragrance of the garden sweeping in . . . And from afar in the darkness the
train to Milan was flying over the bridge . . .
Dyodyo dearest . . . I don’t want to write about business today – tomorrow, after
seeing Kautsky . . .
Yours Roza.14
Amongst the many things that struck me in reading Luxemburg’s letter above is the recur-
rence of the ‘do you remember’ question. Written on the day of her birthday, the reiteration of
the need to remember in the author’s epistolary discourse becomes particularly significant in
the light of Arendt’s existential concept of love and its link to memory, natality and politics as
discussed in the previous section of this chapter. It is by recalling past [and scarce] moments of
living together with the beloved – who is also a comrade and a political mentor – that Luxem-
burg’s amorous discourse unfolds. What is further important is that memories of the crescent
moon, the train passing by in the darkness, simple dinners in the Italian countryside and wor-
ries about Kautsky’s reception of her work, the ordinary and the extraordinary, are crammed
together in the bodies of these letters.
In discussing the discourse of remembrance in amorous epistolary narratives, Linda Kauff-
mann (1986, p. 17) has noted that retrieving past moments of happiness in the text of the letter is
an amorous epistolary practice that goes back to Ovid’s Heroids. But while the Ovidean heroine
writes to the beloved recalling past moments of happiness – since writing is the only act that
can revert the position of ‘the deserted woman’ – there is a significant inflection in Luxemburg’s
epistolary practices: the memory of blissful moments of being goes hand in hand with the mem-
ory of political creation and action: the period when she was writing ‘the little masterpiece’ Step
by Step or working with The Administrative Theory Notes. Luxemburg is not ‘a deserted woman’ –
although sometimes she feels so by Jogiches’ indifference – but a political actor, who wants to
change the world not just on the macro level but also in the minutiae of everyday life. In this
light she actively seeks and claims the pleasure and right of being happy: ‘we will be happy, we
must’, she notes emphatically in the birthday letter above.
But for Luxemburg the often controversial and ambiguous image of ‘a happy life’ is interwo-
ven in the web of political relations in a mutual co-dependence. A ‘happy life’ for Luxemburg is
about loving, studying, writing, acting; as a revolutionary she wants them all and she wants them
388
in the Now that she reflects upon and wills to revolutionize and radically change. In tracing signs
of the author’s expression of a forceful will, the reader of these letters cannot but make connec-
tions with Arendt’s configuration of love as an existential force that binds together thinking,
willing and judging in Luxemburg’s ‘life of the mind’. Luxemburg’s Now is Arendt’s timeless
present, a site of struggle, but also a region par excellence for thinking and remembering: ‘The
gap between past and future opens only in reflection [which] draws these absent “regions” into
the mind’s presence; from that perspective the activity of thinking can be understood as a fight
against time itself ’ (1978, p. 206).
Luxemburg’s letters, I argue, open up possibilities of communication about politics, the revolu-
tion and the lovers’ life in a future that is radical and open. In this light the unbearable heaviness
of being separated from the beloved was not just a contingency of the amorous relationship; while
visualizing a different world, Luxemburg was specifically situating her life within it. Her letters
to Jogiches are thus creating tangible links between the particular and the universal. In reflect-
ing upon the unhappiness of her own life, she was departing from the abstractness of political
discourse. Although accepting the fragmentation of the world, through her letters, Luxemburg
was attempting ‘to accommodate the modern sense of alienation in the world and the modern
desire to create, in a world that is no longer a home to us, a human world that could become
our home’ (Arendt, 1994, p. 186). In doing this Luxemburg was continuously confronted with
different ideas and perspectives: not just those of the social democratic circles she was refuting and
in which she was acting in concert with Jogiches, but also with those of the beloved. Her letters
to Jogiches stage a scene of an on-going struggle of ideas and perspectives – not so much about
politics but mostly about love-in-politics – that would remain open till the very end.
Love, letters and agonistic politics

In this chapter I have argued that Luxemburg’s letters to her lover and comrade Jogiches create
an interesting archive wherein the epistolary form dramatizes and gives specificity to the relation-
ship between politics and love. Luxemburg’s letters have been read as political narratives: tangible
traces of the contingency of action and the unpredictability of the human condition, constitutive
of politics and of the discourse of History. In acting and speaking together, human beings expose
themselves to each other, reveal the uniqueness of who they are and through taking the risk of
disclosure, they connect with others. In this light narration creates conditions of possibility for
uniqueness, plurality and communication to be enacted within the Arendtian configuration of
the political. Love as an effect of the journey of memory and as a force of life is crucial here:
through love we reconnect with the moment of our beginning, thus becoming existentially aware
of freedom as an inherent possibility of the human condition.
Notes
1 Rosa Luxemburg to Leo Jogiches, July 16, 1897 (in Ettinger, 1979, p. 22).
2 Rosa Luxemburg’s life has been the topic of two main biographies and several biographical sketches. See,
amongst others, Nettl, 1966; Ettinger, 1988. For an interesting discussion of the battleground around
Luxemburg’s political and theoretical work, see Arendt, 1968.
3 In 1893, Luxemburg and Jogiches founded together the first influential Polish Marxist workers’ party,
the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), which was reorganized in 1900 as the Social
Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL). See Ettinger (1979), pp. 2–3, pp. 195–6.
4 Rosa Luxemburg to Leo Jogiches (in Ettinger, 1979, p. 71).
5 Ettinger (1979, p. 72).
6 Ibid., pp. 71–2.
7 Ibid., pp. 73–4.
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Maria Tamboukou
8 I have also studied the following collections of Luxemburg’s letters: Bronner (1993) and Adler, Hudis
and Laschitza (2011), but for the sake of consistency in the problem of the translation I have only quoted
from Ettinger’s collection (1979).
9 See Hoffman’s classic Lost in Translation (1998). See also Temple (2008) for an excellent overview of
questions and issues around translation in narrative research.
10 This a notion that I have used in my work to denote multifarious and disorderly collections of storylines
that are put together by the researcher in the process of creating an archive of the problem s/he is inves-
tigating (see Tamboukou, 2010).
11 See Young-Bruehl (1982), p. 135.
12 See Young-Bruehl (1982) and Ettinger (1995).
13 Isak Dinesen was the male pseudonym of Karen Blixen. See Arendt (1968), pp. 95–109.
14 Rosa Luxemburg to Leo Jogiches (in Ettinger 1979, pp. 73–5).
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30
POLITICS AND NARRATIVE
AGENCY IN THE HISTORY
OF THE VICTORIA AND
ALBERT MUSEUM
Linda Sandino
victoria and albert museum
Introduction
While undertaking research in the archives of the William Morris Society [WMS] on the back-
ground to a story that forms the core of my chapter here, I came across a lecture delivered to the
Society in 1959 by the great socialist historian E. P. Thompson. In it he praised the late nine-
teenth century craftsman, design reformer, and poet as a ‘great moral teacher’, whose ‘greatness
[came] to its full maturity in the political writing and example of his later years’. In relation to
my research the most significant and thought provoking observation was Thompson’s:
feeling that perhaps through fear of controversy and out of respect for admirers of
William Morris who do not share his political convictions – this Society has tended to
be reticent on this matter. But Morris was one of our greatest men, because he was a
great revolutionary, a profoundly cultured and humane revolutionary, but not the less a
revolutionary for this reason. Moreover, he was a man working for practical revolution.
It is this which brings the whole man together.
( Thompson, 1959, 1994, pp. 66–7)
Anxiety about controversy, reticence about politics, a conviction about the value of culture in
bringing about social change, as well as how all these qualities make up the ‘whole’ person reso-
nated with my work on left-wing museum staff working in the Circulation Department at the
Victoria and Albert Museum (the V&A) in London in the mid-twentieth century. The figure
of William Morris (1834–1896) will play an important role in the account that is to follow as
I explore how a narrative can become unexpectedly ‘political’ since initially the Circulation
Department’s politics were not at the forefront of my research into the history of curating at the
Museum. Unlike explicitly political research (for example Andrews, 1991, 2007; Selbin, 2010),
the focus of the V&A project is not ‘politics’, so the discovery of communist party memberships
and allegiances shed a different light, a counter-narrative, to the collections-centred, art and
design history of curating and museum scholarship (Baker & Richardson, 1999).
392
Politics and narrative agency
What is a political narrative?

Two terms need to be engaged with in understanding what is at stake in defining a narrative as
political: narrative and politics. Adrian Leftwich proposes two broad approaches to the problem-
atic definition of politics: arena or site, and the processual. In the former, politics ‘is an activity
found only in certain kinds of societies . . . and in certain kinds of institutional sites or processes
within those societies’; the latter processual approach ‘holds that politics is much a more gener-
alized and universal process which has existed wherever human species has been found . . . and
hence is a characteristic and necessary feature, if not function, of all societies, past and present’
(Leftwich, 2004, p. 2). Common ground between the two approaches encompasses ‘all activi-
ties of conflict (peaceful or not), negotiation and co-operation over the use and distribution of
resources, wherever they may be found, within and beyond formal institutions, on a global level
or within a family, involving two or more people’ (Leftwich, 2004, p. 19).
As a national museum, the V&A is a Non-Departmental Public Body (NDPB) sponsored
by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), its governing trustees appointed by
the Prime Minister’s Office in consultation with DCMS (V&A, 2013, p. 24). Until the passing
of the National Heritage Act in 1983, the Museum had been under the administration of the
Department of Education and Science, and its previous incarnations beginning with the Educa-
tion Department 1856–1899, which oversaw the establishment of the Museum in South Kens-
ington in 1857 (Burton, 1999). Throughout most of its history, therefore, staff were subject to
Civil Service rules and regulations which included signing the Official Secret Acts, the impact of
which affected the continuance of a certain form of connoisseurial scholarship that steered clear
of examining the sociopolitical contexts of objects and collections (Sandino, 2012). As the Keeper
of Ceramics in the late 1940s noted:‘the value of a work of art lay in its formal qualities (‘compo-
sition, pattern, texture . . . linear and other rhythm . . . creative harmony or contrast of colour’)’
(Burton, 1999, p. 101). Museums, especially art museums, were an escape from everyday reality,
rather than opportunity to examine it. However, as an arena or site, by the late twentieth century,
the Museum’s nineteenth century origins provided scholars with the opportunity to scrutinise
its imperialist politics (Barringer & Flynn, 1998; Kreigel, 2007). These examples account for the
Museum as a site of the study of its relation to national, international, government policy and its
histories. However, the interviews I have conducted reveal the subjective dimension of how indi-
viduals negotiate their positions and everyday interactions within the institution, as well as how
it redirected political activism and beliefs. Ivor Goodson, drawing on the work of Wini Breines
(1989), has summarised this adaptation thus:
strategic politics is: you take a new situation and you work out a way in which your
beliefs are reactivated in the new situation. You find a new way to speak about what you
believe in. And that may mean changing your strategic position . . . We are not talking
about changing our beliefs. I don’t think we can talk about changing our beliefs. We
are saying: at this moment that doesn’t work anymore. But that’s a strategic point, not
an ideological point, and that’s a very important distinction. Strategically we are saying,
“It’s no good any more”. That wouldn’t deliver the belief . . . So [Breines] said: there are
two ways that you do politics in a situation where you don’t like your positionality. One
is you invent a new strategic politics, you involve yourself in some way in contesting
the things that are creating a bad position. And . . . the other possibility is what he (sic)
calls pre-figurative politics, where you find, once again, a room or space where all of
those things that you believe in can be done.
(Goodson, 2000, p. 2)
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Linda Sandino
The above quotation demonstrates how political engagement and activism can remain constant;
beliefs are not changed, but new situations demand or create new strategies. As Andrews (1991)
so skilfully demonstrated, political commitments can last a lifetime – especially those that, as in
the case of William Morris (1890), strive for an ideal utopian perfection. Instead of the nega-
tivity associated with the term ‘compromise’, Museum workers, as their narratives demonstrate,
adapted to changing circumstances that included the closure of their department and disillusion
with party politics.
Fellow traveller narrative identities

The battle over Morris’ identity and legacy is in many ways a battle over narratives: which narra-
tive about his various identities is the ‘right’ one? The debate is polarised between art and politics,
two spheres of activity with which we associate total commitment, and his interpreters have often
been firmly on the side of one or the other. Although not incompatible, both imply a conviction
to act as well as to be (Sandino, 2010). The struggle over the Morris’ myths is about pinpointing
where his priorities lay (art or politics?) raising the question about what we understand commit-
ment to mean. Molly Andrews has identified four elements that should be taken into account
when analysing political commitment: intention, duration, action, and priority (1991, p. 143),
all of which, as Thompson argues in the case of Morris, ‘bring[s] the whole man together’. For
Morris’ followers, the integrated character of his life and work was a life to be emulated.
Nevertheless, Morris’ legacy surfaces and changes over time (Wiener, 1976). During the eco-
nomic depression of the 1930s, at the opening of an exhibition of his work at the V&A, the com-
munist historian Robin Arnot Page fulminated how the Establishment ‘simply brush[es] aside the
Morris that was and constructs a Morris that never existed, a sort of sickly dilettante socialist, as
personally incredible as he would be politically monstrous’ (Page, 1934). By the time of Thompson’s
lecture in 1959, Morris’ political vision had become a meeting ground for the common concerns
of another generation of communists (to the extent that the WMS was under surveillance by
MI5). Morris’ commitment to both art and social reform functioned as an identity that resonated
with artists, designers, architects and cultural workers, many of whom in the post-war period were
communists aiming to achieve a better world. This coherent identity was expressed by the historian
Raphael Samuel in his memoir, The Lost World of British Communism (1985), to be a Communist was
‘to have a complete social identity, one which transcended the limits of class, gender and nationality’.
As a philosophy of life, it subordinated the self to the service of a higher cause . . .

Armed with a knowledge of the laws of social development, Communists were thus
uniquely qualified to act as teachers and guides. In a favourite conceit of the time,
they were ‘conscious agents’ of the emancipatory process, ‘conscious shapers’ of history,
‘conscious protagonists’ of the struggle that extends throughout society.
(Samuel, 1985, p. 11)
By unifying Morris’ multiple activities and beliefs into a coherent narrative identity, his fol-
lowers were able to produce a model to guide them into meaningful action. By the 1950s
his ideas found an echo amongst British socialists who reacted to the increasing rise of mass-
consumption and the advance of American cultural imperialism (Callaghan, 2004, p. 87). 1955
saw the founding of the William Morris Society, whose members included V&A staff Peter
Floud, Barbara Morris and several Communist architects and designers (Crick, 2011).1
The concept of a narrative identity was coined by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur to account for
how narrative has the capacity to ‘make concordance out of discordance by bringing together
394
heterogeneous elements’ (Ricoeur, 1984, p. 65) in which the narrator is able to maintain the
dynamic of change and constancy, the dialectic between same and other.
Identity rests on a temporal structure that conforms to the model of dynamic iden-
tity arising from the poetic composition of a narrative text. The self characterized by
self-sameness may then be said to be refigured by the reflective application of such
narrative configurations. Unlike the abstract identity of the Same, this narrative identity,
constitutive of self- constancy, can include change, mutability, within the cohesion of
one lifetime.
(Ricoeur, 1988, p. 46)
Although life histories may adhere around a single a theme, such as art or politics, within the
configuration of the told life, change and transformation will be in dynamic confrontation with
a constant self, and this constitutes the teller’s narrative identity. Commitment is like a promise,
both of which are future-oriented, suggesting that despite change, the promise will be honoured.
On the other hand, Ricoeur also developed the narrative category of character that ‘involves the
same narrative understanding as plot’, but he is careful not to suggest that this implies unity or
concordance. Rather,
the person shares the condition of dynamic identity peculiar to the story recounted.
The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her
narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story
that makes the identity of the character.
(Ricoeur, 1992, p. 148)
The various Morris narratives therefore are all able to accommodate the several, even competing
versions of Morris, but equally able to hold them all together.
My visit to the William Morris Society was prompted by a life history recording with Bar-
bara Morris (1918–2009), a retired V&A curator (no relation to William). Her first husband,
from whom she took her surname, was Max Morris (1913–2008); he had been a prominent
member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, eventually rising to become president of
the National Union of Teachers. From quite different backgrounds, Barbara recounted how
she had met Max at a UCL [University College London] Socialist Ball in 1938. At the time
she was a student at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art. Always ‘a bit of rebel’, she had gone to art
school against the wishes of her father and headmistress who had concurred that her choice was
‘a waste of a brain’ (Morris, 01, 2009). My recording with Barbara began early in 2009 spread
over three sessions of approximately two hours each conducted in her home, surrounded by
her impressive collection of nineteenth century Arts and Crafts furniture, textiles and ceramics,
her area of expertise. Energetic, purposeful and charming, she was 91 at the time of the inter-
view and sadly died some six months after we completed the recording. As is often the case,
I have regrets about questions I didn’t ask, avenues I didn’t pursue. Barbara’s life history has
provided a rich resource for understanding aspects of the museum life and work, but it has also
generated new interpretations, which have built on and complemented others (Andrews, 2013;
Sandino, 2009, 2013). As my first interview with a curator who had worked in the Circulation
Department, the question of its politics became increasingly prominent in my research in order
to understand what impact the Department’s politics had on collecting, exhibitions and other
aspects of museum life. I was also perplexed about how it was possible to be a Party member as
well as a civil servant.
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Linda Sandino
The politics of a museum for all

As a site or arena for politics, the story of the Circulation Department, which Barbara joined in
1947, provides a pertinent example of how Museum staff deployed their political agency within
the bureaucracy of that institution. The history of the Department in the post-war period is a
counter-narrative to the ivory tower specializations of the mid-twentieth century V&A. The
Circulation Department, ‘Circ’, was responsible for mounting exhibitions that that toured to
regional museums, galleries, libraries, as well as organising displays of modern art and design for
the education and inspiration of art school students (Burton, 1999; Floud, c.1949; Weddell, 2012).
It was the only department devoted to what is now called outreach, while the main material based
departments focused on the acquisition and display of their collections at South Kensington.
Scandalously, the department was closed down in 1976 due to government cuts across the civil
service, generating much protest in the press, and anguish amongst the Department’s staff. ‘At the
time it felt really bad, and as I say, at the time we thought what’s the rest of the country going
to say? It’s the Museum slamming its doors.’ A department that had been in service for 120 years
could not be saved despite appeals to the Education Secretary (Shirley Williams) and the Minister
for the Arts (Lord Donaldson), and campaigns in the national and regional press. Describing a
visit to the department by the Education Secretary, the same curator recalled:
I remember Shirley Williams coming and being shown all the wonderful work we’d
done and she agreed it was all wonderful work and so on. Clearly she was going to say
it was all down to the Director and it was his call, but I remember we said, “But we’ve
all got to be moved. We’ve got to be moved to departments we know nothing about,
and she looked at us all in amazement and said, “But that happens all the time.” And it’s
true. It did and it does, but some of us were in tears over it that afternoon.
(Opie, 2012, Track 4)
It was of course the duty of civil servants to comply with government regulations, but for these
curators their work was a vocation, not just a job, based on commitment to an ideal of public
service and the Museum as resource and engine of education in art and design for everyone.
The element that fostered Circ’s distinctive character and reputation as a collection’s depart-
ment was its championing of the domestic decorative arts of the Victorian and Edwardian era,
culminating in a ground-breaking exhibition in 1952. In the 1940s/50s these periods were con-
sidered too recent and too ugly. ‘Art of the past had to serve time in purgatory . . . before it became
worthy of reception in the heaven of the V&A’ (Burton, 1999, p. 207). While we could see this as
disagreements about taste, Circ’s interest in the late nineteenth century decorative arts was more
than just an opportunity to make a claim for an under-researched area of the applied arts, or the
desire to throw down a perverse challenge. It provided the Department with a field that enabled
staff to resolve the paradox of their political allegiance with their role as government civil servants.
Equality and brotherhood

The Keeper who pioneered research into William Morris was Peter Floud. Like Morris, he too
became an inspirational figure whose legacy was permeated the department long after his death
in 1960:
We all, I think, aspired to the character of the first, not first Keeper of Circulation, the
first goes way back into the 19th century, but the most charismatic and most important
396
Keeper of Circulation department in the post-war period [who] was Peter Floud. He
was a renowned socialist, even a communist, I believe . . . Anyway, he was a renowned
socialist and he had an anarchic view of the way his department should be run and be
seen to be run and related to the rest of the Museum.
(Opie, 2011, Track 4)
The son of a British diplomat, Floud joined the V&A in 1936. He had been at Wadham
College, Oxford, during a period of widespread economic depression that, together with the
rise of fascism, drove many upper and middle-class undergraduates to embrace the ideals of
communism (Deakin, 2012). Party membership was not unique at this time. In September
1939 the CPGB had 20,000 members; by March 1945 this had risen to 45,435, although in
1942 the figure had reached 56,000.2 Moreover the 1945 victory of the Labour Party and its
creation of the welfare state seemed to foster an atmosphere in which, as the historian David
Kynaston has suggested, ‘there was a chance of reasonable equality’ (Kynaston, 2008, p. 145).
However, this doesn’t explain the appeal of Communism for Floud, Morris and the other
members in the Department.3 What did it provide that membership of the Labour Party did
not? Although this is not the place to examine the troubled relations between the CPGB and
the Labour Party, the William Morris ‘model’ of activist engagement in the reform of everyday
life, its objects, and work relations provided a practical strategy for putting their beliefs to work.
In a letter of 1955, Circ’s communist Keeper Peter Floud had written: ‘I am naturally a sceptical
person and very averse from hero worship, and yet I can truthfully say that Morris’s writings,
and even more his life, are a direct inspiration to me in a sense that no other are’ (quoted in
WMS Annual Report, 1961).
In the post-war period, there was increasing concern in some government circles about
whether radical political convictions amongst civil servants were a private matter or not. Was
Party membership a form of treason and disloyalty to the state, or was it, as the historian Raphael
Samuel proposed, a ‘philosophy of life’? In ‘trying to deal with this evil’ the Lord Chancellor
stated, ‘we must not fall into the error of adopting methods from totalitarian states . . . the
prevention of free expression [will] not eradicate the menace’ (Parliamentary Report, 1950).
Rather than being dismissed, civil servants suspected of extreme political convictions were simply
transferred from posts where they might have access to sensitive information. This was case with
Ann George, who was moved from her position as secretary to the Minister of Education to the
Circulation Department (Sandino, 2013).
With hindsight it may now not seem surprising that Circ pioneered research on the work
of William Morris (1834–1896). Morris and his company Morris and Co had been involved
with the Museum from 1865 when he was commissioned to decorate the West Dining
Room. Then in 1884, he was appointed to the Museum’s Committee for Art Referees, which
advised on acquisitions. He was not therefore any kind of ‘outsider’. However, also in 1884
Morris, with the support of Frederick Engels, set up the Socialist League, whose manifesto
was echoed in the collaborative, egalitarian values that I was to hear repeated in several of the
Circ narratives. The League’s manifesto called for the dissolution of the boundaries of class,
nationality and sex:
there shall be no distinctions of rank or dignity amongst us to give opportunities for

the selfish ambition of leadership, which has so often injured the cause of the workers.
We are working for equality and brotherhood for all the world, and it is only through
equality and brotherhood that we can make our work effective (original emphasis).
(Morris, 1885)
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Linda Sandino
Subversion of the Museum’s standard procedures and status hierarchies, Leftwich’s ‘processual
politics’, was nicely captured in this anecdote by retired curator David Coachworth, who began
his career in the Museum in 1963. His recollections highlight the distinctive character of the
Department:
Circ was totally different from anywhere elsewhere. We all talked together, which was
rare. I found out in other departments if you were a Museum Assistant you didn’t talk
to – well you could talk to Research Assistant just about, but you didn’t talk to a Keeper;
and if there was any point made, then the Research Assistant would approach the Keeper
and the Keeper might approach the full Keeper, but you didn’t do that, and in Circ we
did! It was always like that all the time. I found for my first year, we all gave Christmas
presents to one another, which nobody else had ever done. I once in my second year,
probably when I was working on the nineteenth century Primary [galleries] went to
a meeting in the Museum with Barbara Morris, and something was discussed at it and
I said, I turned sideways, quite innocently and said, “Barbara, I don’t think that’s what
Hugh was thinking of for this particular thing.” And there was a hiss of an indrawn
breath around the room. I had not only addressed a Keeper by her Christian name, but
I’d talked about my Keeper in that way and it really didn’t happen in those days. Circ
was terribly important in this way because as staff moved out, they spread the good news.
(Coachworth, 2010, Track 4)
Locating political narrative identities

My discovery of Barbara’s CP membership came about indirectly while she was describing a
research trip to Finland in 1961 in connection with a forthcoming exhibition, ‘Finlandia’. On
asking her which of the many museums she’d visited in her career she had learnt the most from,
she cited Scandinavian museums ‘because of their simple methods of display’, but then went on
to say:
And I always remember being – I mean this was a personal visit nothing to do with the
Museum, but I was rather impressed by the museums in Hungary, because I was invited
to Hungary together with my first husband who was a historian, and he was invited to
lecture of Lajos Koshuth, the Hungarian revolutionary leader who spent sometime in
England, and he was invited to give this lecture, and they invited me too so I took the
opportunity to study Hungarian museums while I was there. I meant that was purely
private enterprise. It was in 1948–49 and I did write an article for UNESCO magazine
on Hungarian museums.
(Morris, 2009, p. 13, emphasis added)
Barbara’s emphasis that her visits had been ‘personal’, ‘nothing to do with the Museum’, ‘it
was purely private enterprise’ is contradicted by reference to the UNESCO article which, I
later discovered would have required her Keeper’s permission; all civil servants had to clear any
publications with their heads of department (Chapman, 2004, p. 211). It wasn’t too surprising
therefore that in my subsequent research in the Museum’s archives I discovered that these trips
had of course been officially sanctioned. The Museum’s Director at the time, Sir Leigh Ashton,
had noted rather anxiously in a memo ostensibly about travelling expenses to the Secretary to
the Minister of Education that, ‘Mrs Morris has not yet returned from her trip behind the Iron
Curtain’. The reply was reassuring: ‘The Secretary [of the Ministry] on general grounds, is very
398
much inclined to favour visits of this sort to countries in Eastern Europe’ (V&A Archives, 1950,
PER 8/38/12). Why did Barbara downplay the significance of her membership? At the time of
the interview in 2009, not long before she died, I assumed that this was an awkward part of her
past, since she went on to qualify her political identity as a CP member, which after all had been
over sixty years ago. So when I questioned her about when her membership stopped, I imagined
it was because it was incompatible with her museum post.
Well, I suppose it began with the disillusionment at the time of the invasion of Hungary,
you know, the Soviet invasion in 1956. And now, I mean I can’t see much difference
between any of the political parties. I wasn’t ever really what I call a political animal.
It wasn’t – I suspect it was partly through being a rebel and the fact that both my hus-
bands [were Communists] you know and that just sort of – although I was my own
personality. And I suppose also being very interested in [William] Morris, you know,
who was an early Communist and socialist, and I say what I always have been is what I
call, well no proper category, I’m really a sort of Morrisean, you know, idealist rather than
a practical – it was more a sort of romantic view of socialism rather than a hard political feeling.
(Morris, 2009, p. 13, emphasis added)
Although this is only a short extract from a six-hour life history, it accounts for the disen-
chantment (‘disillusionment’) with political idealism that had marked her younger ‘rebel’ self and
the company she kept (‘husbands’) even though she ‘was her own personality’. The character
of William Morris, however, does not function as the radical revolutionary but as the romantic
idealist, not even ‘practical’. What happened to her political commitment? It was a question I
regretted not asking for sometime. Clearly for Barbara the break had been real and communism
had been left behind in 1956, but what I began to see emerging from the overall narrative of her
museum career is how her political ethos was redirected into her museum work. Like Floud and
Circ staff, she consciously ensured that the original mission of the V&A to disseminate the ethical
values and principles inherent in good design were maintained. Barbara repeatedly affirmed, ‘We
were there to help and educate the public’, the work was not about ‘pursuing our own interests
for the sake of it’ (B. Morris, 2009, Track 3). Peter Floud ‘instilled [in us] that our job was to serve
the public . . . that’s what museums were for: to inform, educate, and generally improve public
taste’ (Morris, 2009, Track 7).
Conclusion: Narrative appropriation

The discordant moment of Barbara’s narrative of political disillusionment had troubled me. It
suggested that the Museum had tamed her radicalism once the Circulation department had been
disbanded and she was transferred to the Department of Ceramics and Glass. Moreover, because
I thought I had detected an ambivalence about her communism at the start of the interview, her
disillusionment demonstrated the power of dominant ideologies to dilute radical tendencies over
time. While Circ staff were together, they were a community that maintained and fostered com-
mitment to socialist values ensuring their constancy both in everyday politics but also in terms
of the arena/site of the institutional context. This was achieved by their actions, scholarship and
core narratives, represented by the figures of William Morris, later Peter Floud and more recently
Barbara. As Ricoeur noted:
To a large extent, in fact, the identity of a person or a community is made up of

these identifications with values, norms, ideals, models, heroes, in which the person
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Linda Sandino
or a community recognizes itself. Recognizing oneself in contributes to recogniz-

ing oneself by. The identification with heroic figures clearly displays this otherness
assumed as one’s own, but this is already latent in the identification with values,
which make us place a “cause” above our own survival. An element of loyalty is
thus incorporated into character and makes it turn toward fidelity, hence toward
maintaining the self.
(Ricoeur, 1992, p. 121)
Once the Department had been disbanded, the commitment to public service remained a pri-
ority, reinforced by the nature of their employment as government civil servants. The issue is
not whether Barbara’s identity as a communist was alone in defining her politics, but how her
socialism was put to work in her life story as a museum curator. In the early stages of my research,
I interpreted her commitment within the terms of an ethos of public service (Sandino, 2012).
It was only as I began to conduct more interviews and go through the archives that the issue of
left-wing attitudes became more prominent in understanding how Circ negotiated its political
identity within the V&A. Although Museum colleagues sometimes tried to dismiss Circ’s politics
as ‘tame’, the strength of belief which the interviews reveal suggested that the paradox of left-
wing socialists working in a museum of elite objects needed to be interpreted anew, or rather
appropriated in the Ricoeurian sense that:
To interpret . . . is to appropriate here and now the intention of the text . . . the intended
meaning of the text is not essentially the presumed intention of the author, the lived
experience of the writer, but rather what the text means for whoever complies with
its injunction.
(Ricoeur in Boos & Boos, 1991, p. 16, emphasis in the original)
Various texts and identities (William Morris, Barbara Morris, Peter Floud, the Circulation depart-
ment; other museum staff interviews) combine to produce an injunction to reconfigure the nar-
ratives of their curatorial work and agency as an idealist but politically committed endeavour, a
view which restores the problematic of Barbara’s disillusionment as a redirection of her original
commitment. This can be read as either Goodson/Breines’ strategic politics, or the flexibility,
which Andrews proposed might be found in commitments that ‘contain a flexibility which
allows individuals to accommodate to new and changing circumstances, while retaining the core
of their original intended commitment’ (1991, p. 143).
In his 1959 lecture to the William Morris Society, of which Floud and Barbara were active
members, E. P. Thompson ended by praising Morris’ work which ‘sought to body forth a vision
of the actual social and personal relations, the values and attitudes consonant with a Society of
Equals, ‘working for “practical revolution”’ (1959, pp. 2, 10). This resonates with interviewees’
accounts of Circ, but also with the ‘practical’ means of disseminating design education via exhi-
bitions of useful, everyday objects (biscuit tins, radios, Christmas cards, packaging, advertising
posters, Scandinavian design because it was part of a ‘social movement’).
Those first years in Circulation were brilliant. I couldn’t believe my luck. I felt I had
landed – I was going to say I felt I’d landed in heaven but that sounds silly – but in terms
of my interests and what I believed in doing where the arts were concerned, we did it
and we did it right and as best as we could. We all did really believe about spreading the
good news about design, architecture, historical information . . .
(Coachworth, 2010, Track 3, emphasis added)
400
Narrative agency does not just empower the individuals who tell their stories, but as the above
demonstrates the appropriation and circulation of narratives are equally powerful in functioning
as guides to action and thinking. My appropriation of Barbara’s interview as a political narrative
enabled me to listen more closely to how personal values are entangled in public life and work,
not just for left-wing museum professionals, but for those others who sought solace in what they
conceived of as a apolitical work, or whose politics I might not share. Leftwich suggests that:
Thinking politically means thinking (and listening) with curiosity about how best to
explain politically, why things have come to be; how they work as they are and with
what consequences; what might happen next, and why; and what might be necessary
for them to made different, should that be thought appropriate.
(Leftwich, 2004, p. 20)
A political interpretation works in the current climate in which public cultural institutions
struggle to survive. Personal narratives provide a fertile resource for understanding and thinking
through how to live honorably in troubled times. At different moments, I will interpret those
narratives under a different lens, hopefully ethical and so in that sense ‘political’, helping us in
‘aiming at the “good life” with and for others, in just institutions’ (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 172).
Notes
1 Ann Kay, John Kay, Graeme Shankland, Ted Hollamby, Robin Page Arnot, Andrew Rothstein, Sidney
Morison, Stanley Morison.
2 For example, Sir Stafford Cripps, whose aunt was the social reformer Beatrice Webb, held several senior
posts in the post-war Attlee government, as well as having been British ambassador to the Soviet Union,
1940–42; Minister for Education Ellen Wilkinson (1945–47) had been a founder member of the CPGB.
Membership figures are from Lawrence Parker, ‘‘Official’ CPGB History: Scotching the Myth’, Available
from: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/944/official-cpgb-history-scotching-the-myths.
(Accessed April 2013).
3 The other known members were Shirley Bury (1925–99), who went on to become Keeper of Metalwork
in 1982; Natalie Rothstein (1930–2010), the daughter of the Communist and historian Andrew Roth-
stein, who became Deputy Keeper of Textiles until 1989. Ann George, former Secretary to the Minister
for Education.
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from: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-02/news-from-the-past-oral-
history-at-the-v-and-a/ (Accessed 15 December 2014).
Sandino, L. (2010) Artists-in-progress: The self as another. In M. Hyvärinen (ed.) Beyond Narrative Coherence.
pp. 87–102. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publications.
Sandino, L. (2012) A Curatocracy: Who and what is a V&A curator? In K. Hill (ed.) Museums and Biogra-
phies: Stories, Objects, Identities. pp. 87–99. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer.
Sandino, L. (2013) Art school trained staff and communists in the V&A Circulation Department, c.1947–58.
In M. Pye & L. Sandino (eds.) Artists Work in Museums: Histories, Interventions, Subjectivities. pp. 83–106.
London and Bath: V&A/Wunderkammer Press.
Selbin, E. (2010) Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power of Story. New York: Zed Books.
Thompson, E. P. [1959] (1994) William Morris. Persons and Polemics: Historical Essays. London: Merlin Press.
V&A Archives. (1950). PER 8/38/12 memo dated 18 May 1950.
Victoria and Albert Museum. (c.1949) The Circulation Department: Its History and Scope. London: HMSO.
Victoria and Albert Museum. (2013) Annual Report and Accounts 2012–2013. London: The Stationary
Office. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/
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Weddell, J. (2012) Room 38A and beyond: Post-war British design and the circulation department. V&A
Online Journal. (4). Available from: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-
no.-4-summer-2012/room-38a-and-beyond-post-war-british-design-and-the-circulation-department
Wiener, M. J. (1976) The myth of William Morris. Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies.
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WMS [William Morris Society]. (1961) Annual Report.
Interviews
Coachworth, D. (2010) Interviewed by Matthew Partington, V&A Archive. London: Victoria and Albert
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Morris, B. (2009) Interviewed by Linda Sandino,V&A Archive. London: Victoria and Albert Museum.
Opie, G. (2011) Interviewed by Anthony Burton,V&A Archive. London: Victoria and Albert Museum.
Opie, J. (2012) Interviewed by Linda Sandino,V&A Archive. London: Victoria and Albert Museum.
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PART IV
Ethical approaches
Introduction
‘BUT WHO IS MRS GALINSKY,
MOTHER?’
From Nana Sikes’ stories to studying
lives and careers
Pat Sikes
When Ivor Goodson said that he wanted each of the part editors to write about their personal and
professional involvement with narrative and auto/biography, my heart sank. I had on a number
of occasions and for different purposes (eg Sikes, 2009a, 2013a, b; Sikes & Goodson, 2003) pro-
duced such accounts and, apart from being particularly mindful that I had once written critically
about self-plagiarism (2009b), I wasn’t convinced that I could tell the story in a way that added
anything of significance to what I’d already said. Of course, when writing about our own lives
‘we may change our interpretations and our stories as we remember or forget different details
and as we assume (for whatever reasons) different perspectives and acquire new information. . . .
Different interpretations over time are almost inevitable’ (Goodson & Sikes, 2001, pp. 43–4). I’m
in no doubt about this: I actually wrote those words; and I have always been entirely in agreement
with Jerome Bruner when he states that
an autobiography is not and cannot be a way of simply signifying or referring to a ‘life

as lived’. I take the view that there is no such thing as a ‘life as lived’ to be referred to.
On this view, a life is created or constructed by the act of autobiography. It is a way of
construing experience – and of reconstruing and reconstructing it until our breath and
our pen fails us. Construal and reconstrual are interpretive . . . Obviously, then, there is
no such thing as a ‘uniquely’ true, correct or even faithful autobiography.
(Bruner, 1993, pp. 38–9)
All that aside and even though it’s possible that I have reached the point where my breath and
pen actually have let me down, it is the case that the basic story of how I came to, and developed
my thinking around, auto/biography and narrative hasn’t changed in terms of timing and of
what happened when, or with regard to ‘facts’ such as getting particular jobs, meeting particular
people, attending particular conferences or coming into contact with particular ideas. In detailing
these chronological events and constructing an account that, as a life historian, I think is worth
giving because it locates my experiences in the methodological and epistemological zeitgeist of the
times I lived through, I would have had to repeat myself, at least up until the latest (Sikes, 2013b)
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version of my storied academic life. Such revisiting might not be unethical but I would feel a tad
uncomfortable going over the same ground yet again. Consequently I decided to take a different
tack, craft a story from my life that I hadn’t written before, and offer that, followed by a number
of musings about aspects of narrative and auto/biographical research, as a temporary/current
reflection of where I am now, hoping that this would at least begin to offer the brief I was set.
This is a messy solution but then storying lives can only ever be a messy business, however much
we may do it with the intention of creating a sense (a chimera?) of coherence!
*****
It was late September in 1972, a Tuesday afternoon, and my mum, my Nana Sikes and I were in
the car and on our way to Nottingham to have tea with Auntie Kit. I should have been back at
school, getting into life as a first year sixth former, but over the summer I’d had glandular fever
(mononucleosis for North American readers) and was still too feeble and tired to do anything
that was remotely intellectually or physically challenging.
This had been a relatively serious illness, not in life threatening terms of course, but it had been
nasty and I had felt very poorly. Now though, the drenching sweats, throbbing headaches, swollen
glands and razor-scored sore throat had abated and I was able to get out of bed and stay awake
for the greater part of the day. Academic work and reading being still out of the question, I chose
to spend most of my time sitting at the table in Nana’s kitchen, doing little jobs to help with the
annual sub-industrial-scale jamming, pickling and wine making that was going on, a glass of a
previous year’s vintage to hand (‘it’s medicinal tonic, Patricia’) and, of course, listening to stories.
Being with Nana meant listening to stories and that was what I especially liked.
We lived next door to Nana, my dad’s mum, and she and I had a special, close relationship
grounded in unconditional love and acceptance. Nana had not had the easiest of lives, although
she considered herself to have been blessed and fortunate. Born in the early 1890s, she had had 7
children, with the first, Kit, coming along when she was 17 ‘as a bit of a surprise because I didn’t
know that that was how you got babies. I knew we probably shouldn’t have been doing what
we did but I didn’t expect that to be the upshot’. Whilst the family was not poverty stricken,
money was tight, especially when my grandpa, ‘a good enough man but a bit of a drinker’ died,
leaving Nana a widow in her 30s with her two youngest children, my dad and his sister, both
still at school.
Despite all the work that a big family entailed, especially in pre-electrical-appliance days,
Nana was always out in the community. She was an active member of the Red Cross and the
Mother’s Union and an avid night school attendee, taking a range of classes in different crafts. As
these classes tended to be aimed at producing Christmas presents and since my mum and three
of my aunts generally accompanied Nana to them, there was usually predictability and duplica-
tion in the contents of Santa’s sack in Sikes family households (‘Oh! How lovely! Another pair
of moccasins!’)
Nana was energetic, active and enjoyed excellent health. Despite her 7 pregnancies, she pro-
fessed never even to have thrown up until one day, in her late 70s, when she ate some dodgy
prawns. She did, however, tell stories of having made the most of the confinement period that, in
her day, was expected to follow childbirth and of how she had gone along with the notion that
women were weak after delivery and in need of the bed rest:‘I was perfectly capable of getting up
and getting on but it was more trouble than it was worth to go against the old wives who said all
sorts of dreadful things would happen if you didn’t lie in. To be honest, it was nice to be able to
enjoy the baby, although when Jean was born your dad was a bugger. He kept coming up stairs
and wanting to get in the bed and crying when I didn’t give him enough attention. He didn’t like
406
‘But who is Mrs Galinsky, mother?’
not being the baby any more you see’. These, however, were exceptional periods. Throughout her
life, Nana liked to be doing things, even becoming, in her late 80s, a dispenser of ‘meals on wheels
to the poor old folk’, who were, on the whole, considerably younger than she was.
All this busy-ness aside, what Nana liked best of all was talking, ‘gossiping’ about her day to
day experiences and encounters and telling stories from, and of, her and her husband’s families’
histories and lives. She often told people that her brother, Lou, had once said, ‘Our Dorrie was
vaccinated with a gramophone needle’ and then she’d sometimes reflect on how gramophones
and penicillin and televisions and space travel and lots of other things that we now take for
granted or which have even been superseded, came into being during both her and Lou’s life-
times. It was Nana’s love of storying that brings me back to that particular Tuesday afternoon.
From the moment we’d got into the car to set off to Kit’s, a journey of around an hour, Nana
had been telling us all about ‘poor Mrs Galinsky’ who she’d got into conversation with the pre-
vious day when walking up the village from the Co-op grocery store. Mrs Galinsky had, appar-
ently, had a dreadful life. Born into a subsistence farming family somewhere or other – Nana
hadn’t quite been able to catch the name of the country in question – she’d emigrated to the UK
just after the Second World War. Here, in England, she’d met her husband to be, who was also an
émigré, albeit from a different European country to hers. They’d married and had an unspecified
number of children, now mostly grown up and settled with their own families, although two
younger sons were still at home. Unfortunately, about 4 years ago, tragedy had struck, leaving
Mrs Galinsky hard pressed financially as well as emotionally devastated; her husband had become
sick and had subsequently died from a gruesome and protracted mystery illness that the doctors
couldn’t fathom. Nana, on the other hand, was fairly certain, on the basis of things Mrs G had
hinted at, that she knew exactly what had been wrong but she ‘wasn’t saying’ – although her
not saying led her to segue into her experiences of working, as a Red Cross member, with the
National Blood Transfusion service and of how, when they did sessions ‘up in Highfields’ (when
it was the red light district of Leicester), they’d take the blood of women they suspected were
prostitutes because ‘they were good enough to give it, but when they’d gone, we’d put it down
the sink’. Anyway, Mrs Galinsky’s lads were ‘a real trial’. Neither were doing well at school and
one was probably ‘like that’: although Nana couldn’t herself see anything wrong with this because
‘look at Vera’s son! He’s a lovely boy who takes very good care of her, spoils her rotten and he’s
doing really well with his re-upholstery business. Mrs Patel in the corner shop showed me some
chairs he’d done for her and they were absolutely beautiful. But it’s a shame for Vera that she
won’t have any grandchildren’.
And so it went on. So many things seemed to be conspiring against Mrs Galinsky. Eventu-
ally, as we turned into Kit’s road and Nana took a pause for breath, Mum said, ‘This is all very
sad, Mother, but who is Mrs Galinsky?’ ‘You know her, Joan; she lives up the street, and Mrs
Galinsky said one of her boys was in Patricia’s class’. This was a surprise to me since I didn’t
know anyone called Galinsky. After a bit of detective work that continued as we went into
Kit’s, bemusing my aunt, who didn’t get a proper hello, it turned out that Mrs Galinsky had
quite another name, one that wasn’t in any way reminiscent of East European heritage. On
reflection, the name change didn’t make any difference to this story, although it might have
done so, given the time frame involved and the emigration: Mrs Galinsky could have been
escaping Nazi persecution, for instance. And it might have been significant if Nana’s purpose
in telling the story was other than sharing and reflecting on a female neighbour’s personal trials
and tribulations, although, even in Nana’s particular recounting, these sufferings were explicitly
as well as implicitly contextualized in their historical, social and cultural contexts. Getting the
name wrong, however, was the significant factor that leads to this being a story about Nana,
rather than about Mrs Galinsky. So it is that our stories intertwine and, in their intertwining,
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add to our understandings of ourselves in the worlds we inhabit, to our identities and to how
others see and understand us in those worlds.
Anyway, the mystery solved, the conversation moved on. We ate one of Kit’s renowned high
teas, we chatted for a couple of hours, and I slept in the car on the return journey, lulled off lis-
tening to Nana recounting in graphic detail a recent Mother’s Union trip to the Pedigree Petfood
factory in Melton Mowbray (‘Would you believe it, Joan? There’s a man there whose job it is
to taste every batch’).
When we got home, mum told dad about the Galinsky confusion, and the next day she shared
it with Auntie Louise, who passed it on to her siblings, and so it came to have a place in the family
cache of stories about Mother/Nana. I recently reminded my cousin Helen, Kit’s daughter, of it
(which prompted her to recall even more Nana tales). We can remember it vividly 40 plus years
afterwards, and we probably will for as long as we have memory, although I can’t say whether
my own children, who know the story but never knew Nana, will carry it on. If I am realistic,
I suspect they won’t because this isn’t a particularly gripping story – although the denouement
(that there wasn’t a Mrs Galinsky) was very funny to those of us involved. The story re-presented
Nana very accurately to her family and in that context had special emotional currency. Maybe
some readers will recognize the sort of story it was from their own families’ narrative reposito-
ries and will understand why such apparently insignificant and quotidian tales can assume quite
other status within the communities they come out of and belong to. Referring specifically to
researching academics, but speaking, I believe, more generally, Kip Jones (2014) has noted that
‘scholars often find their own narratives in the stories that people tell them for their research’.
So, too, may we find those narratives in reading other scholars’ accounts of their research careers.
****
I have tried to craft this narrative to show how I grew up with and came to be interested in life
stories and also to demonstrate the ways in which individual stories invoke, and are contextual-
ized in, historical and social locations. Thus, my story touches on such areas of life as: women’s
knowledge of conception and childbirth practices in the UK in the early twentieth century;
opportunities for community involvement and voluntary work; attitudes to sexuality; immigra-
tion; widowhood; intergenerational story telling – and so on. In terms of scholarly inquiry, each
and any of these areas could be picked up and developed and discussed in the context of the rele-
vant literatures. Other peoples’ stories could also be told alongside it in order to illustrate, explore,
and offer explanations for a range of experiences. How the stories were regarded and treated as
data sources – obviously – would depend on why, and to what end, they were being used. But
used they certainly could be because in the twenty-first century, explicitly acknowledging the
fundamental centrality and importance of all personal experiences and subjective perceptions
(e.g. social, embodied, spiritual, material) to and for the approaches by which we seek to make
sense of the way and the weight of the world (to borrow from Bourdieu et al., 1999), be that as
scholars or as ‘ordinary’ human beings, is practically axiomatic. So too is a view that history, social
structure and auto/biography intersect, influencing/shaping personal and collective agency and
experience and, thereby, influencing/shaping future histories, social structures and auto/biographies
in a sort of perpetual cycle.
It hasn’t always been like this, though, and it certainly wasn’t back in the late 1970s when I
started my academic career and was told by my PhD supervisor that I had to show that I could
do ‘proper research before you get on to your soft sociology stuff ’. ‘Proper research’ was, in
those days, quantitative research involving large samples and generalisations, and I am sure that
demonstrating an ability to do such work was necessary for obtaining the academic credentials
408
that could allow one to go on and do other things, including focusing on the small scale and
subjective and using creative methods and forms of re-presentation.
Nowadays, we have access to and can draw on numerous accounts, histories and literature
reviews which tell stories of the contributions scholars, including Robert Merton, Zora Neale
Hurston, Robert Park, Clifford Shaw, Howard Becker, C. Wright Mills and Liz Stanley, have made
to bringing about academic acceptance of auto/biography and narrative. Building on these foun-
dations, Ken Plummer, Norman Denzin, Laurel Richardson, Ivor Goodson, Carolyn Ellis and
the other authors whose work appears in this Handbook are currently involved in questioning,
critiquing and pushing boundaries in terms of using and re-presenting narrative and auto/bio-
graphical approaches to further understandings of individuals and groups, societies and cultures.
Indeed, this Handbook is, in itself, both a part and an example of the scholarly trajectory which
values narrative and auto/biographical inquiry and which dates back at least as far as Thomas and
Znaniecki’s (1918–1920) monumental study of imm/em-igration. The story about Mrs Galinsky
can be seen to be within this tradition. It also provides an(other) illustration of some of the ways
in which people (Nana, me, mum, Mrs Galinsky, in this instance) live by and through, know and
are known via stories: stories which we tell, stories which we hear, and stories in which we fea-
ture. Goodson (2013, pp. 3–4) quotes from Christopher Booker, and I agree, that stories ‘are far
and away the most important feature of our everyday existence’. Saying this is not to make any
sort of grandiose and probably unsustainable truth claims for the content of stories we tell about
ourselves, others, or events (cf Butler, 2005; Gannon, 2006; Jackson & Mazzei, 2008) nor is it to
make any assumptions about individuals’ abilities to story their lives to beneficial personal and col-
lective effect. I am well aware, too, of the need to subject auto/biographical storying/narrativising
and its use in social science as an approach to data collection, analysis and re-presentation, to
critical review. Even acknowledging these caveats, and alert to the dangers of indulging in what
Mary Maynard has called ‘vanity ethnography’ (Maynard, 1993, p. 329), and Michael Apple has
described as ‘privileging the white middle-class woman or man’s need for self-display above all
else’ (Apple, 1996, p. xiv), I hold by my view that my story about my Nana and Mrs Galinsky does
have something to say about the use of auto/biographical narratives to make sense of individuals
in the worlds they inhabit, and about the process of interrogating ‘stories of action within theories
of context’ as Goodson, quoting Stenhouse, has so often put it (Downs, 2013).
*****
Using personal vignettes to start a conversation about studying lives and careers is hardly a
unique approach, and it is far from uncommon for those of us who use narrative and/or auto/
biographical approaches to research and/or to re-present aspects of social life to explain, to justify
even, how we came to be fascinated by life stories. Ivor Goodson (2013) and Robin Boylorn
(2013) both describe growing up in families and communities where (reflecting Booker, quoted
earlier) storytelling and hearing was a, if not the, fundamental component of everyday life. It was
through stories that these authors, in their very different working class, not particularly literate
settings, learnt about their personal histories and also about how these histories, as well as their
contemporary experiences, were located in and influenced by social, historical, geographical,
economic (and so on) contexts.
I chose Boylorn and Goodson as illustrative here because, as I write, their words are still rel-
atively fresh and clear in my memory and because Berkshire in the UK and Sweetwater in the
deep south of the USA offer what I consider to be a fascinating contrast, but I could have referred
to a myriad of other writers who offer similar accounts to theirs and, indeed, to mine. Many of
these authors put some emphasis on having origins and family backgrounds where schooling
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was elementary and where few possessed much in the way of high cultural capital. When this is
the case, there often does seem to be a justificatory, if not defensive tone, along the lines of ‘we
didn’t have academic learning but we did have stories’ – almost as if it is not the case, as David
Silverman has pointed out, that ‘all we sociologists have are stories. Some come from other peo-
ple, some from us’ (1998, p. 111).
Of course the stories are there regardless of the researcher’s class origins. Whilst Goodson talks
about using narrative approaches in terms of echoing ‘a drive to stay close to ordinary working-life
culture and not become entirely detached within university academia’ (2013, p. 4), it can be
argued that in the days when the discipline/study of history was the chief scholarly approach to
understanding the social world, it was the stories of the ruling classes which got told. These were
stories that carried the status of privilege and power and were shaped to ensure the (hegemonic)
maintenance of that privilege and power, but they were, nonetheless, stories. And all stories are
told through interpretational lenses anyway. Authorial honesty – and ethical practice – would
seem to require that writers are as clear as they can be about the lenses they use (see Sikes, 2010).
Liz Stanley’s (1993) description and conceptualization of the reflective and reflexive ‘auto/
biographical I . . . an inquiring analytical sociological . . . agent who is concerned in constructing,
rather than ‘discovering’, social reality and sociological knowledge’ (p. 49) is useful here and, as
Stanley goes on to note:
the use of ‘I’ explicitly recognises that such knowledge is contextual, situational, and
specific, and that it will differ systematically according to the social location (as a gen-
dered, raced, classed, sexualitied, person) of the particular knowledge-producer. Thus
the ‘autobiography’ . . . of the sociologist becomes epistemologically crucial no matter
what particular research activity we are engaged in.
(Stanley, 1993, pp. 49–50)
We (whoever we are) are there in our research and narrativising regardless of whether or not we
explicitly acknowledge our presence.
It is perhaps worth pointing out the obvious here: widening participation in education has
brought scholars and researchers (like Goodson and Boylorn and myself ) from previously mar-
ginalized and silenced communities into the academy. Alongside these demographic changes,
concerns for and commitments to critical, socially just inquiry leading to the development of
methodological approaches ever seeking to better re-present personal experience within social
contexts (cf Denzin & Lincoln, 2011) have allowed more voices to be heard, and new generations
of scholars have challenged the hagiographic traditions of the past. This is primarily because, as
social scientists, they have had the scope to do this. Goodson puts it like this:
it is one thing to have a set of questions: it is quite another to have the opportunity
to explore them. Our social position also influences our dispositions and capacities.
So I have been profoundly fortunate to have the research opportunities to explore my
enduring questions about the meaning and status of life stories.
(Goodson, 2013, p. 4)
As Ann Oakley noted,‘academic research projects bear an intimate relationship to the researcher’s
life and . . . provoke ideas that generate books and research projects’ (1979, p. 4). I have personally
taken advantage of these opportunities throughout my career both to provide me with research
topics (e.g. Sikes, 1997, 2008; Sikes & Sikes-Sheard, 2008) and to account for my research related
beliefs, values and practices (e.g. Sikes, 2009a; Sikes & Goodson, 2003). Indeed, the research
410
that I am involved in as I write, an investigation of the perceptions and experiences of children

and young people who have a parent with dementia, came about directly because of personal
circumstances. Quite simply, I would not have been aware of the situation without close hand
experience and insight into the lives of youngsters in such families. Thus I, like so many others,
have taken up C. Wright Mill’s injunction to use the ‘sociological imagination’ and exploit the
enormous potential that auto/biography and narrative offer for connecting private and public in
a way that could lead to transformative action at individual and wider levels (cf C. Wright Mills,
1970). Linking public and private in this way can, however, raise far-reaching and significant
ethical questions, and it is to these that I now turn.
*****
I have written elsewhere (Sikes, 2010, 2013a, pp. xxxvi–xxxix, 2013b) about my observations and
experiences (from the perspectives of reader of research accounts, researcher, doctoral supervisor
and examiner) of the particular ethical dilemmas associated with auto/biographical research and
narrative re-presentation. These dilemmas, it seems to me, often tend to coalesce around the
need to:
• protect the people whose lives are the focus and substance of our research;
• respectfully depict those people;
• be alert to the potential misuse of interpretational and authorial power;
• be aware of tricky and slippery questions and issues around truth/s (or ‘truth/s’) (cf Medford,
2006 p. 853);
• avoid what Sabi Redwood (2008) and Bergin and Westwood (2003) call ‘violent’ textual
practices which shape and tame the lives that we use as ‘data’ in order to present and privilege
a version that serves our purposes.
Of course, these requirements apply to all research, regardless of the methodological approach
adopted or methods used. However, the way in which auto/biographical work – whether life his-
tory, autoethnography, testimonio or any other variant – is based on singular and particular lives,
together with the complex ways in which the researcher/narrator’s life can be implicated in the
study and the narrative, makes Laurel Richardson’s reminder that ‘narrativizing, like all intentional
behaviour . . . is a site of moral responsibility’ (1990, p. 131) especially pertinent. My view is that,
with this kind of research, one of the most important ethical concerns is to ensure that we do not
use narrative privilege to demean, belittle, or take revenge – especially revenge which masquer-
ades as sociological scholarship! We also need to be aware of the way in which writing can freeze
and fix lives, attitudes, beliefs and values at the particular point at which they are depicted without
allowing for the possibility of change in the future. Dealing with and allowing for this is not
easy. Not only can people change but so too can our assessment of their lives after they have died
if new information becomes available which challenges existing interpretations. Perhaps all we
can do to address this problem is to stress, in what we write, that lives and making sense of them
are both works in progress. I have been particularly mindful of this issue in my current narrative
research with young people who have a parent with dementia. One participant, speaking of the
inexorable progress of their father’s illness commented: ‘Each time he reaches a new stage when
he becomes unable to do yet another thing, I am conscious that at one and the same time this is
the worst he has been and the best he will be’. A life in progress indeed.
*****
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I have written:
My bottom line, acid test, for whether or not I consider my own or other people’s
research to be ethical is: how would I feel if I, members of my family, or my friends
were to be involved and treated and written about in the way the research in question
involves or treats or depicts its participants? Any qualms raise alarms and questions
for me.
(see Sikes, 2006; 2010, p. 14)
Since I first wrote that, I have come to recognize that what I want for me and mine may be
based on values that others may not subscribe to. Thus I, and others, have responsibility for at
least trying to establish whether there is common ground for sharing. Nonetheless, this is still
my starting point. So how do I think my auto/biographical story about Nana and Mrs Galinsky
matches up? Well, it tells about a time in my life and a particular afternoon which I recounted
as I remembered experiencing it. There is no one left alive who can confirm that these things
happened as I have said they did, and readers have to take what I say on trust and as my subjective
recollection. I have not used pseudonyms because this is a story in which I am involved and, as
I am not writing this piece under a false name, there seems to be no point in or possibility of
disguise nor do I see any need to fictionalise. I have presented an affectionate account of Nana
because I loved her very much. I have talked about Nana’s views on personal matters – sex,
childbirth – feeling that this was acceptable because I used the words and phrases I had heard
Nana use when telling her stories to people who were not family members or close friends. In
other words, I do not think I betrayed any intimacies. Any concerns I do have around the ethics of
my story concern Mrs Galinsky. Although I can’t see why anyone would want to do so, it might
be possible for a reader with personal knowledge (along the lines of what Tolich (2004) refers
to as ‘internal confidentiality’) to work out who Mrs Galinsky was. Mrs Galinsky had not been
reluctant to tell Nana details about her finances or about her husband and sons that, conceivably,
could have been harmful to reputations. I do not, however, have the same degree of confidence
about her willingness to share more widely as I do about Nana. Raising this might be seen as
being overly sensitive but, then, where is the base line?
When Heather Piper and I embarked on a narrative life history study focusing on allegations
of sexual misconduct made against male schoolteachers (Sikes & Piper, 2010), we were acutely
conscious of the ethical issues the project involved. These included the dangers of providing an
opportunity for a teacher who had abused a pupil to take part in the research with a view to
constructing a fallacious identity as a wronged innocent which might enable him to go on to
commit further offences; providing information in our narrative which could lead to readers
believing, erroneously, they could identify individuals whom they could then harass, or worse;
and issues around our strategy of constructing fictionalized, composite stories (Sikes & Piper,
2010, pp. 35–54 for a discussion). In the sensitivity of its substance and in light of the contem-
porary moral panic surrounding paedophilia, this work highlighted and emphasized many of the
ethical dilemmas that auto/biographical narrative research can give rise to. However, I would
argue that whatever topics we focus on and however innocuous our research might at first glance
appear to be, we should always be asking: ‘what damage might be done to individuals or groups
or communities or to social justice by doing and re-presenting this research in this way?’ This
is a broad question with far reaching implications that go further than causing immediate and
obvious harm. Some of these implications are raised in the chapters that follow.
*****
412
When Ivor Goodson asked me to edit the part of this Handbook dealing with ethical and
moral considerations implicated in researching and re-presenting lives using narrative and auto/
biographical approaches, I approached a number of scholars who, in my opinion, had in their
practice and/or writing demonstrated particular expertise and insight in this area. Anticipating a
range of approaches, I stressed that I had an open mind as to the specific content and style that any
particular contribution would take. This invitation resulted in 17 chapters, involving 20 authors,
many of whom have played major roles in developing and advocating narrative and auto/bio-
graphical research and writing, whilst others have been key figures in debates around ethical
social science research. All had compelling and thought provoking stories based on personal
experiences of research to tell. Contributors came from a range of disciplinary backgrounds,
although everyone wrote from a current academic institutional base in the UK, North America,
Australia and New Zealand.
Having received final copies of each chapter, I began to think about how to present them to
readers. Any sort of grouping or classification runs the risk of creating and imposing frameworks
that probably say more about my own preoccupations and prejudices than about ‘real’ connec-
tions. Such an exercise could even be considered antithetical to certain understandings of, and
motivations for, using narrative and auto/biographical approaches where the aim is to let the
storytellers tell their own stories. Certainly many of those who use such approaches have no
intention of producing any sort of generalisations about the lives that are the focus of their work.
As I have noted, I did not specify what authors should write about. Inevitably all talked, in
some way or other, about relationships because, obviously, these are at the heart of ethical con-
cerns. Some wrote about their relationships in particular projects, some discussed issues to do
with the crafting and nature of stories and, thereby, their impact on readers, most discussed ‘truth’
and ‘truths’, and all, in some way or other, talked about the particular ethical concerns of research
that explicitly stories lives. It is possible to argue for similarities and differences in and across all
of the contributions and, although I am going to resist the temptation – perhaps felt as a result
of the strength of the legacy of positivist research, or ‘proper research’, as my doctoral supervisor
termed it – to group the chapters under headings, I am going to construct a ‘running’ or narrative
ordering of them. Readers can make their own minds up as to the story I see them as telling.
*****
In their chapter, ‘Ethical considerations entailed by a relational ontology in narrative inquiry’,

Jean Clandinin, Vera Caine and Janice Huber draw on their experiences of doing research to
show how thinking about ethics in narrative inquiry has evolved over the last 40 or so years. In
the early 1980s, as they noted, it was pretty much the case that ‘research ethics belonged some-
where else. They belonged in debates and discussions about doing no harm, and about consider-
ations of anonymity and confidentiality’ (this volume, p. XX). However, the work of philosophers
such as Buber and Arendt and, more especially, relationships with the people involved in their
various research project raised questions such as ‘Who are we in relation to our participants?
What are we doing here, not only as researchers, but as people?’, which led them to a shift in
thinking that places an awareness of respectful and developing relationships unequivocally at the
heart of any ethical research endeavour.
Clandinin, Caine and Huber cited Nell Nodding’s work around an ethic of care as having a
significant influence on their thinking. In a chapter titled ‘Compassionate research: Interviewing
and storytelling from a relational ethics of care’, Carolyn Ellis also acknowledges Nodding as she
reflects on working with Holocaust survivors and tells a story about visiting Treblinka as a friend,
as well as a researcher, with a research participant and members of his family.
413
Pat Sikes
Madeline Grumet has observed that ‘telling a story to a friend is a risky business: the better
the friend, the riskier the business’ (1991, p. 69). In ‘Suspicious, suspect and vulnerable: Going
beyond the call and duty of ethics in life history research’, Mark Vicars describes his experiences
of using his friendship group when investigating the literacy practices of gay men. His chapter
raises questions about the ethics of encounter, the getting of ‘data’, vulnerability and notions of
identity and one’s place in the research process.
Yvonne Downs considers ‘The ethics of researching something dear to my heart with others
“like me”’, prompting questions around ‘some of the ethical issues of doing research with a per-
sonal agenda involving personal relationships’ (this volume, page XX). As a feminist, Yvonne is
committed to critically reflexive research that has an underlying moral purpose. She reflects on
the ways in which her experience of this project contributed to her developing understanding
of praxis.
Over the years, Arthur Frank has made a significant contribution to understandings of the
importance of stories about illness, demonstrating how different types of narratives around illness,
told by the sick, their doctors and others can affect how illness is experienced. Here Frank
considers ‘How stories of illness practice moral life’ and how choosing which illness stories to
tell and to listen to is a moral activity which can have the effect of forestalling ‘the suffering of
diminishment’ of the person that sickness can entail.
Similar issues to those raised by Frank are considered by Dan Goodley and Rebecca Lawthom
in their chapter, ‘The ethics of researching and representing dis/ability’. Reflecting on three pro-
jects which used narrative approaches to explore and challenge notions of dis/ability, they discuss
how intellectual work, theorizing, has consequences for how disabled people are perceived and,
consequently, for their life experiences, and they call for creative social theories that respond
affirmatively to the actions of the disabled and their families.
In ‘An act of remembering: Making the “collective memories” my own and confronting
ethical issues’, Janice Fournillier writes from the perspective of a returning ‘native’ researcher
confronting ethical issues around collecting and using life stories and collective memories for her
own academic purposes. She makes use of the West African concepts of Sanfoka and Ubuntu to
argue that her work can, in itself, become part of collective memory.
In recent years and in the ‘western’ academy, narrative, life historical and auto/biographical
approaches have become extremely popular and have achieved at least some degree of accepta-
bility as legitimate social science methodologies. In some countries, however, such acceptance
has not yet been achieved, and this has implications for the extent to which we should encourage
students from these countries to use them in postgraduate work. Sheila Trahar looks at some of
the associated issues and how to address them in her chapter ‘“The path is made by walking
on it”: Ethical complexities in supervising international doctoral researchers using narrative
approaches’.
Auto/biographical writing always, as I noted earlier in this chapter, implicates others and,
therefore, entails heavy ethical responsibility. In ‘Writing the (country) girl: narratives of place,
matter, relations and memory’, Susanne Gannon acknowledges this responsibility and eschews the
obvious option of not telling our own stories. Instead (and alongside reflexivity and respectful
re-presentation), she suggests an explicitly multilayered narrative performance which contextual-
izes personal accounts materially, spatially, historically, socially (and so on) and admits of revision
and addition and of multiple interpretations.
Ethical awareness characterises all of Laurel Richardson’s work. Many of her most recent
publications offer her unique perspective on aspects of what it is to become an elder. Her con-
tribution to this Handbook, ‘Ethics and the writing of After a Fall: A Sociomedical Sojourn’, reflects
both on the ethical imperative/urge she felt to write about her experiences in a rehabilitation
414
facility when recovering from a fracture and also on the methodological and re-presentational
decisions she took.
Narrative appears to offer a way of making sense of lives, both our own, and of those of the
people who are the focus of our research. If we can only impose some order and coherence on
the things that happen to us, then maybe we can gain control or mastery through explanatory
authority, or so the stories we have come to believe would have it. Clive Baldwin writes about
‘Ethics and the tyranny of narrative’ – about the temptation that most, if not all, of us feel to
shape life stories along linear trajectories and about the consequent mis-representation of the
complexities that always go to make up lived experience.
‘The door and the dark: Trouble telling tales’ is a fictional story that Malcolm Reed has crafted
to serve as an academic argument. In itself, the story exemplifies ethical questions around truth
and truths, and the discussions the characters have raise questions faced by all of us who seek to
capture and re-present lives through narrative.
Those who use arts based approaches to research often do so with an aim of reaching a wider
audience and having greater impact than is possible through traditional academic and scholarly
mediums. This aim requires a consideration of how best to balance responsibilities to scholarship
and to viewers. Kip Jones’ chapter, ‘“Styles of good sense”: Ethics, filmmaking and scholarship’,
looks at some of the ethical and aesthetical issues and dilemmas experienced during the making
of the award winning film Rufus Stone.
Will Van Den Hoonaard has been a steadfast critic of the unsuitability of mandated, ethical
review systems (e.g. Institutional Review Boards, research ethics boards, Human Ethics Review
Committees), initially developed to oversee research in the biomedical sciences, being applied to
qualitative studies. In ‘Lingering ethical tensions in narrative inquiry’, he considers the legacy of
such systems and their codes and argues that narrative research is so diverse that each case must
be considered in its own right.
Martin Tolich’s chapter, ‘Purpose built ethical considerations for narrative research: Broad
consent or process consent but not informed consent’, follows on from van den Hoonaard’s
critique and discusses how the notion of informed consent as it has come to be understood and
enacted through regulatory ethical procedures is inappropriate for narrative research.
Norman Denzin similarly picks up on the challenges that formalized systems pose for narrative
researchers. In ‘A relational ethic for narrative inquiry, or in the forest but lost in the trees, or a one-act
play with many endings’, Denzin proposes an interdisciplinary ethical code – methodological guide-
lines rather than regulations – informed by a human rights, social justice agenda. In line with this
code, rather than one party signing a consent form, participants and researchers mutually enter into
a research contract that privileges relationships and acknowledges that research is a process that does
not necessarily go where we expect it to. Being able to adapt to change is essential for ethical practice.
In their chapter, ‘Narrative ethics’, Derek Bolen and Tony Adams focus on issues around nar-
ratives that draw on their authors’ personal experiences. Authorial privilege brings with it ethical
responsibilities to acknowledge perspective and also to be acutely aware of the fact that those
others who are depicted in accounts seldom have the opportunity to put their side of the story
to the same readers. In many cases, too, those depicted will not know that they are implicated in
print. Bolen and Adams also raise the question of the ethical responsibility of readers and advise
reflection on relationships with authors and the stories they tell.
So there we have it. Seventeen accounts that represent the thinking of scholars actively involved
in grappling with the ethical issues that narrative and life history work can throw up. As I indi-
cated, relationships are the theme running throughout, and here I would encourage readers to
take up the advice offered by Bolen and Adams to engage with the authors and to think about
what their accounts mean for them. Ethical practice implicates us all!
415
Pat Sikes
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31
ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
ENTAILED BY A RELATIONAL
ONTOLOGY IN NARRATIVE
INQUIRY
D. Jean Clandinin
university of alberta
Vera Caine
Janice Huber
Introduction
Coming to the ethical considerations entailed by a relational ontology in narrative inquiry has
been a process composed over many years. In this chapter, we trace the development of the
unfolding of ethical considerations, as we understand it, in narrative inquiry. During the time of
her doctoral work, Clandinin was part of a small group of doctoral students and faculty at the
University of Toronto. Rereading old research journals, she remembers one particular day:
We are gathered at a seminar table, heads bowed over the identical small paperback books.
We, including me and Michael Connelly, are reading and discussing Kaufman’s translation
of Buber’s book I and Thou (1970). Our study is of teachers’ experiential knowledge, what
we are beginning to name teachers’ personal practical knowledge. The way we are imag-
ining and living out the study is in teachers’ classrooms and schools and in conversations
with teachers. We are naming the study as a study alongside teachers and we are reading
Buber’s work to help us think about who we are in relation to the teachers whose lives
and classrooms we are becoming part of. We turned to Buber, Macmurray, and Arendt
to help us think about what we are attempting to do. Dewey, of course, was a constant
companion in our struggle to understand teachers’ experiential knowledge.
In early research inspired by Dewey’s (1938) work on experience, Connelly (1980), Elbaz
(1983) and Clandinin began studies of ways to understand teacher knowledge as experiential
418
Ethical considerations
knowledge. Their early work, grounded in Dewey and Schwab (1971), had not taken a narrative
turn. It was not an intention to think about research ethics that drew Clandinin to reading and
rereading Buber, Macmurray, and Arendt. For Clandinin, it was a question of what it meant to
work alongside others, to enter into a relationship with a participant, a teacher, and to enter a
classroom that drew her to search out these philosophical authors. Clandinin’s intent was more
methodological than ethical.
At that time research ethics seemed somehow to belong somewhere else. They belonged
in debates and discussions about doing no harm, and about considerations of anonymity and
confidentiality. Considerations of research ethics lived ‘over there’ and appeared not to be rele-
vant to the questions of working alongside and entering into relationships with teachers, who
were now research participants. Even professional ethics, expressed through professional codes
of ethics, which Clandinin was familiar with through her work as a teacher and a psychologist,
appeared not to help her think through the messiness of proposed new relationships with research
participants. What was being discussed in the work alongside teachers was not like the research
relationships she had learned about in her heavily positivistic master’s program in educational
psychology. In her masters’ research, parents consented to the correlation of their children’s test
scores on reading tests with their test scores on intelligence tests. Anonymity and confidentiality
were promised. No lives were visible. No relationships established.
Buber’s book I and Thou (1970) seemed to offer an important part of trying to think of the
research relationships Clandinin was imagining with participants. As Kaufman noted in his 1970
translation of I and Thou, Buber directed attention to the many modes of I-You. Kaufman, in
his comments on his translation, noted, “Kant told men always to treat humanity, in our person
as well as that of others, as an end also and never only as a means. This is one way of setting off
I-You from I-It” (p. 17). Reading Buber drew Clandinin’s attention to the innumerable “ways
in which I treat You as a means” (p. 17) and when “you treat me only as a means” (p. 18). Buber
wrote “One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation; relation is reciprocity” (p. 58).
Buber’s intense focus on the relational in human relations and in education was compelling as
Clandinin and Connelly considered ways to understand the underlying relationship between
participant and researcher.
At the same time Clandinin was also introduced to the work of Macmurray (1957). He too
offered a way to think about the primacy of mutual relationships between persons rather than
from the standpoint of the solitary ego. He offered a way to connect relationship with action,
with the living. Creating community was a central human endeavour. For Macmurray, as for
Buber, our existence as persons is rooted in living and in the mutuality of I and You. Macmurray’s
philosophical starting point was both action/living and mutual relationships.
Arendt’s work was also on the table during those intense seminar groups. Arendt’s under-
standing of political theory was profoundly shaped by her own experiences. In her perhaps most
influential book, The Human Condition, Arendt (1958) makes the point of saying “What I propose,
therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing” (p. 5). Arendt takes
up this notion in particular ways by focusing on hopeful and democratic practices and by recog-
nizing that we are part of what she calls the web of human relationships. Perhaps in her essay The
Crisis of Education (written in 1954; published in Arendt, 1994) she makes most evident the link
between action and education, and the ethical component that is linked to action, when she states,
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to
assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except
for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.
(Arendt, 1954, p. 193)
419
D. Jean Clandinin, Vera Caine and Janice Huber
As Connelly and Clandinin began their early work alongside teachers and an administrator
in one Toronto school in the early 1980s, they devised a set of working principles to guide the
research and to help them think about engaging with participants. They wrote of negotiation
of entry and exit with a sense of the importance of attending to participants’ experiences, of
reconstructing meaning as distinct from judgement of practice, of attending to participants as
knowers and as collaborative researchers, of the importance of openness of purpose, judgement
and interpretation; they explained that when we participated in the situation, we would care for
it (Connelly, 1980). During the inquiry it was important to acknowledge and work with multi-
ple interpretations of text and make visible the ethical quality of the co-participant relationship.
However, at the time, these working principles seemed more attuned, for Clandinin, to questions
of methodology than ethics.
By 1985, as Connelly and Clandinin began to turn to more narrative understandings of phe-
nomena under study (for them, the study of teachers’ experiential knowledge) and as a methodol-
ogy for the study of experience, they began to wonder about ethics more directly. For Clandinin,
this was an ethical turn. She (Clandinin, 1985) raised concerns about a different understanding
of research ethics when she wrote:
As researcher, I cannot enter into a teacher’s classroom as a neutral observer and try to
give an account of her reality. Instead, I enter into the research process as a person with
my own personal practical knowledge. My knowledge of teaching interacts with that of
my participants. Inevitably, the data collected reflects my own participation in the class-
room and my own personal practical knowledge colors the interpretations offered . . .
The meaning created in the process of working together in the classroom, of offering
interpretations and of talking together, is a shared one. Neither teacher nor researcher
emerges unchanged. In terms of narrative it is appropriate to view this process as the
negotiation of two people’s narrative unities. The notion of narrative unity is borrowed
from MacIntyre (1981) and is defined as a continuum within a person’s experience
which renders life experiences meaningful for the unity they achieve for the person.
What we mean by unity is the union in a particular person in a particular place and
time of all that he has been and undergone in the past and in the past of the tradition
which helped to shape him. . . . The notion of narrative unity allows us the possibility
of imagining the living out of a narrative as well as the revision of ongoing narrative
unities and the creation of new ones.
(p. 365)
In this early article based on Clandinin’s dissertation (1983), she did not name what she
was describing as part of the ethics that shaped the research. In rereading the article now,
however, we clearly see the ways that a relational ethic began to emerge in the narrative
conceptualization of experiential knowledge and in how researchers positioned themselves
alongside teachers. In a 1988 article Clandinin and Connelly began to more explicitly con-
ceptualize a research ethics that was appropriate for narrative inquiry. They wrote “Because
the study of personal practical knowledge requires intensive close working relationships with
practitioners, fundamental ethical issues come close to the surface throughout the research,
from negotiation of entry to the preparation of results” (p. 273). As they attempted to live
out their earlier working principles with participants, they experienced what they called an
ethical incident, an incident in which a researcher made public a research text without the
participant’s consent. It was that incident that called them to see the need to attend much
more closely to relational ethics.
420
Drawing on the writing of MacIntyre (1981) alongside Clandinin’s (1985) work, they attended
much more closely to the negotiation of researcher and participant narrative unities. In 1988,
relying mainly on MacIntyre’s work, Clandinin and Connelly conceptualized the underlying
relational ethics in the following way:
In everyday life, the idea of friendship implies a sharing, an interpenetration of two or

more persons’ spheres of experience. Mere contact is acquaintanceship, not friendship.
The same may be said for collaborative research which requires a close relationship akin
to friendship. Relationships are joined, as MacIntyre implies, by the narrative unities of
our lives.
(p. 281)
As Clandinin and Connelly searched for ways to conceptualize ethics within a relational research
stance, they found others who were also attending to more relational ways of thinking both nar-
ratively and ethically. Noddings (1984), in her book titled Caring: A Feminist Approach to Ethics &
Moral Education, was instrumental in their thinking. As Noddings wrote,
I want to build an ethic on caring, and I shall claim that there is a form of caring natural
and accessible to all human beings . . . building an ethics of caring locates morality pri-
marily in the pre-act consciousness of the one-caring . . . Human love, human caring,
will be quite enough on which to found an ethic.
(pp. 28–9)
Noddings goes on to say that
in genuine caring relationships and caring situations – the natural quality of my engross-
ment, the shift of my energies toward the other and his projects – I form a picture of
myself . . . But as I reflect also on the way I am as cared-for, I see clearly my own longing
to be received, understood and accepted.
(p. 49)
Noddings’ work began to offer ways to conceive of relational ethics within narrative inquiry.
In 1990 Connelly and Clandinin attended more directly to ethics in narrative inquiry as they
wrote, drawing on Noddings’ (1986) work, that
the negotiation of entry highlights the way narrative inquiry occurs within relation-
ships among researchers and practitioners, constructed as a caring community. When
both researchers and practitioners tell stories of the research relationship, they have
the possibility of being stories of empowerment. Noddings (1986) remarked that in
research on teaching “too little attention is presently given to matters of community
and collegiality and that such research should be construed as research for teaching”
(p. 510). She emphasized the collaborative nature of the research process as one in
which all participants see themselves as participants in the community, which has value
for both researcher and practitioner, theory and practice.
(p. 4)
Noddings (1986) drew attention to the ways we situate ourselves in relation to the persons with
whom we work, to the ways in which we practice in collaborative ways, and to the ways all
421
participants model, in their practices, a valuing and confirmation of each other. As Connelly
and Clandinin drew on Noddings’ writing, they attended to how the research relationship is
composed within community, and offered possibilities for growth and change for participants
and researchers who are part of the community. The influence of Buber, Arendt, Macmurray and
Dewey is visible in the ways their focus was on reciprocity, mutuality, and an underlying attention
to relationality, to care for others. In the 1990 article, they attended more clearly to a research
ethics of relationships. We see Arendt’s (1958) understanding of responsibility; her ideas of public
and private and also her recognition that uncertainty is a condition of human relationships were
beginning to shape important aspects of ethical commitments and responsibilities in narrative
inquiry. In rereading Connelly and Clandinin (1990) now, we see how central these early discus-
sions and readings were to trying to figure out ways to compose relationships with participants
that allowed being alongside participants, that did not set researcher as separate from participants,
and that made it possible to recognize that both sets of experience were under study. It is clear
to us in our rereading that reading philosophers who were asking questions about the relations
among people seemed to offer more insight into ways forward than did those who were begin-
ning to make ethics review more central in the social sciences and humanities research discus-
sions. It seemed that research ethics boards had turned to Kantian ethics of rights, which seemed
to provide little help for this early work in relational research methodologies.
Connelly and Clandinin (1990) also drew attention to the importance of not silencing the
stories of either participants or researchers in narrative inquiry. They wrote,
In the process of beginning to live the shared story of narrative inquiry, the researcher
needs to be aware of constructing a relationship in which both voices are heard. The
above description emphasizes the importance of the mutual construction of the research
relationship, a relationship in which both practitioners and researchers feel cared for and
have a voice with which to tell their stories.
(p. 4)
In this article they indicated there was a mutual construction of the research relationship, as a
space where both the voices of participants and researchers are heard, and where care, as defined
by Noddings (1984), has a central place. There was not yet, however, the naming of a relational
ethics as central to the appropriate and needed ethical stance in narrative inquiry.
Through the 1990s narrative inquiries were ongoing in classrooms, schools and other insti-
tutional settings. More and more conversations were undertaken around the ethics of narrative
inquiry with the need to focus on what an appropriate ethics would be. In the late 1990s, while
Clandinin and Connelly were in the midst of authoring Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story
in Qualitative Research (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), a more relational stance toward ethics was
clearly defined as they attended to the maintenance of relationships with participants, now and in
the future, as a first consideration. Ethical concerns needed to be reframed as concerns of “rela-
tional responsibility.” As Clandinin and Connelly (2000) wrote, “relationship lives at the heart of
thinking narratively. Relationship is key to what it is that narrative inquirers do” (p. 189). In this
way, ethics lives at the heart of narrative inquiry.
As Clandinin and Connelly were engaged in writing the 2000 book, Clandinin and Huber
engaged in a narrative inquiry alongside a teacher, children, and families in a Grade three and
four classroom in a school in a large urban setting in western Canada. As part of the inquiry they
received research ethics approval, which included informing parents and children that Clandinin
and Huber would be engaged in a narrative inquiry in the classroom over the full school year.
They also indicated their desire to engage in further research conversations with children and
422
families, which they described in two letters of informed consent, one written to potential parent
participants and the other written to potential child participants. These letters noted the ways
that harm, anonymity and confidentiality would be managed as part of the research ethics review
process. While the ethical review processes were ones established by the research review board,
Huber and Clandinin were attentive to much more of the relational. Part of this attentiveness was
sharpened by an incident with one of the children. Approximately seven months into the school
year, as Huber engaged in a research conversation with Azim, a child participant, and his mother,
Huber and Clandinin began to wonder about how the children saw them as co-researchers, how
the children saw themselves as co-researchers, and how they saw themselves as co-researchers
with children. This experience lingered with them and they came to see it as an ethical moment.
As they inquired into the puzzling experience, they questioned who they were and who they
were becoming as co-researchers alongside children (Huber & Clandinin, 2002). As they won-
dered about future narrative inquiries with children as co-researchers, they wrote:
We could compose a new story of ourselves as researchers where we tell Azim [the
child] he cannot share “those kinds of stories” of his life and that if he does tell them,
we would have to suppress them to maintain confidentiality and to protect him from
harm. Or we could try to obtain prior consent from Barbara [Azim’s mother] as to
which stories Azim is authorized to tell. We might also compose less relational stories
of research. In less relational forms of research, we could give over Azim’s story to the
out-of-classroom place and not care about the fixing he, and maybe other members of
his family, may be subjected to. We could fall out of engaging in research where the
stories of co-researchers and our lives intermingle and into more acceptable plotlines of
researcher and participants. We could compose interview or survey questions in which
we silence those voices that do not fit within our researcher plotlines.
(p. 800)
Huber and Clandinin became more thoughtful about the plotlines that were shaping them as
researcher/teachers alongside children as co-researchers. They explicitly named that sustaining
relationships with children were a first obligation and responsibility for narrative inquirers and
in so doing, situated the ethics of narrative inquiries as a “relational responsibility” (Clandinin &
Connelly, 2000, p. 177), noting
attentiveness to relationship could conflict with dominant stories of what “good”

teachers and “good” researchers do. Plotlines for good researchers do not often attend
to the aftermath for children’s lives as their first concern. As relational narrative inquir-
ers engaged with children as co-researchers, we realized that it was here that we needed
to attend.
(p. 801)
Huber and Clandinin drew on Behar (1996), who wrote that she wanted to write and think in a
more “vulnerable genre” (p. 13). However, Behar (1996) suggested that although “vulnerability
doesn’t mean that anything personal goes” (p. 13), she also suggested that “the exposure of the
self who is also a spectator has to take us somewhere we couldn’t otherwise get to” (p. 13). While
Behar was helpful in making explicit how narrative inquiry calls attention to the exposure of
participants, in narrative inquiry, both researchers and participants are at risk as we move “into
the enormous sea of serious social issues” (p. 14). In choosing narrative inquiry with children
as co-researchers, we realized our heightened responsibilities to attend to where stories are told,
423
and knowing that when stories are taken from their relational contexts, they can be understood,
particularly for children whose lives are at the edges of dominant plotlines, from within more
common social and cultural narratives, narratives that are not attentive to the stories the children
are living and telling.
In the early to mid-2000s conversations at the research issues table at the Centre for Research
for Teacher Education and Development at the University of Alberta continued to focus on
narrative inquiry, both as a research methodology and as a way of understanding experience.
The publishing of the 2000 book in which ethics was named as living at the heart of narrative
inquiry began to open up many conversations. Some of the participants at the table discussions
were of indigenous heritage, and beginning scholars such as Gorman (2005), a Mohawk scholar,
began to speak of the principle of non-interference and of “all my relations,” which centrally
directed attention to a relational ontology. As the discussions unfolded over months and years,
other scholars of indigenous heritage such as Young (2003) joined in. In the conversations, we all
began to link narrative inquiry, what we now called a relational methodology, with a relational
ethical stance. We began to talk and write more explicitly of narrative inquiry as having a rela-
tional ontology (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007).
During these years Clandinin, alongside Piquemal and Caine, was reading Lévinas’ (1981)
work. As Piquemal (2004) thought about the ethical responsibilities of teachers in a diverse
society, she noted Lévinas’ call for ethical relationships to be grounded in a commitment to
difference:
Lévinas suggests that ethical relationships ought to be based on a commitment to dif-

ference. Breaking away from the Cartesian model in which the subject (“Cogito”)
is central and exists independently of others, Lévinas defines the self as a decentered
subject in relation to the other who is an absolute other, meaning that his/her alterity
(or essential identity) is irreducible. Lévinas is opposed to the rationalistic reduction of
the other to sameness, thus suggests the idea of a commitment to difference. Lévinas
reminds us that the other resists comprehension in the sense that we can never pos-
sess the other, and that the other’s otherness is not interchangeable with ours. Lévinas
argues that an ethical relationship begins when the self becomes aware of the other and
is humbled by the other’s irreducible alterity. An ethical relationship with a relational
other is defined as an ethic of responsibility. Responsibility means co-existing with the
other while preserving one’s irreducible otherness.
(p. 4)
These ideas highlight the need for a particular kind of relationship between researchers and par-
ticipants, a relationship in which the researchers acknowledge their always incomplete knowing
or understanding of participants and themselves. What these ideas made significant for narrative
inquirers and participants are commitments to honouring this always incomplete understanding
of one another through openness to imagination and playfulness (Caine & Steeves, 2009).
Exposure to other ways of thinking about ethics also came through other faculty members,
and we were introduced to Bergum and Dossetor’s work (2005) published as a book called
Relational Ethics: The Full Meaning of Respect. For them ethics goes beyond the principles-based
approach and acknowledges the social context of people’s lives; they see ethical decision making
as part of the ordinary relationships between people in both health care encounters and research
relationships. Bergum and Dossetor (2005) assert that it is within relationships that our ethical
knowing is grounded and that this grounding shifts ethical decision-making and practices. In
these moments ethical commitments become paramount and entail important elements such
424
as respect, engagement, embodied knowledge and attention to the environment. This under-
standing of ethics, as one embedded in relationships and commitment, resonated for us. Much
like Bergum and Dossetor (2005), we too could see that it emphasized the respect we have not
only for each other, but also for the differences we, as researchers and participants, bring to each
narrative inquiry.
Throughout this time narrative inquiries were still underway and we continued to try to puzzle
through in the living what it meant to engage in ethical ways in a relational methodology such as
narrative inquiry. Both Janice Huber and Marilyn Huber, alongside Clandinin, continued to work
in school sites and met a student who Janice Huber and Clandinin had originally met in their
2000–2001 study. The student, Ryley, who we had known when he was in Grade three, was now
finishing his junior high school experience. We had come to know both Ryley and his mother.
Marilyn Huber connected with Ryley and his mother and learned that Ryley was struggling in
junior high school, that he felt some of the teachers were racist toward youth of indigenous ances-
tries, and that he sometimes stayed away from school, spending his days helping his dad who is a
mechanic. In time, Marilyn Huber also learned that many of her colleagues saw Ryley as a “diffi-
cult student”. New puzzles emerged about our “long-term relational responsibilities as narrative
inquirers” (Huber et al., 2006, p. 209), puzzles that drew us toward questions, such as: “Who are
we in the ongoing life stories of children and families with whom we have previously engaged in
narrative inquiry? What are our long-term responsibilities to these children and families?” (p. 211).
In her masters’ work, Caine (2002) engaged with aboriginal women to inquire into their
experiences of living with HIV. This work profoundly shaped Caine and also raised many ethical
questions for us. Some of the questions were familiar and reminded us of Arendt’s and Lévinas’
work, questions about what is it that we are doing here; what are we doing when we face the
other; who do we become in these moments? Yet other questions were emphasized and called
forth in new ways. In the final stages of negotiating a narrative account, Deanna, one of Caine’s
participants with whom she had engaged for the past two years, disappeared. Deanna, like some
of Caine’s other participants, had chosen to write a small book about her life, and as a way to
close the narrative account Deanna wanted to write a letter to her children and place this at the
end of her book. At the time, all of Deanna’s children had been apprehended and were in foster
care or were involved in an adoption process. Deanna had wanted to write to her children, as she
was unsure if she would ever have the chance to tell her children just how much she loved and
cared for them. Deanna worried about her ability to live well with HIV.
As we puzzled through these questions, we were drawn toward Charon and Montello’s (2002)
understanding of the “ethics of ordinary life” and their sense that
the ethics in question are the ethics of ordinary life: how to fulfill life goals, to honor
obligations, and to make sense of events in ways that make it possible to go on. These
ethical issues . . . are also the ethics of life.
(p. xi)
Such an understanding, however, shaped numerous new tensions in our lives as narrative inquir-
ers, tensions such as maintaining relationships with participants, particularly when significant
geographic distance or work or life changes and obligations gradually separated us from sustained
and/or in-person interactions. In addition, we wondered about our obligations in the shift that
happened in the situation with Ryley, that is, as we shifted from a researcher/teacher relationship
with Ryley and his mother into a teaching relationship, yet still felt deep obligations as Ryley
struggled with aspects of his life in school. While we did not arrive at definitive solutions to
these tensions, in thinking with them, Morris’s (2002) sense of ways in which “thinking with
425
stories” (p. 196) situates ethical action at the heart of what we do was important. Morris wrote
that “the ancient Western binary habit that requires us to put reason and emotion into separate
words and unconnected categories . . . [shapes] crucial implications for ethics” (p. 196), which
he described in the following way:
The concept of thinking with stories is meant to oppose and modify (not replace) the
institutionalized Western practice of thinking about stories. Thinking about stories
conceives of narrative as an object. Thinker and object of thought are at least theoreti-
cally distinct. Thinking with stories is a process in which we as thinkers do not so much
work on narrative as take the radical step back, almost a return to childhood experience,
of allowing narrative to work on us.
(p. 196)
Drawing on Basso’s (1996) work alongside people of the Apache nation, Morris saw the process
of thinking with stories as opening up the potential for putting “us in contact with valuable
resources for moral thought and action” (p. 201).
In a culture that avoids direct rebuke, these narratives, as Basso demonstrates, provide
unobtrusive and gentle but steady moral guidance. One Apache male describes how
such tales, when told in the context of moral misconduct, have a way of almost literally
getting under your skin: “That story is working on you now. You keep thinking about
it. That story is changing you now, making you want to live right. That story is making
you want to replace yourself.”
(p. 201)
In thinking with the stories we lived, past and present, and which we imagined living into the
future in relation with participants in narrative inquiries, we saw that an important forward-look-
ing story (Lindemann Nelson, 2002) was that of staying wakeful to who we were, and who we
were becoming, as narrative inquirers. In this way, Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) sense that
“narrative inquiry is the study of experience, and experience, as Dewey taught, is a matter of
people in relation contextually and temporally” (p. 189) shaped ways for narrative inquirers to
situate the deeply relational aspects of their narrative inquiries as central, both in the living of the
inquiry and in representing the inquiry in research texts: “Participants are in relation, and we as
researchers are in relation to participants. Narrative inquiry is an experience of the experience.
It is people in relation studying with people in relation” (p. 189).
By 2006, Connelly and Clandinin were more confidently offering a view of the ethical rela-
tions of narrative inquiry. Drawing on the everyday notions of how people live in relation with
each other, views grounded in the ethics of everyday life, they wrote:
Reflecting on ethical relations in inquirers’ own everyday lives is a starting point for
thinking about proper, ethical relationships with participants. Ethical considerations
permeate narrative inquiries from start to finish: at the outset as ends-in-view are
imagined, as inquirer-participant relationships unfold, and as participants are repre-
sented in research texts.
(p. 483)
As Clandinin, Huber, and Caine continued their work in the years past 2006, we continued to
search for ways to strengthen what we saw as the relational ethical stance of narrative inquirers
426
that was centrally linked to the relational ontology of narrative inquiry. As Caine et al. (2013)
note:
a relational ontology requires that we do not turn first to the inquiry as a way
to make these stories fit. Representation, as the act that arises from our relational
ontology, necessitates our living with the unfitting story rather than with attempts
to tame, sanitize, or analyze. As narrative inquirers we attend to difficult stories and
experiences, we stay with them; we dwell alongside participants in possible ways to
retell them.
(p. 581)
As we wrote about the tensions we experienced as we bumped against dominant narratives, we

were awakened yet again to the importance of slowing down and attending. As Clandinin et al.
(2009) wrote:
we try to attend to these moments when participants’ or our lives crash into one another
or into the social narratives surrounding us as moments of tension, and we see how
important it is to stop and attend, to inquire into what these tensions can teach us about
the meeting of diverse lives and the negotiation of narrative inquiries.
(p. 88)
We were, as we engaged in narrative inquiries, always mindful of the importance of response

communities. “It is amidst response communities that narrative inquirers become awakened to
methodological and theoretical possibilities, learn about ethical and responsive ways to be in rela-
tionships, and learn to listen again and again” (Clandinin 2013, p. 211). Response communities
keep us firmly grounded in the living out of experience, in the day to day composing of our
lives. They remind us to move slowly, to not take experience for granted but to see it as shaping
our puzzles, how we understand the experiences of participants and help us attend to what is
happening to us in the midst of the inquiries. Caine et al. (2013) wrote:
Honouring this living of our relationality is key to narrative inquiry. In these moments
we know that not only does our life matter, so do the lives of others, and that the stories
we each tell, and, once told to each other, are important moments through which we
interconnect. These stories speak of, and about, our experiences, and of, and about, our
relationships with others.
(pp. 581–2)
The deeply relational work of narrative inquiry draws attention to what is happening to us as
narrative inquirers, to how we are being changed in the living as well as how participants are
changed in our living with them. We are reminded again of why it matters to honour the rela-
tional ethics that are the heart of narrative inquiry.
Drawing ethical understandings together, for now

As our chapter shows, when Clandinin and Connelly first turned toward narrative as a way to
understand teachers’ experiential knowledge, they were not setting out to create narrative inquiry
as a research methodology. However, over time they, and many others, continued to ask questions
of themselves, questions of who they were and who they were becoming as they participated
427
in inquiries, initially alongside teachers and administrators in schools and increasingly alongside
participants composing diverse lives in and outside of school and other institutional, as well as
social, places. As these questions of being and becoming in relation were sustained, they shaped
both more questions of, and continued puzzling around, relational responsibilities, both in the
midst and aftermath of narrative inquiries.
Turning back to scholars such as Buber, Arendt, Macmurray, Dewey, and Noddings – alongside
the works of scholars such as Lévinas, Bergum and Dossetor, Charon and Montello, and Morris,
who were also asking questions of relational ethics – alongside the ontological and epistemolog-
ical puzzles we were experiencing in our inquiries sustained our attention on research ethics as
enmeshed in the living, in the co-making of the inquiry with participants. In this way, research
ethics no longer seem to belong somewhere else but are, instead, at the heart of the relational
ontological commitments of narrative inquirers.
These relational ontological commitments of narrative inquirers reverberate with institutional
research ethics boards, which are concerned about aspects such as power, expertise, and vulner-
ability. However, as narrative inquirers, our wakefulness to aspects such as these, and others, are
ongoing throughout, and long after, the completion of an inquiry. Furthermore, in the midst, and
in the aftermath, of narrative inquiry these aspects are continuously negotiated with participants,
just as we negotiate, make sense of aspects such as these in our everyday lives and interactions. In
this way, we do not do something special or different or act in alternative ways as we and partic-
ipants live in the midst of, and co-compose, narrative inquiries. What we do, how we interact,
how we live with one another is indelibly woven into, and with, who we each are and who we
are each becoming.
Unfinished stories: An ethics still in the making

The envelope in the back of the book that Caine was writing with Deanna continues to remain
empty – Deanna disappeared before the letter could be written. Deanna’s partner at the time
called Caine the night of her disappearance and together they reported her missing, posted posters
and looked for any signs of her alongside her family. It was not for another 10 years that Deanna’s
body was found, her bones strewn across a desolate area at the outskirts of a large city. It became
clear that she had been murdered. The empty envelope at the end of the book and the events
that happened following Deanna’s disappearance have also marked our understanding of ethics.
Who are we in relation to our participants? What are we doing here, not only as researchers, but
as people? What are our responsibilities in the absence of the physical presence of participants?
Who do we become as lives unfold in uncertain and unanticipated events? For many years Caine
was unable to write or talk about how important Deanna remained in her life; it seemed as
each time she talked new wounds opened and a deep sadness ensued. Yet, over time this silence
was unbearable and created tensions with the responsibilities Caine felt towards Deanna. Caine
began to think about the envelope in more metaphorical ways and wondered: Could she mark
the edges of the envelope by recalling her experiences alongside Deanna, the ways in which
Deanna talked about her children, her encounters with them and their relationship with Deanna
in the brief moments of supervised visits, the moments of reading about them in the newspaper?
Could Caine talk about her experiences alongside Deanna in ways that honoured her knowing
of Deanna? And in these moments Caine also turned to thinking about her responsibilities to
Deanna’s partner and extended family, as well as how the lives of missing and murdered aboriginal
women are understood.
428
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32
COMPASSIONATE RESEARCH
Interviewing and storytelling
from a relational ethics of care1
Carolyn Ellis
university of south florida
‘And what is as important as knowledge?’ asked the mind. ‘Caring and seeing with the heart,’
answered the soul.
Anonymous
“I understand on an intellectual level what you say about compassionate interviewing, but how
do you do it?” the audience member asked after my presentation.2 Her question and the discussion
that followed have encouraged me to address how we as researchers do compassionate research
that has as a goal to honor, care for, and support others we interview. What does it mean, how
does it feel, and what decisions have to be made as we form relationships and relate to our par-
ticipants moment by moment, situation by situation? What role does our own self-examination
play in doing this well? Does compassion require that we bring agency or a sense of regeneration
to the lives of our participants?
In this chapter, I approach these questions from a relational ethics of care. I begin with the
discussion that took place after my presentation. For guidance in addressing the issues raised
there about compassionate research, I call on work on ethics from feminist, oral history, and
autoethnography scholars, as well as from those writing about relational ethics in health care. I
discuss concerns that arise in doing research with those we already know or with whom we form
relationships during the research process, as is the case in my work with Holocaust survivor, Jerry
Rawicki. To open up a conversation about how compassionate research from a relational ethics
of care might take place in practice, I end with a story that portrays my relationship with Jerry
as we visit Treblinka, where his family members were murdered.
Relating compassionately
“Your face,” Sarah says now from the audience. “It’s your face . . .” Jolted by Sarah’s comment,
I turn and stare at my face, the frame still frozen on the screen.
431
Carolyn Ellis
As part of the talk I give at this conference, I show a raw footage clip we had filmed earlier at
the Florida Holocaust Museum where another survivor had responded to Jerry’s description of
the anti-Semitism he experienced in Poland:
Male Survivor: We were in Poland after 67 years. My wife and I were both born in Warsaw . . .
I experienced a great deal of anti-Semitism as you did. What surprised me was
that in the large cities . . . like Warsaw and Krakow, the younger people were
very open. You didn’t feel the anti-Semitism. But we were also visiting small
communities – my wife’s father was a physician in a concentration camp in
a place called Starachowice and he was murdered by the Nazis on the way to
Auschwitz . . . We travelled through Poland with a film crew; they were filming
my wife where the camp was . . . And . . . an older Pole passed by, and talked to
me in Polish. He assumed that I was another Pole watching, and made some very
derogatory remark.
Jerry: (gasps) Oh . . .
Male Survivor: Anti-Semitism in the small communities is very much alive. Among the younger
people in Warsaw and in Krakow, it’s a totally different story.
As I watch this clip along with my audience, I find it difficult to concentrate on the survivor’s
words because I am focused on my face, which looms large between the faces of Jerry and the
speaker, sometimes crowding them out of the frame. We must edit out my face.
And now, “Your face . . . ,” Sarah says again. The intrusion of my face must interfere so much
that this listener has called attention to it. I hope the audience doesn’t think that my being in this frame
is intentional.
“Its presence might embarrass you,” Sarah continues, reading my mind or the expression on
my face, “and I would guess you want to edit it out.” I swallow and nod.
“But it’s important that your face be there,” she says, leaning forward. I feel my eyes open wide
and my eyebrows rise, as I question the meaning of her comment. “Your face reveals so much.
It lets us in on the compassion you feel.”
I wait. “I mean it’s clear from your facial expression that you feel compassion for Jerry and
the other speaker. You are feeling with them and relating to them.”
“I don’t know how to do it,” she says, settling back into her chair, her voice sounding deflated.
“How do you do compassionate interviewing?”
“Nobody has ever asked me that before,” I say.
“Let me explain,” Sarah continues, becoming animated as she talks about her own research.
“In my work, I have examined how people communicate compassion through the activities of
recognizing, relating, and (re)acting (Way & Tracy, 2012). Recognizing requires paying attention
to what is going on, seeing the whole person, reading the details of their emotions and relational
cues, including nonverbal and silence, and trying to figure out what they mean (see also Kanov
et al., 2004, p. 18; Miller, 2007, p. 235; Way & Tracy, 2012, p. 301). (Re)acting means responding
to another’s pain, trying to help the person live through it or get rid of it (see also Kanov et al.,
2004, p. 814; Way & Tracy, 2012, p. 305). Responses also can include inaction, giving the person
‘the gift of quiet, time, and space’ (Way & Tracy, 2012, p. 306).”
I nod for her to continue.
“Those two processes I have no trouble with,” she says. “I can recognize when a compassion-
ate response is called for. And I can usually figure out what needs to be done. It’s the relating part
I don’t know how to do. Can you tell us how you do that?”
“First, tell me how you define ‘relating’ in your work,” I say.
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Compassionate research
“In our article, we describe relating as ‘an active communication process that includes listen-
ing, feeling, identifying and making connections with others in their pain and suffering. It means
to reach a shared sense of the experience and of each other (Way & Tracy 2012, p. 304; see also
Kanov et al., 2004, p. 813; Miller, 2007). I know what ‘relating’ means intellectually. I just don’t
know how to do it. Relating compassionately seems to come naturally for you.”
“I’ve never thought about how I do this,” I respond. “I imagine that much of what I do comes
from how much I care about Jerry. We have worked together now for more than five years and
I feel connected to him. I have grown to love him; he is like family to me. Though I don’t think
you have to love someone to feel compassion.
“I also try to pay close attention to him when we are together, so that he feels my interest.
I think I give off cues of attention and compassion by learning forward, making eye contact,
presenting a calm body posture, and nodding. Sometimes I put my hand on his arm, and now
I feel comfortable hugging him and verbally expressing my affection. One can learn this body
language, but the storyteller usually can tell if your attention and feeling are authentic or not.
Actually it’s best not to think about how to do it, but just let your body and mind do it naturally.”
“That’s what I don’t get – how to do all that naturally,” she says.
“I’m not sure I can explain it. I do know I try to listen deeply to understand what Jerry
is telling me (see Ellis & Patti, 2014; Patti, 2015). I try to make my questions relevant to our
conversation, though it’s best if I am not focused on what I will ask next and instead trust the
conversational flow. Then I can focus on what he is saying. I also try to put myself in his place
and feel what he is feeling, though I know I can’t. I try to read him, which means I seek to figure out
what he needs in any situation we are in. As with the rest of us, he is not the same all the time.
Sometimes he welcomes questions that bring up his emotion; sometimes he seeks to contain
his emotions. I try to sense the mood to help determine the questions I ask him and the topics
we cover (Field, 2006, p. 152). When we are together, I often don’t take out the tape- or video
recorder, because I intuit that we need or want to visit solely as friends or that there is a pressing
personal issue that Jerry wants to talk to me about. Or perhaps that day, we just want to have a
good time together with no pressure.”
“But how do you keep from feeling hopeless in the wake of all that tragedy in the Holocaust?”
Sarah asks.
“I think about Jerry and the Holocaust a lot, but I don’t agonize, dream about it, or have
nightmares. I also don’t take the trauma home. I can still go about my business and live my life.
It becomes important in deep listening for storytellers of trauma to feel you empathize but also
to feel confident that you can handle what they are telling you. They don’t want to feel they
have brought you down.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” I say, and nod to Patricia, who waves her hand.
She begins, “You say in your handout that your compassionate and relational approach offers
survivors the opportunity to tell and retell past and current stories in multiple and new ways,
reflect on and analyze their meanings, and contribute to the richness and direction of stories
told . . . Survivors say this storytelling process is healing for them . . . and in the telling, new
plotlines and insights are discovered together. ‘I thought I knew everything about the Holocaust,’
says Jerry, ‘but our interaction brings out things that were buried by the overall tragedy. Some
of the nuances we uncovered helped me understand what is happening now.’ In this passage and
in the clips you showed us, Jerry is articulate about how his participation in your research has
affected him,” Patricia says, glancing up. “But you didn’t mention in your presentation how you
have been changed by this project. From your passionate presentation, I feel you have been greatly
affected, but what you told us was how your appreciation has grown for your interviewees. What
do you get out of this process?”
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“Whew, another difficult but meaningful question,” I say, smiling. This audience seems to want
more of me in this presentation, not less. “First, I get to feel that I am potentially doing something for
Jerry in helping him to revitalize his life and find meaning in what we are doing.”
“I understand that,” she responds. “But that skirts the issue of how you think differently about
your life as a result of immersing yourself in this research.”
“I get to have a deep friendship with Jerry. And though we focus on Jerry’s life, we share
experiences of loss and I find that comforting. I have been interested in loss and grief for a long
time, and Holocaust survivors are experts in that arena. So I learn a lot. I also feel I am doing my
part to remind people of what happened during the Holocaust. This gives me a sense of purpose,
which also addresses Sarah’s question of why I don’t fall into hopelessness.”
“Jerry says he can look at his life differently and in a depth he has not been able to do emo-
tionally before,” she says. “What about you?”
“I will have to think about that some more,” I say, realizing that I am still dodging what Patricia
is asking. I am not ready to feel as vulnerable in this space as talking about my own losses and anticipated
losses would entail. Perhaps my reluctance is just a matter of needing more time to process these intense
questions, I think, glancing at my watch and noting my time is almost up.
“Carolyn,” Melanie says, when I look in her direction, “how has your work in autoethnogra-
phy and examining your own life assisted you in this project?”
“We come to understand others through our self-understanding and we come to understand
ourselves through understanding others, so it’s a two-way street. I think that deeply examining
my feelings and experiences helps me figure out how to work with Jerry in examining his.
Writing evocatively and emotionally about grief and loss in my life has helped me write about
his. It is harder to write about Jerry’s emotions than my own, because I don’t have the feelings in
my body and memory to call on. I have to depend on empathy and on Jerry’s ability to convey
what happened and how he was feeling almost seventy years ago. Nevertheless we go through
the same process together that I go through alone in trying to conjure up my own experiences.”
I nod toward Rachel, who says, “Don’t you think that embracing and accepting your own
story and opening it up to others’ judgment and criticism enables you to enter others’ stories?”
“Yes. That process is part of autoethnography. Peoples’ responses to your story provide an
opportunity to turn your attention to what their responses tell you about them and to enter their
experiences through your own.”
“It seems to me there is something unethical—at least disingenuous – about exploring the
depths of another’s life when you haven’t opened up your own to the same,” Rachel continues. I
nod, acknowledging the importance of her point. “How can you have a sense of how that process
might feel to another person if you haven’t examined your own life?”
“I’m not sure you can. Autoethnography requires you to do just that. You have the opportu-
nity to feel what it’s like to put your life on the line and receive responses to your story.
“Clearly autoethnography taught me much about compassion and how to do this project with
survivors in the most ethical and caring way I could,” I say, looking across the whole audience.
“Thank you for your insightful questions.” I sit down, stunned by the thoughts and feelings
this conversation has engendered about doing research compassionately and ethically.
Ethical concerns in having close relationships

and sharing authority with participants
All research – from surveys to ethnography and interviews – presents ethical issues for investi-
gators. Survey researchers generally concentrate on whether their research is credible and valid
and have concerns about confidentiality and informed consent. Less pondered is the potential
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distress of respondents asked to answer questions that tap into traumatic and personal concerns.
As sociologist Einwohner (2011) observes, even working with secondary data can present ethical
conflicts. In a review of stories from Shoah, Einwohner found herself eliminating real names
and identifying people with numbers, which reminded her of how Nazis had treated Jews. As a
Jewish woman who had lost relatives to the Holocaust, she came to feel that it was unethical to
objectify her subjects by breaking up their lives into coded small segments.
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) (and other systems of ethics review) mandate that prior
to doing our research we institute procedures to protect human subjects from harm, obtain
informed consent, maintain confidentiality, uphold honesty, and respect privacy. While designing
ethical procedures prior to beginning our projects is a minimum requirement for doing research
with human subjects, most questions and ethical dilemmas in qualitative research emerge during
the research process, especially in studies of traumatic and sensitive topics. In most cases, IRBs
provide little guidance on “process ethics” (also called “situational ethics” or “ethics in practice”
[Guillemin & Gillam, 2004, p. 4]) – those unanticipated situations, dilemmas, and concerns that
arise and demand immediate attention in the course of our study. Nor do IRBs offer direction
about “relational ethics” – how to make good interpersonal decisions concerning our respon-
sibilities toward those in our studies, especially when we ask about intimate and/or traumatic
events that might engender strong emotions in respondents (see Ellis, 2007). Relational ethics
also include mindful self-reflection about the researcher’s role, motives, and feelings during the
research process. This mindfulness extends beyond ourselves to the lives of our participants and
communities in which they live, and includes reflection on how our work might contribute to
them (see González-López, 2011, pp. 448–50).
While required, the focus on procedures by IRBs may lull us into thinking that we are doing
ethical research if we have IRB approval and follow the procedures we have laid out. This orienta-
tion then may lead to an absence of sufficient concentration on those complications most certain
to arise in the research process and in the relationships we form with participants. Anthropolo-
gists Davis and Holcombe (2010, p. 1) warn that there is a difference between ethical standards
in protocols and guidelines and “the actual practice of ethics: the upholding of moral behaviours
in face-to-face encounters.” Using indigenous research as their focus, they note that we need “a
balance between regulatory compliance and institutional governance of ethics through codifica-
tion and the practice of good ethical behaviours in actual settings” (2010, p. 9). Writing about
mindful ethics in her studies of sexuality and incest in Mexico, sociologist González-López (2011,
p. 448; see also Yow, 1997) advocates that we consider the histories and stories of those in our
studies and view them as complex people with “complex everyday lives characterized by unique
social circumstances,” aspects that are important for “understanding their relationships with us as
researchers.” IRBs do not come close to addressing the complex ethical issues researchers confront
and, as Kellner (2002, p. 31) says, guidelines for human subject reviews often “fall far short of
involving caring about the people being studied” (cited in Huisman, 2008).
Especially complex are those circumstances in which we study people we know, develop
friendships/long-term relationships with our participants (see, for example, Huisman, 2008), or
invite participants to share authority or coauthor with us (see High, 2014; Sheftel & Zembrzycki,
2013; special issue of the Oral History Review on sharing authority). These situations are foreign
to most IRBs, which view research as short-term, bounded, with strangers, and controlled physi-
cally and emotionally by the researcher who is separate from those studied (see Ellis, 2004, 2007;
High, 2014, p. 27).
Even some who support doing research with familiar others raise questions about the dual
relationships researchers might have with those in their studies. While advocating an ethic of
care, intimacy, and collaboration, feminist researchers, in particular, warn that friendship with
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respondents can cause problems for respondents as well as researchers. This closeness can cause
emotional harm to participants, offered Judith Stacey (1988, p. 24), who wrote that “the greater
the intimacy, the apparent mutuality of the researcher/researched relationship, the greater is the
danger.” Many feminists have supported Stacey’s statement about the dangers of the ‘friendly
façade’ that accompanies qualitative research (Patai, 1991; Wolf, 1996). Others have warned of the
emotional load on researchers who are not trained as psychotherapists (Brannen, 1988; Edwards,
1993) and the physical load on researchers who are considered to be friends. More recently,
sociologist Huisman (2008) discussed how the Bosnian women she interviewed expected her
to visit regularly and spend many hours with them. They told her their secrets and she feared
violating their trust if she were to leave the field. She said, “I became increasingly concerned that
my ‘reciprocity’ contributed to the exploitation” they had experienced during the war (386).
While “double vision” or having multiple identities might provide a wider vision, these roles
also might conflict. For sociologist Jacobs (2004), the conflict she experienced was between data
gatherer and bearing witness to the memories of suffering of Jewish women in the Holocaust,
especially since she was Jewish. Huisman (2008) felt conflict in her roles of researcher and friend
to the Bosnian women she had interviewed and responded by choosing to work with a team of
researchers in her follow up project so as not to get so close to participants.
In spite of potential problems, many scholars do successfully occupy dual roles with those they
interview and come to understand narrators’ stories differently when they get to know them
better (see Owton & Allen-Collinson, 2014; Zembrzycki, 2013, p. 139). Qualitative researchers,
particularly communication scholars who work from a narrative and autoethnographic perspec-
tive, interview family members and friends and become friends with those in their studies. For
example, Tillmann (Healy), who made a strong case for friendship as a method (2003), inter-
viewed gay men who had become close friends in her study of gay and straight relationships
(2001). Later she accompanied these men to their hometowns and interviewed family members
(Tillmann, 2015). Adams (2011) called on interactions with gay friends and acquaintances for
his study of coming out of the closet. Brooks (2006) collaborated with a friend in his study of
masculinity and male friendships. Hodges (2014) interviewed family members in his research
on white working class, and Boylorn (2013) returned to her hometown to talk with family and
others in the community for her study of Black, rural, working class women.
Prevalent among autoethnographers, these practices are becoming more common among
other researchers as well. According to historian High (2014, p. 127), a “growing number of oral
historians interview family members.” In High’s large-scale study of people displaced by mass
violence, The Montreal Life Stories Project, five members of his team interviewed parents (High
2014, p. 127). Afterwards they reflected together about the risks and benefits to themselves and
to their families. Additionally, folklorist Norkunas (2013) and anthropologist Waterston (2005)
interviewed their fathers about difficult memories.
Many oral historians and other researchers now “share authority” with research participants.
Coined by Frisch (1990), this phrase means that the researcher gives up some control over the
process and/or product of research. Oral historian Zembrzycki (2009), for example, interviewed
her grandmother, her Baba, in her study of the Ukrainian community in Northern Ontario. She
then shared authority with her grandmother in the role of co-interviewer in order to gain more
access to the Ukrainian community and their stories.
As well, researchers, especially those dealing with trauma, build relationships and share author-
ity with storytellers. Psychologist and playwright Greenspan (2010) has spent almost three dec-
ades in conversations with Holocaust survivors and has published a book that demonstrates the
deep conversations he had with Agi Rubin (Rubin & Greenspan, 2006). Communication scholar
Patti (2015) told of being called to the bedside of a Holocaust survivor he interviewed, whose
436
dying wish was to talk with Chris about sharing his story. In their edited book, Oral History off the
Record, Sheftel and Zembrzycki (2013) included many oral history contributors who spent years
building relationships with their interviewees. Zembrzycki (2013), for example, wrote of the long
relationship she built with a survivor, which culminated in their joint visit to the death camps in
Poland. In my work with Jerry, we also built a long-term friendship characterized by compas-
sionate friendship and shared authorship (Ellis & Rawicki, 2013, 2015; Rawicki & Ellis, 2011).
Doing compassionate research with a Holocaust survivor

I first met Jerry, a Warsaw Ghetto survivor, in 2009 when I interviewed him along with forty
other survivors for a project with the University of South Florida Libraries Holocaust and Gen-
ocide Center and the Florida Holocaust Museum. Though Jerry, now 87 years old, and his
older sister survived the Holocaust, his father died in a work camp, and his mother and younger
sister were murdered at Treblinka. My initial exchange with him was in the form of a traditional
oral history interview, based on the Shoah Foundation model, which posed questions chrono-
logically about life before, during, and after the Holocaust. Aware that the last of our survivors
were approaching end of life and there was little time remaining to establish testimony in direct
collaboration with witnesses, I began follow-up conversational interviews with a small number
of survivors as a way to elicit different and possibly untold stories. I believed that stories told
conversationally in long-term and close relationships might present opportunities to tell new
stories, revise, develop, and analyze them along the way. I also hoped this process might provide
a positive experience for survivors.
Jerry became the first person I asked to participate in these conversations. We worked together
well and quickly became friends who cared about each other, enjoyed spending time together,
and looked forward to this work. A highlight of our time together occurred in June 2013, when
I accompanied Jerry on his return to Poland for the first time since he left at the age of 21. While
in Warsaw, we produced a video, Behind the Wall, featuring Jerry in situ exploring his memory
of his past and his feelings about forgiveness toward his homeland.
In my work with Jerry, I employ compassionate interviewing and storytelling (see also
Ellis & Patti, 2014; Patti, 2013, 2015). In compassionate interviewing, researchers and par-
ticipants listen deeply to, speak responsibly with, feel passionately for, share vulnerably with,
and connect relationally and ethically to each other with care. In compassionate storytelling,
researchers – sometimes with participants – write and tell stories empathetically and respect-
fully, accompanied by a desire to relieve or prevent suffering. In the recent past, I have used
other similar terms to designate this approach, for example, intimate interviewing (Ellis, 2014),
relational autoethnography (Ellis & Rawicki, 2013), heartful autoethnography (Ellis, 1999),
and collaborative witnessing (Ellis & Rawicki, 2013; Ellis & Rawicki, 2015). Though compas-
sionate research signifies an orientation toward doing research more than a particular strategy,
this approach builds on work I have done previously with collaborators on useful techniques,
such as interactive interviewing (Ellis, Kiesinger &Tillmann-Healy, 1997) and co-constructed
narrative (Bochner & Ellis, 1995).
With Jerry, I have integrated my roles of friend and researcher so that they blend and com-
plement each other rather than present conflict. Foremost in my mind is a consideration of our
relationship, one focused on Jerry’s wellbeing and the possibility of renewal and purpose in his
life (and mine). I can do the research I do, which involves emotional sharing, because Jerry and
I are close friends. Our friendship was formed around our interest in the Holocaust, trauma,
and loss, but it now includes much more – caring for each other’s families, other survivors, and
day-to-day concerns and problems in living. Even if I were to end this work, we would remain
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Carolyn Ellis
friends. But I have no intentions to leave the field, because I am committed to this work; besides,
there is no field to leave since Jerry is part of my life.
Jerry and I share goals for this research – to write stories, give lectures, and do work that has
the possibility of bringing experiences to audiences that might make a positive difference. We
seek to make changes one story, one life at a time (Ellis, 2009), and reach the larger community
of Holocaust survivors (see also Blee & Currier, 2011; González-López, 2011; Rupp & Taylor,
2011). This approach adds a relational and emotional dimension to the research we do on trauma,
such as the Holocaust, that enables us to learn from our interaction with others as well as from
what our participants say. The focus on lived experience and storytelling then can add to what
we know about trauma from work in history, art and literature, individual life histories, memoirs,
and qualitative studies using snippets of life stories to tell a collective story.
My ongoing relationship with Jerry also provides an opportunity for us to try to understand
together the perils and joys of being involved in a compassionate research process. While not many
researchers have the time, inclination, and/or the personality to immerse themselves in relationships
with participants or to study their own close relationships – nor do most research projects call for
it – I offer this kind of immersion as an option to consider, especially when studying sensitive issues
such as loss and trauma. Previous inquiries into the “ethics of care” and “relational ethics” provide
ways of thinking through these relationships and accomplishing them with care and respect.
Relational ethics of care

Following Gilligan’s (1982, 1988) and Noddings’s (1984, 1995) ethic of care and drawing exten-
sively from Bergum’s and Dossetor’s excellent discussion of relational ethics (2005) in health care,
I employ the term “relational ethics of care” to emphasize the role of relationship and care in
the ethics that guide my work (see also Ellis, 2007). This approach is closely related to commu-
nitarian ethics, feminist ethics, ethic of care, and case based ethics, among others (see Christians,
2000; Denzin, 1997).
By a relational ethics of care, I refer to the “way people are with one another” in their various
roles and relationships from moment to moment (Bergum & Dossetor, 2005, pp. 3–4). Following
a relational ethics of care does not mean a rejection of an ethic based on justice. As Held (1995,
p. 3) suggested, justice sets the “moral minimums beneath which we ought not to fall, or absolute
constraints within which we may pursue our different goals” while “[c]are deals with questions of
the good life or of human value over and above the obligatory minimums of justice.” We need both
justice and care, reason and heart. As Gilligan (1983, pp. 35, 47, quoted in Bergum and Dossetor,
2005, p. 35) proposed, we need an ethics that is “fundamentally dialectical in the sense of contain-
ing an ongoing tension between justice and care . . . aspiring always to the ideal of a world more
caring and more just.” Noddings (2002, p. 3) made a case for the close relationship between the two
principles in her description of justice as “caring about” the welfare of others at a distance from us,
which generates the motive and content of justice, while “caring for” involves relating face-to-face.
As proponents of relational ethics in health care research, Bergum and Dossetor (2005, p. 3) defined
the focus of relational ethics as being “on people (whole persons) and the quality of the commitments
between them. These commitments are experienced in a relational or ethical space . . . The shift
is from solving the ethical problem to asking the ethical question.” Though some ethical issues can
be anticipated, it is impossible to know ahead of time all the moral conundrums that might arise
in any research project. As in any relationship, a researcher and participant must try to negotiate
and resolve misunderstandings and disagreements that might result in moment-to-moment inter-
actions. Central to a relational ethics of care, the main concern is asking, “What do we do now?”
rather than declaring, “This is what you should do now” (Bergum, 1998).
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Relational ethics of care are ongoing, uncertain processes. Often what is ethical to do in any
situation may not be clear, but something must be done and/or decided. Sometimes researchers –
similar to health care practitioners – do it right and sometimes they make mistakes or in hind-
sight see a better way of doing things. One is never finished making ethical decisions as long as
interacting with others. Thus we must be fully present and continually asking questions about
“what is going on here” – in particular, “What is needed to make this interaction go well, to
honor the other person, and to take care of myself?” Though we prepare ourselves for ethical
dilemmas through reading, thinking, talking and imagining, most “ethical reflection occurs after
the fact” as we consider what we have done and the consequences it produced, and try to learn
to do things better (see Bergum & Dossetor, 2005, pp. 9, 24; Caputo, 1989 as cited in Bergum &
Dossetor, 2005, p. 9).
Relational ethics of care focuses on the particular, concrete story at hand, not the universal,
abstract and theoretical (Bochner, 1994). Rather than relying on objective standards, acting ethi-
cally depends on engagement; it relies on building trust rather than drawing conclusions. As Ber-
gum and Dossetor (2005, p. 128) said about health workers and patients, “Dialogic conversation
involved give and take, back and forth, being strong and being vulnerable, listening to stories of
pain and staying in pain, and confronting death and staying with the dying.”
This kind of dialogue involves paying full attention to each other.3 Weil ([1951] 2000, p. 65,
cited in Noddings, 2002, p. 15) described attention: “The soul empties itself of all its own con-
tents in order to receive the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.” As Noddings (2002,
p. 3) argued, the reception is relational: someone signals a readiness to receive and becomes a dual-
ity, who sees though “two pairs of eyes, hear[s] with two sets of ears, feel[s] the pain of the other
self ” in addition to her own. The selves of both participants then have potential to be changed.
Since the researcher is part of this conversation, relational ethics requires the researcher to do
a continuous “moral self-examination” (Jacobs, 2004, p. 236), which involves interrogating and
trying to understand self to understand the other and honor the space and dialogue in between
(see Ellis, 2007; also see Bergum & Dossetor, 2005, p. 11; Jacobs, 2004). We must explore our
own issues as we explore theirs, be willing to reveal ourselves and be vulnerable as they reveal
themselves vulnerably, care for ourselves as we care for them (see Fahie, 2014), share our stories
while they share theirs, because that is how relationships develop and that is what mutual respect
means. We must be self-aware but not self-absorbed, all the while keeping the focus on them and
their stories (Bergum & Dossetor, 2005, pp. 81–2). In the process, we (researcher and participant)
should have the possibility of coming to new questions and understandings about ourselves and
each other, and our relationship, as well as the substance of our research.
As we interact, we open up to the other, imagining the world through the other’s being,
feeling close to what this person feels, knowing we can never fully imagine their experience, but
trying with all our might anyway, and doing so without losing a sense of ourselves (Bergum &
Dossetor, 2005, p. 55). As we try to become the other, we then have compassion for the other as
we might have for ourselves. They, in turn, might have compassion for us, as our lives and goals
intersect. We become a witness to the other and to ourselves (Laub, 1992, p. 58).
Writing compassionate stories: Being with Jerry in Treblinka

To convey how a relational ethics of care might take place in practice, I offer a story about
accompanying Jerry to Treblinka, where his sister and mother were killed. This story serves two
purposes. First, rather than proclaiming what happened there, the story invites readers to imagine
the moment-to-moment concrete experience Jerry had in Treblinka. It provides the possibility
to feel with and for Jerry and other survivors like him. Perhaps you have had similar feelings or
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Carolyn Ellis
been in similar situations so that this is an opportunity to remember, empathize, compare, and
understand what happened to you and to him more fully and more deeply. Perhaps you have not
had a similar experience, and this story offers a chance to try to understand something unfamil-
iar. Whichever, you as the reader are invited to become a compassionate participant observer in
opening up to and trying to understand life as lived in all its complexity.
Second, this story offers the possibility of putting yourself in my place, as a researcher nego-
tiating the intersection of my roles as friend and researcher. You enter my feelings and thoughts,
as I experience Jerry’s grief and the grief produced from my own remembering. You are privy
to my moment-to-moment decisions, as I do my best to take part fully in this important event
with Jerry and give him my support, yet also preserve our experience for the telling. You become
witness to how Jerry, his family, and I try to create meaning in our trek toward and away from
Treblinka. In the process, you are called to your own meaning making.
This is a difficult piece to read with ghastly images of murder and emotional images of griev-
ing. Some scholars critique using these images in our stories and say we should respect the ‘void’
of the unspeakable and unthinkable nature of the Holocaust (see Lang, 2005). My philosophy is
more akin to that of Charlotte Delbo (1995, p. 86), a member of the French resistance who sur-
vived Auschwitz. She advises us to ‘try to look. Just try and see.’ As an ethnographer, that is what
I do – look, see, relate to, and feel, exploring what goes on in my surroundings and in my heart
and mind, and what I see and imagine goes on for Jerry as he and I move through Treblinka.
“Groaning from the soul”4

Arm in arm, we cautiously yet rhythmically make our way over the uneven cobblestones toward
the memorial at Treblinka. To steady Jerry, I grasp his left arm tightly: his daughter-in-law
JoAnna does the same with his right. Three of Jerry’s grandchildren and our guide traverse
the path ahead of us. Jerry, JoAnna, and I slowly follow the trail bordered by large egg-shaped
stones symbolizing the barb-wired boundaries of the camp and alongside the row of railroad
ties carved of concrete representing the path of the old railroad tracks. Momentarily, I conjure
the image of the trains arriving there during the Holocaust and of the people’s terror as they
were herded down the “road to Heaven” to their fates at this death camp – the men shoved to
the right and the women and children to the left. “To be showered and deloused,” they were
told. From the exhibits at the small museum we visited and the history I have read, I know that
approximately 800,000 people died in Treblinka, almost all immediately upon arrival. I visual-
ize the crowds getting off at the fake train station, with the fake clock and fake ticket window
casting a last ray of hope. How much worse could this be than the long journey in a crowded
boxcar with dehydrated and emaciated people defecating and dying during the trip? They soon
would find out.
I wonder if Jerry and JoAnna are thinking similar thoughts as we walk quietly toward the
monument. The silence feels overwhelming and a sense of tragedy permeates the air. A slight
wind blows and birds chirp, but I quickly block them out, pushing away any semblance of peace-
fulness that threatens to permeate the edge of this dense forest on a summer day. The atmosphere
and the slow, steady pace remind me of the many times I have walked the hill to the burial site
in my home town where my mother, father, brother, and aunt are “laid to rest.” Oh, how I miss
them at this moment. I wonder, is there any “rest” here? I can feel Jerry’s tenseness, apprehen-
sion, and sadness – through my arm linked with his, and I sense – and share – his desire and
reluctance to approach the towering monument up ahead. Please may he find here some sense
of what he is looking for – be it peace, connection, or release of grief. He may have no idea of
what to hope for. I know I don’t; I am just glad to be here, with him, on this journey. Though I
440
think of videotaping, my camera hangs by my side. After quickly filming the entryway, I sense it
is disrespectful to turn it on, to record this emotional, spiritual, and sacred experience.
After ten minutes, we see ahead the garden of approximately 17,000 multi-shaped and multi-
colored stones ranging from the size of a hand to a large tombstone. I take a deep breath and
imagine the piles of burning bodies in the crematorium. I imagine the women waiting in line,
naked, their heads shaven, holding their babies close to their chests as long as they can, while the
men are gassed first, their moans and screams shattering any remnant of hope. Fifteen to twenty
minutes is all it took. Did it seem a lifetime or a quick moment to them? Maybe both. I imagine
the women and children now herded into the gas chamber after the men were shoveled out in
heaps on the other side, some still gasping. I imagine the children – the ones who had not already
been flung against walls, their brains splattering – tossed in on top of the women who were made
to stand with their hands in the air to make room for more. Though I don’t fully understand
why, I must make myself imagine the horror, though I know, and am glad, that I really cannot.5
We talk quietly as we walk, commenting on what we see in front of us. Jerry stops several
times to blow his nose. “I feel like I’m finally able to pay my respects,” he says, “to come to their
grave. If only there was a marker.”
“Maybe we can find the Bodzentyn stone,” I say, remembering that one hundred and thirty
stones are engraved with the names of the towns of the victims. Bodzentyn is the location of the
small ghetto from which Jerry’s mother and younger sister were taken. Delineating the extermi-
nation camp, the symbolic gravestones spread out in a circular formation in front of us as far as
the eye can see. I fear I have raised Jerry’s hopes in vain. Still, it’s worth a try. If the stone is here,
I’m determined to find it.
As we enter the garden, I begin scanning the jagged stones. Quickly, I see what appears to be
Bodzentyn imprinted in large letters on a four foot high stone. Could that be? “Come this way,”
I say to Jerry. “I think I see Bodzentyn.”
“What?” asks Jerry, cupping his ear.
Then, “Stay here a moment,” I motion, fearing I am wrong, and not wanting him to make
the trek for nothing. I quickly approach the stone, and I see that, yes, Bodzentyn is engraved on
its front.
“I’ve found the Bodzentyn marker,” I say to Jerry and JoAnna when I return.
“Really?” Jerry says. His face lights up for a moment before the tears start to fall. “Where?”
“Over there.” Jerry walks fast in the direction I point, and JoAnna and I rush to hold onto him.
“Bodzentyn, there it is,” JoAnna says as we approach the marker. She and I support Jerry until
he can lean on the tombstone-shaped marker. He begins to weep, and we begin to cry quietly
as he hangs his head over the stone and touches it reverently. We take turns gently rubbing his
back, to let him know we are there, then move away, to give him a sense of privacy. Continuing to
weep, Jerry lovingly traces each of the engraved letters with the tips of his fingers. His grandson,
a Brother in the Catholic Church, approaches and prays aloud with him. I note the small pebbles
that visitors have left on top of the marker, signifying permanence and a reminder to all who arrive
that others have been here as well and that we are connected and continue through memory.
Our guide from Warsaw stands apart watching the scene. I think of our trip here and how
the guide’s commentary was halted when Jerry said his mother and sister had died in Treblinka.
The guide turned to Jerry and began asking him questions. If he had not identified Jerry as a
mourning survivor, he likely would be talking to us now, describing what we are seeing, as if we
were tourists. Instead he gives us time to grieve on our own. He acknowledges the sacredness of
our being there, that it is an event in need of no words.
From a respectful distance, the guide takes video of Jerry at the stone. JoAnna also steps back
and snaps a few iPad photos of Jerry. With that, I feel I have permission to record the scene and
441
Carolyn Ellis
Jerry, though I too move away and film for only a short time. Listening to the video later, I hear
weeping and sniffling, and it takes a while to recognize the sounds as mine. Even as I write this,
I sigh and feel deep sadness, which I experience as a heaviness in my body, an emptiness in my
stomach, and tightness in my chest.
Jerry turns away from the stone and signifies with a nod that he is ready to go. “Finally I
have been able to grieve,” he says. “Before I didn’t have a place to come to, no cemetery, noth-
ing.” JoAnna and I link to his arms again and we wander with no purpose around the cemetery,
commenting on the names on the stones. We walk toward the tall monument in the center of
the garden. Standing at the site of the former gas chamber, the granite tower is shaped like a tall
tombstone with a crack down the middle, and capped by a mushroom shaped block covered
with carvings of a Menorah and Jewish symbols. Without a word, we then turn back, forgoing
a visit to the pits of mass graves, the stone arch that marks the location of the crematorium, and
the labor camp section of Treblinka.
We start the long trek back to the car, along the same railroad tracks that brought Jerry’s
mother and sister to their deaths. Jerry will say later that “the railroad tracks were the hardest
part, as I imagined my mother and sister arriving in the boxcar. The death itself,” he will add,
“was swift; at least I hope it was. And I hope they already had lost their minds from shock so they
did not know what was happening.”
When Jerry sighs with relief, I consider turning on the video camera. But that would be
intrusive, I think, and might interrupt the solemn and contemplative mood. Besides, I can’t point
the camera toward him and continue holding his arm. It is most important to be with Jerry, to
support and feel with him. I feel honored that he invited me to be part of this experience. It feels
irreverent to risk making a spectacle out of his grief. I know now that my decision to forego
bringing a film crew on this part of the trip was the right one.
We walk a ways in silence. Still wanting to have a record of this moment, I think that perhaps
Jerry and his family might want one as well. I turn on my palm-size video camera, and continue
walking with it pointed toward our feet, to unobtrusively record the sounds of our steps and our
words. After a while we begin to talk – about suffering, ongoing genocide, relief from suffering
through death, and Treblinka as a memorial. When Jerry says he wishes he could pray better,
JoAnna replies that prayer is “groaning from the soul – it’s not the words that matter.”
“When I left Bodzentyn I knew I would never see them again,” Jerry says, a moan escaping
from deep in his throat. “I feel close to them now being here.”
“They must be smiling,” I say.
“What?” asks Jerry.
“Your mother and sister. To have you here with your daughter-in-law, your wonderful grand-
children. It signifies that their deaths were not in vain. You survived. You survived,” I repeat with
emphasis on ‘you.’ “And through you their memories live on.”
Jerry nods. Then, “Do you hear the birds?” I ask Jerry, suddenly becoming aware of the
chirping.
He says yes. “Their song is beautiful,” I say and he agrees. We walk and listen quietly to the
serenade.6
Notes
1 Thanks to Jerry Rawicki, Jo Anna, and Andrew Rawicki, and their family members, who invited me into
their lives; Art Bochner for discussing and editing this chapter; Sarah Tracy, Patricia Geist-Martin, Melanie
Mills, and Rachel Williams-Smith for their insightful questions; Chris Patti, Keith Berry, and Tony Adams
for lively discussions about this topic; and Vangie Bergum and John Dossetor for their helpful book on
relational ethics.
442
2 This talk, titled “Collaborative Witnessing and Documentary Research: Working with Holocaust Survi-
vors,” took place at the 2014 Ethnography Pre-Conference at The National Communication Association
meetings.
3 See Freeman (2014) for an insightful discussion of the importance of attention – being there fully for the
other – as a major component in considering the priority of the other.
4 This material is published in a slightly different form in: A. Bochner & C. Ellis (2016) Evocative Autoeth-
nography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories (pp. 275–279). New York: Routledge.
5 The information in this section about Treblinka comes from online sites, including: “Treblinka Con-
centration Camp: History and Overview” Available from: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/
Holocaust/Treblinka.html#what) (Accessed 30 December 2014) and “Symbolic Cemetery at Treblinka”
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Treblinka/Treblinka05.html (Accessed 30 December 2014).
6 Later, I give Jerry some photos and tell him about the footage. He says he is glad we have images of
Treblinka, and asks me to send them to his son, Andrew, who could not be with us that day. I write to
Jerry:
I want to make sure you are okay with the story I have written about Treblinka. I have pretty explicit
description in one paragraph of the murdering there and I am afraid it will unnecessarily upset you.
Once I looked up information on the internet about the plane crash my brother was in. I was able to
hear the conversation of the pilots and the cockpit sounds when the crash happened, and it was really
disturbing to me. I don’t want that to happen for you. My inclination is to take out that paragraph
before I send it – its absence won’t interrupt the story.
Jerry writes back:
Carolyn, do not delete a single syllable in your paper. Though the pain will never cease, by now I’m
inured to all the tragedies of the Holocaust. Nothing will ever assuage the memory of the night
in Starahowice after trekking there from Bodzentyn, when I realized I would never see my mother
and sister ever again. So please make your writing as vivid as you possibly can, even as you have to
draw on your personal tragedy the way you described it in your Final Negotiations [Ellis, 1995], or
as I remember the airplane plunging into the Potomac River from your story about your brother’s
death [Ellis, 1993].
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33
SUSPICIOUS, SUSPECT
AND VULNERABLE
Going beyond the call and duty of
ethics in life history research
Mark Vicars
victoria university
Introduction: Checking oneself in the discourse

In 2004, I embarked on fieldwork for my Doctoral study in to the literacy practices of gay men.
Having completed a Masters degree in methodology prior to the commencement of my doctoral
candidature, I reasoned to myself that I probably knew something about what I should be doing.
And, yet, as the imposter syndrome strengthened, I nervously embarked on the fieldwork. I had
assembled, from amongst my middle-aged, middle class, tertiary educated, gay friends, a group of
five men who had been briefed that the focus of our conversations would be about our reading
practices in adolescence. We met twice a month for eight months to discuss, how in childhood
and adolescence, our literacy practices had been intimately involved with, and inseparable from
our implicit queer motivations, involvements and desires. As we referenced how our sexual desires
had positioned us as readers in search of particular knowledge, we told stories of tacit pleasures,
covert relationships, and of the psychic and emotional messiness that emerged from becoming
teenagers in a decade in which the global pandemic of AIDS had produced a zeitgeist of increas-
ing moral panic and hysterical homophobia. As we reflected on how we had invested in discourses
of normalcy (Walkerdine, 1997), our stories of tactically performing passing to re-author and
reauthorize ourselves, our tales of illicit fucking and sucking, falling in and out of lust and love
became connected to narratives of reading, of watching movies on drizzly Sunday afternoons
in the North of England and of inserting in to these ostensibly ‘straight’ texts a queer presence.
Putting the Queer/in throughout the fieldwork, was from the outset, never a deliberate inter-
ruption on my part. I knew that I didn’t want my presence in the interviews to be that of ‘know-
ledgeable researcher’ and I thought I had successfully positioned myself as a responsive audience to
what would be my ‘informant’s’ uninterrupted narrations. On reflection, the first session(s) were
a disaster in terms of ‘data collection’. I found myself doing most of the talking and my intent of
surrendering the interview scene to the informants went somewhat awry. Eliciting feedback, in
the second session, my friends spoke of how initially they didn’t know what to do or say. It was
only after I had shared my experience(s) of texts, that they had a clearer idea of what it was that
we were supposed to be doing.
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Suspicious, suspect and vulnerable
As the stories of our interactions with literary texts emerged, so did subaltern texts of identity.
Stories of disastrous blind dates and sexual adventuring peppered our collective conversations,
and within legitimising institutional discourses ‘Sexual identity is regarded as part of one’s private
life, and therefore, according to the prevailing norms of academic culture, not supposed to intrude
into one’s professional life’ (Wafer, 1996, p. 262). Foucault (1981) has considered sexuality to be
rendered silent by educational discourses and articulates this experience when he says: ‘We know
quite well that we cannot speak of just anything in any circumstances and that not everyone has
the right to speak of anything’ (Foucault, 1981, p. 52). Such a view has its origins in an ideological
system that constructs and legitimises the terms and conditions of how the ethnographer enters
the ethnography and once the enterprise of fieldwork had begun, I soon came to realise that
our way of being with each other was being cultivated by our willingness to participate in those
habits of being through which we had become and are revealed as gay men, what Miller (1988)
has termed the ‘open secret’.
Our confessional conversations, situated in and across a range of lives and contexts, per-
sonal involvements and emotional attachments (Goodson & Sikes, 2001; Sikes et al., 1996) were
grounded in the sharing of our storied selves, and Russell and Kelly (2002) have noted how sub-
jectivity in research information originates with both the researcher(s) and participant(s), each
of whom brings individual experiences and pre-existing perspectives into the research event.
This aspect of life history work – the connection to and with individuals – imbues the act of
research with a personal and ethical force. Being congruent involves taking up an position as a
listener, being beside in the telling of a life story contests the notion that knowledge production
can be disembodied as presence informs and shapes relations. Being situated within and beside,
I suggest, calls for an attentiveness to how ‘Experience, discourse, and self-understandings collide
with larger cultural assumptions . . . A certain identity is never possible; the ethnographer must
always ask not “Who I am?” but “When, where, how am I?” (Trinh, 1992, p. 157). Bines et al.
(1995, p. 43) have suggested a presence that informs and shapes relations:
The constructs held by individuals are likely to involve a mixture of political, ethical
and theoretical ideas which have been shaped by a particular knowledge, values and
experience and by membership of particular social groups.
And, reflecting on the past ten years since I conducted the study, I have become more certain
of my motives for pursuing life history research throughout the last decade. I have repeatedly
questioned what my reasons are for framing and interpreting life history research as a critical
praxis. I remain convinced that reconstructing knowledge from the complexity of the unknown
must surely involve a questioning of the regimes of truth that naturalise knowledge production
and that such a belief draws attention towards the consequences of employing a research meth-
odology that ‘clearly links scholarly work to real-life conditions’ (Trueba, 1999, p.593). I have
subsequently come to position the work of the voice of ‘I’ as a substantive component of ethical
encounter in life history work. On a theoretical level, it has become my conscious praxis of insist-
ent refusal and rebuttal of the silences that surround how discursive practices situate and position
subjectivity vis-a vis the normative. It involves attentive listening to when what lies beneath and
beyond the surface in the telling of tales about individual lives is made material, and method-
ologically it makes presence present as an ethics of careful encounter (Cacciattolo et al., 2015).
I have come to believe the production of knowledge inevitably bears the imprint of its knower
(Smith, 2001) and in discursively interrogating the wider contexts, social structures and social
relations that impact on private and public lives and at the heart of social inquiry there has to be
authentic engagement with the individual. Making a space for and interpreting the intersubjective
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Mark Vicars
in social inquiry is, I suggest, aligned with scholarship which has asked “How do we move . . .
critical, interpretative thought . . . to theory and method that connects politics, pedagogy and
ethics in to action in the worlds?” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, p. x). In my fieldwork, I queried as to
whether a group method of inquiry could have the potential to mobilize social justice concerns,
and I argued that stories of lives reproduced in this way had a wider social and political signifi-
cance as a way of sensitizing the hegemonic to the marginal (Goodson & Sikes, 2001). I remain
convinced of the efficacy of practices of mutual endeavour and of auto/biographical group work
in that it can provide a space for multiple perspectives to be put in to play in which
Every action, or experience simultaneously holds within it the possibility for openness,
dislocation and the trace of the ground that gave it birth . . . it is the social’s shared
nature conducted in the inter-play of the political difference – at once opened and
closed, groundless and grounded – which defines us as beings and reveals to us the
contingencies of the center of Being.
(Bloom, 2009, p. 3)
Research that works out of a different kinds of logic, that is embedded in ‘non-linear relation-
ships and flows’ (Law & Urry, 2004, p. 401), is often seen as being suspect, and embarking on
life history interviews with other gay men in a friendship group, I sensed I was already in trou-
ble. Transgressing traditional epistemic totems and taboos of what are considered to constitute
‘appropriate’ research relationships is bound to a policing of objectivity and subjectivity (Vicars,
2008). Methodological concerns to do with the research/researcher relationship and with subse-
quent interpretivist activity have shifted with a greater awareness for understanding of our own
personal, political and intellectual autobiographies as researchers and the importance of making
explicit where we are located in relation to our research respondents. As Moreton-Robinson
(2013, p. 334/335) notes:
Haraway’s term ‘the God trick’, critiques the disembodied view that knowledge is every-
where and nowhere and calls attention to how all social research relies on the experiences
and knowledge’s of research subjects to inform the research. As responses to research
questions, conversations and observations become the material for analysis and inter-
pretation . . . we make choices about the area and method of inquiry, framing questions
for investigation and developing a conceptual approach based on our identification of
the problematic. These choices are informed by . . . collective meanings and shared
knowledge that exist within and outside of the academy. Researchers like all subjects
who produce history and knowledge, do so under conditions not of our choosing. In
other words how we are socially and culturally constituted through discourse as subjects
play a determinative role in our individual ‘choices’ of research topic and methodology.
Finding familiarity in queer places

Our twice-monthly meetings held at the house of Mother, a long-standing friend of twenty years,
started out as ‘messy affairs’, and it would be fair to say that they didn’t conform to any of my
expectations of what I thought I would be doing when doing research. In our first encounter,
we all brought Mother flowers, who in turn wined and dined us on Mediterranean fare, during
which we partook in scurrilous gossip and ‘dished the dirt’ on each other’s sexual antics. The
ambience provided by kitschy musical compilations had us, after several gin and tonics, singing
along with campy classics of our youth. As the evening progressed and the boundaries between
448
the researcher and the researched were becoming rapidly erased, I became increasingly apprehen-
sive in speaking from and out of my autobiographical experiences. My feeling of hyphenated
Otherness (Fine, 1994) and my axiological anxiety increased with gin and tonic, and with each
utterance my method/ological ‘dispositions, positions and position-takings’ (Luke & Carrington,
2002, p. 2) were situated in, by and through a state of researcher disappearance. Our collec-
tive conversations had not extended much beyond work-place bitching, sex encounters and
boyfriend troubles. This was nothing like my notion of ‘proper’ fieldwork and the uppermost
thought in my mind was, ‘When will I get to collect the ‘real’ data?’
The following are transcripts of the fieldwork reconstructed as dramatic scripts. The per-
formative action is an occasion to place research before the reader as a form of evocative re/
presentation and uses ‘scenes to show rather than tell’ (Sparkes, 2002, p. 45).
Dramatis personae
Mother: Flamboyant, singing and dancing host for the occasion.
Aunty: Mother’s ex-lover, a butch(ish) top (takes the active role in sexual intercourse).
Ingenue: Mother’s protégé and work colleague.
Novice Researcher: Friend to Mother.
Act one, scene one

A dinner party. At the table are arranged four 30-something gay men. Tonight is the first time,
as a group, they have met face to face. Two of the men are ex-lovers of each other, two are current
work colleagues of each other and two are my ex-flat mates from University. The conversation
reveals their chosen occupations – all are teachers – and as Mother, the slightly flamboyant host,
clears away the dishes from the first course, refreshes drinks, and changes the CD to yet another
torch song compilation, he announces:
Mother: Enough, ENOUGH of work talk!
(Mother embarks on a different course of conversation and as the talk shifts to ‘the dishing of
dirt’, the previously formal atmosphere is replaced by squeals of delight, a verbal applause at the
revelation of the intimate. As more and more scurrilous gossip pours forth, appetites are whetted,
another bottle of expensive red wine is opened, and Mother embarks on exhaling the outrageous,
each snippet punctuated with plumes and swirls of tobacco smoke.)
Mother: M . . . testicles are huge and my god can he fuck! All day Sunday in bed shagging, shagging and
more shagging! He just kept on going and going . . .
Aunty: Well, I hope you remembered to douche. I did a guy in London last week and would you believe
it, he had a tuft of toilet paper sticking out of his arse.
(Everybody laughs)
Ingenue: What did you do?

Aunty: What did you think I did?
ingenue: You mean you went ahead?
Aunty: Listen and learn! His thighs were amazing, real rugby-player thighs . . . gorgeous!
Wasn’t going to pass up on those.
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Mark Vicars
Aunty: (To Novice Researcher) And what about you? I have been hearing some interesting
stories about you.
Mother: He taught me all I know. When we first met I was a fresh faced innocent . . .
Novice Researcher: Err . . . well; I was thinking if you had all managed to get a look at the outline of the
research that I e-mailed.
Aunty: Oh we will get to that later, have something more to drink. Tell us about the bathhouses
in Bangkok.
(An hour later, and after what could only be described as a confessional epic, the flow of conversation
started to ebb . . . )
Ingenue: Do you have any specific questions that you are going to ask us?
Mother: Where do you want me to start, I could talk about myself all night.
Ingenue: Well . . . I enjoyed reading Batman, Spiderman and Superman comics.
Aunty: That’s ‘cos you’re a closet Muscle Mary fan! All you were interested in was the pictures of rip-
pling thighs and pecs. It was your formative wank fodder! Do we all remember the cartoon called
He Man? He had unfeasibly large thighs he was absolutely fantastic! I fucking love thighs! If
you look at rugby players’ thighs they are absolutely gorgeous. You know you couldn’t possibly
walk with the thighs of He Man. I love touching thighs . . .
Ingenue: Oh shut up about thighs. Can we talk about something else?
Aunty: What about telly? I have used to have a thing for the Man from Atlantis; he did this flagellic
action that I found very, very erotic. I used to watch it loads and thought it absolutely fantastic!
It turned me on in a way that I didn’t know I could be turned on. I used to look forward to it
on a Saturday evening and once it was finished I was upset ‘cos I had to wait another week to
see it again. I can’t remember what the stories were about but I remember him going through
the water. It must have been terrible special effects, but that action in the water turned me on,
at the age of 8 or 9 that guy turned me on. It plugged me in to the whole idea that you know
I might be gay.
Mother: Oh and Thunderbirds what about that in terms of getting your rocks off, I mean in
terms of cartoon characters. I thought Virgil was the better looking out of all of them in
Thunderbirds .
Ingenue: I must have been about eight or . . . me, my brother and his mates were on the school field, it
was the only bit of grass we had nearby and we came across a porn magazine, a straight porn
magazine. My brother and the boys who lived next door started to tear it all up. There was this
one bit where there was this man or woman and I wanted that bit. I only wanted the page with
the boy bits . . .
During the drive back home after that initial meeting, I was somewhat perplexed as
to what had been going on and I struggled to find anything that I considered could
be of any use. How ethical would it be to tell the tales of sexual intimacy they had
offered when ‘I’ had set out to investigate their stories of their reading practices in
adolescence?
Improbable conversations
As, in subsequent meetings, we gossiped our way through the books and movies of our
adolescence, we spoke of how they became the main instruments for our queer con-
fessions and of how, as we reconstructed texts for our own purposes, our subjectivities
450
shifted. We talked of putting into place interpretive strategies that successfully displaced
what has been called the heterosexual imaginary (Ingraham, 1997), those heterosex-
ual forms of meaning that make it almost impossible to consider being anything but
straight, and of how, paradoxically, straight culture became the rich discursive and ‘tex-
tual space’ wherein we re/produced dissident forms of world and self-making and had
continued to do so.
Act one, scene two

(Four weeks later. The men are seated on scatter cushions; Mother is finishing off lighting candles,
pouring wine, rearranging cushions and making sure that the scattered bowls of olives and nuts
are within easy reach.)
Novice Researcher: How do you feel about doing this as a group?

Ingenue: It’s not a problem, it’s not stopped me talking.
Mother: I am happy to talk about myself. I am happy to talk in a gay context as well, in terms
of my everyday life; I think I live in a very heterosexual world. A lot of my friends
are straight and even though I do have pockets of my friends who are gay we don’t
normally talk about these issues. I mean it’s lovely that we can talk this way about
being who we are.
Ingenue: Yeah! Even though we share lifts to work, we normally don’t talk about this stuff.
Mother: This is just an extension of stuff that goes on in my head so for me I am trying to make
it as sociable as possible. It’s fun!
Aunty I find our evenings very interesting and at the moment it is even more so because at
the moment I live with my parents. I moved back home recently as my Father has been
diagnosed with bowel cancer. I tend not to talk about my life with my parents ‘cos even
though they know that I am gay, it is not part of their life. I go down to London every
two weeks to see my boyfriend and have a fantastic time and then I come back. I suppose
I am living in a very heterosexual bubble so to do this . . . it’s a bit like free therapy.
I was saying jokingly to my boyfriend that this has been good for me as my therapist
only ever made notes rather than recording my sessions. You know when you talk with
people about things and they go ‘Oh yeah, I did that too’. . . you get a sense that you’re
not alone . . . and sometimes you just need reminding that gay people are everywhere.
You know what I mean? (To Novice Researcher) I see you as a person who is actually
in the group but you have to jump out sometimes, I suppose I see you as a subjective
observer.
Ingenue: You are doing a PhD but this is not at all clinical or clear cut and you’re not being
unsympathetic. There is a friendship value to this so I don’t feel defensive; I feel that
you are . . . testing the waters.
Mother: Sweetie, you are being Mark. I actually think you are enjoying yourself, which is quite
nice. I don’t find you a threat whatsoever and . . . I am, it has to be said, thoroughly
enjoying myself.
Aunty: I think that you are getting a lot more than you anticipated. The brief that you gave
us, whilst not narrow I think has been exceeded . . .
Mother: I think the stories will come if you let us talk, that may mean endless eons of tape but I
think the stories will come when we are talking. I have quite enjoyed hearing about our
commonalities tonight. We have all lived through a common experience and thinking
about it geographically, I mean (to Ingénue) you were in the Wirral, I was in Cheshire,
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Mark Vicars
(to Aunty) you were in Yorkshire and (to Novice Researcher) you were in Humberside.
We were in one big line that spanned the breadth of England but we were all living
through this same experience. I think that is interesting, maybe it’s because we are gay
that we recognise those things or may be it is because we were all of a similar age at the
same time.
Gossip has been acknowledged as important in establishing and maintaining social relations and
norms within a group (Blum Kulka, 2000), and Roscoe’s (1996) notion of ‘gay cultur-ing’ refers
‘to the negotiation and formulation of homosexual desire into cultural forms and social identities’
(Roscoe, 1996, p. 201). Throughout the conversations, our various attempts and struggles with
identifying with ‘difference as the grounds for identity’ (Britzman, 1995, p. 161) were referenced,
and any sense of self that we laid a claim to had a foundation in our understanding of selves as
being discursively reproduced. Speaking out of a queer discourse not only framed how we got
heard but also provided opportunities for recognition that were affirming and celebrated the
possibilities for unbecoming, as Foucault (1977, p. 319) has noted:
The critical ontology of ourselves must be considered not, certainly as a theory, a

doctrine, nor even a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating. It must be
conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the manner of critique
of what we are is one and the same the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us
and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.
Act one, scene three

( The men are sat in Mother’s front room. The remains of paella and sangria are strewn across the
floor, and as they stretch out, relax and make themselves even more comfortable, they sink back
into oversized armchairs, stretch out on sofas and start to make fun of the Novice Researcher’s
antiquated tape-recorder.)
Aunty: I’ve enjoyed tonight! It has been good to look back. I think that unless you live in a
world of philosophical academia, which very few of us do, that there isn’t time to reflect
with a group of like minded people about who we are. I think tonight has been very
useful for me because I have been able to say what I am. In the discussions we have had
tonight I have had to think more carefully while I have been talking and about what I
have been saying. I think that through talking together I know myself a little bit more
than previously because in my head my mental voice tends to give out disjointed ideas
but by saying them they have become almost physical and I have been able to see what
I think. Does that make sense?
Mother: I’ve enjoyed the commonalities. We have all had common experiences and since the last
session I have thought about that quite a lot.
Ingenue: I would say that our commentaries on what each of us has had to say have made me
think.
Novice Researcher: How?
Ingenue: Oh . . . about stuff that happened in my past.
Aunty: I don’t feel it has hindered us doing it this way and that is the best you can get. At the
outset I thought that you might have had a set agenda, that you had a list of research
questions you wanted us to answer. What has happened from letting us talk is that
things have come out and I guess that you will be able to pick from that what you
452
need. I think it important that this kind of research goes on because academia becomes
stale without the human element. So often you get to read stuff that is supposed to
be what is in people’s minds, how they feel, but it reads like those doing that research
haven’t actually asked the people. It is the same in education with all that carry on
and talk about psychology of education and the philosophy of children but as a teacher
if you lose sight of that seven year old who comes in to your class in the morning
with a snotty nose and a bloodied knee and . . . if you forget that child you might as
well fucking light a match with your research because if it doesn’t impact back on the
people you are talking about, don’t kill the fucking rain forest to do it. I think of our
conversations as being akin to free verse poetry. If you had started to restrict the stanzas
of our speech by the way you formed the question then you are not going to get out of
it what I think you want. Whereas when you let people talk within a loosely based
frame, as we are doing, then I think we all get more out of doing this. Looking back
I think the second group session was when we got started because in the first meeting
you interrupted us with questions whereas in the second time we met, you just let
us get on with it. While we had to go round the houses I think that you got a much
more rounded and broader response, not just the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, and while they
have their place you are not going to get full marks for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers. I think
that we have got to continually refer to texts and my text is my experiences. Unless I
am allowed to revisit quite a few of them there is no way I am going to bring out the
one that I think is the best one. Revisiting my experiential texts is really a way about
talking about my life in general.
Mother: I think I assumed that this would be quite easy because we have lots of things in
common . . . but (To Aunty) I think your sexuality and personality as a gay man is
very different to mine in respect of your experiences of growing up. I don’t think that
hinders, I think that in many ways it has helped.
Ingenue: I couldn’t have talked to a straight man about some of the stuff I have talked to you
guys about.
Aunty: I don’t think I would have signed up if I knew a straight guy was doing this.
Mother: I don’t think it would have worked. I mean just listen to some of the stuff we
have said and also it wouldn’t have been any fun. This way we have not only
told you about ourselves but we have had fun and camped it up. You couldn’t
do that with a straight guy, so, no it wouldn’t have worked.
Within a space of difference: ethical dilemmas . . . again.
As did E.M. Forster in Howard’s End, I came to realize that the best mantra was ‘only connect’.
The ethics of encounter represented in the life history research within this chapter has situated
critical ontology as having an ethics of presence in which the psychic and emotional ethical
complexities of the ‘Being Here’ space of the field and the ‘Being There’ space of the academy
(Geertz, 1988, p. 148) presses into action a reflexivity of becoming. In interrogating genealogies
of being part of a social group, involvements happen and the meaning that is given or made
occurs in relation to locating the wider social, political and cultural dynamics. Subjectivity, if read
as an ongoing intertextual event, situates performative interactions with others in the world as a
process of becoming through which an understanding of self as a culturally intelligible subject
can be achieved.
Our experiences of queer becoming interpolated us as subjects within inscribed identi-
ties. In revisiting the re-encounter, our stories of self were derived in part and partiality from
our being invested in and taking up a shared identification as a gay man. Our experiences of
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Mark Vicars
affiliation and our taking up of particular ontological positions tells something of our on-going
endeavours with the social performatives of identity as gay men. At the end of the fieldwork,
the men remarked on how their sexuality had and continues to shape themselves in the social
as particular subjects:
I never spoke about my attractions and desires whilst growing up; it would have been
admitting to something of which even I wasn’t sure. People didn’t talk about gay things
in those days, and I was hoping against hope that it was a phase that would pass. My
life was already too different; I was desperately clinging to the idea that somehow, one
day I would fit in and be part of that which was considered ‘normal’. I wanted to get
a minimum of education, a decent job, to have a respectable life, and all the time I was
being knocked back. Britain in the 1960s and 1970s was a very racist and homophobic
society and as a Turkish Cypriot child supplanted into white protestant, middle-class
Hampshire and Hertfordshire, the force of racism HIT! Institutionalization HIT! I used
to wonder if anything else was going to be thrown at me . . . Homosexuality HIT!
How I am perceived is important. We all need a certain amount of acceptance from
people we care about and those we work with; I am not openly gay and I tend to let
people draw their own conclusions. I don’t confront any anti-gay sentiments unless
they are directed at me; being gay is private and I see it in terms of fairness not in terms
of honesty and dishonesty. Growing up, I felt it just wasn’t fair that I couldn’t have all
these things that other people had; I felt like I had been short changed. I didn’t want
a girlfriend; I wanted a boyfriend. Doing this with you, telling you about my life, is
difficult because it is putting me in a position to trust, and I feel that telling anyone
about my life is the highest form of trust. It is about believing that one is not going to
be betrayed. I don’t like being probed deeply and these are not pleasant experiences; I
have put them behind me, and dragging up some of those times nasty times in my life
is not at all enjoyable. Being gay is private, having a private life; except with you, we
have a shared common experience, and there are times when one has to recognise the
context of the telling.
Dowager
Growing up where and when I did, I was easily marked as Other, or as the kids on the
estate put it, A fat poof! I spent my childhood leisurely turning into the archetypal fat
kid, the one who is always last to be picked when choosing sides for the football team.
Since I came out there has not been one aspect of my life that has been problematic.
My urban family love and support me; I now have people in my life who are very
important to me, they have stood the test of time, they love me unconditionally and I
love them unconditionally. We may not see each other all the time, but they are in my
life and I KNOW they will be there for me. I have constructed my own kind of family.
I have seven god children for which I feel an immense sense of responsibility and love
unconditionally. I value that people consider me worthy enough to be a relative and
important factor in their child’s life. I try to be a good godfather; I remember all their
birthdays and I am fantastic at Christmas. What I have always said is that I wanted to
be the godfather that I think I always wanted. I want to be a figure in their lives. I don’t
yearn anymore but I do think that if I had had me in my life growing up, it would have
been marvellous.
Mother
454
It is a typical Saturday morning, my mum and I are sat at the back of the local bus head-
ing out of the village. She is checking her list, making sure nothing has been forgotten
for the big shop in Sheffield and I . . . well, I am tagging along out of boredom. It has
been assumed by my parents that on a weekend, a fourteen-year-old with nothing bet-
ter to do should help with the carrying of the copious bags.
As the bus snakes around the lanes that border one village from the next, I doodle
on the juddering condensated windows. I had failed to notice anything remarkable
about the blanched middle-aged man boarding the single Decker. It is only as he makes
his way along the aisle and starts to look for a seat amongst the young mums and old
age pensioners that I become aware of his presence. He gingerly edges his way around
the collapsible buggies, side-steps the tartan shopping bags, avoids being knee-capped
by wicker baskets and silently squashes himself into a seat a couple away from ours. It
was then my mum leant over and half whispered, ‘That man lives on his own.’
I think she was trying to say this could be you; go down a different track, I want you
to be happy. Throughout the journey, I stared at the back of his head and the thought
that kept running through my head was how in thirty years’ time I didn’t want to be
getting on a bus to hear a mum saying that to her son about me. He journeyed with
us for all of five minutes and in that time I had read his life . . . Once I knew of my
gayness for sure, I said to myself, this could be a bloody hard life. Some might think that
to follow gay tendencies would be relatively straightforward, but homosexuals are out-
siders; they don’t fit in, and they get watched because being different gets equated with
being unsafe. I spent my formative years growing up in the sheltered community that
was a south Yorkshire coal-mining village and grew up being played by the rules. I was
being hit by the subliminal force of what heterosexual men are and of what they did.
It wasn’t until I left the village and went away to university that I thought I could live
that choice about being open or not. I was doing a teacher training degree in Newcastle
and in the press at that time there was a furor about gay teachers being pedophiles. It
was 1991, and the College didn’t ask the question so you didn’t tell. There wasn’t much
around in terms of what you might now call a ‘positive attitude’, so I didn’t want to
be defined by a certain characteristic, a certain flaw. I didn’t want to start my teaching
career apologizing for being different. If I had come out, I probably wouldn’t have made
it through the course, so . . . I chose not. I don’t think there is a term to describe myself.
I would have to make one up, wouldn’t I? Basically, I am a straight-acting man who has
sex with other straight-acting men. I am just a normal bloke who is attracted to men.
Aunty
Sharing our stories of self in the social and cultural encounter meant the rendering of the stories
became subject to shared altered and heightened emotional states. As we referenced how insti-
tutional frameworks shaped and provided contexts for our being, we began to face questions to
do with identity, power and social being and in our re/experiencing vulnerability, we were once
again located in telling relations. Jones (2015, p. 8) has asked, ‘Other than dry academic reports,
how can we retell these stories in sensitive and ethical ways to wider audiences? How do the stories
themselves inspire creativity in retelling them? How can we involve participants in the retelling
of their stories? How much of their story is also our story? When is the gathering of the story
itself, itself the story? How willing are we to let go of ourselves?’ The complexity that comes
with asking such questions can, I propose, be answered by thinking through how as subjects in
discourse autobiographical group encounter presents opportunities for situating presence both
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Mark Vicars
as an analytic category in interpretation of life stories and as a way of putting in to practice an

ethic of care and consideration for the tellers of the stories. Taking into account how the situated
and temporal dynamics of identity and subjectivity are made material in the storying of lives
means putting into consideration how the ‘reconstruction of experience, (is often) a simulacrum
(and) its repetition (is an interpretation) (of ) something more real’ (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 111).
The stories we come to tell of ourselves to others, if read as enactments of subjectivity within
narratives of social action, imply an on-going endeavour of making sense and making meaning.
How we conduct research in the social unavoidably touches the emotional and psychic worlds
of our participants and, as such, we become implicated not only in the retelling of the story but
also in the construction of the story of the storying. How I remain mindful of this responsibility
and how I take into account the dynamic of presence in my research interactions is the ethical
question that I continue to ask of myself as a life history researcher.
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34
THE ETHICS OF RESEARCHING
SOMETHING DEAR TO MY
HEART WITH OTHERS
‘LIKE ME’
Yvonne Downs
university of huddersfield
Introduction
In this chapter I revisit some of the incidents, concerns and pre-occupations that arose for me
while doing research for my PhD and which I see as arising precisely because of what I was
researching, how I was going about it and why I had started it in the first place.
For many years prior to starting my research, I had become increasingly concerned about
the absence of a lexicon (Reay, 2005) with which to articulate my graduate story, the nature of
the enduring influence of higher education in my life, and what this contributed to analyses
of the value of higher education. I was hearing little that resonated with my own experience,
either in policy rhetoric, or in conversations with friends and family who were not graduates
and who had not experienced any form of higher education. Once I began my own research, I
also found that academic research on graduates focuses mainly on employment issues, earnings
potential or social mobility. Research on those who had been graduates for a decade or more
was rare. I thought that talking to longstanding graduates about all aspects of a life, and not just
a working life, for example, would be a good way of finessing and fragmenting the meaning
of value in the context of higher education and that a longer time span would focus attention
not only on the enduring but also the changing nature of the experience, how it plays itself
out over a lifetime, and how this can be articulated in terms of value. Consequently I enlisted
the help of eight other women ‘like me’ – graduates from white working class backgrounds
who had gone from school to English universities in the 1970s – in order to hear their stories.
Therefore my research was intensely personal in that I wanted to make sense of the unruly mess
that constituted my feelings about whether going to university had been a positive move for
me. My hope was to hear counter-narratives to those dominant stories that made little sense of
my experience. But it was also sociological, in the broadest sense of the word, in that it offered
a way to challenge a decontextualized concept of ‘the’ value of higher education, one which
seems able to preserve the appearance of unvarying uniformity and general acceptability while
simultaneously being open to a range of definitions. I now critically review the ethical basis and
conduct of this research.
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Ethics of researching something dear to my heart
Although the main purpose of this chapter is to consider some of the ethical issues of doing
research with a personal agenda involving personal relationships, I have also reflected on the
evolution of my understanding of praxis, or ‘philosophy becoming practical’ (Lather, 1991, p. 11),
and my claim to do feminist research with an underlying moral purpose and a commitment to
critical reflexivity. Praxis in my view is always in process and is informed not only by experience
but also, crucially, by the circumstances in which that experience is located. If I were a journal-
ist rather than an academic researcher, say, I have no doubt that my understandings about and
approach to research ethics would not be what they are now. The contextual nature of what
follows cannot be ignored.
I have organized this chapter into two broad sections. In the first I begin by outlining each of
three kinds of ethics – procedural, situational and relational – and I layer that with a consideration
of the fact that my research was both dear to my heart and purported to involve others’ like me’.
Transitioning to the next section, I then set out what I mean by feminist research as feminist
praxis and how each kind of ethics both informed and created tensions for this praxis. The second
section involves the analysis of two vignettes through the lens of this feminist praxis and with
the critical distance afforded by the passing of time, focusing specifically on the inflections of
power and ethics in relationships. Because it connects most closely to the particular issues I am
highlighting here, I will focus most strongly on relational ethics in this section. But this should
not be taken for its privileging. My argument is that reliance on any one framework is unwise
(Sikes & Piper, 2010). Although it seems to be the case that procedural ethics are institutionally
privileged, and I have found that there are particular instances in the conduct of research in which
one or the other concept of ethics might be to the fore, it is by no means the case that any of
them can ever be discounted.
What kind of ethics?

There tends to be an assumption of shared understandings about what ‘ethics’ means and a
sense in which research ethics is seen as a bounded body of knowledge, a way of conducting
oneself in research situations that is broadly understood and agreed. This is, however, a very
particular view, although it corresponds closely to the notion of procedural ethics, the kind of
ethics enshrined in and fostered by Ethics Review protocols, for example.1 Those whose work
brings them into contact with humans (or human tissue) will require ‘ethical clearance’ by their
institutions. This means that (some, and certain) ethical considerations are brought to the fore-
front of our minds at the very start of the process. This will necessarily lend procedural ethics
a dominant air.
But my own experience led me to conclude that what ethics is, what it is supposed to do,
and expectations about both are not as consistent as the protocols associated with ethics review
might suggest. There are a number of ethical frameworks on which we might draw and this will
influence how we go about our business and, in turn, what it is we share with the world. Sikes
(2010, p. 14) makes this clear when she sets out her ‘bricolage’ approach to research ethics and
Hendry (2013) demonstrates that judgements about what might be deemed ethical in relation to
practices in the world of finance are not static but dependent on whether one is taking a virtue,
utilitarian or Kantian contractualist, or consensus ethics framework. In short, what we mean by
‘ethics’ influences what we give prominence to; how we set limits and draw boundaries; how we
choose the questions we ask; how we articulate those questions; and how we analyse, evaluate
and interpret research. I am focusing on only three particular constructs of ethics here because
they resonated with, and created tensions in, my desire that the conduct of my research should
realize my feminist praxis.
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Yvonne Downs
Procedural ethics
The term ‘procedural ethics’ was used by Guillemin and Gillam (2004), primarily to distinguish it
from ‘situational ethics’. It corresponds to the kind of ethics conceptualized in, for example, the
ethics review process or the IRB. A distinguishing feature of procedural ethics is the assumption
that certain situations and challenges can be anticipated and met ethically even before research
begins. I am not dismissive of the requirement to think in advance about some of the ethical
challenges that might occur (Tolich, 2010), or about how to translate the ethical intentions of
feminist praxis into ethical acts. However, my view of procedural ethics was coloured by my
first attempt at doing life history research when I interviewed my sister about her experiences
at school for a Masters in Educational Research which I was doing at the University of Sheffield
in the UK. I thought I had anticipated the ethical issues this would entail, but only days before
our scheduled interview, our mother suffered a stroke from which she would not recover. My
research went ahead as planned, because my sister said it would be a welcome distraction for her.
However, I was also aware that my ready acceptance of her assurances were silencing a nagging
voice urging me to give my sister more time to think things through.
It is not the specificity of this situation that is most important here, and subsequent conversa-
tions with my sister lead me to believe she would not have changed her mind, and I certainly did
her no harm. Nor does it reveal in a more general way the tensions created when the exigencies
of research are brought into the arena of human interaction. It highlights instead that bridging
the gap between ethical intention and ethical action asks much of the researcher as a human being
in interaction with other human and non-human beings. The review process, however, seems to
have less to do with creating the conditions for the development of ‘ethical wisdom’ (Sikes and
Piper, 2010, p. 176) and more to do with adherence to protocols. Moreover, these very protocols
and the apparent rigour of the process can create a false sense of security. I found it ‘very painful
to fall down the gap between professed intention and action, between what I thought I was doing
and what I was actually doing, without even realising it and despite my best intentions’ (Downs,
2007, p. 73). I was more than mindful to find a way to avoid this experience in future.
Situational ethics
When I began my PhD I was therefore already aware that ‘vigilance in practice and duty to those
I research is infinite and relentless’ (Downs, 2007, p. 73). It is this need for constant vigilance that
sits at the heart of situational ethics. Situational ethics encapsulates the idea that research, certainly
qualitative research involving other people as well as the researcher, is a dynamic process that is
shaped and re-shaped, and that shapes and re-shapes itself, in the course of its execution. The
researcher must be equally alive to the way in which ‘ethics explodes anew in every circumstance,
demands a specific re-inscription, and hounds praxis unmercifully’ (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 176). It
is therefore an ethics in practice and differs from the notion of ethics as fixed set of challenges
against which one can take action or which can be mitigated in advance. It is the ethics of that
which does not fit the form. In my own research on the value of higher education, it came into
play through my methodological decision to work at the interface of autoethnography and auto/
biography (Stanley, 1992). Such a relationship does not signify a particularly innovative approach.
Gubrium and Holstein (2009, p. 22) highlight the linkages between narrative and ethnography
and in fact use the term ‘narrative ethnography’, for example. Nevertheless the prominence of
temporality in auto/biographical research and of situation in autoethnographic research created
the need to look in different directions and from different perspectives simultaneously and to be
alive to the ethical aspects created by those dynamics.
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Relational ethics
The fact that my research involved both my own story and that of other women who were ‘like
me’ demanded a third way of thinking about ethics, one that Ellis (2007) calls relational. Ellis
(2007, pp. ff 4) states that ‘relational ethics requires researchers to act from our hearts and minds,
to acknowledge our interpersonal bonds to others, and initiate and maintain conversations’ and
to ‘deal with the reality and practice of changing relationships over time’. If procedural ethics is
about imparting a sense of sure-footedness, relational ethics is about keeping you on your toes.
The question ‘what should I do now?’ goes with the territory. (Bergum, 1998, quoted in Ellis
2007, p. 4). Ellis (2007, pp. 4–5) asks, ‘If our participants become our friends, what are our ethical
responsibilities toward them?’ and this was particularly pertinent to my own research, where there
were pre-existing friendships and friendships that developed because of it. While this question
can in theory be anticipated and addressed as part of ethics review, this is only to some extent
because the subtle, complex and evolving interplay between humans by its very nature eludes
articulation in language (Buber, 2000).
Research ‘dear to my heart’

A major contextualising factor in this critical review of the ethical basis of my research was that it
was motivated by a personal agenda. It might reasonably be argued that all research is motivated
by a personal agenda, whether that is for instrumental reasons such as furthering one’s career,
or altruistic reasons such as a commitment to social justice, for example. Indeed, viewed from
another angle, what kind of research would it be if the researcher had no personal investment in
it? When I say personal agenda here, however, I mean research on topics and in areas that have a
deeply personal resonance in the life of the researcher, when you would not have started it unless
it answered questions about something you care about in your own life. In this sense I would
say that a personal agenda is a pre-requisite of auto/biographical and autoethnographic research.
Furthermore, all research, even that which is not required to gain ‘ethical clearance’, is suffused
with the need to consider issues of an ethical nature. The ethics of research is not necessarily
greater in research such as mine where the personal agenda was to a great degree explicit (but not
entirely explicit – that would require a degree of self-awareness few possess, and certainly not I)
but they are of a different order and they are often amplified, which to my mind is all to the good.
I designate my research as dear to my heart because it was designed to answer questions that
were important to me personally. I had been seeking answers to them for a while and this reached
a crescendo while I was working as Aimhigher co-ordinator in a college of further education.
Aimhigher, an initiative by the then Labour government in the UK, aimed to encourage students
from groups under-represented in higher education to apply to institutions of higher education
and to continue their education at that level. A much overlooked fact about this policy initiative
is that the definition of higher education and higher education institutions was broader than
doing a full degree at university. This differentiated nature of the educational offer did not pen-
etrate popular consciousness to any extent, but it was one reason that I was conflicted for much
of the time in this role. It also led me to question the value of higher education in my own life.
At the time the fact I had been to university didn’t seem to have done me much good, either
financially, or in other ways such as in my personal relationships. Indeed I recall one moment
of clarity when I realized my situation and the ‘choices’ I faced looked little different to that of
my mother, who had left school aged 16 in 1942. At the same time, and even with the benefit
of hindsight, I knew I would make the same decision again because there was something about
my university experience that was irreplaceable in my life. So there was a personal agenda here
inasmuch as I wanted to understand what that was.
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Yvonne Downs
Nevertheless, this kind of research, particularly when it is realized through autoethnographic

approaches, seems to invoke some trenchant, not to say virulent, critiques. Delamont (2007),
for example, calls it ‘lazy research’, going so far as to question its legitimacy and referring, for
example, to ‘the narcissistic substitution of autoethnography for research’ (Delamont, 2009, p. 51).
Skeggs (2002, p. 349) challenges the ethicality of narrative genres generally in her contention that
that ‘(t)he techniques of telling also rely on accruing the stories of others in order to make them
property for oneself ’. In her critique of reflexivity as ‘confession, catharsis or cure’, Pillow (2003)
has also addressed issues which are pertinent to research in general and to auto/biographical and
autoethnographic research in particular. Needless to say I disagree with Delamont, Skeggs and
Pillow, although I value their critiques as a clear starting point for a critical and ethical engage-
ment with my own views. That notwithstanding, I think the most fundamental issue here is
not the prima facie legitimacy of any particular way of researching, or the criteria by which we
judge research quality. Important as these debates are, the fundamental issue here pivots on the
purpose of the research.
Academic research with a personal agenda that has salience only for oneself is difficult to
justify, even unjustifiable, perhaps unethical. Even if it is not wasteful of the resources that we as
academic researchers have at our disposal, is it a good use of them? Goodson (1999) posits the
idea of the researcher as public intellectual, and as fraught as this notion may be in the current
political climate, this would seem a more appropriate use of public funds. But while my research
had a personal agenda, it was not done simply for the purpose of satisfying personal curiosity.
Saying that my research had a personal agenda and was motivated by questions I had about my
own life is not synonymous with saying it was only relevant to me. If graduates like me were
almost entirely absent from the academic literature, it reflects the fact that we are actually missing
from higher education. Official statistics, imperfect as they may be, confirm that white working
class men and women are still the most under-represented group in higher education in Eng-
land (Ebdon, 2013; National Audit Office, 2008) Combined with my Aimhigher experience, I
suspected that the questions I had were relevant to me because they were relevant to others. My
personal concerns implicated policy (why have a decade of initiatives failed to have an impact?)
and the politics of research (why are long-standing graduates and particularly graduates like me
being ignored?)
Stanley’s (2000) argument that emphasis on the self leads to the social collapsing into interior
processes seems to have less salience here than the early feminist insight that the personal is polit-
ical. I was deeply troubled by the lack of nuance in the stories about participation in higher edu-
cation. Aimhigher presented it as an unmitigated good, some popular storylines cast the presence
of ‘non-traditional’ students in higher education as contaminating, some people told themselves
stories about higher education being ‘not for the likes of me’, others still saw it as a measure of a
person’s worth and so on. None of these stories made sense to me, at least not entirely. If I could
make sense of my own experience, I reasoned, I would be better able to engage with and challenge
those accounts that were failing to help me understand more about the complex, changing and
enduring meanings of higher education as I went through the course of my life.
Research with ‘women like me’

Because I wanted to explore resonances and dissonances in our stories, I wanted to speak to
women who shared some of the structuring variables of my life – white women from working
class backgrounds who, in the 1970s, went to university straight from school or almost straight
from school (and hence followed the same trajectory as their middle class peers). This decision,
of course, creates methodological issues, but this is not my concern here. My concern is with the
462
ethical issues that arise when emphasis is placed on the commonalities or perceived commonal-
ities between researcher and participants.
There are several arguments against the inclusion of the researcher’s story. Martin Tolich
(2010, p. 1608) contends that ‘(t)he word auto is a misnomer’ because ‘(t)he self might be the
focus of research, but the self is porous, leaking to the other without due ethical consideration’.
Whilst I would take issue with Tolich about the degree of ethical consideration that is usually
exercised by those of us doing such research, his point about leakage is an important one and
was further complicated in my case by the fact that my story was so proximate to those of other
women ‘like me’. Although she was by her own admission being deliberately provocative, one
of Delamont’s six arguments against autoethnography is that it ‘abrogates our duty to go out and
collect data’ and another is that ‘we are not interesting enough to write about in journals, to teach
about, to expect attention from others’(2007, p. 3). Delamont expresses here a widely held view
that research is about other people and other people’s lives. Although my research might satisfy
Delamont to some extent, the presence of my own story not only raised the issue of ‘leakage’,
but linking the research to an explicitly personal agenda and then bringing this into proximity
with persons other than myself immediately and forcefully raised other ethical challenges. These
are, particularly, the potential for exploitation and the horror of what both Reinharz (1979)
and Lather (1986) call ‘rape research’, the privileging of the researcher’s story above others, the
imposition of a ‘shared narrative’, ventriloquism, the smoothing out of difference and an enforced
homogeneity.
Principles of feminist praxis

It is apparent from this last point that my research involved the interplay of ethical issues with
issues of power. This is a challenging dynamic with which to engage and my way of doing so
was through the underpinning principles of what I refer to as feminist praxis. My understanding
has been shaped with reference, rather than adherence, to Bhavnani’s (1993) engagement with
Haraway’s (1988) discussion of what ‘feminist objectivity’ might mean. There are three things
to add to my own engagement with Bhavnani. First, she may not acknowledge any similarity
with the original in my interpretation (although I do believe I have stayed faithful to that).
Second, although the application of criteria such as these can become a mere tick-box exercise,
thinking through how principles may be realized or jeopardized in practice was a useful rubric
in making ethics review more than simply procedural. Finally, I use the term ‘feminist praxis’
here but I would say these principles are applicable to notions of praxis in general, regardless of
its incarnation.
The first principle that guided my feminist praxis concerns responsibility to participants.
It is vital that what you do, and the way you go about it, does not re-inscribe participants
into prevailing representations. For example, some narratives of higher education represent the
presence and inclusion of working class students in higher education in terms of excess and
as contaminating the academic ideal and undermining the prestige of having a degree. This is
not without precedence. (Skeggs, 2004, p. 99) states that ‘the working class have a long history
of being represented by excess’. She further maintains that the dynamics of race and gender
are serving to cast white working class women as ‘the abject of the nation’ (2004, p. 23). This
is an important issue for procedural ethics because to my mind ethics review has a hand in the
re-inscription process. A major raison d’être of ethics review, it might be argued, is to pro-
tect research participants from unethical researchers and research practices. But it also assumes
researchers, or more accurately the academic institution in which researchers are located, need
protection from participants should they become litigious. This means that both researchers and
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Yvonne Downs
participants are represented as simultaneously devious and infantile and naive. Quite apart from
the tension this creates, it is precisely the juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible traits which
Said (2003) identified as a powerful mechanism in the process of ‘othering’. Taking account of
this principle alerted me to the need for something more than the procedural. Another aspect
of one’s responsibility to participants is that representations of participants should not minimize
the presence of structural factors but nor should they valorize or romanticize participants. This
was a major consideration when crafting participant stories, which were used in the research,
but it also came into play when I was face to face with the co-participants, as I referred to them,
as I will illustrate shortly.
A second principle requires that research should be cognizant of the macro political context
in which it is carried out. In my study on the value of higher education, this included factors
such as the marketisation of education, the politics of academic research and widening par-
ticipation policy rhetoric. Reference to the macro political context also necessitates awareness
of the historical moments in which research is located. My co-participants and I were talking
in the 21st century about events and experiences that had happened decades before. It would
be erroneous to have seen this only as something to be addressed methodologically. Revis-
iting our younger selves at a time when the position of women was in some respects unlike
that of today, and in others unchanged, is in many ways an ethical issue inasmuch as it forces
a confrontation with identity at the point where ‘private troubles’ and ‘public issues’ collide
(Mills, 1959). None of us, on the day we were born, could have anticipated the trajectory our
lives would take. Our educational life histories represent ‘border crossings’ which have in turn
necessitated an ongoing engagement with our personal ‘life politics’ (Goodson, 2011), and this
process is imbued with deep emotional undercurrents, the depths of which can be estimated
only partially in advance.
The third principle, that research should account explicitly for difference, speaks directly to,
and makes usefully problematic, the ‘like me’ in my title. There are two aspects to the notion of
difference here. Ontologically there are of course commonalities and divergences in our biogra-
phies. But there is also an epistemological aspect. Although we might have shared an experience,
the knowledge and sense making frameworks and traditions on which we were drawing, thirty
years and more later, were not shared. The fact that this was ‘my’ research from which only I
would benefit concretely and directly, and the fact that the contribution of the co-participants
in analysis, interpretation and sense-making was entirely at my discretion, cannot be addressed
through methodology alone. Indeed it is methodology itself that disguises here the strength and
extent of the epistemological warrant on which the research proceeded. The word ‘co’ is no
match for ‘auto’ in this instance.
It is for this reason that I consider the final principle, which insists on transparency around the
micro-political processes of research, to have been paramount in this study. It is apparent from
the above that everything we do as we go about doing research, from our broad methodological
allegiances to the minutiae of its day to day conduct, is implicated in a broader political agenda,
whether we intend it to be or not. But quite apart from this, seemingly small acts have a political
significance of their own, inasmuch as they echo broader power relations.
Having now talked in broad and general terms, in the next section of this chapter I will ani-
mate these points through the use of two conversational vignettes, brief composites of some of
the things that happened when I went to interview women for my research. They are conceits –
they have been composed by me to make or bring to the fore certain points – but the incidents
contained within them are not fictitious, even though they have been condensed and fictional-
ized. Likewise the ‘participants’ in the vignettes are composite representations, but they are each
drawn from two actual participants – different ones in each vignette.
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Feminist praxis in research

For Bhavnani the micro-politics of research are most clearly to the fore in the research interview
because you are literally being brought face to face with them. She says of her own experience,
as a woman of colour working with younger people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, that ‘the
interviewees and myself were inscribed within multi-faceted power relations which had struc-
tural domination and structural subordination in play on both sides’ (Bhavnani, 1993, p. 101,
original emphasis). But these processes of domination and subordination are not easy to explicate.
Firstly, both researcher and participants are multi-dimensional in their own right and the com-
plexities of this are compounded in their interactions with each other. The locus and nature of
power, and how it becomes manifest, also shift and change. This means that grappling with ethical
issues needs to be sensitive not only to individuals but to the dynamics between individuals and to
the context in which these interactions take place. As unsatisfactory as this would be considered
in a ‘how to do ethical research’ textbook, the best I could achieve sometimes was to take a call,
do the best I knew how, and to own the consequences of that.
First vignette: When private troubles and public issues collide

The context for this first vignette is that I arrive early to interview a co-participant. I ring the
bell and no-one comes. I am standing there, nervous, wondering what to do when the door is
opened. The participant speaks first.
• Sorry about that I was on the phone

• No problem I’m early
• I’ve made lunch. We won’t concentrate if we’re starving and I’ve done a cake to have with
our tea later. You did say you drink tea?
• That sounds great. Thank you. You shouldn’t have gone to any trouble.
• My mother would never forgive me if I let you go away hungry
• She sounds like my mam
• Is yours still alive?
• No she died a year ago.
• Mine died last month
• Oh I am so sorry for your loss.
She bursts into tears. I fumble for tissues and pass her one. She speaks:
• How embarrassing. I bet you feel like running off.

• Not at all. It will get easier in time.
My purpose here, apart from animating the concept of relational ethics, is to show how power
dynamics are imported into research settings and evolve in the conduct of research. I found this
demanded a more nuanced approach to ethics than adherence to any one framework might
suggest. Although I had initiated the relationship, I was on this woman’s territory and she was
the one who determined the start of the encounter. Moreover, despite creating a particular role
for her, namely co-participant, she did not simply acquiesce in its occupation. She foregrounded
other roles for herself, those of ‘hostess’ and ‘daughter’, for example, she had views on the optimal
conditions for research interviews that did not entirely accord with my own, and she consid-
ered herself at least my equal in creating those conditions. Moreover, she saw in the face to face
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Yvonne Downs
encounter with another woman ‘like her’ the chance to articulate her grief. But the attempt to
subvert my research agenda was not, and could never be, all encompassing. Ultimately I had not
only the power but also her permission, thanks to the participant consent form, to steer things
in my direction. But I did not feel so secure in this. Two questions fought it out in my mind.
‘What kind of person would simply ignore the suffering of someone standing in front of them?’
‘And what kind of researcher would allow themselves to be put in a position where they might
do more harm than good?’ because at this point I had no way of knowing whether I was being
cast as therapist. Was this woman crying simply because of the perceived commonalities between
us or did she see the interview as having some therapeutic value?
Ellis and Bochner (2000, p. 757) maintain that stories should have a therapeutic purpose but,
where the creation of those stories involves others, the ethical implications are complex. In par-
ticular it demands a relationship with the participant that the researcher may not be willing or
able to maintain beyond the interview and it fixes researcher and participant into a particular
power relationship – with the participant in an arguably subservient role. It has, in short, great
potential to fall foul of the principle not to re-inscribe participants into prevailing representa-
tions. As a researcher I had already set a particular relationship in play that would inevitably
compromise any other. I re-iterate that I am not reading this situation through a methodological
lens but through an ethical one. Given that I was neither willing nor felt able to enter into a
therapeutic relationship, I asked if she wanted to continue participation in the research. I had
specified in the participant consent form that participants could withdraw from the research at
any time, but finding myself in a position where this could become a reality was no small matter
for me as my research population was already limited (very few working class girls were in higher
education in the 1970s). I had found it hard to find women to talk to and I was worried about
losing anyone, having found them. The fact that I did ‘the only honest thing’ (Delamont, 2009,
p. 51) speaks to the power of relational ethics as much as it does to my personal integrity. It is
illuminating that I addressed this diversion of my own agenda by re-imposing my own. I am not
unsympathetic but distance myself, reject the role of fellow traveller on grief ’s road and, in the
offer of a tissue, redirect the flow of power. This speaks eloquently to the way in which ethics
and antecedent power politics are manifested in particular research situations.
Second vignette: Friendship and research

I interviewed each of my co-participants twice and the following conversation is one that begins
after completion of a second interview. The participant here is not the same as in the first
vignette, in the sense that she is drawn from two different, but still actual, co-participants. She
speaks first.
• I can’t believe three hours have gone by.

• I am so sorry – I know I said it would take about two.
• Me too.
• Before you go I have tickets for a Damien Hirst retrospective. I think it would be right up
your street. Do you want to come?
The purpose of this vignette is to highlight issues around friendship in research. Goodson
and Sikes (2001) advise caution in working with friends, but I was left with little choice because
of difficulties in finding participants. Furthermore, friendship is not a unitary concept – it takes
different forms and can change in nature. Two of the women I worked with were already friends
of mine. Friendships also developed in the course of research, and of these two have endured.
466
And I was certainly friendly with them all. Although I am concentrating on ethical issues here,
there are of course methodological challenges attaching to researching with friends and becom-
ing friends with research participants, and it is not always easy or wise to see these as separate.
For example, it was talking to a friend about the difficulties I was having that led her to suggest
her own participation. I initially intended to use this interview as a ‘pilot’ but changed my mind
because I felt to do so would be too dismissive of her contribution.
Despite differences in their form, there are certain characteristics that friendships share and
these highlight some of the issues attaching to relational ethics. One of the key elements of
friendship is trust and this will either be imported or will develop in the research setting. Finch
(1984) has highlighted the fact this may make the research setting feel safer, but it also increases
the potential for exploitation, primarily of the participant by the researcher but also of the
researcher by the participant. I was very conscious about the times the research interview went
off track – or I when I was led off track. It was difficult for me to deal with this. On the one
hand it would have felt too clinical to say, ‘That isn’t relevant for my research so I won’t respond’.
On the other when interviews took longer than I had allowed for on the participant information
sheet, I felt conflicted. It was one thing for it to take up more of my time – after all, that was my
research. But everyone I interviewed had full and busy lives. Less altruistically, sometimes the
most trenchant points were made through these digressions and I didn’t want to interrupt this.
Particularly when interviewing friends that I had before doing the research, and therefore where
I might have felt less inhibited about interrupting, I often didn’t for reasons of ‘getting good data’.
Hence behaving ethically as a friend and doing the best I could in terms of the research were not
entirely and not always compatible.
This dilemma also played itself out when someone cried as I interviewed them. It is apparent
in the first vignette that these were times when I (re)took command. I was not unmoved in the
face of their distress, but I didn’t cry with them, although I cried later while I was transcribing
interviews and crafting their stories. I am still not sure how and why I held myself in check.
Perhaps I didn’t consider it appropriate researcher behaviour, or perhaps it was previous training
in ‘holding safe’ those in anguish. Whist this was laudable on the one hand, on the other it set up
a power relation in which I as researcher remained in control.
A further issue concerning friendship in research is that I did worry about how the partic-
ipants would react to what I wrote about them. All the participants read their own transcripts
and were able to amend and edit and redact what they had said. My analysis was done through
the crafting of stories about their lives as graduates and they also read these. All gave permission
to share their stories with other participants and most read, and commented on, all the other
participant stories. It therefore wasn’t so much on their behalf that I was worried. I felt I had
ample assurance that they were satisfied I was not out to misrepresent them. It was on my own
behalf that I was troubled. I was worried that what I wrote would damage existing or burgeoning
friendships. Although it did not ultimately influence the decisions I made, it did cause me some
sleepless nights.
Conclusion
Re-visiting how I went about my research and certain in the knowledge that no-one has sued me,
or contacted me to express regret at their participation or the way in which I represented that, and
staying in contact with half of the women who took part, has given me the confidence to look
with a more critical eye at the ethical conduct of my research than I might have done had any of
these things occurred. Although the requirement of procedural ethics to anticipate ethical issues
prior to beginning research was useful in some respects, I was wise on this occasion not to let it
467
Yvonne Downs
lull me into a false sense of security. I was also wise to the ways in which it might run counter
to the principles of my feminist praxis. This time I was aware of the constant vigilance required
by situational ethics and the necessity of attending to relational ethics.
And yet, in terms of my ethical conduct, doing the right thing as a researcher was sometimes
the very thing that made me behave in ways that I would not have done otherwise. My own
view, formulated over time and informed by my particular experiences, is that it is wise to see
research as a human enterprise, one that is integrated with a range of researcher and participant
identities and activities. This does not obviate the need to attend to the fine grain of specific research
acts and situations and to set these in congress with particular ethical rubrics. But I would argue
that the primary function of such protocols is not the protection of research participants, includ-
ing researchers, but the mitigation of the consequences of unethical breaches for the pockets
and reputation of their institutions. Even with the benefit of hindsight, I still feel that research
that proceeds from a deep involvement with other people, regardless of the form that takes, can
never be other than challenging and uncomfortable and require versatility and sensitivity in its
realisation. And this might equally be applied to life in general.
Note
1 Academic research in the UK, with which I am familiar, that involves humans or human tissue is reviewed
for its ethicality before it is allowed to proceed. There are similar review processes and protocols in other
countries, such as the IRB in the US.
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35
HOW STORIES OF ILLNESS
PRACTICE MORAL LIFE
Arthur W. Frank
university of calgary
vid specialized university, norway
I must put myself into words.

Michel Foucault1
Reprinted by kind permission of
University of Chicago Press
from Foucault, M. (2014)
Wrong Doing and Truth Telling
Some illness stories may seem to be just about illness. Other stories explicitly present illness as a
occasion for posing questions that can be called ethical or moral, although most storytellers would
find those words pretentious. The title of Arthur Kleinman’s book What Really Matters (2006)
provides a useful gloss on the meaning of moral and ethical in everyday life.2 Moral action is doing
what has a sense of rightness about what matters above other things. That sense of rightness
can be more or less open to dialogue with those who might disagree and more or less open to
accommodation with situational contingencies.
Rightness shades into necessity; at one extreme, what is moral are ways to act and ends to seek
that a person believes must be, their particular ought trumping other claims. Other moral action
is hesitant, with its inherent uncertainty balanced against a practical need to act. Some moral
action is reflective in the sense that the actor, if asked to account for the action, can cite a source
or principle. Probably more often, people’s sense of what is moral is better described as embod-
ied. Acting that way is felt to be right, and that feeling is as unquestionable as feelings of love or
anger; the feeling is its own justification. Thus in any moral action, multiple continua intersect:
monological to dialogical, consciously reflective to pre-consciously felt, imperative to uncertain.
Serious illness is a privileged occasion for considering what really matters, most obviously
because illness threatens to shorten life’s timeline. Faced with finite time, ill people have to reset
priorities; they have to rethink what does matter most. What matters is challenged by the variety
of strangers who enter an ill person’s life, each making claims to act for and on the ill person.
These strangers include persons – health-care professionals, neighbours, and family members on
whom one is now dependent or who claim a role – as well as institutions that act by imposing
routines, requirements, and protocols. Not least, the strangers include the physical impedimenta
that attend treatment and care: everything from IV pumps to monitors to pharmaceuticals. These
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How stories of illness practice moral life
too impose schedules and tasks, making claims. These human and non-human strangers, in their
different forms, often assert different priorities for what really matters. Thus, illness is when moral
worlds, each with its distinctive sense of rightness, can collide, each challenging others and being
challenged.
Stories are a distinctively useful means for sorting what really matters; four reasons stand out
for mention.3 First, telling a story allows a person to be both the first-person protagonist in the
story and also the narrator reflecting from some distance on the actions of that protagonist. Espe-
cially important in telling illness stories, the protagonist can at that point in the plot be distraught
and distracted, while the narrator can keep the narration on track. Second, characters in stories
run into other characters whose perspective differs from their own. Sometimes, that difference is
merely curious; other times, it can be troubling. The story’s plot may be continuing conflict or
reconciliation between those different perspectives. Third, stories can leave matters undecided,
open to future consideration and subsequent events. At the end of a story, ambivalences can
remain, and maybe even have to remain.
Fourth, these features of storytelling converge in the easily recognizable plot of a character
who finds him- or herself uncertain how to proceed, a condition symbolized in European folk-
lore by being lost in a forest. Through a series of encounters with other beings – helpers and
antagonists – the protagonist eventually discovers, or rediscovers, what really matters and learns
to act on this knowledge. That discovery, with its mixture of knowledge and will, is what makes
the protagonist worth calling a hero. In folklore, that discovery is often symbolized as a marriage
or a reunion; the reaffirmation of the moral requires at least two.
Thus for any person, but most immediately for the ill, stories are a useful, even essential,
medium through which to reevaluate what really matters, both in relation to oneself and in rela-
tionships with others. At the core of any relationship is a degree of agreement about what really
matters, what is well done, and what is wrong. Stories describe relationships, and storytelling
builds relationships. Whether or not a story includes an explicit evaluation of what happened,
any story appeals for its listeners’ assent. How the events are narrated – emphases, inclusions and
omissions, choices of description – already reflects an evaluation, although the storyteller may
become aware of that evaluation only in the course of the telling, or not at all. In monological
storytelling, evaluations claim to speak a last word. In dialogical storytelling, no evaluation ever
finalizes the story. Especially in stories of one’s own life, endings are necessarily provisional. Any
character could go on to act differently. Retrospective interpretations could change.4
An appropriate figure or metaphor for thinking about stories and what really matters is the
Möbius strip, a strip of paper given a half twist and joined at the ends. At any point on the curve
of a Möbius strip, one is neither inside nor outside; the figure deconstructs that opposition. A
story is worth telling because a prior sense of what really matters makes particular events narrata-
ble – that is, worth telling a story about – but what really matters emerges only in the course of the
story’s telling. Stories are how people regain a sense of what really matters in their lives – that is,
what is ethical, or moral, or good in the sense that philosophers since Aristotle talk about the good.5
Telling stories is especially important when a prior sense of what matters has been disrupted and
rendered questionable. Stories, as one form of narration, do not offer any solution to questions
of what matters. And yet, the telling of the story is itself a form of solution. One story not only
leads to the next; often, one story seems to require another story. Somewhere in that chaining of
stories, a sufficient clarity of purpose and action may emerge.
The next section of this chapter develops the moral purpose of telling stories about illness by
discussing one storyteller, Anatole Broyard (1992). The subsequent sections expand the scope by
discussing types of narratives that people use as resources to tell illness stories, and the possibili-
ties of these narratives for making different kinds of moral arguments. Most of my examples are
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Arthur W. Frank
skilled storytellers. My final storyteller is too inexperienced in life to have become skillful, and
that makes him a good example of how human artfulness in storytelling, if not quite innate, can
be realized with a minimum of resources.
Being a good story

These ideas about why people need stories, especially during illness, are given voice in a fragment
from the literary critic Anatole Broyard.6 Broyard died of prostate cancer about twenty years ago.
Although his disease progressed quickly, he left some remarkable writings about how he sought to
preserve his humanity in the condition of illness. Broyard (1992, p. 45, original emphases) writes:
I would also like a doctor who enjoyed me. I want to be a good story for him, to give
him some of my art in exchange for his . . . Just as he orders blood tests and bone scans
for my body, I’d like my doctor to scan me, to grope for my spirit as well as my prostate.
Without such recognition, I am nothing but my illness.
The moral suffering of illness is its reduction in the scope of the self and its possibilities. The patient
becomes nothing more than a sum of complaints, recognized and suspected symptoms, conclusive
and inconclusive tests, scans, and treatments. Thoughts become nothing more than an interior mon-
ologue of bargaining – “If I’ve got disease x, that’s still better than y”. Fears seep into every moment,
specifically fears of further diminishment. What matters about living becomes lost in the instru-
mental requirements of remaining alive. Broyard needs an ally against being diminished by illness;
he needs his physician to recognize that he has a spirit as well as a prostate – that he still seeks what
really matters in life. The story Broyard seeks to be is the medium of that alliance to sustain the moral.
Broyard does not want merely to cope with illness. He wants to use his illness to enlarge his
sense of self – the self that is the subject of the story he wants to be. That enlargement of self is
reflected in his posthumous book’s title, Intoxicated by My Illness. Broyard wants us to take seri-
ously this hyperbole that imagines illness as a form of ecstatic state. In more restrained language,
he refers to critical illness as “a great permission” (1992, p. 23). For what, we might ask? Permis-
sion to make of one’s life the kind of story it has not yet been permitted to be. That is the core
plot of a good story in Broyard’s and my sense: becoming what one has never permitted oneself to
be, or perhaps a more completely realized version of what has been permitted.
Broyard’s other claim in the quotation above is his need for his physician’s recognition of the
good story he wants to be. Recognition, of course, goes well beyond one person simply perceiving
another’s presence. Human recognition involves each affirming value in the other. The particular
morality of recognition is its seeking to be mutual. Broyard titled the lecture from which I quoted
“The Patient Examines the Doctor.” Recognition begins with each’s awareness that the other
person is examining, evaluating, deciding what sort of person she or he faces.
Broyard wants his physician to recognize him as telling – and living – a good story. A story
becomes good when it reveals what is valuable about the self, but here again we encounter the
Möbius strip: what counts as having value emerges in the telling of the story. In illness stories,
what is valuable can be simply the capacity to continue to tell the story in adverse conditions. But
is any story an ill person tells necessarily a good story? If so, is what really matters entirely relative,
a matter of personal subjectivity? I doubt Broyard would think so. How, then, do we tell a good
story about ourselves by being able to discern when a story is good? There is, I believe, no answer
in principle. Discernment is a matter of practice.
Is it going too far to suggest that if there could be a foundational understanding of what
is good in life, a solid consensus about what really matters, we humans would not need to tell
472
stories in any sense that exceeds exchanging information and offering occasional amusement?
Broyard’s work, the moral practice to which his illness calls him, is to make a good story out of
a bad situation. By telling his story, he will teach himself, then his doctor, then a wider circle of
readers, what a good illness story can be. Not what it must be, but what it can be. Discerning a
good story, knowing what to tell and what to attend to when listening, is a matter of experience.
In Aristotle’s language, it requires phronesis, the practical wisdom gained through disciplined
experience (Frank, 2012).
Broyard offers his story as an example of a good story, hard-won through his experience and
contributing to the readers’ experience. Such examples may be as close to the good as humans
can get. No examples can ever exhaust the possibilities of good stories. Examples can excite the
imagination of other possible good stories, which I believe is Broyard’s objective and certainly
is mine.
What some types of stories are good for

After reading a number of first-person narratives of illness, it becomes possible to identify types
of stories; but to what end? Again, the core presupposition is that telling a particular type of story
is a form of moral practice, and it is through practices that people acquire and refine their moral
being. Telling particular sorts of stories both reflects and develops what can be called a moral
habitus, that is, a sense of rightness that comes to be experienced as second nature.7
The value of naming types of stories is to help the people who are telling these stories to under-
stand what kind of story they are now telling, and thus what their moral practice is. That reflective
knowledge matters, if one believes as I do that the stories people tell affect how they experience
their lives.8 Allowing one type of narrative to define personal experience has predictable effects on
what a person can experience. To anyone telling the story of his or her life, the question is: If you
keep on telling that kind of story about yourself, how will things turn out? And then: Can you
imagine how telling a different type of story might lead to experiencing life differently?
This section of this chapter revisits the narrative types of illness stories described in my earlier
work (Frank, 2013); the following section proposes some new types. My work in the 1990s was
founded on the trope of the wounded storyteller, with Broyard as one exemplar. I meant this phrase
to complement the more frequently used trope of the wounded healer. I wish I had kept count,
over the years, how many times I have been mis-introduced as the author of “The Wounded
Healer.” That slip shows the cultural bias of putting the healer in the protagonist position in sto-
ries about illness – exactly the bias that I was working to unsettle. Others had done a good job
speaking as and about wounded healers. My task has always been to give equal air time to those
seeking healing. But those who introduced me incorrectly were not entirely wrong. Wounded
storytellers do become healers.
The Wounded Storyteller proposes three core narratives that are the resources ill people use to tell
their individual stories. My premise is that any storyteller faces two complementary problems: a
problem of composing the story and a problem of being understood by others. The solution to
both problems is to base an immediate, local story on a narrative that has broad cultural recog-
nizability. I identified three such narratives of illness: the restitution narrative, the chaos narrative,
and the quest narrative. Few actual stories are ever of one narrative type only, but in most stories,
one type predominates, with the other two in the background.
When people frame their experience within a restitution narrative, the action looks forward to
the end of treatment, when the storyteller expects to have his or her former health restored, or
at least a proximate version of their former health. That restoration to physical health is what
really matters, and whatever happens along the way is evaluated in relation to that ending. Thus
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Arthur W. Frank
as a moral practice, restitution stories effect a reconciliation between personal preferences and the
medical demands of treatment; the latter trump. Such a moral practice breaks down when the
body requires recognition that health is not being restored. At that point, one option is for
the person to cling to the restitution narrative despite all evidence to the contrary; the moral
vocabulary expressing this practice includes such terms as “being a fighter” and “not giving up”.
Alternatively, other narrative resources have to be found to tell a different story.
My second type, the chaos narrative, is actually an anti-narrative form of storytelling, in the
sense that Samuel Beckett’s (2011) 1953 play Waiting for Godot is an anti-narrative. Beckett’s pro-
tagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, are incapable of mobilizing themselves to movement; they can
only wait. In chaos narratives, the protagonist can only be oppressed by afflictions so interwoven
that no effective response is possible. Fixing one problem seems impossible because what that
would require is also broken, out of reach as a resource. The tacit and sometimes explicit message
is that nothing can be done by anyone. What really matters is, effectively, nothing.
Yet chaos anti-narratives sustain a minimal form of dialogue. These stories reach out, in their
own frustrated and frustrating way, in part because the narrator describes the chaos is at some
distance from the protagonist living that chaos. Someone telling a chaos anti-narrative seeks
others’ recognition of how bad things are, and if that recognition is offered unqualified – which
is a big if for healthcare providers – that can be the beginning of a new story. For those living in
chaos, holding their own begins with gaining others’ recognition of how oppressive the mutually
exacerbating forms of suffering are.
The quest narrative, my third type, proposes that through the experience of illness, the self
can become not necessarily happier, but perhaps more fully human. What really matters is, as
expressed by Broyard, a final opportunity to enlarge the scope of the self. Their heroic qual-
ity makes stories within the quest narrative closer to what healthy people want to hear from
those who are ill, but quest stories also confront and challenge those who are healthy. Unlike
the feel-good stories of personal growth that become the stock rhetoric of support groups and
fund-raising, quest stories are bluntly honest about how awful illness is. Between the Pink Ribbon
and the Cancer Sucks buttons, quest stories choose the latter. That realism is evident in the advice
offered by the novelist Reynolds Price (1994, p. 183), in his great memoir of illness and disability,
when he recommends becoming “the next viable you, a stripped-down whole other clear-eyed
person, realistic as a sawed-off shotgun and thankful for air”. What really matters is creating a self
in stories that are the practice of that creation.
Writing The Wounded Storyteller I resisted presenting these three types of narrative – restitution,
chaos, and quest – as a stage theory, much less as a teleology. Any ill person almost certainly needs
all three types at various times during illness; each has its work to do, and that work is never
finished. Each type of narrative can generate good stories. If I can presume to rephrase Broyard,
with a loss of his pithy concision but a gain of descriptive accuracy, an ill person should want to be
not “a good story” for his doctor, but rather a succession of stories that are each good according
to the needs of different moments. My revised statement opens up the frequency with which a
person’s multiple stories contest each other. The dialogue is not only external with other people
and their stories. It is also internal, between a person’s own diverse and contradictory stories.
Resentments and transcendence

Within the narrative types of restitution, chaos, and quest, other stories are embedded. These sto-
ries depict particular moments in the illness trajectory. I want to propose four types of embedded
stories, each of which can be a good story through which to avoid the diminishment that illness
always threatens.
474
The first type can be called resentment stories. Every illness narrative includes a resentment
story, but Reynolds Price (1994) may be the master of this type. Two of his stories are about
how physicians deliver bad news. Price sets the scene of first story with pitch-perfect precision:
At five o’clock on that second day, I was lying on a stretcher in a crowded hallway,
wearing only one of those backless hip-length gowns designed by the standard
medical-warehouse sadist. Like all such wearers I was passed and stared at by the usual
throng of stunned pedestrians who swarm hospitals round the world.
(p. 13)
Price and his brother awkwardly try to pass the time, when “we saw my two original doctors
bound our way with a chart in hand.” These doctors proceed, there in the hallway, to tell Price
that he has some sort of swelling – possibly a cyst or possibly a tumor – in his spinal cord and
they recommend immediate surgery. “Then,” he writes, “they moved on, leaving me and my
brother empty as wind socks, stared at by strangers” (p. 13).
Price’s artfulness as a storyteller is most evident in the next section of the story, the evaluation.
He writes:
What would those two splendidly trained men have lost if they’d waited to play their
trump till I was back in the private room for which Blue Cross was paying our mutual
employer, Duke, a sizable mint on my behalf?
At least on private ground, with the door shut, the inevitable shock of awful news
could have been absorbed, apart from the eyes of alien gawkers, by the only two human
beings involved. It might have taken the doctors five minutes longer, and minutes are
scarce, I understand, in their crowded days. I also know that for doctors who work,
from dawn to night, in the same drab halls, it all no doubt feels like one room. But any
patient can tell them it’s not, and I’ve often wondered how many other such devastating
messages they bore that day to actual humans as thoroughly unready as I for the news.
(p. 14)
Later in Price’s medical odyssey, much the same thing happens, and he tells this story far more
briefly by means of a single metaphor:
The presiding radiation oncologist had begun our first meeting by telling me, with all
the visible concern of a steel cheese-grater, that my tumor was of a size that was likely
unprecedented in the annals of Duke Hospital – some fifty years of annals.
(p. 41)
I am able to add a coda to Price’s first story. I had the privilege of spending some time with
Price, and he told me that after his recovery – after the radiation treatments left him paraplegic
but alive – one of the hallway internists continued to be his physician and eventually asked
him to meet with medical students. One of these students challenged Price about the hallway
story, idealistically asserting that no physician would deliver such news so badly. Much to
his credit, the internist immediately acknowledged that he had been that physician, and the
scene had happened just as Price described. I think of that as a moment of true healing for
all concerned.
Why tell these resentment stories? Physicians call them “doctor bashing” and immediately
tune out, just as nurses go into denial when confronted with stories about bad nursing practice.
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These are hard-working people who deserve our respect, but they reduce the story to being an ad
hoc complaint and then argue whether or not it is fairly directed. The specific complaints are real,
but beyond its specific complaint, resentment stories may be better thought of as performative –
their telling itself is what really matters.
One of the epigraphs to my own At the Will of the Body (Frank, 2003) is from stage notes
written by the playwright Christopher Durang. “Unless you go through all the genuine angers
you feel,” Durang writes, “both justified and unjustified, the feelings of love that you do have will
not have any legitimate base and will be at least partially false. Plus, eventually you will go crazy.”
That quotation resonates for me as strongly as when I found it twenty-five years ago. Many times
during the last decades an ill person has told me that she or he worried about being crazy because
of resentments they held, until they read someone else’s resentment story about being treated the
same way and thus became able to speak of their own resentments.
Durang is also right about his more contentious claim that these stories need to be told
whether the anger is justified or unjustified. Price is careful to imagine the physicians’ perspec-
tive that made their actions justifiable to themselves. Any story can be retold from a different
perspective, changing its moral force. What matters is that unjustified angers can drive you just as
crazy as justified ones, and telling the stories behind those angers can help people feel less crazy,
and that is one goal of moral practice.
A second type are trickster stories (Frank, 2009). Numerous tricksters populate folklore – North
America’s coyote, raven, and Br’er Rabbit; Africa’s Ananzi the spider; the Norse god Loki; the
Greek god Hermes, at least in his youth (Hyde, 1998). Tricksters differ considerably, but they
share certain qualities that give tricksters an affinity with ill people. One is that tricksters often
get hurt, although ill people wish they had tricksters’ powers of regeneration. A second is that
tricksters can be remarkably stupid – diagnosis with a serious illness induces mental fog – but in
the next moment they are equally remarkably inventive. Third, tricksters and ill people are both
underdogs, having to make their way amid more powerful beings. And fourth, tricksters are good
at getting out of traps, even if they have gotten themselves into the trap. That is the trickster
quality ill people most need to emulate. The most troubling quality of tricksters is that they often
hurt other people, and only some of those people deserve what happens to them. Holding that
hurtful quality as something worth worrying about, tricksters provide a useful model for how to
be a patient; telling trickster stories is a form of moral practice.
In At the Will of the Body (Frank, 2003) I write about a moment when I discovered the pleas-
ure and power of being tricksterish. The night before I was scheduled for surgery for cancer,
I was just getting to sleep when the door of my room opened with no knock, the light was
switched on, and with minimal introduction an anesthesiologist began asking me questions
relevant to the next day’s surgery. Unfortunately, he was planning to do the wrong operation,
he spoke too rapidly and unclearly, and he seemed intent on looking at me as little as possible.
He was, in short, exactly the kind of physician who drains a patient’s confidence the night
before surgery. As he was leaving I had one of the very few inspired moments I’ve ever enjoyed
while being a patient.
I realized the perfect revenge was to hold out my hand for a handshake. The last thing he
wanted to do was actually touch me, to acknowledge me as a person. But because my bed was
between him and the door, he couldn’t ignore me. He shook my hand and fled. Or at least I was
able to see his departure as flight. For him, it was probably normal locomotion. My moment of
tricksterism may have meant nothing to him, but it gave me a sense of renewed confidence. That
renewal is what really matters in trickster stories.
The actor Evan Handler’s (1996) memoir about his years of being treated for leukemia tells
a trickster story from late in his treatment, after Handler has had a bone-marrow transplant
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and consequently has a suppressed immune system. His central line becomes infected, which is
life-threatening given his lack of immune response, and no surgeon shows up in his hospital room
to pull the line. I have never understood why in that cancer centre a surgeon was required for
this simple task, but institutions have their particular rules. Handler’s oncologist, whom he calls
Dr. Melman, tells him there is nothing more she can do to get a surgeon there to pull the line.
Handler plays a verbal trickster, pressing her to get action. Please remember that he is now an
experienced patient, unlike Price in my earlier stories.
“Dr. Melman,” I asked. “What is the recommended action for an infected catheter?”
“If the infection can’t be cleared, Evan, then the catheter should be removed.”
“And if the infection is not cleared and the catheter is not removed, that could be a
dangerous situation. Am I right?”
“Theoretically, yes. Of course.”
“So, if I have an infected catheter, and it’s been three days, and it hasn’t been removed,
and you can’t give me a date and a time when it will be, how is it that I’m receiving
adequate care?”
“You are receiving adequate care, Evan,” I was told. “Because this is the best care
that the hospital can give you.”
It was the purest doublespeak I had ever encountered outside the pages of George
Orwell’s book . . . But I never thought Dr. Melman really ascribed to it herself. I can
only guess, but I choose to believe that Jesselyn Melman was embarrassed by the state-
ment, and that’s why, the next day, only four days too late, a surgeon arrived in my room.
(Handler, 1996, p. 226)
The point is not that Handler’s verbal fencing induces the surgeon to arrive any sooner,
although Handler might be right that by forcing Dr. Melman to say out loud and thus admit
to herself what was going on, he did get her to make a stronger case to her colleagues. Less
speculative is Handler’s need to put on a show to convince himself of something about him-
self. To recuperate a sense of self after illness, Handler needed to practice showing himself he
could act even in a situation of comparative powerlessness. In good trickster fashion, he finds
a crack in the system and breaks it into an opening through which he can escape what traps
him. We have circled back to what Durang writes about having to tell certain stories in order
to avoid going crazy. That is why Handler has to tell the story, and it is why his story can be
such a valuable resource to other patients, who have to find their own trickster moments, lest
they go crazy.
A third type of story – and these types are by no means exhaustive – can be called transcendence
stories. In these stories, a self that is mired too deeply in itself, often in its embodiment of pain,
finds itself suddenly transported outside itself. These stories are about moments of grace, when a
universe that seemed cold and hard is revealed to be filled with spirit and wonder.
Lous Heshusius (2009), who lives in disabling pain as a result of an auto accident, begins her
memoir emphasizing how completely chronic pain isolates those who suffer from it. This iso-
lation is as communicative as it is physical: pain defies the sufferer’s attempts to find sufficiently
descriptive language that can show others how bad it is. But there are moments of relief. Her
story of one such moment begins with a quotation from the therapist Jon Kabat-Zinn. “Have
you ever noticed,” Zinn asks his reader, “that your awareness of pain is not in pain even when
you are?” (Heshusius, 2009, p. 37). This question is not to be answered, but rather it can only
be meditated on, and from this practice something happens that makes real what Kabat-Zinn is
suggesting.
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For Heshusius (2009, p. 192), one of those moments comes when she is able to sit in her back-
yard. At the end of winter, deer come there to feed. She learns to recognize one deer in particular
and names him Beauty. She writes:
[Beauty] brings a healing power whenever he walks into my backyard. Always on his
time. Expected, yet unexpected. He comes. He goes. As true beauty, he just visits . . .
Something is stirred in me by Beauty’s hovering presence. He spreads out the pain,
thins it, lightens it, and transforms some of it into a softness that ripples away into the
nature that surrounds us. Into something beyond myself that nevertheless holds me.
That last phrase – “something beyond myself that nevertheless holds me” – shows why tran-
scendence stories are the purest expressions of what really matters. The moment that I call – by
no means adequately – transcendence is when one thing matters so much that all else disappears
into the background, however momentarily.
Living such moments is good, but making what-really-matters matter seems to require telling
the story of such moments. Heshusius is doing what Broyard wants to do: she is being a good
story, not to her doctor but to her readers. She needs those readers for the same reason Broyard
needs the recognition of his doctor. A crucial principle is at work here. Only when a story is told
to another person can it be told to oneself with full conviction. In other words, people tell stories
to others because listeners enable storytellers to believe the stories they tell to themselves. Stories
always have two audiences, one external and one internal, and the internal audience absolutely
needs the external audience.
Although transcendence stories seem to be a pinnacle, let me propose one final type of story,
in part to anticipate one significant objection, and also to underscore how storytelling works in
all these types of stories. Elsewhere (Frank, 2013) I call these stories borrowed narratives, but here
I will call them mirroring stories. One person hears another’s story, sees his or her life reflected in
that character’s situation, and both adopts and adapts that story as his or her own. The hero of
that story becomes an alter ego, both an imagination of the self and a companion. The objection
I anticipate is that my three storytellers – Reynolds Price, Evan Handler, and Lous Heshusius – are
all skilled storytellers; they have rich narrative resources to work with. Many people lack these
resources. One way these people still tell stories is by borrowing a story and making it their own.
The most poignant example I know of a storyteller who borrows is a boy named Willy,
described by Cheryl Mattingly (2010) in her research on families in which a child is chronically
ill. Willy is not ill, strictly speaking. When he was a toddler, his slightly older sister attempted to
cook, and a pan of boiling grease was tipped onto Willy’s face. He spends his childhood having
a series of reconstructive surgeries. One aspect of his treatment is the requirement that he wear
a fitted mask at all times, in order to minimize scarring. The mask itches and is uncomfortable.
The need to wear it causes all sorts of family tensions until, in an inspired clinical moment, the
occupational therapist who is fitting Willy for a new mask says, “Now you look like Batman”
(p. 181). The masked-superhero becomes a narrative Willy can borrow. He works through a
series of identifications with masked heroes until he finally settles on Buzz Lightyear from the
Toy Story films. Buzz is an astronaut who has crashed on earth and refuses to take off the visor on
his helmet, because he believes earth air is toxic. That becomes a narrative explanation for why
Willy cannot take off his mask. It is a story he can live with, literally.
Hospital workers learn to co-construct this story in which Willy mirrors Buzz. Here is the
opposite of Reynolds Price’s story about being told bad news in the hospital corridor. This time,
Willy and his mother might look like those “stunned pedestrians” in the corridor. But they are
experienced patients who know just where they are, which is sitting in a waiting room that is
478
situated adjacent to the corridor. A physician who treats Willy but is not seeing him that day
happens to walk past. “‘To infinity and beyond!’” he calls out to Willy and his mother, without
breaking his stride. Mattingly observes their smiles and immediate relaxation as they react to a
phrase Mattingly calls “quintessential Buzzspeak” (p. 182). The physician is showing that he
speaks his patient’s preferred language. That addresses fears that haunt Willy’s mother, that the
staff will not recognize her son for who he is. To return to Broyard’s language, she fears that the
doctors will probe only Willy’s scar tissue, not his spirit.
I conclude with Willy, because he reminds us that every storyteller is always borrowing stories:
recognizable plot lines, character types, metaphors and other tropes. Mattingly shows us how
Willy artfully adapts Buzz’s story to fit his life. He not only sees himself in the mirror of Buzz’s
story – Willy actively shapes the mirror to offer the reflection he wants and needs. This child
shows that storytelling is the most democratic of human capacities, lending itself to any level of
capacity.
Readers will have noticed that these four types of stories overlap, just as the three narratives
of restitution, chaos, and quest weave together in any specific narration. Evan Handler’s trickster
story can also be heard as a resentment story, and the story of the physician speaking Buzzspeak
to Willy can be heard as a transcendence story, with the physician being to Willy something like
what Beauty the deer was to Lous Heshusius. Stories, like tricksters, refuse to be trapped in the
categories where academics place them. But over the years I have heard from many ill people who
say it helped them to be able to name their stories as one particular type of narrative. Naming
narrative types helps people to understand what some particular story is doing for them – what
kind of companion the story is (Frank, 2010) – and the limits of what it can do. Knowing the
names of multiple types of stories helps people realize why they may need more stories of dif-
ferent types, and it connects them to examples of such stories that they can borrow and adapt.
Coda: What really matters

Telling a particular type of story places a person within the gravitational field of a moral world,
with its weighting of what really matters. To describe people choosing what type of story they
tell, and thus choosing what really matters, is true but incomplete. People choose what stories
to tell, to whom, on what occasion, but their choices are predisposed. We humans come into
consciousness – we begin to think in language – with stories already in our heads (Zipes, 2012,
pp. 6–7). Those stories are the medium of coming to consciousness, and they become templates
that affect both how we tell our own future stories and who else’s stories we pay attention to.
Yet predisposition is never determination; people do choose. People tell stories that modify,
combine, and recreate previously recognizable narratives. Doing so, they create their own sense of
what really matters.9 These acts of creation are both deeply personal and inextricably dialogical.
When stories are told, we should hear in the background the many storytellers who gave the
present storyteller her or his sense of possibility. Equally to be acknowledged are those listeners
who not only allowed but enabled the person to be a good story for them. In their recognition,
the suffering of diminishment is forestalled a little longer.
Notes
1 Foucault (2014: p. 167).
2 Kleinman (2006) tells the stories of several people whom he has known personally or, in one case, through
his writing. In these stories, Kleinman explores the distinctive morality of decisions that were initially
difficult for him to understand. The interplay is complex between the stories that these people knew
that informed how they lived, the extent of people’s capacity to narrate their own lives, and Kleinman’s
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narration of the person’s life. Kleinman’s usage of moral is given greater philosophic specificity, but still
within a context of ethnography of illness, in Mattingly (2014, see especially 36–41).
3 For reasons of length, I finesse attempting to define a story, as opposed to other forms of narration. In
the briefest terms, a story is a narration in which a protagonist confronts some difficulty or crisis, action
occurs, and there is an ending that may or may not be a resolution. Stories involve crucial elements of
plot, character, and suspense; they are perhaps most distinguished by how they arouse the imagination of
both teller and listener. See Frank (2010), especially chapter 1, in which I focus on what stories are able
to do – what their capacities are – compared to other narrative forms (for example, a technical-scientific
account of a process).
4 My distinction between monological and dialogical echoes Mikhail Bakhtin. See Frank (2004).
5 For one recent version of neo-Aristotelian ethics applied to health and illness, see the “Afterword” in
Frank (2013). Mattingly (2014) presents a more detailed scholarly overview.
6 For a different exploration of Broyard’s statement, see Frank (2014). That essay, in turn, links to a previous
one.
7 My usage of habitus in this instance owes more to Sloterdijk (2013) than to Pierre Bourdieu. For Sloter-
dijk’s sympathetic critique of Bourdieu’s habitus, see 2013: 178 ff. For Sloterdijk, moral life is effected
through practices. I argue that storytelling is central to these practices.
8 The core argument of Frank (2010) is that humans know what we know as our experience because of
the stories we tell about experiences.
9 Hearne and Trites (2009) is an especially fascinating collection of stories about reimagining stories to
make them good companions.
References
Beckett, S. (2011) Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press.
Broyard, A. (1992) Intoxicated by My Illness. New York: Clarkson Potter.
Foucault, M. (2014) Wrong Doing and Truth Telling. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Frank, A. W. (2003; 1991) At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness. New York: Mariner Books.
Frank, A. W. (2004) The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine, and How to Live. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Frank, A. W. (2009) Tricksters and truth tellers: Narrating illness in an age of authenticity and appropriation.
Literature and Medicine. 28. (2). pp. 185–99.
Frank, A. W. (2010) Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Frank, A. W. (2012) The feel for power games: Everyday phronesis and social theory. In B. Flyvbjerg,
T. Landman & S. Schram (eds.) Real Social Science: Applied Phronesis. pp. 48–65. Cambridge UK: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Frank, A. W. (2013) The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (2nd edn.). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Frank, A. W. (2014) Being a good story. In T. Jones, D. Wear & L. D. Friedman (eds.) Health Humanities
Reader. pp. 13–25. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Handler, E. (1996) Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors. New York: Owl Books.
Hearne, B. & Trites, R. S. (eds.) (2009) A Narrative Compass: Stories that Guide Women’s Lives. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Heshusius, L. (2009) Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hyde, L. (1998) Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: North Point Press.
Kleinman, A. (2006) What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life Amidst Uncertainty and Danger. New York:
Oxford.
Mattingly, C. (2010) The Paradox of Hope: Journeys Through a Clinical Borderland. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Mattingly, C. (2014) Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Price, R. (1994) A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing. New York: Atheneum.
Sloterdijk, P. (2013) You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity
Press.
Zipes, J. (2012) The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
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36
THE ETHICS OF RESEARCHING
AND REPRESENTING
DIS/ABILITY1
Dan Goodley
Rebecca Lawthom
manchester metropolitan university
Introduction
This chapter reflects upon three research projects that Dan had collaboratively led with colleagues
and brings in Rebecca to critically reflect with Dan on the theoretical, analytical and relational
issues raised by these projects: issues that are all inherently ethical considerations. The feminist
philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2013, p. 170) defines a good theory as ‘creating new concepts as a
source of inspiration’ and, crucially, that theorizing brings with it consequences; ‘thinking is about
the invention of new concepts and new productive ethical relations’ (p. 104, our italics). In this chapter
we seek to explore the ethics of representation, particularly as it relates to dis/ability research. Our
starting point is that any encounter with ethics should include the reflexive consideration that
researchers must reflect on (and account for) the possible implications of their intellectual work on
potential perceptions (and conceptions) of those participants that they work with. These respon-
sibilities are heightened when one’s research engages with people whose lives are often ignored
by educational and social scientific literature: disabled people. We consider the role of narrative
inquiry in the study of dis/ability: an emergent trans-disciplinary area of study that seeks to engage
with the dual processes of disablism/ableism and disability and ability. We then critically reflect
on three dis/ability projects that drew upon narrative inquiry to explore the ethics of representing
dis/ability. Project 1 — Parents, professionals and disabled babies: Towards enabling care, was an ethno-
graphic study of disabled babies and young children, their families and associated professionals. A
key learning point from this work is that dis/ability knowledge is always being contested, and this
places an ethical duty of care upon researchers in relation to how they frame dis/ability. Project 2 —
Does every child matter, Post-Blair? The interconnections of disabled childhoods examined what life was
like for disabled children/young people (aged 4–16) and their families in the aftermath of the
changes for children’s policy and practice since 1997 set in motion by the New Labour govern-
ment in Britain. As in the first project we combined ethnography and interviews with children,
their families, communities and professionals. We discovered that ethically researching dis/ability
requires creative social theories that respond affirmatively to the personal and political actions of
481
disabled children and their families. Project 3 — The psychopathology of the normals involved sending
an email to a disability research mailing list asking disabled members to share their ‘favourite’ sto-
ries of how the non-disabled respond to disability. One consequence of this project was that Dan
and some of the email respondents participated in an ethical and theoretical debate about how to
best understand the emergent stories. The debate was, in part, resolved through recognizing that
dis/ability and disablist /ableist processes are co-constituted at the mundane level of the everyday
as well as being structurally and hegemonically located. The chapter concludes with some further
considerations for narrative research and the study of dis/ability.
Explaining dis/ability studies

Before developing a critique of the ethics of representation in narrative inquiry in the field of
dis/ability studies, it would of course make sense to briefly outline, unpack and explain this
trans-disciplinary field of inquiry not least because such a description will illustrate the par-
ticular saliency a consideration of research ethics has for those working in this field. Dis/ability
studies is described in Dan’s 2014 book as an emerging field of critical scholarship that seeks
to understand and contest the practices of disablism and ableism (Goodley, 2014). Disablism
relates to the oppressive practices of contemporary society that threaten to exclude, eradicate and
neutralize those individuals, bodies, minds and community practices that fail to fit the capitalist
imperative (Goodley, 2014, p. xi). According to Carol Thomas (2007), the disabled feminist
scholar, disablism not only places people with physical, sensory and cognitive impairments on the
edges and peripheral boundaries of everyday life, disablism also threatens to get under the skin;
undermining psychological and emotional well being. Disablism is, then, something specifically
experienced by people who are considered to be disabled (Goodley, 2014, p. xi). Ableism, on
the other hand, refers to a set of potentially stifling social, political and embodied practices that
inflict us all (Goodley, 2014, p. xi). These are practices associated with a contemporary society
that increasingly seeks to promote what Campbell (2009) terms the ‘species typical individual
citizen’: a citizen that is ready and able to work and contribute; an atomistic phenomenon cut
off from others, capable, malleable and compliant. Ableism breeds paranoia, confusion, fear and
inadequacy. Ableism is an ideal that no one ever matches up to (Goodley, 2014, p. xi). As McRuer
(2006) carefully puts it: compulsory ableism is to disablism what compulsory heterosexuality is to
homophobia. Ableism provides just the right amount of temperature and nutrients for disablism
to grow. Ableism has in mind, then, a vision of the ideal citizen: productive, competent, capable,
independent and autonomous, ideally suited to the economic and cultural landscape of advanced
neoliberal capitalism (McRuer, 2006). Think here, for example, of the ideal student or learner of
the Western school: a highly performing and academically achieving individual who meets the
performative requirements of testing. Now, while many students fail to reach these high stand-
ards, disabled students often find themselves on the edges of educational communities; not least
because they are also subjected to disablist practices that fail to include a diverse body of learners
and learning styles in an increasingly narrow ableist curriculum and educational culture. Dis/
ability studies also engages with the constitution of disability and ability (Goodley, 2014, p. xi).
Ability stories are ubiquitous (Goodley, 2014, p. xii). They speak of a phenomenon normatively
understood as an a priori capacity to do something and, often, to do something well. When Dan
thinks of his beloved football team (or ‘soccer team’, to those of you of a North American or
Antipodean persuasion), Nottingham Forest F.C., he is reminded of a number of players over the
years whom we would describe, along with my fellow fans, as having ‘wonderful natural talent’
(Goodley, 2014, p. xii). There were other players who had good ‘engine rooms’, never knew when
to stop running or gave 110% each game (it is always 110% in football commentaries). But, when
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Researching and representing dis/ability
we think more broadly and more seriously of ability (and here we have to acknowledge, against our
better judgment, that football is only a game) we find that one person’s abilities are compared with
another’s (Goodley, 2014). An individual’s ability can only ever emerge in relations with others. It
has to be acknowledged, recognized and nurtured. The problem with ability is that, just like the
high expectations of fans of their (in my case, low achieving) football teams, when we think of
ability we have a destiny in mind. This destiny is associated with success. Away from the football
field, such linear, certain and expectant notions of ability undergird many societies’ values around
what it means to be a valued human being. For many of us, ableist expectations are impossible: they
are set as impossible dreams for many (Goodley, 2014). And, as a snowball effect, ability picks up
speed, expands in nature, drawing into it cognitive, economic, cultural factors to become a mon-
strous entity: a great ball of ability. One might say that in its beginnings ability emerges as a seem-
ingly benign concept. We all want to have abilities of some kinds in order to live. But when ability
grows in scope and reach and remains fundamentally linked to the valuing of distinct individual
traits, qualities and characteristics, then it becomes an individualized, anti-social and idealized phe-
nomenon: wary of anyone or any practice that gets in its way (Goodley, 2014). We lose the idea of
distributed competence and locate performance in individuals. Yet, as we write this, we still worry
about our Dan’s football team and wonder: are his anxieties ableist, elitist and exclusionary? Is there
something troublingly desirable about the notion of ability? Or is the problem of ableism when it
is allowed to stop being a story, a debate, a conversation and becomes a fixed ideal (Goodley, 2014)?
So what do we know about the Other of ability – disability? Professional narratives, espe-
cially from medicine, psychology and social policy, tell us that impairments are sensory, physical
and intellectual differences or limitations (Goodley, 2014). Impairments are also endlessly being
identified, constituted, constructed, diagnosed and treated. The Diagnostic statistical manual (now
on version 5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) regularly updates with a contemporary
reproduction of deficit or non-normativity. Impairments may actually be part of the process of
disablism and cultural artifacts of the ableism industry that is quick to categorize those ways of
being in the world that fail to match up to – or, worse, threaten – global capitalism (Goodley,
2014). This feeds into another project: the disability project, or what Longmore (2003) defined
as the disability industry, in which the finding of disability provides an opportunity for the expo-
nential growth of the educational and rehabilitation industries. Playful stories have been told
about the non-disabled, a concept strategically appropriated (Linton, 1998, p. 14) so that ‘disabled
is centered, and non-disabled is placed in the peripheral position in order to look at the world
from the inside out . . . Centering the disabled position and labelling its opposite non-disabled
focuses attention on both the structure of knowledge and the structure of society’ (Goodley, 2014,
pp. xii–xiii). The non-disabled are a curious lot, constituting a community that reacts in the most
contradictory ways to the presence of disability (Goodley & Lawthom, 2013). We might also
refer to them as the normals: another tongue in cheek but serious moment too that recognizes
normality as the preferred way of being (or, what philosophers would call ‘the preferred ontology
of everyday life’) (Goodley, 2014, p. xiii).
A recurring story of this chapter – and one that we have already been unfairly using without
any explanation – is that around dis/ability (Goodley, 2014). This is a split term that we believe
acknowledges the ways in which disability and disablism (and disability and ability) can only ever
be understood simultaneously in relation to one another. The slashed and split term denotes the
complex ways in which opposites bleed into one another (Goodley, 2014). People find it difficult
to define ‘normal’ and ‘ability’ but are far more ready to have a go at categorizing ‘abnormal’
and ‘disability’. Dis/ability studies keep disablism and ableism, disability and ability, in play with
one another to explore their co-construction and reliance upon one another (Goodley, 2014). It
allows the reciprocity to be examined.
483
This leads us, perhaps inevitably, to the role of narrative inquiry as a methodology for unpack-
ing our understandings of dis/ability and as a methodology for contemplating ethics. Narrative
inquiry invites us to consider stories of disablism, ableism and dis/ability; raising a number of
methodological, analytical and theoretical considerations. Narrative inquiry has enjoyed a long
history of association with studies of dis/ability. For example, the work of the Syracuse Centre on
Human Policy in the States has been hugely important in illuminating the meaning of develop-
mental disabilities through the deployment of narrative methodologies. Specifically the work of
Robert Bogdan and Steven Taylor has drawn on narrative methods, including in-depth interviews
and storytelling, to represent the expert voice of disabled people (e.g. Bogdan & Taylor, 1976,
1982). In Bogdan and Taylor (1982, p. 216), they re-present the stories of Ed and Pattie (‘people
with the label of mental retardation’ [sic]), and ask:
What then is the ‘truth’ about Ed and Pattie? . . . The truth of Ed and Pat’s condition
cannot be explained by deferring to official definitions of their problems. Their com-
pelling words require that we give them at least as much credence as we do their judges.
Narrative gives voice to those who are often spoken of by more powerful others. In contrast, Ed
and Pattie offer their opinions on intellectual disabilities:
The word ‘retarded’ is a word. What it does is put people into a class. I like mental
handicap better than mental retarded. The other word sounds nicer . . . my day’s gonna
come through . . . I’m gonna tell them the truth. They know the truth. All this petty
nonsense.
(Ed Murphy, cited in Bogdan & Taylor, 1982, p. 77)
These insider accounts contrast markedly with outsider/etic accounts of clinicians and physi-
cians. Ambitions and experiences are made available over signs and symptoms of impairments:
Case studies of individuals force us to acknowledge their competencies, sometimes quite

hidden from public view, and the existence of which further strains the credibility of
arguments purported to define or explain the nature of retardation.
(Levine & Langness, 1986, p. 192, italics in original)
Narrative accounts of people have clarified the socio-cultural nature of dis/ability as well as
revealing the consequences of the processes of disablism and ableism. Narrative methodologies
have thus had a hugely revolutionary impact: contesting traditional, medicalized and authori-
tative accounts and replacing them with personalized stories that reveal the ways in which any
personal stories are always framed by socio-historical narratives of dis/ability. To acknowledge
the sociology of disability (that lurks behind a personal narrative) is an ethically important aspect
of social research, especially when one acknowledges the many ways in which dominant societal
knowledges have individualized disability discourse, thus making it an issue of personal tragedy
rather than a question of politics.
Unpacking dis/ability representations

The empirical projects described below were qualitative social scientific studies utilizing various
methodologies, methods and analytical frameworks. At the heart of these projects was narrative
inquiry. Every study worked alongside a host of professionals and disabled people and their
484
families in a wide variety of health, social care and educational settings in order to access their
personal stories. A case can be made for the ways in which each of these studies target and
straddle disablist and ableist aspects of contemporary life (Goodley, 2014, pp. 67–8). Disciplines
demand intellectual conventions. In the social sciences there is a tendency to draw upon rich
empirical data and information from respondents, participants and in some cases co-researchers.
Here, there is a need generally for empirical data. In the humanities, it is an analytical convention
to draw on a few sources in a partial and directive fashion (Goodley, 2014, p. 68). We want to
encourage a pan-disciplinary study of dis/ability that is flexible, reflexive and imaginative. We
are interested in a dis/ability studies that is prepared to draw on variegated sources of knowledge
from a plethora of disciplinary and theoretical places. We will give you an example. One of the
things we enjoy doing in our jobs is working with education and psychology professionals at
doctoral level around their research projects. One of the ways in which these researchers face the
methodological and analytical task of doctoral research is to ask what new sources of information
or empirical data can be gathered in order to address a research question, aim or problem. Many
is the time when we speak with teachers and psychologists who have over 20 years of experience
but do not consider this experience as stories worthy of consideration. Research as something to do
empirically rather than something that has already occurred and been experienced appeals to the empirical
imperative that threatens to engulf the social science and humanities research agenda, at least in
the British context (Goodley, 2014, p. 68). This is paralleled by the idea of writing up data – doing
a project and writing up – rather than writing through and with (experience). As Hughes et al.
(2012) warn: an obsession with empiricism threatens to suck disciplines dry of any theoretical
invention. The retrospective that we provide below of some of Dan’s empirical research, in this
chapter, will also seek to ask some representational questions raised by the doings of narrative dis/
ability research. In short, three projects raise a number of considerations.
One interesting discovery of this project – related to the narrative research of dis/ability – was
that dis/ability knowledge is always being contested. Knowledge claims associated with deficit
(disability) or capacity (ability) are deeply embedded in biomedical, psychological and psychiatric
Table 36.1 Project 1 — Parents, professionals and disabled babies: Towards enabling care (2003–2006).
This research project was jointly carried out by researchers at the Universities of Sheffield (Dan Goodley,
Claire Tregaskis, Pamela Fisher) and Newcastle (Janice McLaughlin, Emma Clavering), funded by the
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC grant RES-000-23-0129). Following Clavering et al.
(2006) the project team sought to examine the care experiences of parents of babies and children needing
specialist care and support in hospital and community settings. The team wanted parents’ voices to be
heard in debates around care provision and were particularly interested in looking at how parents and
young children up to the age of 5 were treated by professionals in the care they received. The team
aimed to identify, amongst other things, (a) responsive care that enabled the disabled child to find a place
in the parents’ and family’s lives with positive views about future development and (b) how disability
and impairment were constructed in the relationships between children, families and professionals. The
fieldwork was broken down into distinct but related stages (McLaughlin et al., 2008):
• Narrative interviews with parents of young disabled children regarding their experiences of services,
professionals and related interventions in the early years;
• Observations of parent-professional interactions and parents’ support networks;
• Focus group interviews with professionals.
The team ended up working with 39 families, carried out 93 interviews, 55 days of ethnography and six
focus groups. A number of publications were produced, including McLaughlin et al. (2008).
Source: From Goodley (2014, p. 68–9).
485
discourses. At the same time labels and diagnoses provide opportunities for understanding human
diversity. Dan and his colleagues found with Project 1 that parents of disabled children had a com-
plicated relationship with diagnosis (Goodley, 2007; McLaughlin & Goodley, 2008; McLaughlin
et al., 2008). One outcome of this tense relationship was an elaborate dance between diagnosis
and normality:
Because Thomas is like he is, sometimes, it makes me feel like a freak or there is some-
thing wrong with me. The other day in the supermarket, it felt difficult, he was looking
a bit more drugged up than normal. I’m so used to having everything just right – I’ve
always done well. At the end of the day, though, my view is that there is no such thing
as normality. This idea of normal is what you set out; it’s very oppressive how it works
(Rebecca Greenwood, Goodley, 2007, p. 153)
You see, I can’t keep chasing the normal. I mean I’ve done so much to try and make my
son normal but I can’t keep that up. . . . I need to accept him in the ways that he is and
just enjoy them and him. I must stop pressurizing myself.
(Rebecca Greenwood, Goodley, 2007, p. 153)
This led some parents to roll back from the stresses of the labelling process and instead engage
with processes of reflexive engagement:
I am coping. I do one thing at a time, one day at a time. I do not make huge plans, I
don’t expect certain things. If we overcome a hurdle then great but there’ll be some-
thing else around the corner (Cheryl Smith, mother of Danny who has been labelled
as having autism)
(Goodley, 2007, p. 155)
As Goodley (2014, pp. 69–70) has argued, uncertainty is rarely deemed a quality of human
functioning. Uncertainty is normally (and perhaps normatively) associated with psychological
processes of incoherence, a lack of clarity, a signifier of denial about the realities of disability.
Such notions of analytical certainty jar with the more fluid realities of knowledge production
in lives of families with disabled children. From carefully and ethically listening to parents, Dan
and colleagues found uncertainty to be a productive space for keeping competing ideas together
whilst not privileging one over the other (Goodley, 2014). This might promote openness to new
ideas and locations. Researching dis/ability knowledge must acknowledge the shifting nature of
such knowledge and in so doing respect uncertainty and fluidity in the lives of those people we
work with. After all, as the Marxist geographer Harvey (1996) makes clear: our bodies are always
and for ever situated in the global context of capitalism. There has been, according to Harvey
(1996, p. 197) an extraordinary efflorescence of interest in the body in the social sciences and
humanities. The body is an unfinished project; historically and geographically malleable, evolving
and changing in ways reflect internal transformative dynamics and the effect of external pro-
cesses. This interest in the body is not reserved for academics or professionals but is also a place
of contestation and battle for disabled people and their allies (including their families) as revealed
in the embodied narratives presented above (Goodley, 2014, p. 70). Here then is a first important
ethical consideration in relation to representing dis/ability: researchers are placed under an ethical
duty of care to ensure that they authentically capture the myriad of ways in which dis/ability is
understand and analyzed. To push for fixed and certain perspectives on dis/ability knowledge
risks pushing our participants’ perspectives into theoretical cul de sacs.
486
Table 36.2 Project 2 — Does every child matter, Post-Blair? The interconnections of disabled childhoods
(2008–2011).
This project was also funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES – 062-23-1138) (see
project website: http://post-blair.wordpress.com/) ‘Does every child matter, Post-Blair: Interconnections
of disabled childhoods’. Based at Manchester Metropolitan University, the project involved Katherine
Runswick Cole, Tom Campbell and Dan Goodley. An over-arching aim was to ask what life is like for
disabled children/young people and their families in the aftermath of the changes for children’s policy and
practice since 1997 set in motion by the New Labour government in Britain. To meet this aim, the team
had a number of objectives, including:
• To identify the extent to which Every Child Matters [the guiding philosophy of the then British
government around children’s services] and related policies are reflected as a policy discourse and a
reality in the provision of enabling environments for children and families within the contexts of
health, care, education and leisure;
• To investigate how the ‘parent’, ‘professional’ and ‘disabled child’ are constructed across contexts, over
time, nested in a host of policies and practices and how these relate to notions of ‘good’ parenting,
‘good’ professional practice and ‘well- adjusted’ children;
• To examine critically interactions between children, parents and professionals in terms of the ways in
which disabled children and their families are empowered to take an active and enabling role in the
spheres of health, care, education and leisure.
The study took place in England (as reported in Goodley et al., 2011) and a number of phases of
empirical work were carried out, including:
• Parental stories of disabled childhoods, over 18 months – 13 parents of disabled children aged 14 + were
interviewed three times to reflect on their experiences with their disabled children, and 7 parents of
children (4–16 years) were interviewed four times.
• Interviews with two groups of children (4–11 and 12–16 yrs old) – ten children were interviewed three times.
• Six focus group interviews with professionals – Exploring care and intervention – were held with different
professional groups, including voluntary sector workers, teachers, early years professionals, and teaching
assistants.
• Ethnography – 50 days of participatory and non-participatory observation allowed us to access contexts
such as nurseries, schools, children’s parties, supermarket visits, and theatre events.
Children had a range of impairment labels, including autism, cerebral palsy, developmental disability,
Down syndrome, achondroplasia, profound and multiple learning disability and epilepsy. Katherine
acted as research fellow to the project and was involved on a day-to-day basis with the design and
implementation of the empirical work (as well as the analysis). Katherine accessed families via parent
support groups and other community contacts. Sampling also had an element of snowballing to it as
potential families were informed by word of mouth, emails and via websites about our research. The
ethnography involved Katherine attending children’s birthday parties, visiting bowling alleys, shopping
with families. She was also invited to impairment-specific leisure activities, including an autism specific
social club, parent groups, and user consultation meetings set up by local authorities, services and
professionals to access the views of families.
Source: From Goodley (2014, pp. 70–1).
Children and parents came to divulge deeply personal stories and confess intimate feelings as a
consequence of the familiar relationships they had built up with Katherine over nearly two years
of involvement with the research project (Goodley, 2014, p. 71). Katherine’s own positionality
as a mother of a disabled child, and her willingness to share this with the families, undoubtedly
built mutual trust. In the course of the analysis of interview transcripts and ethnographic notes,
Dan and Katherine visited and re-visited the data to search for themes (Goodley, 2014). One
487
analytical venture found us grappling with the embodiment stories of disabled children (Goodley &
Runswick-Cole, 2013). We aimed to provide readings of intimate accounts of the bodies of
disabled children that also evoked wider considerations of the politics of disability. This aim led
us to a further ethical element of representing dis/ability – researching the complexities of dis/ability
requires imaginative social theories (Goodley, 2014, p. 71) – and that these theories should respond
affirmatively to the personal and political actions of disabled children and their families. It seems
to us that researchers have an ethical responsibility around the ways in which their analytical work
captures, represents and speaks of their participants. Too often in research with disabled children
and their families, research has analyzed focused on the deficiencies, tragedies and troubles that
disability brings to the lives of children and their loved ones. In contrast, how might social theory
represent disability and childhood in ways that are less pathological and more productive and
affirmative? How might theorizing encourage us to develop what Braidotti (2013, p. 104) defines
as new productive ethical relations with our participants? Take for example a story from research
project 2 detailed in Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2013, p. 13):
An authoritative body
Greg is 10 years old. At the time of the interview, he lived with his mother, father and
older sister. His parents have recently separated. Greg attends a mainstream school, and a
conductive education centre at (some) weekends. He loves sport, loves talking and has just
won a letter-writing competition in which he wrote about ‘why my mum is my hero’:
I was at McDonalds with cousins and all that. And I was just eating my meal
and a little kid he was just staring at me nonstop. He was actually eating his
meal looking at me. And I was ‘WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU LOOKING
AT??!!!’ He was eating and looking and me and I was like mm, and then when
I came home I was like ‘mom, give me a hood’ How could I teach people not
to stare? I mean my friends don’t stare because they had a friend who actually
is . . . disabled. I sometimes stare back. There should be a law that that kids
must not stare or you go to prison for 4 years. And if you do that again you
are sent for life, and if they do both they’ll be executed. Imagine the judge
‘You are going down for staring’. We could CCTV cameras for staring. £10
fine just for staring. Hey, that would be fine.
To help them make sense of Greg’s story in ways that honoured the intimacy and politics of his
account, Dan and Katherine found themselves drawn to the postconventionalist theories of Shil-
drick (2009) and the posthuman possibilities of Braidotti (2003). This was not a flight of theo-
retical fancy – theory for theory’s sake – but the search of authentic theory that would do justice
to Greg’s story. This exemplifies a new productive ethical relationship between Greg, Katherine
and Dan. Greg’s reaction to being stared at takes him into some new and exciting pastures. In
theoretically grappling with Greg’s activism we encroached upon what appeared to be comple-
mentary theoretical ideas from Braidotti (2006). In their paper, Goodley & Runswick-Cole (2013,
p. 13) suggest that ‘Greg’s embodied politics appear to capture him “elaborating a site, that is to
say, space and time” (Braidotti, 2006, p. 46) through which to challenge the processes associated
with the pathological stare’. ‘Greg’s narrative’, they continued, ‘arouses an affirmative passion
and desire for the destabilization of a number of identities (Braidotti, 2006, p. 52) including,
in this case, those that stare and those who are stared at. We know from Garland-Thomson
(2006) that staring is saturated with meaning’. ‘Greg’, they conclude, ‘turns the stare back on
488
Table 36.3 Project 3 — The psychopathology of the normals (2012–2013).
In October and November 2011 Dan sent an email request to the Disability Research distribution list
(DISABILITY-RESEARCH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK):
Subject: The psychopathology of the non-disabled: a call for stories
Comrades
I am writing a slightly tongue in cheek (as you can tell by the working title) but also, I hope, serious,
article exploring non-disabled people’s reaction to disability. I would like to collect stories from list
members about non-disabled people’s verbal or other responses to disability that you have witnessed. In
writing the article I will be making clear that not all non-disabled people engage in such responses, that
many non-disabled people are allies, friends, supporters and parents of disabled people and that we are all
marked by differences associated with class, gender, age, sexuality, ethnicity, etc. Moreover, of course, what
counts as non/disabled is open to debate. However, I do want the article to expose, hopefully explain and
also challenge some of the common reactions of non-disabled society to disability . . .
If you would be willing to share some similar (or not!) stories then please could you email them to
d.goodley@mmu.ac.uk. Any reference to these stories in the article would recognise the source (e.g. as
shared by Jon Smith, 2011, personal communication) but, of course, if you would prefer to keep these
anonymous then that would be totally fine too.
Thanks for reading
Dan Goodley
The email managed to solicit stories, reflexive accounts and theoretical musings from 25 respondents.
This approach to narrative inquiry – which positions the storyteller as commentator and critic – adds
certain ethical and political weight to the stories. Most of the accounts were from disabled people. A
few were offered by non-disabled allies. No attempt was made to record impairment labels, although
stories included experiences of people with physical, sensory and cognitive impairments from countries
including Australia, Britain, Canada, Norway, Turkey, and Zimbabwe. Respondents were emailed to ask
how they wanted their stories cited. Many asked for their stories to be anonymized. Others wanted their
names to be kept. Each respondent was responded to individually.
Source: From Goodley (2014, pp. 72–3).
to those bodies that threaten his ontological security’. They suggest that such a reading allows
us to understand children’s engagement with the processes of dis/ability in terms of ‘possability . . .
captur[ing] the affirmative possibilities of the disabled body’ (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2013,
p. 1). Theoretically elucidating the potentiality of dis/abled children to radicalize the world
around them emerges as a key ethical-political concern for narrative dis/ability research (Goodley,
2014, p. 72).
While many respondents shared troubling stories, their involvement was not simply as passive
tellers of stories. In addition, many respondents engaged in email dialogue with Dan in which
they become involved in exchanges about the ethical implications of the kinds of analysis that
Dan might produce. For example, a number of respondents were keen to challenge any sugges-
tion that the reactions of non-disabled people were simply the responses of oppressive individuals
(Goodley, 2014, p. 23). Some were at pains not to paint too negative a picture of the non-disabled
that they wrote about, in similar ways to Malec (1993, p. 22):
those who intrude on my privacy are motivated, quite often, by genuinely felt admira-
tion for what they perceive as my courage . . . I can see the sincere desire for knowledge
or the awe they feel because they are unable to imagine living without sight.
489
Other respondents were less sympathetic. Accounts were subjected to thematic analysis to tease
out recurring themes (see Banister et al., 2011, for a useful overview). A first draft version
of this paper was uploaded to an open access BlogSpot (Goodley, 2014, p. 74). The disability
research mailing list was informed of the draft and list members were encouraged to give their
responses to the paper. Only two commentators visited the BlogSpot to review the paper.
Both of these comments pertained to literature that Dan could draw on to enhance the paper.
Abridged versions of the paper appeared in a book chapter (Goodley & Lawthom, 2013) and
three keynote presentations (Goodley, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). A key finding pertaining to repre-
senting dis/ability was that dis/ability and disablist and ableist processes are co-constituted at the
mundane level of the everyday as well as being structurally and hegemonically located (Goodley,
2014, p. 74). We know that materialist and cultural analyses of disability often seek to probe
the public, macropolitical, structural processes and cultural imaginaries. In order to tease out
the hegemonic, one needs, so it seems, to aim high and think big; ideological underpinnings
of national welfare models; supranational discourses of disability and difference; interconnected
global flows of capital and labour are all essential targets of the social sciences and humanities
(Goodley, 2014). But should we also ask more ordinary, mundane questions of ourselves and
others? Whom and what do we encounter, for example, when we leave home in the morning?
What kinds of spoken, verbal, embodied, felt, thought of moments of interaction happen on
a day to day basis? How do children respond to an encounter with difference? What do these
interactional moments and passages of time say about the makings of dis/ability? Project 3
highlighted the importance of theorizing and storying the mundane – and that this analytical
concern was perceived to be a key question of ethics for some of the respondents. Indeed, this
post from Charlotte illuminates the complexity of the mundane:
In reply to your request for reactions from nondisabled people I find that almost every
encounter I have indicates that non-disabled people react to what they see in front of
them with a tendency to feel sorry for me, think I am brave or think that as well as not
being able to move I must be intellectually impaired. Whether I am annoyed or amused
by their reactions depends on what sort of day I have had and whether I can be bothered
to engage in constant disability equality education!
(Goodley, 2014, p. 74)
C. Wright Mills’s (1970, p. 14–16) famously declared that sociology should examine two key
concepts: ‘private troubles’ of individuals that occur in our relationships with others (often when
our own values are threatened) and ‘public issues’ of organizations and institutions (that often arise
as a crisis of institutional arrangements). In dealing with these public issues and private troubles,
he suggested that the sociologist asks key questions about history and biography (Wright Mills,
1970, p. 13): what is the structure of this particular society as a whole? Where does this society
stand in human history? What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and this
period? To these important questions, we might add that one of our tasks as dis/ability researchers
is to identify and theorize elements of the public issues of society in the private troubles of indi-
viduals’ encounters with others (Goodley, 2014, p. 75). Narratives and their interpretation allow
us to do just that. And if we listen carefully to the perspectives of our participants, then they may
well remind us of the ethical responsibilities that we have as researchers and the generators of
knowledge. One key responsibility that blurs ethical and analytical accountability on the part of
the researcher relates to how we listen and account for the stories of our participants. Narrative
inquiry, when it is done well, permits private stories to be intimately told whilst revealing public
issues that frame and shape those stories. Analytical accounts provided by the researcher must
490
seek to work between the private and the public in order to simultaneously honour the storyteller
and the context of the story.
Conclusions
This chapter has explored the ethics of representation in narrative dis/ability research. In one
sense, such lessons are typical of narrative inquiry per se; as they demand us to think about how
respond to and think with our narrators. In another sense, the focus on dis/ability pushes narra-
tive researchers to think more deeply (and more ethically) about the assumptions we hold about
our narrators. Too often dis/ability is ignored by research in the social and human sciences.
Moreover, narrative research assumes the narrator, storyteller or co-researcher to be a person
untouched by dis/ability. We urge narrative researchers to think about the ways in which dis/
ability broadens not only our skills as researchers but also asks us to think again about the kinds
of assumptions around humanity that we bring with us to the research enterprise.
Note
1 This chapter draws upon sections of chapters 1 and 5 of Dan Goodley’s (2014) book, Dis/ability studies:
Theorising disablism and ableism (London: Routledge), reproduced with the © permission of Taylor and
Francis. We would like to thank Routledge/Taylor and Francis for granting permission for this work to
be used in this chapter.
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37
AN ACT OF REMEMBERING
Making the ‘collective memories’ my own and
confronting ethical issues
georgia state university
“SANKOFA”
“se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenki.”
It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot
I remember when . . .
Professor Jude Preissle, wearing a red facemask with a wand in hand, emerged from the disser-
tation defense room in Aderhold Hall, Athens, Georgia, to do her own version of conferring the
doctoral degree. Jude said, “The dissertation does not end with the defense”. Indeed, I must admit
that excessive nervous energy mixed with excitement and relief might have made me intoxicated
and unable to totally make meaning of those words on that day. However, it is a moment I will
always remember because of the emotions associated with it! I might have embellished it after so
many years but it still is my image of the moment and it is a historical marker for me. As Bochner
(2007, p. 197) warned:
When we attempt to fit language to experience, there is always a cleavage between

experience and words, between living through and narrating about, between the chaos
and fragmentation of living a life and the smoothing orderliness we bring to it when we
write, between what we remember now and what we can say took place then.
Indeed this relates not only to me as the researcher but also the informants1 whose life stories
and experiences provided data for the study (Fournillier, 2005) and this chapter. I return to the
images that I have in the form of digital photographs, transcribed interviews, field notes, literature
reviews, articles, and representations of the findings, and I experience continued tensions between
what I remember about what I did, what I believe I should have done, and the ethical implications
of memory work. According to Wertsch,
Narrative texts used in collective memory are best viewed as tools, or raw materials
to be employed in organizing or reconstructing an account of the past. Instead of
493
serving as containers of precise unchanging information, these texts seem to play a

role in memory by serving as indicators of the “sort of thing” an individual or group
would say.
(2002, p. 8)
Over the years, as I inscribed on my being the identities of instructor/researcher/native eth-

nographer/lifelong learner/student, I came to realize the ‘truth’ of Jude’s statement. The work
continues. Ten years after the event in 2004–2005, I challenge my use and re-presentation of
the life stories that I seemed to have made my own and to which I have assigned the concept
‘collective memories’. There has been much water under the bridge since Halbwach’s theoretical
work on memory provided a framework for memoriologists. Halbwatchs posited that there was
no such thing as ‘individual memory’, the only real memory was ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs &
Coser, 1992). Remembering has been categorized as both a macro and micro process and can
be viewed from psychological and sociological perspectives. Given that a sociocultural view of
learning framed my dissertation work, I found that Wertsch’s (1998) sociocultural perspective
resonated with me. It therefore became yet another tool in the exploration and representation of
this autoethnographic performance narrative. However, Kansteiner’s (2002, p. 180) exploration
of the concept provided food for thought:
Collective memory is not history, though it is sometimes made from similar material.
It is a collective phenomenon but it only manifests itself in the action and statements
of individuals. It can take hold of historically and socially remote events but it often
privileges the interests of the contemporary. It is as much a result of conscious manip-
ulation as unconscious absorption and it is always mediated. And it can be observed in
roundabout ways, more through its effects than its characteristics.
Times have changed, and I have evolved, and the way I view the methods I used to collect data
and qualitative research methodology has changed too. I am now, at this stage in my academic
career, brave and bold enough to use a West African concept of “Sankofa” as a frame for this
narrative that uses writing (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) and memory as methods of inquiry
(Bochner, 2007) and performative autoethnography (Spry, 2011). My audience has changed
and so have I as a scholar. How ethical is it to impose on old data new meanings now that I
have grown in knowledge on ethnography as a research methodology and the possibilities of
combining life history and collective memory (Goodson & Lin Choi, 2008)? As I perform this
narrative on the pages of the text, I ask myself: “Is the principle that governs ‘Sankofa’ appro-
priate only for me the teacher/native ethnographer/researcher; and/or is it also appropriate
for the informants in my study who in the life story interviews did go back and fetch what
they forgot?” What are the ethical implications of going back to fetch the stories? And, how
can the community of scholars interested in narrative inquiry and life history methods benefit
from my experience?
I quietly feel some element of pride that, having co-taught and co-researched the teaching
of a course in the Black Education Congress,2 the concept of “Sankofa” means so much more
to me. It allows me to somehow feel justified in going back to the experience of examining
mas’ makers’ perceptions of the art of Carnival mas’ art as I look at the ethical implications
of the use of memory as work and a method of inquiry (Bochner, 2007). Indeed an impor-
tant aspect of this narrative is the authors that author me as I go back to fetch the stories and
re-write the experience using different philosophical frames and theories that allow me to
think differently. According to Nietzsche et al. (1967, p. 418), “One seeks a picture of the
494
An act of remembering
word in that philosophy in which one feels freest; i.e. in which our most powerful drive feels
free to function”.
Framing the narrative

One of my greatest struggles, as a be-coming scholar and a qualitative research methodologist,
is with the use of Euro-western frames and the ways in which I adopted and adapted them in
my work (Fournillier, 2011). However, I find comfort in the use of reflexivity as a tool. Berger
and Negro in their work on the role of reflexivity in the aesthetics of performance advise that:
Framing, like all metacommunication invokes the reflexive consciousness of the par-
ticipants. Whereas the performer may be unaware of himself or herself as an actor at
the moment before the framing takes place, the act of framing by definition marks the
performer, marks the audience members as audience members, and calls attention to
the fact of interaction.
(Berger & Negro, 2002, p. 65)
In this chapter I continue to work ‘within and in-between’ as I consciously use: African phil-
osophical frames, ‘Ubuntu’,3 ‘Sankofa’,4 Kongo thoughts related to the concept of ‘Kanda –
community’ (Fu-Kiau, 2001);5 sociocultural perspectives on collective memory (Gedi & Elam,
1996; Goodson, 2006; Goodson & Lin Choi, 2008; Margalit, 2002; Wertsch, 2002, 2009; Wilson,
2005), ‘mediated action’6 (Wertsch, 1998) and Ricoeur’s (2004) ‘Réflexion faite’ (looking back),
one of the principles of his phenomenology of memory.
The phenomenology of memory begins deliberately with an analysis turned toward

the object of memory, the memory (souvenir) that one has before the mind; it then
passes through the stage of the search for a given memory, the stage of anamnesis, of
recollection; we then finally move from memory as it is given and exercised to reflective
memory, to memory of oneself.
(Paul Ricoeur, 2004: Memory, History, Forgetting, Kindle Locations, pp. 56–8)
These are the textual tools that, along with the transcribed life story interviews, I use in my act
of remembering. What did I do with the informants and in the research process? How did I make
meaning of the ethical issues involved in the research processes? I ascribe to Ricoeur’s (2004)
notion that “to remember (se souvenir de) something is at the same time to remember oneself
(se souvenir de soi)” (3). At the same time, while I recognize how these concepts and methods
that I employ as an investigator and self-identified “native ethnographer” reflect the academic and
cultural setting in which I reside and work, I am also very much aware of how as Wertsch (2002,
p. 18) states, “Those of us analyzing collective remembering and other forms of human action
are just as socioculturally situated as the individuals and groups we examine.”
Collecting memories
I intentionally dressed in casual jeans and a t-shirt because I knew I was heading into the heart of
Port of Spain, Nelson Street, to the planning buildings. It was some time since I visited the area.
But I immediately remembered my mother taking me to the top floor of the buildings at Car-
nival time when I was a child, to ‘watch mas’’. Hmm, I think now, as I write, was I a ‘spect-actor’
(Boal et al., 2008)? I would soon discover that I was not the only one who was watching mas’
495
and on whom it made a great impression. Rosalind Gabriel, a woman known for her work with
children’s mas’, shared a similar memory in her effort to make the absent present. Rosalind stated,
in her response to my question on how she came to be a mas’ maker:
My first impression of Carnival was when I was five, six years old. My father used to
take us down to Port of Spain. He had a store on Frederick Street. And I used to be
terrified of the devils. The robbers, I remember running off the street into the
store and hiding under the counter. Because in those days they were really playing
mas’. And I think from those early days those impressions stayed in my head of what
Carnival is supposed to be.
I too remembered being both afraid and captivated by the sight of the many persons
parading in costumes. I grew to appreciate it as I experienced my Asian grandmother, Chinee,
bringing her costumes home and having us as children do the final decorating touches to them
every year.
Now 40-something years later, I arrive in the same district as a researcher. The area’s reputa-
tion preceded it and, not having gone into that section of the city for a while, I was a bit hesitant
and somewhat afraid. One of my Trinidadian colleagues, with whom I shared my experience
of going to visit the informants and of how I tried to not stand out when I went into certain
areas, reminded me that my ‘middle-classiness’ was showing. What came out of this district was
evidence of the role the memories of the informants played in the research process and how they
combined with my childhood memories and the historical recollections I had of the early years
of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago.
An Act of Remembering: Senor Gomez
. . . . . . . . .You ready? He asked . . .

Yes, yes, yes! I replied
I started as a young fellow
And in those days the Carnival wasn’t how it is now
I can remember like Jack used to be a bad man beating biscuit drum and so on
And the band used to be small then in those days
We had a band on 111 Queen Street
And then we band used to be like a posh band
Because you know if you could remember
To hell and back
As far as we could remember I mean it had other fellows
Remember there was a Road March by Spit Fire
Anyhow coming back to the days of my input into Carnival
I could remember playing in Tokyo
We went to 29 St. Joseph Road
Mottley was the man that make my first mas’
In them days we had to buy little food
But coming back to me
I got a lot of learning from Pa Mottley
Remember that time, I had the back of the dollar
You see the picture on the wall here is 1960 Facinators
This is my mas’ camp you could see that year I win the best fancy sailor
496
My memory bad,
You make me remember thing that I forget
It have a lot of thing we does really forget yes. . .
(January 2005, Life story interview)
Everyone in the area knew Senor Gomez, so it was easy to get directions to the apartment
in which he lived. I remember now feeling excited to chat with this man, whom one of my
‘pumpkin vine’ cousins, Derek Coker,7 had introduced me to in Normandie Hotel Car park, in
December 2004. I was being apprenticed, inducted and introduced to the community of persons
with whom I would work and learn (Wenger, 2008). But moreover, the sense of community
presented in an African (Kongo) proverb seems even more valuable now.
The community/society did exist before you; the community leads everything, for it
is the head. What is good for the community is good for its members. Everybody is a
social product. One accepts the community as it is, not as one wants it to be.
(Fu-Kiau, 2001, p. 98)
I recognize now that I could also be bold enough to accept the notion of Ubuntu – The
individual can only say: “I am because we are: and since we are, therefore I am” (Mbti, 1984). It is the
community that led me to the informants during the data collection process and who allowed me
to be able to gain the knowledge I did from my interaction during and after the interviews and
the apprenticeship period. My membership in the community made me believe that the mem-
ories that the informants such as Senor Gomez, Collin, Bogart, Kendall De Peeza, and Rosalind
Gabriel8 shared with me over time could have become my own, and that I had a responsibility
to present them in as authentic a manner as possible (see Goodson & Sikes, 2001, pp. 89–103).
Senor Gomez, as he is affectionately known, was one of the leading traditional mas’ makers
who could provide me with the kinds of knowledge I needed to gain if I wanted to understand
how persons learned and taught the art of mas’ making. Reading the transcript of his life story
interview, those of others, and other journal articles and documents related to Carnival mas’
makers that I reference in this paper allowed me to create life histories of the various informants
in my dissertation study (Fournillier, 2005). The text became what Wertsch (2002) describes
as mediated action. The process made me very aware of the role remembering played in the
data collection, analysis, and re-presentation process, and its importance in qualitative research
methodology and exploration of ethical issues. According to Goodson (2013, p. 31) “Life stories
are only constructed in specific historical circumstances and cultural conditions – these have to
be bought into our methodological grasp”. The recollections of the informants in the study, I
argue, became collective memories and I used them as data to examine their perceptions of the
teaching/learning practices and my understandings of the processes (Fournillier, 2005).
At the same time, I remember that I was writing for a thesis panel that insisted, “Janice, teach
us”. They were two American-born women, one Australian-born woman and one white Amer-
ican man. Although I had a responsibility to ensure that the audience was persuaded and there
was verisimilitude, my greater concern was my loyalty to the informants and the community. I
transcribed the interviews and did very little editing, creating life history narratives using the life
stories and developing ethnographic profiles that became findings and supported claims I made in
the study. Senor Gomez’ narrative was presented in the text in a format and structure that I judged
would allow for an easy read more so because I did very little editing and used what sounded to
me like his natural voice. I recognize that it was not just an individual memory but also one that
included my memories, and so for me it became collective memories that needed to be treated
497
with care. It is therefore not just a ‘realist tale’ (Wolf ,1992) but also a re-presentation of the
memories I had of the lived experience and the memories that the participants shared and which
came of out my verbatim transcription of the interviews. I intentionally added the opening words
“you ready, you ready” because they reminded me of how much Senor Gomez took charge of
the interview event and how anxious he was to share his life story and lived experiences of being
a mas’ maker and mas’ player. His belief that I was responsible for making him remember things
that he might forget situates me as being part of his shared memories.
I reached back and fetched Senor Lopez’ (one of the participants in my dissertation study)
life story and purposefully used ‘Réflexion faite’ (looking back) (Ricoeur, 2004, Kindle Loca-
tion 47), one of the principles of ‘phenomenology of memory’, to reconstruct and examine
the researcher and the informants’9 use of memory and remembrances and the ethical issues
that grounded the process. Senor Gomez repeated the word ‘remember’ as he referred to what
he was doing and moved between time frames and issues that related to the memories of the
historical periods during which he became a mas’ maker and mas’ player. He drew me into his
narrative by saying “if you could remember” and suggesting that I played a role in bringing back
the memories and making the “absent present” (Ricoeur, 2004). Although I am using Senor
Gomez’ words from the transcribed interview, I have represented them on the paper in a for-
mat over which he had no control or input and placed them in a narrative that looks at ethical
issues and the use of memory. It is no longer simply his interview but now a re-presentation
of his experience and his identity. In this format and in this narrative, it is now ‘my story’. To
the extent that I have stuck to his words and not brought any harm to the informant, I might
be considered as being ethical. But ethical has to be much more than ‘not doing harm’. There
was a sense of loyalty and not wanting to betray the confidence that Senor Gomez placed in
me when he told his story that lead me to want to not edit, and, if I did, it would just be in the
way I placed the text on the paper. In my effort to vary the informants in the study I chose to
select a participant whose biography told the story of his identity as a teacher in the educational
system and now a mas’ maker.
Patrick – teacher, educator, mas’ maker

Patrick was unlike most of the other informants – much younger, but very much the kind of
‘traditional’ mas’ maker in whose experiences I was interested. He turned out to have shared some
of the same memories as the other informants. However, his being able to relate what he did to
his former role as classroom teacher in the formal educational system made him an appropriate
informant in terms of how he combined memory and history. I realize that my knowledge of
the geographical space that he described so vividly and my memory of being a child and young
person going through the streets in a steel-band came to life as Patrick shared his early days and
what brought him to mas’.
Janice: Maybe you may want to start with your background and your history as a mas’ maker
and maybe how you came to it and that kind of thing.
Patrick: Hm. I don’t know if I came to it or it came to me. I was born in the area that they
loosely call Behind the Bridge just a stone’s throw away from Desperadoes. An um my
earliest memories childhood memories are of carnival and when I take those memories
and equate those memories I find that I was really really young. My early carnivals were
spent with Desperadoes and once I was with Desperadoes I was safe. I didn’t know Port
of Spain so I was with the band and would move wherever they want to go and I would
come back home with the band.
498
Desperadoes is a steel orchestra in fact one of the most acclaimed steel orchestras in the
world. Um a steel orchestra is an amalgamation of players about 120 players – a per-
cussion instrument to make music. And um in those days steel orchestras were the big
bands in the land . . . they would have masqueraders in excess of three thousand and
um a lot of the mas’ they played were the early historical mas’ I remember Desperadoes
playing
Un Noah’s ark at least twice and they played the Bible all kinds of things in history.
They played the snow kingdom. And um I would go to the pan yard nightly visits with
my two elder sisters and they would go then I thought for the music and hearing the
same thing over because they would add on to the tunes . . . What I fell in love with
the guys making the mas’. We would go in the evening seven eight and you would
see what I thought serious progress in the making of the mas’ and that is what I fell in
love with. Additionally I have brother between those two sisters and they brought out a
section a carnival band. And one of those sections made home by us. Nine o’clock was
my bed-time so that I would try my best to stay up as late as possible. So every morning
when I got up I would investigate what they did the night before. That was 1968 and I
remember that because we have a little store room and inside the storeroom they wrote
on the wooden partition the year. I cannot remember the mas’ it was an Egyptian mas’.
So in a sense mas’ like I say, mas’ was a part and parcel of me
(Patrick Roberts, February 2005)
There were things that Patrick chose to remember and those that he forgot. His memories
were not only his own but those of his sisters and brother and the community. Patrick would
later share his memory of an icon in the community and relate the story of the peacock that
was told to me by another mas’ maker and which I too experienced while working in a mas’
camp (Fournillier, 2008). This lived experience became for me a collective memory and assured
me that indeed I was a member of the community and there was more than just ‘thin relations’.
It was clear that being a Trinidadian and my former association with some of the informants
defined our relations as ‘thick’ and therefore put even a greater responsibility on me to be ethical
in the way Margalit (2002) described in her Ethics of Memory. According to Margalit (2002, p. 7),
“Thick relations are founded in attributes such as, as parent, friend, lover, fellow-countrymen. Thick
relations are anchored in shared past or moored in shared memory”. It is ethics that “tells us
how we should regulate our thick relations . . . memory is the cement that holds thick relations
together and communities of memory are the obvious habitat for thick relations and thus for
ethics” (p. 8). More importantly, becoming a member of the communities of memories brought
with it concern for issues of loyalty and betrayal that are “manifested among those who have
thick relations” (Margalit, 2002, p. 8). I opted to use the given names and not pseudonyms in my
re-presentations of the data. This ethical decision for me was one way of honoring the elders’
and younger members’ wishes and allowing the writing to be multi-voiced.
De Peeza’s life story

In addition to doing domain and componential analysis of the data (Fournillier, 2005; Spradley,
1979, 1980), I also created ethnographic profiles and life history narratives that, out of respect
and because of my closeness to the participants, I shared with them. Kendall was one of the first
life history stories I created using our shared memories, transcribed interviews, and our informal
conversations. I interspersed the life history story with excerpts from the interviews and wrote
using Wolcott’s (1990) advice about combining description, analysis, and interpretation:
499
Kendall as a young boy watched closely as his uncle and father made their costumes for
Starlift Steel orchestra (a Trinidad Steel band), which not only provides music for the
Carnival days but also has its own carnival band. Kendall used bits of wire and their tools
to make little men and bicycles. His grandmother at whose breast he was nurtured and
whom he loved dearly, would say to him, “What you doing there always with a set of
wire all over the place?” That did not deter him and he continued to develop his skill in
the quiet of her home. Kendall was teaching himself the wire bending skill, an impor-
tant aspect of costume design. This wire, in its different forms, that is bent provides the
frame over which the material, cloth or paper, is placed to create the carnival costume
that the designer has either in mind or in the drawing or sketch. I say in mind because
Kendall tells the story of a designer calling him on the phone and giving him an idea
of what he needs and Kendall creating it out of wire without even seeing the design on
paper. When he gets to the designer with the product, it is close to what is on the paper.
Kendall’s secondary school teacher would then play an important role in launching
Kendall into his role as wire bender. Forty odd years ago, Kendall’s teacher, who was also
a dancer, inquired whether anyone could assist in making the costumes for his dance
company. Kendall can still remember what the costume looked like: “It was red velvet
I remember it good so we did the roses red and white and we bent the petals a little
rough because I am learning”. Kendall had never done it before but he used to watch
his uncle making these costumes at the back of the house and thought, “I could do
that”. Although he can’t remember the student but he remembers him saying to the
teacher. “Sir, sir, Peeza say he could do it”. When his teacher asked him whether he
could do it his response was “I never did it before”. The teacher replied, “You said you
could make it, you feel you could make it. I will supply you with material and cloth”.
This “brave and inquisitive” (Kendall’s description of himself ) young man began his
work as a wire bender building costumes for the late Cyril St. Louis’ dance company.
Friends would then come by and ask Kendall to make hats for them. His experiences
spanned making mas for steel bands, which brought out carnival bands to large con-
temporary bands like Stephen Lee Heung, one of the top carnival bands in the 1960s
and 1970s. It is here that Kendall met Peter Minshall one of Trinidad Carnival mas’ art
designers and began working with the Callalloo Company. Minshall and Kendall began
learning and teaching each other. Kendall loved Minshall’s concepts and ideas. What
did he like about it? “That it was different to the original aspects of mas and there was
more art to the mas’ (Kendall’s interview). Kendall loves the revolutionary ideas asso-
ciated with mas and the final product that they were able to create. At the same time,
his understanding of self and the notion that we need to get into each other’s head and
learn from and with each other fascinated him. Kendall tells the story of how Minshall
says to him. “Peeza I get into your head and you have to learn to get into my heard and
understand” (Kendall’s interview). Learning therefore for Peeza takes place by getting
into the person’s head and understanding them. This process of understanding is a very
important strategy for Peeza as an artist and as a teacher/tutor.
(Fournillier, 2005)
I arrived at Kendall’s home one more time to share with him the ethnographic profile I created
for use in the dissertation study. I was sharing with him my interpretation of his memory work
that had now become my memory of learning from and with him about mas’ making and his
life story as a mas’ maker; I can still remember the look on his face as he shed a tear, wiped his
eyes and said: “That is me me self ”. I felt a sense of relief and at the same time joy that I was able
500
to share his memory in such a way that he could validate it and feel some kind of emotion. He
then gave the ‘right of way’ to use it in my dissertation. I felt compelled to believe and accept
the informants’ memory of their memories and to use them in ways that allowed me to ethically
represent the data and the experiences of the informants. Hooks (1994, p. 44) reminded me that
“Students are eager to break through barriers to knowing. They are willing to surrender to the
wonders of re-learning and learning ways of knowing that goes against the grain”. My use of the
various cultural and textual tools allowed me to recognize that I became over the years willing
to accept that in spite of the critiques of memory and its use in autobiographical and life history
work, it was valid and important to my work as a researcher studying at home and working with
elders in the community for whom narrative and storytelling were ways of thinking and telling.
When my memory failed me or I was in doubt, I felt a responsibility to return to my participants
to validate what I was going to write about them and their perceptions. I did not make distance a
problem but instead resorted to email as a means of communication to share the data table I created
using the interview data and my informal conversation with another informant, Rosalind Gabriel.
Mas’ maker: Rosalind Gabriel

Rosalind, at age 18, began as a decorator helping Wayne Berkeley, one of the top name designers
in Carnival, and a friend of her husband. Rosalind remembers her early years as a decorator in
the mas’ camp.
Janice: How did you become a mas’ maker?

Rosalind: Mostly in those years we were helping with decorations. Anything he had to deco-
rate. I remember working on the big costumes and it satisfied me. I found a niche for
my creativity. I like to work with my hands and I remember not being able to wait for
Norman [her husband] to come from work for us to go to the mas’ camp. Because
it really drew me being in the mas’ camp. The whole atmosphere . . . it was always a
nice atmosphere to work in and nice things to do.
Rosalind: I remember him being very angry if somebody didn’t do something properly.
—— Original Message ——
From: “JANICE B. FOURNILLIER” <jfournil@uga.edu>
To: <rgabriel@tstt.net.tt>
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 11:06 AM
Subject: From Janice Noel-Fournillier
Hi Rosalind
I hope you are doing fine and plans are coming along nicely for Carnival 2006 MAS’ MAS’
AH KNOW YUH NAME! It will surely be an inspiration to see how many names people
know and remember. Keep up the good work . . . I am sending you a data table file which I have
made based on the interview we had . . . I would like you to let me know if there are any other
things you would like included in the file and if it is ok to go ahead with it as is . . . I am due to
submit the final paper on 11th October . . . If I don’t hear from you I will give you a call to alert
you about the email. I am using this data along with an ethnographic profile, which I will also
send to you . . . in it I am talking about the mas making practices and the meanings you make
of them . . . Attached is a rough draft of the table
Thank you again
Janice
501
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 06:56:59–0400

From: “Rosalind Gabriel” <rgabriel@tstt.net.tt
Subject: Re: From Janice Noel-Fournillier
To: “JANICE B. FOURNILLIER” <jfournil@uga.edu>
Hi Janice,
I have thought of you right through the year, and wondered what happened with the missing
funds from your bank account. Carnival has stretched right through this year, as Tan Tan and
Saga Boy has made numerous guest appearances at almost every major function and VIP visit to
Trinidad. “Mas! Mas! ah know yuh name” is based on our Traditional Characters, King Sailor,
Bats, Dame Lorraine etc. but they will be produced like Tan Tan & Saga Boy (like puppets). It’s
my way of doing something old in a new way. The band launching is today. I have taken a quick
look at the table you sent, and it looks quite impressive, but I notice that “Mas Camp Customs”
only has “nice atmosphere”. These things come to mind:
1. Eating together like a family
2. Sharing problems (home problems & mas camp conflicts or personality conflicts)
3. Trust (I often have to leave and trust the employees to close up and keep the keys till the
following day.) Also to keep on working when I am not around.
4. Encouraging the employees to speak up if they have an idea that can simplify the work or
make it better in some way (this builds their confidence), which makes them feel special.
Just a few thoughts, but will look at it again early next week after I get over this band launching
today.
Great hearing from you.
Lot of love/Rosalind
I was encouraged by her response and felt assured that I did the ‘right thing’ by sending her
the data table. She provided me with much more detail that allowed me to better combine
the findings and interpret the collective responses. It is important to note that she too uses her
memory that is stimulated by the data table and my communication with her as she talks about
“things that come to mind”.
As a native Trinidadian, new scholar, and researcher, I returned home to do pioneering work
with borrowed tools, collected and analyzed data, and represented them in the form of an eth-
nographic case study. I borrowed the methodology and theories from anthropology, sociology,
sociocultural theories of learning, postcolonial theoretical discourses, and social constructionism.
Amidst the challenges and dilemmas I faced during the process, I learned how to appropriate the
knowledge and make it my own. Although postcolonial discourse assisted me as I made ethical
decisions during the research process, I did not then think as I do now as deeply about the ethical
dilemmas of so doing and how my acceptance of what was happening to the individuals and the
whole group during the research process might have been happening to me also and therefore
might have contributed to my thinking that these stories were also my own. I came to have a
better understanding of and appreciation for the African tradition in which, according to Menkiti
(1984), “priority is given to the duties which individuals owe to the collectivity, and their rights,
whatever these may be are seen as secondary to their exercise of their duties” (p. 180). I felt duty
bound to accept that I was a member of the community and not only had a responsibility but
also had to be willing to let them be the teachers and the guides, and if they were seeing me as a
member and sharing the memories, then I needed to accept them as my own also. I share Wol-
cott’s (1980) view that the concepts, beliefs, and practices are not on the ground or solely in the
“minds of the informants.” I believe they come out of constructions and reconstructions during
502
participation in the mas’ making activities, interactions with the members of the community,
the ethnographer’s observations and field notes, transcriptions of interviews, and analyses of the
spoken words of the members of the community and the field notes. It was still important that I
assumed an ethical stance throughout the research process and my later reflections and rewriting
and representation of the events.
This narrative has indeed been for me an event in which I went back to fetch what I forgot.
I have used it to explain the dissertation event, which I might have extolled, ethicized, excused,
deprecated, and named as a significant marker of collective experience (Turner, 1998) in some
way. However, my hope is that it could become a future marker for my behavior as a research
methodologist with an interest in studying ‘at home’ and using memory as a tool for data collec-
tion and representation. At the same time, it pays homage to the memory data of the participants
in the dissertation study and the research process of coming to accept that:
“se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenki.”

It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot
Notes
1 In the study, I learned from and with the actors and informants (Spradley & McCurdy, 1972) about how
learning to make mas’ works and the kinds of practices that they used. I used actor to refer to “someone
who becomes the object of observation in a natural setting” (Spradley & McCurdy, 1972, p. 32). The
informants in the study were persons who supplied me with information on learning to make mas’ and
literally became my teachers.
2 A Black Education Congress, http://blackedcongress.org/
3 “Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole
group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: ‘I am because we are: and since we are, there-
fore I am’. This is a cardinal point in the understanding of the African view of man” (Mbiti, 1969, p. 106).
4 “‘Sankofa’ teaches us that we must go back to our roots in order to move forward. That is, we should
reach back and gather the best of what our past has to teach, so that we can achieve our full potential
as we move forward. Whatever we have lost, forgotten, forgone, or been stripped of, can be reclaimed,
revived, preserved and perpetuated” (Duboislc.net, 2014).
5 “The community/society did exist before you; the community leads everything, for it is the head. What
is good for the community is good for its members. Everybody is a social product. One accepts the
community as it is, not as one wants it to be” (Fu-Kiau, 2001, p. 98).
Within the community everybody had the right to teach and to be taught. Education is a matter of
reciprocity. True knowledge is acquired through sharing (Fu-Kiau, 2001, p. 100).
6 From this perspective, to be human is to use the cultural tools or meditational means that are provided
by a particular sociocultural setting. The concrete use of these tools involves an “irreducible tension”
(Wertsch, 1998) between active agents, on the one hand, and items such as computers, maps and narra-
tives, on the other. From this perspective remembering is an active process that involves both sides of the
tension. And because it involves socioculturally situated meditational means, remembering and the parties
who carry it out are inherently situated in a cultural and social context (Wertsch, 2002).
7 In the dissertation I used snow balling and networking to select informants and gain access to the various
camps and depended on persons who were knowledgeable and long-time members of the community to
introduce me to other informants. The informants requested that I used their names and not pseudonyms
in the write-up of the study.
8 These are the names of the informants who gave me permission to use their names in the study.
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38
‘THE PATH IS MADE BY WALKING
ON IT’
Ethical complexities in supervising international
doctoral researchers using narrative approaches
Sheila Trahar
graduate school of education, university of bristol
Introduction
How ethical is it to be writing a chapter about – rather than with – doctoral researchers? In
articulating the ethical complexities inherent in supervising the work of doctoral researchers
using narrative approaches, I am doing so from my perspective as a supervisor. Is that ethical?
I write about experiences gained through my work with many doctoral researchers, but these
experiences do not belong to me; they transpired because of our relationship. Had I not worked
with these people, I would not be able to write the chapter. Therein lies a puzzle that is, in my
view, ever present in the ‘family’ of narrative methodological approaches, and indeed, in the
supervision process itself – that of ‘ownership’ of the narratives produced through relationships.
Sikes (2012, p. 125), writing about ‘stories drawing on experiences that I have had . . . as a super-
visor of students’ research’ was beset by similar tensions, posing the question, ‘Should I, therefore,
seek ethical clearance from the committee at my university before I write and tell them?’ Let me
state at the outset that I have not sought ethical clearance from my university before writing this
chapter. I consider that the accounts that I share do not ‘belong’ to the university that employs
me. If they ‘belong’ anywhere, they belong to the researchers and to me as they developed out
of our relationship and from accounts of their relationship with their research and their research
participants.
I draw on several vignettes of doctoral supervision throughout this chapter. I requested per-
mission to reproduce many of the researchers’ words as, not only did they write elegantly about
the complexities that I am about to describe, but also I considered this to be a tangible way to
include their voices. Everyone expressed pleasure that I wanted to write about my experiences of
working with them and even more pleasure that their own words were being used, appearing to
give their permission freely. But, was this because they felt compelled to do the latter – because
I, their supervisor – was asking them or because they wanted to? Maybe it was a little of both?
They have all read their contributions to the chapter and ‘approved’ them, but how am I to know
whether they felt coerced into doing so? Cree (2012) engages in similar interrogation when
she writes about ‘the learning process in which I have been engaged as a supervisor’, asking that
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Sheila Trahar
the ‘vignettes’ that she uses in her article ‘be understood as “critical moments” which, in their
own right, have the potential to open a window onto new ideas about practice’ (p. 454). Like
Cree, I have no desire to cause ‘embarrassment’ or ‘harm’ to those whose accounts are included
here, hence my permission seeking processes. Like her, also, I hope that this chapter may open a
window onto new ideas about practices, certainly those practices that, for me, constitute signifi-
cant ethical complexities in doctoral supervision, complexities that, in my experience, are rarely
debated.
In this chapter I focus on several dimensions of doctoral supervision. First of all, I write
about how I position myself as a doctoral supervisor. Secondly, I discuss what I regard as ethical
complexities that arise when supervising doctoral researchers who are using narrative inquiry
and other methodological approaches that fall under the umbrella of narrative research. I
encourage all doctoral researchers, wherever they are from, to position themselves and their
research within paradigmatic perspectives that are consistent with their own values and beliefs
about the world, but, for me, different complexities arise when those from ‘non-Western’
contexts alight on philosophical perspectives that are predominantly ‘Western’ or ‘Eurocentric’
in origin. There is, in my opinion, an additional ethical issue in supporting and encouraging
researchers to use methodological approaches that are either unknown in their context or, if
known, not appreciated. I discuss some techniques and practices of narrative inquiry, in par-
ticular narrative interviewing, the use of a reflecting team and fictionalisation, revealing how
doctoral researchers have interrogated them and modified them so that they are appropriate
for use in the context. Obtaining ethical clearance for research is another issue for discussion.
Doctoral researchers have to undergo the university’s ethical procedures, procedures that have
been devised according to particular ways of seeing the world. In their own context, these
ethical codes may have much less meaning or importance, especially when the methodological
approach is unfamiliar. To what extent should adherence to the university’s ethical framework
be required?
I am concerned that I may be perceived as only attending to the ethical complexities discussed
in this chapter when supervising so-called ‘international’ researchers. Let me be clear that, for
me, in my own work and in my supervision of others’ work, wherever they may be from, these
concerns arise. In this chapter, I have been invited to focus on my work with ‘international’
researchers; hence, it is those experiences that are foregrounded.
Positioning myself as a supervisor

I am a white, British, female academic and have been supervising doctoral researchers in the UK
and Hong Kong – PhD and Doctor of Education (EdD) – for some 10 years. The majority of
these researchers may be defined as ‘international students’, although I eschew that term (Tra-
har, 2011a); neither do I embrace the term ‘supervisor’ or ‘adviser’. These terms evoke, for me,
the scientific tradition in which the ‘doctoral student’ serves an apprenticeship or is a member
of a research team led by the supervisor. In such circumstances, the supervisor is positioned as
controlling the doctoral process (Halse & Bansel, 2012). My aim, as a supervisor, is to develop
a ‘learning alliance’ with the researcher in which we are both learning and in which we share
the responsibility for a ‘fruitful doctoral experience and a high quality doctoral degree’ (Halse &
Bansel, 2012, p. 384). Lest readers begin to think that this leads to an abnegation of any academic
responsibilities, let me stress that this is quite the opposite. I feel these responsibilities acutely
but I also believe that I am supporting/guiding people through their research – the research is
not ‘mine’. ‘International students’ or, in this chapter, ‘international doctoral researchers’ are, as
I indicated earlier, other terms that I strive to avoid. Suffice to say that, in being asked to write
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‘The path is made by walking on it’
about my experiences of supervising international doctoral students, I am focusing on those who

are defined as ‘international’ in the UK higher education system, that is they are not ordinarily
resident in the UK or other EU country. For example, many of the EdD researchers with whom
I work are undertaking the University of Bristol’s EdD programme in Hong Kong. In addition, as
is the case of all those appearing in this chapter, they do not speak English as their first language.
All of the doctoral researchers who feature here use narrative inquiry as their methodological
approach, and I consider it incumbent on me, ethically, as a supervisor, to challenge them to
question whether this is an appropriate methodology for their context. In doing so, I support
them, not only to position themselves philosophically within their research and understand the
relationship between this positioning and their methodological approach and methods, but to
develop their own form of narrative inquiry. I consider, therefore, that ethical considerations
surface at every stage of the research process and are not only to be considered with regard to
research participants (Clough & Nutbrown, 2012).
In my own research, teaching and writing I have problematised, consistently, epistemological
ethnocentricity (influenced by, for example, Stanfield, 1993; Scheurich, 1997) and methodo-
logical approaches, so that those selected are not only appropriate to the research topic and
congruent with my worldviews, but also sensitive to the backgrounds of the participants. The
work of those such as Tuhiwai Smith (2012), Trinh (1989) and Connell (2007) has challenged
me to interrogate my own epistemological and ontological beliefs and, therefore, inevitably, I
have taken these challenges into my research methodology teaching and into my supervisory
relationships. I am at one with Sikes (2012) when she writes, ‘I have long held the opinion that
in investigating, analysing, making sense of and writing other people’s lives, our own lives, our
beliefs and values, our positionality, inevitably, are implicated’ (p. 130) and I have written else-
where of how I cannot and have no desire to compartmentalise my life so that one area does not
impact another (see for example Trahar, 2011a, 2015). When I work with doctoral researchers,
my practice is the same. So, when a doctoral researcher indicates that s/he wants to use narrative
inquiry, or any other approach that falls under the narrative umbrella, I will challenge but also
support her/him not only to develop a version of narrative that is congruent with her/his world
views, but also to be aware of how her/his approach may be received in her/his local context.
In contexts where, for example, quantitative methodologies continue to be privileged over
qualitative ones, narrative research approaches are viewed sceptically and questioned for what
can seem to be spurious reasons to those of us who are familiar with these approaches – and,
moreover, tired of defending them (Trahar & Yu, 2015). Nonetheless, I consider it important
that the researcher is mindful of the risks that s/he may be taking. On the other hand, it is my
experience that those who decide to use narrative often do so out of a strong sense of social
justice and with a desire to enable voices that are often silenced to be heard; a most worthy
rationale that I consider important to foster.
‘More complex issues of how identity and culture play out in complex ways within supervi-
sion pedagogy’ are not addressed in guidelines for doctoral supervisors, according to Winches-
ter-Seeto et al. (2014, p. 611). Research that they conducted with a relatively large sample of
international doctoral candidates and supervisors in Australia – 46 and 38, respectively – con-
firmed similarities between the problems experienced by all doctoral researchers, irrespective of
where they are from, but also highlighted issues that were more specific to non-local researchers,
one of which, that may be particularly pertinent to the focus of this chapter, is cultural differences
in dealing with hierarchy. By the latter, they mean hierarchy in the supervisory relationship, but
I am adding how hierarchy is constructed and conceptualised in different cultural contexts, how
this is manifested in research and how such hierarchical differences are subsequently managed
within the supervisory relationship; an example of this is given in my discussion of the work with
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Sheila Trahar
Aroma, one of my doctoral researchers, in the next section. As I stated at the beginning of the
chapter, how do I ever know whether the people who gave me permission to write about them
did so because they position me as superior to them in our relationship?
Much of the research that concerns itself with doctoral supervision in ‘cross-cultural’ contexts
focuses on the complexities of the relationship due to supervisor and researcher having different
cultural backgrounds. It is difficult, however, to locate research that foregrounds ethical issues
of methodological and philosophical complexities, although Park and Lunt (2015) mention the
lack of reflexivity in most researchers when applying research methods developed in particular
contexts to ‘non-Western’ ones. Halse and Bansel (2012) highlight the value of a socio-cultural
paradigm in doctoral supervision because it ‘conceptualises the doctorate in terms of the epis-
temological, pedagogical and management considerations’ (p. 382) but do not extend their dis-
cussion to articulate how these considerations might be played out in encouraging researchers to
reflect critically on their epistemological and ontological belief and thus methodological choices.
In this chapter, I attempt to do this.
Aroma’s story
I have known Aroma for some years as she first came to Bristol to undertake a Master’s degree
in education. In the course of doing this degree, she became fascinated by narrative therapy
using elements of it in her research for her dissertation. Some time after having graduated, she
contacted me, expressing her desire to do a PhD. She developed a strong research proposal, which
was accepted, and I supervised her research from 2012–2015, when she submitted her disser-
tation. The focus of Aroma’s research was ‘education fever’ in South Korea. Education fever, as
the words suggest, is a term that refers to the myriad practices in South Korea used by parents to
ensure that their children forge ahead in their education in order to be able to attend prestigious
universities that then lead to successful careers. From Aroma, I learned that even young babies
are taken to language classes so that they learn to speak English before they can speak Korean
fluently. Aroma’s concern was that parents, in particular mothers, who in this context hold the
main responsibility for their children’s education, were so caught up in education fever that they
had lost sight of their children’s needs and, indeed, their own life values. In addition, although
South Korea scores very highly on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA),
it has high rates of youth suicide.
There were several ethical complexities that arose for me in supervising Aroma’s doctoral
research. The first was her paradigmatic perspective, which she identified as social construction-
ism. Although perfectly appropriate as a perspective underpinning narrative inquiry, I was con-
cerned about the relevance of this perspective in South Korea ‘regarded as the most Confucian
country in East Asia’ (Park & Lunt, 2015, p. 3). While, to some extent, social constructionism
bears comparison with Confucianism, given its focus on learning through relationships with
others, the traditional hierarchy system and authority attributed to those in specific positions in
society seemed to me to contradict it. I shared my concerns with Aroma and we discussed them at
some length. I felt it important that, in a context that is not yet so familiar with narrative inquiry
and, especially in researching a topic that traditionally has, mostly, been investigated using quan-
titative approaches (Kwon, 2015), were Aroma to produce a study that would be convincing and
exert some influence, she needed to ensure that she paid scrupulous attention to these matters.
Stimulated by our dialogue, Aroma began to reflect on the values and beliefs that permeated her
life. These were drawn not only from the strong Confucian presence in her context but also
from being a Christian. As I reflect and write about this now, I muse on why she engaged in this
critical reflection. Because I suggested it to her? Because she did not want to disagree with me?
508
Because she decided to read more about philosophy? I might congratulate myself that, from my
perspective, her philosophical positioning became stronger, contextually appropriate and confi-
dent, and, moreover, she was able to demonstrate authoritatively how education fever is rooted
in Confucianism, but she may disagree. She may feel that I coerced her into something that she
did not want to do because she found it difficult to disagree with me as the ‘authority’ figure in
our relationship (Park & Lunt, 2015).
Aroma decided to use narrative interviews and the reflecting team in order to gather sto-
ries about education fever from several South Korean mothers. Both methods are relatively
unknown in Korea, in particular the reflecting team, so, in order for them to be functional, she
modified them. I write about her approach to the reflecting team later in the chapter but her
method of narrative interviewing leaned heavily on unstructured conversations in which she
expected to share her own resonances, as a Korean mother, with narrators, thus leading to a
form of co-construction of narratives (Riessman, 2004). I had not anticipated that the ages of
the mothers would be significant. I learned that in Korean society, age and experience of life
are considered very important. Were she to interview mothers who were older than her, there
would be an issue of trust, not only because of Aroma’s age, but because she had fewer years of
experience as a mother, although one of her children is a teenager. This possible obstacle was
overcome by a friend’s suggestion that she include other mothers of teenagers in her research,
volunteering herself as a participant and inviting her friends, also mothers of teenagers, to partic-
ipate. Thus the ‘Confucian setting with accepted hierarchies and social mores gave opportunities
to use social networks to recruit respondents and to collect rich data. However, there were also
corresponding risks of the sample being wholly dominated by networks and undermining the
integrity of the study’ (Park & Lunt, 2015, p. 14). From my perspective, the integrity of the
study was not undermined by Aroma’s use of these complex social networks. The ethical ques-
tions that arose were: How appropriate is it to use this unstructured style of interviewing and
to share personal memories triggered by the interaction in a context within which relationships
are somewhat more hierarchical than those in which these ideas developed? Might such behav-
iour lead to Aroma being ridiculed or even shunned by her participants? More generally, how
ethical is it for me to support and encourage a researcher to use methods that are unknown in
their context?
In Hong Kong
Supervising doctoral researchers in Hong Kong poses a particular set of ethical complexities, none
of which I would have predicted, other than perhaps the criticism of the use of ‘I’ in academic
writing and the use of ‘small samples’ rendering the outcomes of the research as not ‘general-
isable’. To illustrate some of these complexities, I share elements of my relationships with four
doctoral researchers, Judy, Song Yun, Mabel and Ming, together with the ethical questions raised
that are related to philosophical and methodological intricacies.
Judy
It was through Judy’s account of a conversation between herself and a fellow doctoral researcher
(reproduced below), in a draft chapter sent to me for comment, that I learned of their cynicism
and resistance to my suggesting that they reflect on themselves as Chinese women in order to
surface the influences of their Confucian heritage on their research. Reading Judy’s writing was
a salutary experience for me as it raised a more fundamental question of whether I was being
ethical in my exhortations to researchers to ensure congruence in paradigmatic perspectives. In
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Sheila Trahar
other words, was I, unethically, imposing my own beliefs about the importance of the relationship
between philosophical positioning and methodology(ies) onto them?
It was not until I tried to interpret and analyse the data that I collected from the inter-
views with Johnny that I realised the Chinese, mostly Confucian values hidden within
me. Perhaps they have always been here since my cognitive abilities developed. Only
one week before I started to analyse the data, I had this conversation with my doctorate
fellow, while having coffee at the university campus, about the struggle to recognise
the Chinese elements within us. “Like, we are not collectivists. We didn’t go overseas
to study because of our parents. We made the choice ourselves. We are actually quite
individualistic. Just blame our education system for us being so westernised”, said my
classmate.
“Yeah, it is hard to ask me all of a sudden, to squeeze out some ‘Chinese elements’
to strengthen my philosophical stance,” I agreed with her.
Having read these words, I wrote the following comment on Judy’s draft:
I am imagining that this conversation took place, partly because I had suggested that you
‘locate’ yourself much more clearly and firmly as a Chinese woman in your context?? If
that is the case, I am perfectly OK for you to say that. In fact, if you do say that, it will
be clearer to the reader why that conversation took place.
By writing this, I was striving to encourage Judy to be transparent about her criticisms of
what had transpired between us. I considered that a more detailed explanation of what led to the
conversation between the two friends (I also supervise the friend’s research), would not only
be clearer for the reader, but it would also provide a more convincing rationale for her para-
digmatic positioning and her struggles with it. Another offshoot of this interaction between
us was that Judy told me that she had been talking with her husband about her Chinese herit-
age and he, like me, had been encouraging her to reflect on it and to integrate such reflections
into her research. The conversation that Judy recounted in this draft chapter was profound for
me. It was clear that the two researchers had been discussing their supervision and, I inferred,
been critical of my incitement to them to consider their Chinese heritage when formulating
their philosophical perspectives. Later in her chapter, however, Judy articulates her growing
awareness of the extent to which she uses her heritage when she is analysing and reflecting
on her research conversations with Johnny, one of her research participants. Perhaps I can
allow myself to feel vindicated as I concur with Clough and Nutbrown (2012, p. 39) when
they write:
They must articulate the ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ aspects of their studies in order to give
meaningful report to the research act . . . the really successful – that is, the persuasive –
studies are those which demonstrate a clear, logical and reflexive relationship between
research questions and field questions and, in the process, provide deliberate, careful
consideration of ethical questions . . . this relationship is not one which is articulated
in a so-called ‘methodology chapter’ but one which is also evident throughout the work.
(original emphasis)
Thus, when Judy completes her dissertation and defends it in her Hong Kong context, she can be
confident in claiming that it is located, decisively, within the cultural mediators of that context,
510
having attended to the ethical questions raised by her earlier positioning within paradigmatic
perspectives that are informed by worldviews that may be at variance with those of Hong Kong.
Song Yun
Song Yun’s research focuses on the experiences of students from Mainland China who attend
her university in Hong Kong. Methodologically, this is the first time that she has used narrative
inquiry and the ethical dimensions of her research have been the subject of several of our conver-
sations. She has completed the University of Bristol ethics process but I have asked her, repeatedly,
to ensure that she has ethical clearance from her institution to conduct research with students.
Frequent attempts to have the conversation with her line manager had not been productive, and I
was anxious that she should ensure ethical clearance as, even though she is not teaching or assess-
ing the student participants, she is in a position of authority in her institution. Finally, Song Yun
reported that she had met with her line manager who had communicated to her that, as she was
conducting research with so few participants, she did not need to go through the ethics protocols.
To me, this not only communicated ignorance of ethical issues in qualitative research but also that
the line manager did not consider the research to be important. Song Yun wrote the following:
Completing the ethical review process at the University of Bristol was relatively
straightforward, as the ethics questionnaire allowed room for an informed discussion of
issues that a qualitative, or more importantly a narrative, researcher may confront, with
room to justify options that may deviate from traditional practices such as signing an
informed consent form. Getting ethical clearance from work proved to be much more
challenging.
When I first started my research project, I informed my line manager at work and
briefly outlined my project. At that stage, as mentioned, I was not prepared to apply for
ethical clearance, as I wanted to explore the key issues before I submitted an applica-
tion. Half way through my project, I approached my line manager again asking him for
advice as to whether I should submit an application for a review, since, while there are
guidelines on research requiring the use of questionnaires and for biomedical research,
there are no specific guidelines for qualitative or narrative research. My line manager,
who was not familiar with narrative inquiry as a research method, suggested that since
my research involved students, I should apply for a review. Like Webb (2006), I was
concerned that narrative research may not be well-understood, and so I submitted my
written research proposal to him, together with the documents that I sent to partici-
pants on how we would work together on the research project, as well as a summary
of a draft paper I had written on methodology, hoping to provide more information
on the implications and possibility of unintended consequences to facilitate him in
making a decision to support my application for ethical review without the students
having to sign a consent form. For weeks, I waited for him to respond or for further
comments. However, while we discussed other issues at work, the research project was
never brought up. After waiting for 2 months, I approached him again, and two days
later, I received a written note from him with the advice that the project did not need
to go through formal ethical review.
I was puzzled by the decision. While from one perspective, I was glad that I had
my line manager’s written approval to proceed without going through formal ethical
clearance, I found the outcome dissatisfying as I was fully aware of the ethical issues and
implications of the project . . . I was left to wonder if the decision was made as a result
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of capitalist imperialist preference for efficiency to avoid confronting the issues of alter-
native research methods, which may justify alternative ethical considerations (Connella
& Lincoln, 2007). However, I find it hard to confront my line manager again on the
issue, sensing that doing so may be construed as challenging his authority as a senior
staff member in the context of a rigid hierarchical work relationship. In any case, I was
under no illusion that the endorsement would absolve me from my ongoing concern
with equity and the imposition of power as I continued with my research.
In this elegantly written account, Song Yun explains the convoluted process that she went through
to gain ethical clearance in her institution and the tensions that she experienced in a context
unfamiliar with narrative inquiry. She illustrates the inextricable links between ethics and meth-
odology, the hierarchical intricacies of the Hong Kong context and the nuances of the exertion of
power in her institution. Such a tortuous experience, however, renders her even more determined
to interrogate transparently the complex power issues in her research.
The reflecting team

The reflecting team originated as a practice in family therapy and has been adopted by narrative
therapists (see, for example, White & Epston, 1990) and referred to as a reflecting team or an
outsider witness ceremony. Its use in research has been more limited. I have used it in various
ways in my own work to encourage people to reflect on ethical complexities in research and in
‘teaching’ the analysis of narrative data (Trahar, 2011b). Given that, as I wrote earlier, I strive to
develop relationships with doctoral researchers that lean towards ‘learning alliances’, inevitably
I share with them different ways of gathering ‘narrative data’, of ‘analysing’ and re-presenting
them. Several have opted to use a reflecting team to gather together research participants in the
collaborative sharing of experiences. I share two illustrations in this chapter: Mabel, a researcher
in Hong Kong, and Aroma, whose work I discussed earlier.
Mabel
Mabel is a teacher educator in Hong Kong. Her doctoral research focused on the professional
identities of school counsellors in Hong Kong and the extent to which these were mediated by
the extensive reforms to guidance and counselling in schools made by the Hong Kong govern-
ment. As a former counsellor and counsellor trainer myself, I had critiqued what I referred to
as ‘dominant narratives’ of approaches to counselling – i.e., theoretical approaches informed by
‘Western’ ways of seeing the world (see, for example, Trahar, 2011a). In early conversations with
Mabel, it emerged that, initially, the Hong Kong government had required schools to implement
an approach to school guidance developed in the UK and then subsequently, one developed in
the US. I recall sharing with Mabel that I considered it inappropriate to adopt policies developed
in one context without considering carefully any differences between the contexts. This notion
of policy borrowing has been critiqued heavily for several years by, for example, Crossley (2000)
and, more latterly, Bridges (2014), and I found it dispiriting that the Hong Kong government
was still engaging in it. In those early conversations, Mabel revealed how certain elements of
those policies concerned her, as did theories of counselling. She had only ever been exposed
to these dominant narratives; no effort had been made to problematise their applicability in
a Chinese context. Those early conversations encouraged and supported Mabel to engage in
a sensitive and deeply reflexive critique of approaches to counselling in her context and to
articulate how she – and indeed her research participants – were striving to develop therapeutic
512
approaches that were more congruent and appropriate. Her confidence grew significantly and
she engaged in similar critical interrogations in developing her philosophical perspective and
narrative inquiry approach.
Mabel’s words describe the approach that she took to using a reflecting team practice (RTP)
in her research in Hong Kong:
Self-disclosure is risky for some people. When I invited the school counsellors to par-
ticipate in both the individual interview and the RTP, they asked me the same question:
‘Who will be invited to be in the reflecting team?’ Two of them told me that they were
worried that there would be someone in the team that they did not like. Their relation-
ships with the others were important for them in deciding whether or not they would
participate in the RTP. I had not confirmed all the participants at the time of the initial
contact, so could not tell them the names of the others. I deliberated whether it was
appropriate to let the participants know each other’s names before the RTP took place.
For Confucius, the self is related to others in one’s personal development and human
relationships are of great concern in Chinese culture (Luk-Fong, 2006). To self-disclose
in a reflecting team is a risk-taking process and resonance occurs through trusting
dialogue with others. I therefore concluded that participants had the right to know in
advance who else would be in the team. After obtaining their consent to disclose their
names to other participants, I passed this information to all of them. Finally, they all felt
comfortable joining the RTP even though they did not know each other.
(Shek, 2015, p. 74)
In the extract above, Mabel indicates how she has considered the reflecting team practice as an
appropriate research method and ‘customised’ it for her context. It did not occur to me that peo-
ple might need to know who else was in the team before agreeing to participate because, in all
of the reflecting team practices which I have participated and facilitated, people have known one
another. In a relatively small context like Hong Kong, the counsellors were worried that they may
have known one another or had colleagues in common, issues that would have rendered them
vulnerable and inhibited conversation. By this stage in her research process, Mabel is comfortable
with making gentle challenges to my suggested approach to a reflecting team, striving to ensure
that it is used in ways that are commensurate with the customs and sensitivities of the context.
Thus, not only does she behave ethically but also she demonstrates her growing confidence as a
researcher.
Aroma
Aroma conducted several reflecting teams as part of her research in South Korea. She worked
with three different groups of participants, conducting two teams with each. She had read about
the reflecting team, familiarised herself with how it could be used as a collaborative research
process and had participated in one that I had facilitated. Reflecting teams in Korea are, however,
unknown and, moreover, she found that gathering together a group of mothers in this hothouse
environment to be somewhat different from the collegial events that she had read about and,
indeed, experienced. The mothers, who were her research participants, were much more used to
competing with each other with regard to their children’s achievements when they met together
as a group, rather than sharing their fears and concerns about their children’s wellbeing. In the
first reflecting team, Aroma’s experience was that the mothers compared themselves with the
narrator, evaluating the situation that she had described, rather than sharing their own resonances.
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Sheila Trahar
Rather than struggling to conduct the reflecting team in the ways that she had experienced in
another context, Aroma realised that she needed to be flexible, to accept that this was a very
different style of meeting for them. The outcome was similar, in that the mothers shared their
stories, but the process was somewhat different. One participant commented, ‘I liked the individ-
ual interview but I gained more from the other mothers’ hearts in the group, and then I could
put my ideas in order. If I compare between the reflecting team and the individual interviews,
I learnt more in the group’ (Kwon, 2015, p. 157). In the second reflecting team in each group,
Aroma provided refreshments and materials so that participants could create artefacts symbolic
of their learning from being a participant in her study of education fever. One of these ‘teams’
continued for more than 3 hours; in another, she found herself weeping with the mothers as she
listened to their stories:
When they cried, tears came to my eyes, and I choked up telling them my experiences.
Even though I tried to control my emotions, I did not hide my feelings from them.
There was no boundary between the mothers and me. We talked to each other as
mothers.
(Kwon, 2015, p. 162)
Thus, although I might have felt that the way in which she conducted the team was some-
what unusual, what actually transpired was not that dissimilar to the reflecting team experiences
familiar to me – i.e., the participants experienced the power of not feeling alone and of being
companions, the meaningful values of the process.
The use of fictionalisation

I have used fictionalisation in re-presenting elements of my own research (see, for example, Tra-
har, 2011a) and, therefore, invite doctoral researchers to consider its use, if appropriate, and also as
a way of ensuring that their dissertations are persuasive, engaging and readable. Fictionalisation is
a ‘device used by many narrative inquirers to communicate co-constructed narratives, or to bring
to the awareness of readers complex situations that may be difficult to do otherwise’ (Trahar & Yu,
2015, p. xvii). It can be a means to tell a story that is ‘based on “real” events to produce a version
of the “truth” as she or he sees it’ (Trahar & Yu, 2015, p. xviii). But, for me, encouraging some-
one to consider fictionalisation is another ethical complexity. Its use as a literary device in social
science research is relatively unknown in many contexts and so, by introducing it as an option,
am I behaving irresponsibly? Fictionalisation can be a way of getting around the complex issue
in narrative approaches of rendering visible those who either have not given their permission to
be visible or are unable to give their permission for various reasons. Gaining permission from
everyone and the use of pseudonyms are culturally mediated processes, however, as is the issue
of having research participants sign informed consent forms (see, for example, Andrews, 2007).
But, that aside, in cases where a researcher wants to tell a particular story that, in the telling, may
trouble some people, it can be a useful and powerful device.
Ming’s use of fictionalisation

Ming, a doctoral researcher in Hong Kong, investigating the experiences of a group of South
Asian children, did so through the use of Forum Theatre. Forum Theatre is an interactive form
of theatre that presents a theatrical debate to create a group that encourages audience inter-
action. Ming has a background as a drama teacher and extensive experience of using Forum
514
Theatre as a powerful tool for exploring solutions to difficult problems. Much of Ming’s dis-
sertation is, therefore, presented as a play. In wanting, however, to represent the story of Billy,
one of the participants in her Forum Theatre whose account of experiences at the hands of his
Hong Kong teachers had been particularly troubling to Ming, she decided to use fictionalisa-
tion. Her decision was based on wanting to conduct an ‘investigation’ into Billy’s story of cruelty
at the hands of his teachers and to give the other ‘protagonists’ an opportunity to present their
version of events. Ming was the investigator in the fictionalised account, which begins with her
entering the meeting room, sensing the ‘intense atmosphere’ and proceeds with her questioning
the teachers and several other children without Billy being present. To me, this seemed a richly
creative way of telling Billy’s story ‘differently’ in order to emphasise the inappropriate discrim-
inatory behaviour permeated in the classroom by local Chinese teachers that had emerged from
her research. I alerted her to the possible risks of the scepticism that might result in presenting
her research in such a way in Hong Kong and in Macau, where she lives, but, nonetheless, she
decided to go ahead. She provided admirable justification for this by drawing on an ancient
Chinese philosopher, Zhuangzi:
Many readers may be unfamiliar with fictionalisation as its use is still not common
in research in HK. However, I found it similar to Zhuangzi (莊子)’s philosophy and
way of teaching/writing. Zhuangzi is a famous representative of Taoism in ancient
China . . . He liked to use story to teach. One of his famous teachings, Zhuang Zhou
dreaming of a butterfly (莊周夢蝶), is written in a fictionalised form. It is about a dream
of Zhuangzi. He became a butterfly in the dream and he was happy; however, when he
woke up he could not differentiate whether it was his dream of becoming a butterfly
or it was a butterfly’s dream of becoming Zhuangzi. This suggested a theory – human
beings cannot precisely differentiate between reality and illusion . . . Thus even though
it may not be very common to use fictionalisation in research in contemporary HK, it
exists in teaching in ancient China. Fable is an example. Zhuangzi wrote many fables,
giving speech through some creative characters, to communicate messages more easily.
Zhuangzi used fables to teach and tell his theories. Hence, even though the characters
may be created, the philosophy behind it is well founded. This is similar to fictionalisa-
tion. Although it is written as a fiction, which has created scene, conversation and even
characters, it is based on fact, data and knowledge of the research topic. Fictionalisation
is a method, which tells a message or perspective in a form that readers can easily read
and understand. It also gives space for readers to think. Readers can visualise the situa-
tion in the fiction and even have ‘the chance to play a role in the relationship and to hear
their own inner voice as they internalize the emotions and ideas’ (Cheung, 2015, p. 46)
of the characters in the fiction. For example, readers may imagine they were the South
Asian student being punished by the teacher in the following story. This helps them
to construct their own meaning of the story and ‘develop a deeper understanding of ’
the South Asian students’ experiences. This also enables readers, who are in a different
context, to understand what I see and what my position is.
This, for me, is another illustration of the importance of the development of a strong learning
alliance. I had never heard of Zhuangzi. My caution about Ming’s use of fictionalisation may
have been misplaced. My sharing of this caution with her, however, as what I consider to be my
ethical responsibility, supports Ming to explain her use of fictionalisation from her own literary
and philosophical traditions. It is also a salutary reminder to me of the importance of trusting
doctoral researchers to take responsibility for explaining decisions in their own way.
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Final reflections
The metaphor of journeying is a common one in research and writing and one that I have used
previously (Trahar, 2011a). The invitation to write this chapter has taken me on yet another
journey, one of reflecting on what constitutes ethical practice for me in working with doctoral
researchers from many parts of the world who decide to use narrative approaches. As I indicated
at the beginning of this chapter, the methodological complexities that I encounter and consider
to be ethical issues in supervision do not seem to have surfaced in the literature, yet, for me, these
are noteworthy considerations in this academic practice. The responsibility placed on me as a
supervisor is significant. My role is to support and guide people through their research and to
produce the best possible dissertation. For me, an intrinsic dimension of this process is clear and
honest communication together with dialogue about methodological risks and philosophical
perspectives. I have such conversations with all doctoral researchers but, as I have illustrated here,
feel different responsibilities when supervising international researchers. I acknowledge that this
may be related to my intensive and continuous interrogation of my own values and beliefs in my
research and teaching but, as I have written elsewhere (Trahar, 2013) ‘the path is made by walking
upon it’. Perhaps another path has been made . . .
Many thanks to Aroma, Judy, Mabel, Ming and Song Yun for their contributions to this
writing.
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39
WRITING THE (COUNTRY) GIRL
Narratives of place, matter, relations and memory
Susanne Gannon
western sydney university
Introduction
This chapter explores some of the ethical implications and complexities of writing about girl-
hood in memoir, autoethnography and collective biography. While recognizing that ‘the girl’ can
be understood theoretically as ‘an assemblage of social and cultural issues and questions rather
than a field of physical facts’ (Driscoll, 2008, p. 14), as a ‘cultural, historical and social phenom-
enon that is shaped by social policies and institutions’ (Gonick & Gannon, 2014), this chapter
turns to narrative ‘empirical’ accounts of country girlhood in a dialogue with Driscoll’s The Aus-
tralian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience (2014). It assembles narrative vignettes of girlhood
memory in particular moments of temporal and spatial dislocation, including in the present.
Rather than seeking to create a definitive account of a ‘real’ experience of country girlhood, the
chapter attempts to disinter, dislocate and multiply narratives of memory around the figure of
the country girl. It follows affective and relational flows, and evokes the materiality of memory.
It situates personal memories within socio-political and historical contexts. And it seeks to be
ethically responsive to those others with whom the narrating subject and her story are entangled.
In this chapter, I bring together ‘memoir’,‘autoethnography’ and ‘collective biography’ as types
of narrative. However, they vary in terms of their audiences, their methods and their disciplinary
leanings. While memoir circulates as a literary form, with readership situated largely outside the
academy, autoethnography and collective biography stake their claims in the academic world
(Boylorn et al., 2013; Davies & Gannon 2006, 2009, 2012; Gonick & Gannon, 2014; Holman
Jones et al., 2013). They might be thought of within the broad parameters of social science
research into lived experience; however, each of them – along with other modes of narrative
inquiry that are discussed in this Handbook – poses direct challenges to the desire for generalizabil-
ity, the aspiration to objectivity and the immutability of the truth claims of much social scientific
research. Writing in a narrative mode means refusing to generalise, and it demands that we detail
the idiosyncrasies of place, time, and people. It means embracing the subjectivity of perspective
and point of view, and articulating how these necessarily limit what can be told. It means mod-
esty, as any truth claims will be partial, provisional and particular. Any other person will have a
different perspective, another story to tell. Furthermore, in any place or point in time, the stories
that a single person will be able to tell will also shift their shapes and emphases and do different
sorts of work. This chapter draws upon these dialogic possibilities.
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Writing the (country) girl
I’m interested in how encounters with other people, texts and perspectives can be put to work
as provocations and opportunities for thinking and writing otherwise about experience. Rather
than outlining a formula that might be replicable, or delivering an elaboration of method that
might be citable, I have allowed the text to find its own particular form through the writing,
rather than in advance of it. This is a multilayered narrative performance organised around the
trope of the ‘country girl’. Rather than a bucolic or pastoral account of the pleasures of country
life, or a transcendent tale of overcoming the harshness of the Australian bush, this is a textual ‘call
and response’ that draws on other texts and responds to other voices (Gannon, 2013). Drawing
on personal, social and cultural history, it adds new narrative fragments to the ‘swirling backdrop
of stories’ of Australian country girlhood (Driscoll, 2014, p. 178).
Dislocation: ‘Tell us about the pub!’

The country girl evoked in this chapter, drawn from memory, paradoxically, erupted in the
present when I was in the audience at a public lecture on country girlhood given by Catherine
Driscoll, partly in order to launch her new book. In the lull after the lecture, someone called out
‘Tell us about the pub!’ I caught my breath, surprised by the surge of feeling through my body.
I can’t pin a name on what I felt in that moment but it came in a rush and a tangle and while it
called me up in a peculiar way, it also precluded me from speaking into that space. What could I
have said? Could I have declared myself as having a special relationship with that sort of place –
‘the pub’ – a place that is over-coded in the cultural imaginaries of both the UK and Australia?
Later in the university bar, before the official book launch, I asked the person who had called
out about the ‘pub’ comment. I was told that Driscoll had worked behind a bar in a pub in a
country town pub while she was researching the book. I read the comment, in that moment,
as though this was understood as a fantastic and interesting fieldwork strategy. I wondered if it
was a sort of anthropological adventure, a mode of going undercover, in a different sort of exotic
surrounding, or perhaps it was slumming it with an ethnographic eye? I didn’t know how long
this was for, or what working behind the bar signified. I didn’t ask. Instead, my visceral reaction
to the call and my particular (mis)readings of it became the pivot point for own musings about
my own particular country girlhood.
For me, who grew up in country pubs from when I was ten years old until I was eighteen,
who worked behind a bar well before I was legally old enough to drink, and for more days and
nights than I can remember, and without wages, the comment, ‘Tell us about the pub!’ was a
dislocation, a displacement. Not a momentary destabilisation, quickly rectified as more usual
ways of thinking and speaking in an academic milieu realigned along familiar tracks, but one
that stayed with me.
In a narrative mode, while the awkward collision of ‘girl’ and ‘ pub’ can be thought through
discursively, such as how gender and age construct certain types of subjects and relations in
certain institutional and social locations, I also need to attend to the particularities of that pub,
that girl, that moment. While ‘the girl’ may be an ‘assemblage of social and cultural issues and
questions’, she is materialised within particular and unique embodied experiences and locations
which, although they may be problematized and contextualised, are also simultaneously experi-
enced as individual, personal and central to the formation of subjectivity, no matter how mobile
or fragmented we might understand the concept to be.
Both our accounts rely on detailed evocations of particular places, people and times. Driscoll
begins, as I could, with ‘I grew up in a small town . . .’ (2014, p. 1). Her musings on country
girlhood are also called abruptly into the present when a taxi-driver names her as a ‘country girl’
because of her friendly manner, and willingness to talk to him. I recognise this practice of polite
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Susanne Gannon
curiosity about the other as perhaps a ‘country’ characteristic that we share. But the spaces of
everyday country girlhood that she surveys in her book, including the ‘Miss Showgirl’ compe-
tition at the annual Agricultural Show,1 the pony club, and the Country Women’s Association
(CWA) are not so familiar to me. These are all places where girls who live in and out of town are
likely to come together, and they are gendered female. In contrast, in this chapter, I turn directly
to the decidedly non-girl space and practices of the country pub that frames my memories of
country girlhood.
I use the term ‘pub’ deliberately, not just because of the dislocating effect it had on me when
I heard it at the book launch, but because of the emphasis it brings to gender and class relations.
The pub was not a genteel establishment for the middle classes but a place for workers to slake
their thirst companionably at the end (or even in the middle) of the working day. At the pub
that I write about in this chapter, the working men came after shearing sheep, harvesting wheat
or barley, pruning grape vines, picking apricots, building fences, driving trucks, labouring on
roads and in quarries, loading grain at the silo by the railway line. They came in when they
were unemployed, or underemployed. It was also a place for communities to gather, the hub for
football and netball teams after training, or after the game. The Lions Club convened monthly
meetings in what had once been called ‘the ladies’ lounge’ under a portrait of the girl-queen in
a yellow frock. Women were there, for sure, as were children, but the conditions and varieties of
ways in which they could be there differed from those available to men.
My parents ran two hotels through my childhood. When I was ten, they leased a medium-sized
hotel in a town that was then just under a thousand people, one hour north of Melbourne; then,
when I was fifteen, they bought a tiny pub in a town of only six houses, a lamp-post, and a wheat
Figure 39.1 Mystic Park ©Google, accessed via Google Earth Professional, 2016.
520
silo on the edge of the Mallee, a swathe of arid semi-desert landscape in north-western Victoria.
This place – unambiguously country and only just a town – is what I focus on in this chapter.
The lamp-post is significant as this was what designated our one-street town as ‘a built-up area’.
It was illegal to discharge a firearm in a built-up area, as my father found when he was fined for
this offence, after he shot dead a dog that bit my younger sister in the face, and the neighbour
sued him for damaging property. My high school was one hour’s bus trip, each way, from home.
Despite living in a designated town, I was definitely not a town girl. Though I’ve always joked that
if you live in the middle of nowhere then it may as well be in the pub. When the joke was on
me, it was as the ‘publican’s daughter’ who every (drinking) man would want to marry. Though
my parents sold the pub eleven years after I left home, there is still a sense that this is still my
country, and the pub was the last place where I was at home as a child, where I made friendships,
developed relationships, navigated my way more or less through the complications of sex, school,
drugs and alcohol and other aspects of teenage life.
Disinterring memories: Memoir, autoethnography, collective biography

Truth to tell, I had already been wondering about how to write these narratives of growing up
in a pub, and why I was beginning to feel compelled to disinter them. I knew the sort of place
that I had grown up in – the family run and family owned small rural hotel – was disappearing.
I was interested in the collision of masculine spaces and young female bodies in the mid-1970s
and in the particular rural spaces within which I had grown up. Details seemed to shift each time
I tried to write, as they always do. Memory is not a veridical act, coinciding with a singular truth.
Rather, we might think of memory as turning ‘toward the situation of the moment, presenting to
it that side of itself which may prove to be the most useful’ (Bergson, cited in Byers et al., 2014,
p. 82). Like a kaleidoscope, each turn in the present brings a different pattern from the past. They
are ‘contemporaneous and entangled’ (Byers et al., 2014, p. 84). Memories are not consecutive, or
ordered chronologically. Nor do they ‘lie side by side’ as static or discrete episodes. Rather, they
are dynamic, animated by movements of affect and sensation, and by the circumstances of the
present within which they emerge.
Fragments of these memories rose up in other writing contexts – a retreat in the desert, a short
course on memoir, a writing group with friends, a collective biography workshop that focused on
girlhood. As fragments, they did not aim to construct coherent or seamless narratives explaining
how things came to be, or how I came to recognise myself, or be recognised by others. Nor were
they organised in advance around the trope of the ‘country girl’. Each time I wrote, I aimed to
evoke immersive moments that were sensory, embodied, relational and as precise as possible in
their evocation of material details. They do not take up an overarching trope or construct an arc
of character or event. They did not link together although they can be plotted in time and space.
The line I drew was precisely that line from the book launch and the command I gave myself each
time, was, I suppose, almost the same: ‘Tell them about the pub!’ What Driscoll’s book demands,
as well as a reflexive and critical approach to embodied experience, is that moments of individual
or familial experience should be contextualised with popular culture, social history, and images.
Her text calls my stories into relation with hers, and invites me to think further through the
problematic of the pub as a cultural formation.
Rather than dividing this chapter into a discussion or analytical section and a narrative section,
I have interspersed pre-existing narrative fragments written at different times throughout the
chapter. I have indented and italicised them to emphasise their indeterminacy. In this instance, I
do not pin down their meanings with any definitive or provisional analyses; rather, I want to let
them speak across and amongst one another. Repetitions and refrains between them suggests the
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insistence and problematics of memory, somewhat like the imagined text that Meaghan Morris
describes as ‘an orchestration of modes of domestic repetition . . . going back again and again
over the same stories, the same terrains, the same sore spots’ (cited in Driscoll, 2014, p. 2). The
text in-between introduces some of the theoretical and methodological aspects of writing and
memory, and introduces further details of context.
We came in a season of flooding before a hot summer. All the summers were hot and
few of them were wet but I didn’t know that yet. That year and the spring of the fol-
lowing year there were floods. The Loddon and the Murray swelled and spilled their
brown swirling waters over levee banks, ignored irrigation channels and filled the flat
plains, the paddocks, the chains of lakes, lagoons and salt soaks and seeped through the
spindly state forest of stunted mallee and saltbush. Water spread unevenly across thou-
sands of acres of flat land.
Lambs were born bedraggled on higher pieces of ground and wheat crops were
drowned. Grain stored in the silos and the bunkers covered in plastic sheeting started
to sprout. Farmers were ruined now by too much rain. Ours was a ground’s eye view
of water, as it rose up to meet the Kerang bridge, roared over the spillway at Lake Kan-
garoo, covered the bitumen and crept along the road towards the little town that was
becoming ours. The edge of the lake wallowed up towards the houses at Gorton Point
and even the willows had more than their fill of water.
Flashes persist of late nights lit by headlights and people whose names I didn’t know
yet, and don’t know now, wearing waist high waders and gumboots filling sandbags and
stacking walls of them across the Mystic Park Road near the war memorial. That would
have been one of the years that Murray River encephalitis frightened the adults. Mos-
quitoes as big as helicopters sought to carry us off and midges wheeled in dark bands
at twilight near the surface of the lake. These were the times when the ‘Dry weather
only’ signs made sense and warned us off the Dip Road and the Benjeroop Rd and the
Tresco Rd and all those unnamed crisscrossing tracks that ran along the fencelines and
gave people so many other ways to get home from the pub.
That spring, one hundred acres of sunflowers grew out the back of Lake Charm. As
Scrivo’s school bus tracked along the fence lines, morning and evening, they lifted their
droopy faces towards and away from us, turning their backs to track the sun towards the
horizon. Some days we saw an emu and her chick running up and down up and down
along the wires. I sat high in my seat, reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but dreaming of
disappearing into head-high forests of yellow flowers and learning to love the wideness of
the sky. On Sundays that spring, as the water levels dropped, I went up the Darling River
fishing with my boyfriend and learned to love the rivers, the redgums, the pools and eddies
of water, the white sandbanks, the sleepy afternoons, dozing in the shady heat on a blanket.2
This narrative fragment draws from conventions of memoir, in its attention to literary style –
to artfully formed sentences and well-chosen words – and to reorganising experience to focus
on a particular aspect – growing up in a country pub. However, and more usefully in this text on
social science methodologies, it could also be described as autoethnographic. This is a narrative
mode that has been claimed for social science, one that aims to privilege personal experience,
voice, and cultural contexts within which they are realised, and that draws upon many of the
techniques of literary writing. Authenticity emerges in terms of the capacity of the text to move
an imagined audience, and to generate ‘voice’ for hitherto overlooked perspectives, and be ‘an
opening to honest and deep reflection about ourselves, and our relationships with others, and
522
how we want to live’ (Ellis in Holman Jones et al., 2013, p. 10). These claims of autoethno-
graphic conventions imply a coherent speaking subject and insist upon the veracity and honesty
of the narrative accounts that are voiced by the narrator. Clough suggests that in the intention
to give voice, there is a ‘forgetting of not knowing or of the unconscious and desire altogether’
(Clough, 2000, p. 17), and suggests that rather than striving for coherence, autoethnography
might produce ‘disjointed temporalities of experiences that cannot be known for certain, cannot
be placed once and for all but repeatedly pressure the subject with bodily effects’ (Clough, 2007,
p. 4). The narrative fragments in this chapter aim for precise material and sensory detail. They
do not seek narrative closure, chronology or causality. As part of a destabilizing autoethnographic
project, they might be considered as attempts to know some things about the past, but to keep
them trembling, to trouble the humanist notion of the subject as capable of self-knowledge and
self-articulation and to consider the body, affects, emotions and experience as ‘texts to be written
and read’ (Gannon, 2006, p. 474).
Several times I have tried to write moments of my life growing up in a pub in collective
biography workshops, but these stories never quite made it, or the pub parts of my stories were
edited out.3 Collectively biography works with memories in an explicitly poststructural frame,
enabling groups of researchers to collaboratively explore how power circulates and gender is
constructed, to investigate theory in the everyday through their memories of lived experience.
Researchers aim to recognize discursive effects, incorporate bodily knowledge and affect, and
move beyond individualized versions of psychological subjects with linear trajectories towards
understandings of ‘subjects-in-relation’ and ‘subjects-in-process’ in particular times and places
(Davies & Gannon, 2012, p. 79). Storytelling in collective biography tends to be volatile and
generative so that, in the space of a workshop where participants remember and share stories
from their lives, memories will spin off each other in unexpected directions and affective flows
will emerge and circulate amongst the group. While flattening out difference in the desire for
collective recognition is never an intention of collective biography – indeed, the particularity
and specificity of the telling is what opens out memories to others in the collective space – there
Figure 39.2 Mystic Park Hotel ©Google, accessed via Google Earth Professional, 2016.
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Susanne Gannon
may also be a reticence to draw attention to incommensurable experiences. Through collective

memory processes, ‘memories are no longer told as just autobiographical . . . but as opening up
for, and in, each other, knowledges of being that previously belonged only to the other . . . our
bodies take on the intimate knowledge of each others’ being’ (Davies & Gannon, 2009, p. 9).
But what if the particularities of the telling do not allow this recognition, or the discursive and
analytical alignments just don’t happen? What if the place, context and experience of a memory
is just too odd for others to understand?
Multiplying narratives: A social, cultural and personal history of the pub

As I have noted, one of the problems with the pub as a social and cultural formation within
which the family – and more specifically the girl – must make its place is that it collapses
the conventional public/private divide of the familial home. Public spaces intrude everywhere,
despite temporal and spatial demarcation. Little brass plaques nailed on to certain doorways and
passageways declare ‘Private’ or ‘Guests only’ but these are futile gestures. Even upstairs, where we
live in little rooms with numbered doors opening off long carpeted corridors, there are always
other people. As even this is a quasi-public space, our bathrooms are segregated by gender, with
dad and the boys using the male bathroom in the other wing of the U-shaped building, along
with a shifting crew of temporary and long term male boarders, and me, mum, my grandmother
and sisters using the female bathroom on our side where the only extra female guests we had
were our relatives and friends. When I was a kid, women tended not to stay in the pub, certainly
not by themselves, and not over long periods of time, as the men did. After all, a woman didn’t
need the domestic comforts of room and board – their food cooked, their laundry done, their
beds made – that these men, who were split up from their wives or working temporarily away
from home, needed. A woman wasn’t as likely to go into the bar after dinner, every night, or to
be privileged with her own personal stool by the bar. But, behind the bar, there might be a girl –
filling in for an hour two, after her homework, or on a holiday or weekend – learning as much
about the public/private lives of other families as of her own.
Struggletown
There was a pub, a hall, a tiny church, a football club, a telephone box, a railway station,
a street light and six houses when we moved there. We lived in the pub.
I went to bed to the sound of the desert she-oaks in the wind and the clack, clack,
clack of trains full of wheat, counting carriages until I was asleep.
From upstairs we could see the school bus coming for miles, the dust puffs raised by
its tires hanging in the air.
Low mallee scrub in the state forest all the way down the lake along the long straight
road.
Over the railway line were silos of wheat in the summer, the tallest with a ladder up
the outside and a door at the top that was always unlocked. My brothers would jump
from the little metal platform into the huge tank of yellow wheat, walking slow and
longfooted across its surface like the men on the moon.
The Post Office man broke his wife’s arm once over his knee. Their son was a quiet
boy. But it was only when they were found stealing cash that the police intervened.4
The social history of pubs in Australia, unlike those in UK and Ireland, has always been
entangled with accommodation and related ‘hospitality’ services, particularly in rural areas
524
where hotels were often the earliest buildings around which the town developed. The availa-
bility of accommodation and meals was at various times a condition of laws licensing the sale of
alcohol. Thus the usual architecture favoured a downstairs public bar and eating and cooking
areas, and upstairs bedrooms with a common lounge for socialising and watching television.
Heavily regulated opening hours, influenced by temperance movements, meant that from
WW1 through to 1966, pubs in Victoria closed at 6pm, giving rise to the ‘six o’clock swill’
where men would head to the pub as soon as they finished work at 5pm and ‘drink as much
as possible, as quickly as possible, in the hour before the pub closed [fostering] an endemic
culture of daily binge drinking’ and drunken public and domestic violence (Wikipedia, 2014).
Perhaps the reforms allowing 10pm closing times were good for some families, but for those
who lived in small hotels it made it difficult to ever be together for a meal. It was only three
years after six-o’clock closing was abolished that my parents, having faced bankruptcy in their
previous business, moved us into a hotel. Later, mum explained to me that leasing a hotel was
the best way they could think of to secure ‘somewhere to live’ for their growing family ‘as well
as an income’. The collapse of public and private space was precisely what attracted them to
the idea of the pub.
When we moved again, into the shabby little pub in that flat dry country, far from
home with so many things lost along the way, I was glad to find the brass door pulls
at the front. They were smooth, heavy and beautiful, curved exactly to fit the shape
of a human hand. You could hold them both at the same time, pull them forward or
push them back to make a grand entrance, in case anyone was looking. But I polished
them on Sundays or in the mornings before we opened, when the bar was empty. They
were shiny where the lanolin hands of shearers or the sweaty hands of farmers coming
over from the silo hauled them open day after day. But no one had polished them for
a long time, not into the crevices and corners where they bolted onto the oak doors.
This was my job.5
The gendered politics and histories of the pub are problematic and contested. In popular cul-
ture, the Australian pub of the 1970s and earlier is portrayed as a distinctly male establishment,
with women’s presence limited to work as barmaids or as customers limited to the designated
and more genteel ‘ladies’ lounge’. The first popular book set in an Australian pub was a memoir
written by a woman, Caddie: The Autobiography of a Sydney Barmaid, by Catherine Edmonds
(1953), which was made into a film in 1976. It documented one woman’s struggle to maintain
respectability when barmaids were by definition morally suspect, and sexual advances from cus-
tomers were common. The novel Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook (1961) – and the renowned
1971 film – grimly documented the descent into a hypermasculine hell, beginning with binge
drinking in the pub, of an innocent young school teacher in a remote western town. This was
a set text in my English class in year 12, so I analysed the pub scenes at school, then went home
each night to the pub where I lived. The later novel The Glass Canoe (1976), by David Ireland,
is a ruthless fragmented drama set in a pub whose ‘regulars are the book’s cast. They drink, they
brawl, they dream, they weep . . . The world is empty; its routines revolve around alcohol, blood
and sex’ (Rothwell, 2012). Thus the pub of the time has been largely represented as a space for
men, apart from the clearly segregated worksites of kitchen and bar where women might be
found and the conditional spaces of the ladies’ lounge.
The bar was a site of feminist incursions in mid-century Australia, with accounts of women
storming into pubs and chaining themselves to the bar reported as early as 1965 through to the
early 1970s. ‘Respectability’ remained a primary concern, with a barmaid of the time noting
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many years later on current affairs television program Four Corners that ‘It makes a woman a bit
on the low side, drinking in a pub’ and a politician suggesting that ‘the prestige of womanhood is
too high and it’s too valuable and too precious to be destroyed by vulgarism’ (2001). The ambi-
guities of being a woman in a pub in the 1970s were managed by the barmaid’s selective deafness
and the clients’ expectation of this:
Interviewer: But they still hear a lot of swearwords, don’t they?

Pub Patron 4: Well, I think they just hear them more or less in passing. I mean, they don’t –
they’re not standing there listening to – to, um, oh, blue jokes or anything like
that. They just serve the – do their work as anybody else and move on. . . .
Interviewer: But you’re a woman and you work here and you hear what men say here. Don’t
you object to this?
Bar Maid: We don’t take much notice. We’re too busy. We never listen. Working on one
side of the counter and drinking on the other side are two different things.
Four Corners (2001)
Perhaps the country differs from the city, but there is no doubt that the pub bar in particular
has tended to be marked as male, and that women and girls who entered these spaces were
placed at risk in different ways than in other public spaces. In these texts, the conditions for
women in the bar are clear. Respectability is elusive and the role for women is to work. Work
for women is not only in the bar and in the kitchen, however, as feminist historian Clare
Wright discovered in her history of women publicans in Australia. Many women may have
inherited pubs, or continued to run them as widows, but there has been a consistent line of
women proprietors from colonial times to the present, particularly among Irish and in work-
ing class areas. In contrast to the prevailing view, she argues that rather than ‘being a “male”
domain, where all women were delegated to the pitiful margins of public drinking space until
the liberating 1970s, the Australian hotel has in fact been an enduring site of female control
and independence’ (Wright, 2004, p. 4). They have been pivotal as ‘women brought values that
were associated with female sex roles: domesticity, respectability and maternal restraint’ into the
pub (2004, p. 6). The pub is an ‘intricate, heterosocial space which has historically relied on the
labour, initiative, personalities and devotion of women’ (2004, p. 6). However, Wright explores
girls in pubs mostly in larger urban hotels where daughters might be coddled by nannies or
female house staff, or sent to boarding school to evade ‘the risk of moral contamination asso-
ciated with public drinking’ (2004, p. 141). These girls would not have been found working
behind a bar.
In The Australian Country Girl, the fleeting appearances of the pub are shaped by these ambigu-
ities. In the Australia Hotel, in one of the five towns in which she conducted fieldwork, Driscoll
notes that ‘a regular I’d come to know passingly told me that Miss Showgirl had disappeared
because “the feminists” complained about it. I never discovered what evidence he had for that, or
if it was a joke at my expense, because the conversation was redirected to discussion of whether
his friend or the other barmaid should be Miss Showgirl. The friend mimed preening. The bar-
maid said she had better legs, to everyone’s laughter. While both would have been the right age
for Miss Showgirl, everyone knew that neither would have entered, or won’ (2014, p. 47). This
sort of repartee is familiar to anyone who’s been a barmaid in a pub. There’s a certain cheekiness
required, despite the need to pretend not to hear, and a requisite willingness to enter into what-
ever conversational conditions are established by the men who are the customers. Behind the
bar is not the moment to challenge an awkward ‘joke at my expense’ – the barmaid goes along
with the joke, or walks away, and the conversation flow is ‘redirected’ by the men. Decorum is
526
an achievement that is always at risk. As Driscoll establishes, the respectable spaces of country
girlhood – Miss Showgirl, the CWA, the pony club – encourage performances of appropriate
middle class country girlhood that favour girls from certain types of family.
The ambiguous space of the bar, potential lurking disapproval, the risks of respectability,
impacted on my mother. She had never intended to work in the bar, but Dad became ill within
weeks of moving in and she had to learn, though she had ‘hardly ever been into a pub before’
and her parents didn’t drink at all. She learned how to ‘pull’ a beer from a travelling soft drink
salesman, and kept doing it for almost twenty years. Rather than a limitation, she describes this
as a liberation, as here was where she became her ‘own person – not someone’s wife/ daughter/
mother, but liked and appreciated for myself alone’. Unexpected opportunities and pleasant sur-
prises also came to me when I was a girl and ‘looking after’ the bar.
I didn’t really have high school jobs – lived out of town in a little country pub sur-
rounded by half a dozen houses and wheat fields and sheep with a phone box and a
football field. I would work behind the bar in a haphazard sort of way. One long hot
summer afternoon, there was some problem at the silo and the supervisor was over at
our place all afternoon as phonecalls went back and forth and drinking beer and as
time went by and drinks went down he confessed that he had been a national yodelling
champion and someone else ran for a mouth organ and someone else had an old guitar
with a couple of strings and we had ourselves a party for hours and hours, me and all
these old guys and this great music.6
In these fragments, I want to stress the specificity of this place. The earliest hotel on this site
was built in 1879, and its name – ‘Mystic Park’ – was given to the railway siding when the rail-
way line went through in 1890, and to the small town proclaimed in 1893 (Ballinger, 2008). A
boarding house and ‘wine shade’ were converted to a hotel called the ‘Mallee Birds Refuge’ in
1896. After a fire, another hotel was built in 1910 and called the Mystic Park Hotel, and pulled
down and rebuilt in brick in 1937. This is the building that we bought. A population of 60
in 1891 lived in sixteen dwellings, and this had dwindled to twenty-eight people by 1901 and
small temporary waves of population rose and fell through the century. More people lived in the
sprawling marginal farms in the wider area. Seven decades later when we arrived, the population
was lower, and now it is lower still.
In my last two years of school, there were few people my age in my vicinity. Small children
came to the pub with their families and ran crazily about outside while their parents drank.
Older children played sometimes with my siblings. But people my age, not old enough to drink
but too old to be dragged about by their parents, did not really come in. When they did, they
hovered around the pool table near the bar, drinking endless cokes and lemon squashes. I was
studious, for the most part, happy to spend time at my desk in my bedroom or reading on the
bed. It was an hour each way to school and back, and I had no transport of my own to get into
the town. I did lots of time behind the bar, and perhaps following the practices of decades of
barmaids before me, often I went out of my way not to hear the conversations, though more
out of boredom than fears of impropriety. In my memory, I read Anna Karenina the first full
summer I was there, between ‘shouts’, watching out of the corner of my eye for empty glasses
to be plonked on the mat, rifling through the piles of change, remembering whose turn it was
to pay this round. And remembering who preferred a shandy, a light beer, a whisky chaser, or
an occasional wine from the cask in the coolroom, and who drank from a 5 oz glass instead of
a 7 oz. Oddly, no one ever asked for water. We didn’t sell it and we didn’t give it away, though
I guess we would have, had anyone thought to ask for it. I was adept at never losing my place
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Susanne Gannon
in a book, but when my friends came in, all of them older than me, and all of them long out of
school, I put the book away.
Her real life is lived away from school. She works well while she’s there and most week
nights, after she gets off the long bus trip back home, she’s up her room writing essays or
studying for this exam or that. But Tuesdays it’s him after football training, and Fridays
it’s him after work, and Saturdays it’s the whole afternoon and into the night with him
wherever the game is that week. And it’s her and him and all his so-much-older-than-
her friends and their girlfriends, and they’re oh so tolerant and she tries to be like them.
One day she will be. But she’s the only one who’s still at school, and most of them left
early anyway. Why else would they still be there? She couldn’t stand the place when
her parents dragged her here, until she met him and settled in. She’s just turned 16 that
year that he turns 21 . . .
Her dad says he doesn’t like the way the boyfriend talks about her when he’s sitting
with his mates at the bar and he’s had a few too many, but what would her dad know.
And her dad shouldn’t even be listening, even if he does have to work there. She and
her dad have a row about it in front of the whole bar and she slams the door behind
her and all the glass falls out and smashes on the floor.7
Perhaps the public exposure of private business made this story unimaginable to other partic-
ipants in our collective biography workshop. The story is cropped where we have written about
it elsewhere (Byers et al., 2014). But it is the stuff of local history back there, when every time I
return someone else remembers that door in that corner of the bar and the girl with the temper
who shouldn’t have been there.
Finally . . .
As I have written elsewhere, writing memories carries ethical consequences and responsibilities
as the textual performance of self always implicates others. It calls others into particular relations
to which they cannot respond. Whether we write memories separate from others as in memoir
and autoethnography, or in a collaborative space as in collective biography or a sort of textual
dialogue, the voice and perspective of the narrator always seems to pin others into particular
positions that are hard to destabilise or to loosen up. Perhaps we might refuse to narrate our
experience, but that seems a poor response to a difficult task, or to empty our memories of others
altogether but that is impossible. Every choice of word, every phrase, is as much about foreclosing
possibilities for thinking and feeling as it is about openings.
In these fragments, I have thought about those others implicated in my text, those who are
evoked and implied and those other writers whose accounts of lived experience have offered
me ways of thinking about my own. You, dear reader, will, no doubt, have your own stories,
feelings and thoughts about girls and pubs. These all contribute to the movements of a ‘mobile
textual and material assemblage within which myself and others are always in circulation’
(Gannon, 2013, p. 230). The others in these narratives include the midnight sandbaggers who
pitched in to save a town that was only ever marginal (and those who did it all over again in
20118), the violent Post Office man that in my memory everyone knew about but no one did
anything about, my mum and dad, my siblings, that girl who polished the fingerprints off the
brass handles, the one who read Anna Karenina behind the bar some days, and hung out with
the footballers on others. The others in this chapter also include those I have evoked in the
present, including the person who called out ‘Tell us about the pub!’, to whom I have imputed
528
particular intentions – who I have represented in only one amongst the many ways that might
be possible.
I might ask, finally, what does it mean to be a girl in a pub, as Driscoll asked, what does it mean
to be an Australian country girl, but I don’t have an answer. Or rather, the answers proliferate and
multiply, each time I write.
Notes
1 “Miss Showgirl is a combination of Harvest Festival Queen and beauty pageant queen” (Driscoll, 2014,
p. 37).
2 Salmon Writing Group, Lawson, August 2014.
3 See, for example, the version of the final story in this chapter in Byers, Gannon and Rajiva (2014).
4 Finke River Writing Retreat, Northern Territory, July 2008.
5 Memoir Writing Course, Katoomba, October 2013.
6 Correspondence, Glenbrook, January 2004.
7 Schooling and sexualities workshop, Nova Scotia, Canada, 2011.
8 See http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/residents-advised-to-evacuate-20110122-1a0ax.html for news
of the 2011 floods.
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40
ETHICS AND THE
WRITING OF AFTER A FALL:
A SOCIOMEDICAL SOJOURN
Laurel Richardson
the ohio state university
Four interlocking ways of knowing drove my writing of After a Fall: A Sociomedical Sojourn (Left
Coast Press, 2012): sociological, autoethnographic, literary, and my remembrance of things past.
The writing cut across disciplinary and cultural landscapes because the ways of knowing inter-
sect, angle off, or travel along together in tandem, creating what I think of as a sojourn, a little
journey across time and space.
I became a patient at The Bellemont Rehabilitation Facility following major surgery on my
left ankle. I stayed there for a month. The narrative from my childhood was that if I were sick or
lame or diseased, I would be abandoned by those charged with my care and with those who sup-
posedly loved me. That is was what I expected to happen to me when I entered the Bellemont.
I took no field notes while I was recovering in the Bellemont because I had not planned on
writing about my experiences. But a month after I had returned home, I wrote a short piece for
inclusion in a book of essays I was writing called Seven Minutes from Home. My first readers urged
me to expand my account. Thus began six months of obsessive writing. Doing anything other
than writing about the Bellemont felt like an intrusion, an interruption, an annoyance: the book
had taken on a life of its own – or so it seemed. In all my years of writing, only the writing of a
poem had held me captive. Never prose and never for months. The idea that a book has a life of
its own is a cliché, a silly trope that mystifies one’s labor. But it is how I felt.
The different ways of knowing intermingled and co-habited, increasingly so as I revised. With
each revision I hoped to show more clearly and compellingly how it was for me and others who
lived or worked in The Bellemont. I wanted that writing to reach different audiences, such as
qualitative researchers, social-scientists, health professionals, paid and unpaid care-takers and res-
idents. Most optimistically, I hoped to reach and affect those in positions to legislate or manage
the care of both the residents and the staff.
My ethical consciousness was driving me. The urgency I felt to write was not coming from
any threat to my life; it was coming from a deep-seated ethical commitment to “leave the world
better than you found it.” It would not be enough for me to “get well” and “get moving”: to
complete my experiences I would have to write a narrative that grew out of my ethical longings
and touched the ethical stances of others. I wanted to reach into the world in which we live – one
in which the “temporarily abled” call the shots with the “disabled” not necessarily in their sights.
531
Laurel Richardson
Could I do this without field notes? Could I write a compelling and true narrative? And if so,
could I share how such was possible with qualitative audiences – particularly graduate students
who might be struggling with the doubts about their abilities and dealing with advisors who
doubt their projects?
After completing After the Fall, I wrote an Appendix that described my unusual methods. But
I decided not to publish it. I feared that the Appendix might reduce the societal impact of the
ethnography. I publish it here, though, as it is part-and-parcel of the kind of ethical issues not
discussed in seminars that confound ethnographic researchers. Bluntly stated: whether to share
my ethnographic methods was/is an ethical issue.
If readers doubt your “methods,” will they doubt your “findings”? If they doubt your “find-
ings,” will they ignore your quest for ethical social changes? This raised a tertiary ethical question
for me: Can I “reveal” my “special” gifts without sounding “special”? I decided that I did not
have special “gifts. “ I had special training. I would have to talk about that.
Each of us has special skills and training. Some can close their eyes and “see” a re-run of an
event as if they are watching a movie. My best friend could recount the scenery from the train
trips she took. Not me. My special skill and training is aural.
My father trained me from pre-school on to remember exactly what I heard. Father was a
defense attorney, a trial lawyer, who specialized in finding fault with the testimonies of experts
and eye-witnesses. While still a preschooler, I was expected to remember the grocery-list, spoken
to me in bits and pieces by my mother as she noted something we needed. If I forgot an item, my
punishment was the knowledge that I had let my family down. Games were introduced where
I was to repeat back what I heard; only if my phrasing, accent, and intonation were an exact
imitation would I be praised.
By the time I was five, I was entrusted with answering the home phone – a phone my father
used for talking to his clients. I was expected to remember “word-for-word” what the client said
including phone numbers, addresses, times. Nothing could be written down, not that I would
have been able to anyway.
Early in grade school, I was enrolled in the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where I learned my
lines not by reading them, but by speaking them out loud. Elocution lessons added sensitivity to
speech patterns. I was a total bore during elementary school’s Monday morning Show and Tell as
I would re-enact the dialogue of the movie I had seen Saturday morning. By the fourth-grade, I
was a champion speller because my mother made my older brother spell his list out-loud, and
I was listening. I never took lecture notes in high-school, college or graduate school. And, in
college, I partook in Compass Players (the predecessor of Second City) and University Theater.
(I think I “majored” in it, at least in the amount of time I gave to it.) Remembering what I heard
became a badge of honor, a mark of identity.
In addition, my eyesight was always poor. I am not good at remembering faces because I don’t
see very well. I mostly recognize people by how they move in space and how their voices sound.
I rarely forget conversations or stray comments. Friends comment that they depend upon my
memory when trying to reconstruct their own.
So, I depended – as I always do in my everyday life – for my aural memory to ground me in
my ethnography of Bellemont. But, I had other methodological aides. Because I had driven past
The Bellemont for probably two decades, I had a sense of its site placement. I had saved The
Bellemont’s brochures and mailings before I became an in-patient. While in rehabilitation, I took
digital photos of my room, get-well cards, food trays, my dogs, wrapped-up foot, wheelchair, visi-
tors, and views out my window into the courtyard. These became memory-jostlers of my private
space. I also made pen sketches. When I sketch something, it is as if I have created and saved it not
only on paper but in my brain. My drawings have a “line-energy” even if they “disregard true
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Ethics and the writing of After a Fall
representation,” as one drawing teacher described my work. When I look at them, I re-experience
the energy I had felt in the space when I originally drew them. This re-experiencing is like being
in an immersion memoir, where one relives the experience in the present. It is an oddity, perhaps –
but probably not – that capturing a feeling state through a sketch is more “true” than a “true
representation.” But if I had declared in After a Fall that my “line drawings” brought the experi-
ences back to me, would my work have been devalued?
Two other senses that are rarely mentioned by ethnographers aided me in the reconstruction
of my experiences at The Bellemont. These are tactileness and smell. “Do you have to touch
everything?” Mother’s voice. Sister’s voice. My husband’s voice. “Yes, I do.” My voice. I know
something through how it feels; I judge something – like food or flowers or floor coverings or
frocks – on how they feel. By re-touching, for example, the fleece blanket I had at The Belle-
mont, I remember how it was to have it covering me up. Similarly, I have a strong sense of smell.
Present me with whiffs of steam-tray food, cleaning products or human excrement and I can be
back at The Bellemont.
To organize the writing of the ethnography I deployed a sense that is not talked about even
as a sense in methods classes: time-sense. Because, for the most part, there was orderliness to my
days and weeks, I could ex post facto construct a calendar of people and events. I made a long list
of the Events I had experienced. Then, I made a large grid with days/dates down the left side
and people along the top. In the intersecting cells, I entered Events. So, for example, late Monday
mornings I got my hair washed (day, person, event); Thursdays and Sundays, my son Josh and his
son Akiva visited before supper (days, time, event); Fridays for supper, Ben and Tami came (dates,
time, events.) Other dates were on my DayTimer – like some visits from friends, a trip to the
orthopedist, home evaluation. Many events were quotidian – like visits from Ernest and the dogs,
meals, occupational and physical therapy. They came in predictable time-slots. And some events
were so unexpected and startling – like my Vicodan-induced paranoia – that they emblazoned
their own place on the calendar.
But once specific times and dates had been ticked on the Calendar, there were still some
Events on my list that had not been incorporated into the ethnography. What to do about the left-
overs? This was another ethical question for the writing of the book. Should I just exclude them?
Some of the leftovers were scraps of talk; others were whole scenes. All of them were mem-
orable to me, even though I could not remember exactly when they occurred. Ethnographic
writing, fortunately, makes no claim to be history or a chronicle of events in chronological order,
anymore than memoir claims to be autobiography. Ethnographic writing does claim, though, to
proffer insight into systems of meaning in the lives of a particular group of people at a particular
time. It describes and explains, hopefully, engaging the reader intellectually and emotionally.
Perhaps even moving the reader to action. And definitely changing the ethnographer whose
fingerprints are all over the manuscript. There is no claim to a single true account, but there is
claim to veracity for one’s own account.
Contemporary ethnographic theory in line with other contemporary theories of knowledge
recognizes that ethnography is written by someone – a someone who has experiences, a biog-
raphy, a perspective. As it would be impossible (even for a Proustian) to report everything that
happens, the ethnographer decides what to include and exclude. Because the ethnographer is a
member, albeit usually temporarily, in the world being written about, the writing must include
the writer. Within this broad and open expanse, the individual ethnographer has many choices
for structuring the ethnography.
My choice was to write an autoethnography that both described the setting, practices and
relationships within The Bellemont and let me to show how those experiences kindled old
memories and jarred me into making peace with myself and my family. The book expresses
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Laurel Richardson
my recovery experiences with a narrative arc. My introductory problem – I will be abandoned

because I am “sick” – is resolved. I am not abandoned; I am loved and cared for.
Given these writing structural decisions, deciding what leftovers to keep and where to put
them became a socio-literary/ethical problem. I found there were themes developing in the
book – such as friendship or dogs or doing what is right. Seeing a theme, and having a “left-
over” that fit with that theme, suggested where to place the leftover. Doing so heightened the
sociological understanding and could give the reader a kind of Aha! Feeling that one gets when
disparate things are seen to fit together.
Because I was intent on writing a narrative about rehabilitation that had an ethical effect
on its reader, I found that I had to suppress extended sociological commentary during the first
thirteen drafts of this book. I was unable to wed my foundational knowledge as a sociologist
with my desire to tell the story, support the people in the story and lead toward social change.
Undoubtedly, though, what I chose to write about in the narrative was based on my sociological
way of knowing. At my core, I am a sociologist. I notice how people interact – the way a chef might
notice Mandarin oranges and ginger or a plastic surgeon a scar under a chin.
Incorporating explicit sociological understandings into the manuscript would give it a better
chance of affecting health professionals and legislators, I knew. The writing problem was how
to do this without disrupting the narrative flow of the book, which is what would “hook” the
health professionals and legislators into considering changes.
I decided to read the thirteenth draft of After a Fall as I read articles sent to me as a journal
editor – that is, to read my work from the perspective of a critical sociologist. When I came to a
sentence or scene that brought out my “inner sociologist,” I stopped reading and began writing.
For example, early in the manuscript I mentioned my not-so “blended family.” This became
an opportunity for me to introduce four sociological ideas: (1) most second-families do not
“blend;” (2) the metaphor of “blending” parallels that of “the melting pot;” (3) the cultural value
placed on homogenization; and (4) the political, social and ethical challenges to that value at both
familial and cultural levels. However, I did not have to spell it out, as I have above, disrupting the
flow; I could insert it like a thought balloon.
Some thoughts were longer, though. To include those, I depended upon literary techniques
that I had already used in the manuscript. For example, I wrote the sociological insights around
the architecture of rehab facilities by writing about remembered conversations I had had with
architectural professionals and the sociological implications of poor space design. I developed
the idea of the binary between nature and culture through an imagined conversation with the
writer, James Dickey. No matter how complex or long the sociological issue would be, I decided
its discussion needed to be included in the text proper. My writing task was to find appropriate
literary devices that both contributed to the narrative flow, conveyed the sociological insights,
and contributed to my social change issues.
The main substantive concern of the book, though, disability, was/is a topic too large to
be adequately addressed through sociological asides, no matter their length, and those asides
would probably not do the social and political work I wanted them to do – namely, to revi-
sion disabilities. I needed to add a chapter to my narrative, which I did. The added chapter,
“Temporarily Abled,” is constructed as part of the main text, listed as a chapter in the Table of
Contents, not as an appendix. The chapter trope says that the material is necessary and central
to the project’s goals.
A final comment on ethics is necessary. There are some fifty people who speak in After A
Fall. They are not composites and they are not characters. They are people. I have tried to honor
their humanity. Nobody in this book is without some saving grace. In a late draft of the manu-
script, I expurgated all gratuitous negative descriptors. For example, I changed “bottle brunette”
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Ethics and the writing of After a Fall
to “stylish brunette.” I gave names and positive explanatory stories to persons who had annoyed
me. For example, the “grunting” woman in the corridor became the Corridor Woman and I
re-imagined her to be like my favorite Aunt. I changed the names and identifiers of all the staff.
And, because there are five rehabilitation facilities seven minutes from my home, the site of the
autoethnography is concealed, as well. I sent my friends and family (with the exception of my
brother-in-law Paul, who did not want to read what I wrote) the paragraphs that I had written
about them, asking if they wanted any changes. One friend did. I changed my text – not because
of member check issues – but because she is my friend.
A final note. The working title of this book was Kisses in the Dark to signify that no matter
how bleak things may seem there are little unexpected pleasures to be had. The title has changed
but the subtext has not. Whether writing from a sociological, autoethnographic, literary or
remembrance standpoint, writing is an ethical activity. My writing choices have been moral choices.
I am trying not only to write well but to inspire good spirits and right actions in myself and my
readers.
What has stayed in my ears these past months are not the alarm bells at The Bellemont or the
“Help me’s” or the “moans and grunts” or the West African accents of the nurses. What I hear is
the woman patient in the long-term wing saying over and over again into the air, “Kiss me . . .
Kiss me.” She was not asking for very much – she was not asking to be held or cured or brought
home or for changes in the health-care system. She was asking to be recognized, touched gently
with another’s breath of life, her own breath of life comingling. I have hoped that my writing
is a kiss.
Reference
Richardson, L. (2012) After a Fall: A Sociomedical Sojourn. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
535
41
ETHICS AND THE TYRANNY
OF NARRATIVE
Clive Baldwin
st thomas university
Introduction
In 1828 a young man, Kaspar Hauser, was left standing in the Unschlitt Square of Nürnburg, with
an unsigned letter addressed to Cavalry Captain Wessenig in hand:
I am sending you a boy, Captain, who wishes to become a soldier and serve his king
faithfully. The boy was brought to me in 1815; one winter night he was suddenly
found lying at my door. I have children myself, am poor, I can hardly make both ends
meet; he’s a foundling and I have not been able to ascertain his mother. I have never
let him stir out of the house, no one knows about him; he does not know the name
of my house, nor does he know the village. You may ask him but he won’t be able to
tell you for he’s not yet able to talk decently. If he had parents – which he hasn’t – he
might have entered a decent calling; you need only show him anything and he will be
able to do it at once. I took him out of the house in the middle of the night and he has
no money about him, so if you do not want to keep him you will have to kill him and
hang him up the chimney.
(Wasserman, 1985, p. 36)
Deprived of a story within which to locate the young man and given the inability of Kaspar
Hauser himself to provide such a story, the populace of Nürnburg were faced with the task of
how to make sense of this peculiar phenomenon. What followed can be understood as a process
of narrativization – the construction of a credible story concerning Kaspar.
The case of Kaspar Hauser is an apt starting point for a discussion on the role of narrative
in the construction of identity. Since 1828 there have been numerous attempts to construct a
lasting, coherent, consistent and persuasive narrative about who Kaspar Hauser was. At the time
important figures such as Ritter Anselm von Feuerbach, Professor Georg Friedrich Daumer
and Philip Henry, 4th Earl Stanhope embraced different constructions of Kaspar’s identity. For
von Feuerbach, Kaspar was the heir to the ruling house of Baden; for Professor Daumer, Kaspar
was the original noble savage corrupted by society; for Lord Stanhope, Kaspar was to become
his adopted son based on an assumed narrative of high birth until Stanhope gave credence to
an alternative narrative of imposture. More popular constructions moved between constructing
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Ethics and the tyranny of narrative
Kaspar as an innocent foundling, a drain on the town’s resources, a side-show freak and a con
artist. Following Kaspar’s death – the result of a stab wound – these different narrative construc-
tions of Kaspar Hauser persisted: was Kaspar the innocent victim of an unknown assailant or was
his wound self-inflicted so as to regenerate the interest in him that had started to wane? As late
as the 1990s and early 2000s debate as to Kaspar’s relationship to the house of Baden continued
via competing and contradictory DNA test results (see Weichhold et al., 1998 for the argument
that Hauser was not of the royal line of Baden; and for the reports that further DNA analysis in
2002 by the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the University of Munster could not rule out such
a relationship, see Boardman, 2012).
The phenomenon that is Kaspar Hauser is one in which there are multiple possibilities for nar-
rative construction. Like Boje’s account of the play Tamara (Boje, 1995) there are very many nar-
rative pathways to follow, with little, if any, possibility of a comprehensive or consistent account.
In what follows, I will argue that the attempt to limit narrative constructions through the insist-
ence that such narratives be linear, realistic, mimetic, internally coherent, self-consistent, and
emplotted – in other words, good, upstanding Aristotelian narratives – fails to do justice to the
complexity, ambiguity, and messiness of lived experience, and that, therefore, we need to find the-
oretical and practical ways of loosening the grip of Aristotelian narrative thinking. This, in turn,
calls for a quasi-aesthetic approach to ethics with regard to the presentation of narrative research.
In making this argument I will first summarise some of the key features of what I will call the
‘narrative coherence’ (NC) approach. Next I will discuss some of the major challenges to that
approach, challenges that come for a number of directions. In the latter part of the chapter I will
explore three areas in which we might loosen the grip of the NC approach (the extension of
dilatory space, the representation of ambiguity and ambivalence, and engaging the reader), before
returning, in brief conclusion, to the matter of ethics.
Narrative in the social sciences

Many who have followed the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences (see Kreiswirth, 1992, for a dis-
cussion of this turn), have taken a particular view of what narrative is: a linear, realistic, mimetic,
internally coherent, self-consistent, emplotted account of events and experience. Though not
necessarily explicitly acknowledged, this is, generally, the Aristotelian position on narrative as
having a fixed sequence, a definite beginning middle and end, a ‘certain definite magnitude’ (that
is, an appropriate size and order), and a sense of unity or wholeness (see Aristotle, 2001). Sub-
sumed under this general view are narrative features such as a particular and recognisable point
of view, characterisation of persons in recognisably humanist form (an essential self, common to
all of humanity), and an event-structure incorporating one or several narrative arcs in moving
from beginning to middle to end. The representation of lives in this way cuts across the different
standpoints on narrative’s relationship to life, self and identity: both those who view narrative
as a window onto the Self (or experience) and those who see narrative as constituting the self
and without which there is no experience of which to speak. Such an approach to narrative –
what I shall call the narrative coherence (NC) approach – can be found in authors as diverse as
MacIntyre (1981), whose conception of the good life is the quest for narrative unity; Dennett
(1992), for whom the Self is the centre of narrative gravity; Schechtman (1996), who posits a
narrative identity based on survival, moral responsibility, self-interested concern, and compen-
sation; Polkinghorne, who claims that we “make our existence into a whole by understanding
it as an expression of a single, unfolding and developing story” (1988, p. 150); Sachs (1998), for
whom “narrative is us, our identities” (p. 110), and a host of works (including some of my own)
in which Barthes’ statement on the universal nature of narrative is cited:
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Clive Baldwin
The narratives of the world are numberless . . . Able to be carried by articulated lan-
guage, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures . . . narrative is present in
myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting,
stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation.
Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every
age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there
nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have
their narratives . . . narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply
there, like life itself.
(Barthes, 1977, p. 79)
As an example of the importance given to narrative coherence, and thus by inference the other
narrative features, we can look to the literature on mental illness and narrative in which it is
claimed that a) there are strong links between narrative coherence and psychological well-being
(see Adler, 2012; Waters and Fivush, 2014); b) certain mental illnesses impede or destroy the
ability to formulate a coherent sense of self – for example, in dementia where persons are
sometimes referred to as ‘losing the plot’; c) the loss of narrativity – the ability to narrativize
one’s life – is symptomatic of mental illness, such as in the case of some interpretations of schiz-
ophrenia (see Lysaker and various colleagues 2002, 2003a), and d) the restoration of narrative
coherence can be therapeutically effective (see McLeod, 1997; Lysaker et al., 2003b; Burnell
et al., 2011). Outside of this, narrative coherence also plays an important part in other profes-
sional arenas, such as medicine (see Barone, 2012, on the importance of narrative coherence in
patient-doctor interactions), the law (see Bennett and Feldman, 2014, on the persuasiveness of
coherent narratives), and social work (see Fiese et al., 1999, on storytelling within families). In
social science research, until relatively recently (see later), the emphasis has been on how partici-
pants and researchers construct narrative coherence from the chaos of everyday experience (see
Denzin, 1989; Gubrium and Holstein, 1998; Linde, 1993; Ochs and Capps, 2001). This focus
on narrative coherence is neatly summed up in the closing scene of Werner Herzog’s portrayal
of the Kaspar Hauser phenomenon (Herzog, 1974), in which the town clerk emerges from the
autopsy performed on Kaspar Hauser and says, “What a wonderful, what a precise report this
will make! Deformities discovered in Kaspar Hauser’s brain and liver! Finally we have got an
explanation for this strange man . . .”
For Boje (2008a), drawing on Derrida (2004), insistence on this form of narrative – what Boje
calls ‘theoretic narrative’ – becomes hegemonic by making experience accountable to narrative
form or content:
By theoretic narrative we mean the obsession of form over context, the preference
for theoretic structure or plots of cause and effect . . . Theoretic narrative posits
mono-system-wholeness, mergedness, representational coherence, and finalizedness.
(Boje, 2008a, p. 3)
and, quoting Bakhtin (1973, p. 12), “narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid and unshake-
able monological framework”.
This notion of theoretic narrative is the assumption that there is something about the NC
conceptualisation of narrative that is universal or essential (that is, capturing the essence of narra-
tive). The holding of experience or subjectivity to account by the NC approach, that is, totalisa-
tion by the NC approach, fails to recognise the possibility that the other is, in a Levinasian sense,
radically inaccessible to us and radically incommensurable with the NC approach. As I shall
538
indicate later, this may be seen in postcolonial terms as a subordination of life and identity to a
peculiarly Western notion of narrative.
Of course, narrative approaches to research and practice were never as neat or as uniform as
I have implied above (or as hegemonic as Boje claims) – throughout the narrative turn there
have been voices raised against the imposition of this sort of narrative order (see, for example,
Mattingly, 2000, who, while appreciating the merits of narrative, argues that “life as lived may
be incoherent or mere chronology” [p. 185]; or Hyvärinen, 2008, who sees both coherence and
diversity as narratively necessary), though it is only relatively recently that such voices are coa-
lescing around a concern for the impact of such a view of narrative and the possibilities made
possible by loosening its grip. More of this later. I have presented the prevalent formulation of
narrative so starkly here so as to serve as a foil against which to develop my argument not for its
abandonment but for a place for alternative ways of conceiving narrative and practising narrative
analysis, and for creating spaces for what I shall call ‘narrative mess’.
Challenges to the narrative coherence account

The challenge to the NC account has come from various quarters. First, there is the ‘life is simply
not like that’ challenge, found in authors such as Dershowitz (1996) and Strawson (2004). Der-
showitz argues that life does not imitate art and that life is not a dramatic narrative:
In Chekovian drama, chest pains are followed by heart attacks, coughs by consumption,
life insurance policies by murder, telephone rings by dramatic messages. In real life, most
chest pains are indigestion, coughs are colds, insurance policies are followed by years of
premium payments, and telephone calls are from marketing services.
(1996, pp. 100–1)
Strawson, on the other hand, argues that the case for narrative and its relationship to life is over-
stated in that some people do not experience themselves diachronically (that is, as the same per-
son over time), but episodically and thus questions both the narrative nature of identity and the
notion that the good life can only be found through narrative coherency. While I think that both
Dershowitz and Strawson overstate their cases – for Dershowitz the fact that life is not a dramatic
narrative appears to be a reason to abandon narrative altogether rather than simply noting that
some stories of life are just mundane; for Strawson the fact that some people experience life (and
themselves) as episodic removes all notion of, or necessity for, narrative, whereas many such epi-
sodes are narrative in nature, as in a picaresque novel – both make an important point: that those
who support and promote narrative approaches to understanding individuals’ experiences and
identities need to allow for more messiness or alternative narrative formulations through which
to understand those meaning-making activities.
The second challenge comes from those who see insistence on the NC approach as disad-
vantaging or marginalizing those individuals who do not, or cannot, articulate their stories in
this fashion. This is the argument that is to be found in Andrews’ (2010) discussion of stories of
survivors of torture, stories that seem to be almost inexpressible within the confines of the NC
approach. An earlier example of this critique was my own Narrative Dispossession of People with
Dementia (Baldwin, 2006), in which I argued that if we insist that narrative take a particular shape
(i.e., the NC approach above) then this may result in certain people and groups being excluded
from the ‘narrative club’. For people with dementia, for example, the fragmentation of memory
may result in a breakdown of linearity, coherency and consistency and give rise to the view that
they have ‘lost the plot’ or do not have a story to tell. This, I argued, was more to do with the
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Clive Baldwin
inability of the cognitively intact to recognise and appreciate different forms of narrative then it
was to do with the dementia process itself. What I called ‘narrative dispossession’ can be applied to
different groups who cannot tell their stories in the NC fashion: for example, those experiencing
severe mental illness or those with certain developmental or cognitive conditions. The point here
is that the NC approach cannot always understand or represent that which is told to us, a point
made by Stone (2003, 2007) regarding first person accounts of madness, and illustrated by Ross
David Burke’s autobiography, When the Music’s Over (Burke, 1995).
A third challenge comes from a cultural critique of the NC approach as being a peculiarly
Western construction of narrative. In this view, while Barthes may be correct in viewing narrative
as universal, narratology is not. For example, in Chinese literature:
A narrator may intrude into his fictional work as he pleases. Author, narrator, commen-
tator, and reader may all appear in the same fictional work. The narrator may declare
a patently untrue account as true events that have happened in life or history. Realistic
tales are structured in mythical or supernatural frameworks . . . In emplotment, an
extended narrative may often be structured on a series of episodes, some of which
possess few easily discernible connections.
(Ming, 2006, p. 313)
Such idiosyncrasies (as perceived by the Western realist, mimetic tradition) appear as limitations
rather than “signs of fictional artistry” (Ming, 2006, p. 313).
Similarly, Japanese and East Asian literature differs from Western literature’s mimetic thrust
in being dominated by affective-expressive narration and also in the sharp distinctions between
narrators and authors (Miner, 1990); in Indian literature the particular configurations of interiori-
sation, serialisation, fantasisation, cyclicalisation, allegorisation, elasticisation of time, spatialisation,
stylisation and improvisation serve to distinguish Indian narration from its Western counterpart
(see Paniker, 2003).
This is, of course, not to say that there are not similarities, cross-overs, between Western and
non-Western narratologies – but should indicate that there are differences enough to support
the argument that Western narratology should not be seen as universal and thus its imposition be
seen as a form of colonisation. This is amply demonstrated in Readings’ (2000) discussion of how
Herzog’s film Where the Green Ants Dream (Stipetic and Herzog, 1984) depicts the impossibility of
representing the Australian Aborigines through the lens of the notion of common humanity. In
operating on this assumption, the Aborigines are, “killed with kindness, by the assumption that
they are the same kind of people as the white Australians; they are silenced by the very fact of
being let speak” (Readings, 2000, p. 123). Similarly, the universalism of the NC approach silences
the other who is made to speak with that voice.
The fourth challenge, similar to the third in arising from within narratology, comes from
experimental literature and theorising around the impact of new media on the nature of narrative.
From the realms of experimental literature we see a challenge to the NC approach in the
works of very diverse authors. For example, in Thru, Brooke-Rose (1975) challenges the read-
er’s perceptions of the novel through the inclusion of ‘charts, lists, diagrams, concrete poems,
linguistic formulae, letters, graded student papers accompanied by the teacher’s handwritten
comments, an academic vita and occasional Chinese characters’ (Kafalenos, 1980, p. 43) and the
disruption of plot through introducing “a number of plots, each of which is cut off (almost as
soon as it begins) by the introduction of another plot, only to recur later, often in a quite altered
form” (Kafalenos, 1980, p. 43). In similar vein, Saporta (2011) plays with multiplicity and the
author-reader relationship through his Composition No. 1, which consists of 150 unnumbered and
540
unbound pages that can be endlessly reconfigured by the reader. In another direction, Foer (2010)
challenges the NC approach to narrative through emphasising authorship as erasure in his Tree
of Codes. Taking Schulz’s novel The Street of Crocodiles (Schulz, 1977), Foer proceeded to (literally)
cut out most of the text, leaving only a few words from each page (in the physical book these
words are surrounded by empty space), the remaining words themselves telling a story. And as a
final example, Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (Pavić, 1989), in which he recounts the history of
the Khazars and their religious conversion:
calls into question the spaciotemporal continuum, the principle of causality, bivalent
logics, univocal relationships, the principle of identity, and the principle of contradic-
tion. Every phenomenon in Pavić’s literary world appears radically pluralistic, hetero-
geneous, and paralogical. Chance and freedom, sense and nonsense, have equal rights
in a kind of open ambiguity.
(Leitner, 1998, p. 157)
Developments in electronic media have also raised questions about the nature (or the future) of
narrative. For some, such as Landow (1997), hypertext may transform our understandings and
expectations of narrative in terms of plot, characterisation and setting. Others, such as Ryan
(2006), point to potential changes in the relationship between narration and interactivity with
readership becoming a far more participatory/constructive activity than previously (see Ryan,
2006). Further, Ryan (2006) delineates a number of narrative modes, each lying along some sort
of continuum, with features of traditional narrative lying at one end (features such as externality,
fictionality, representation, diegesis, scripted and determinate) and features of more marginal
forms of narrative at the other (the corresponding features to those are above being: internality,
non-fiction, simulative, mimetic, emergent and indeterminate).
A further challenge, though not originally directed at narrative in particular, comes from
developments in social science research, articulated by authors such as Law (2004). Arguing that
the world may be, at times, fluid, elusive, disorderly and multiple – that is, messy – Law suggests
that research methods in the social sciences need to be reinvented:
If much of the world is vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elu-
sive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t really have much of a pattern
at all, then where does this leave social science?
(Law, 2004, p. 2)
Perhaps we will need to rethink our ideas about clarity and rigour, and find ways of
knowing the indistinct and the slippery without trying to grasp and hold them tight.
Here knowing would become possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision.
(Law, 2004, p. 3)
Narrative, as a social science research method, may, in some ways, be, if not suited, at least amena-
ble to re-inventing itself along these lines.
This challenge is, essentially, an ethical one. According to Levinas (1961), the Other is irre-
ducibly different from the Self and violence arises when one attempts to subsume the Other into
oneself, one’s worldview, or one’s way of understanding. Participants’ lives extend far beyond the
boundaries of, and are far messier than, or even at times contradictory to, that which is reported
in research. Taking seriously the irreducible Other, “I must refrain from treating the other person
as an extension of my categories, my theories, my habitual or learned ways of perceiving others.
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Clive Baldwin
Indeed, I must refrain from seeing the person through any system of human thought because
when I use my categories to ‘know’ the other person, I treat him or her as an extension of my
knowing. This, for Levinas, is violence – even symbolic murder” (Rossiter, 2011, p. 985). Rossit-
er’s admonition could equally well apply to the attempt to finalise participants’ stories through
adherence to, or imposition of, a particular narrative frame.
If we take seriously this challenge, we need to design (narrative) means by which to articulate
multiplicity, imaginaries, Otherness (not only with regard to individuals but also in terms of
narrative itself ) and indefiniteness. In other words, to allow for, encourage, and make space for
multiple narratives and interpretations that bump up against each other, generating a continually
changing narrative vitality.
I want to suggest that we might achieve this through three means: the extension of dilatory
space, the representation of ambiguity and ambivalence, and extending the role of the reader, and
that these can, at least to some degree, be achieved through experimenting with narrative form.
Narrative desire and the extension of dilatory space

According to Brooks (1984) ‘the usual structure of desire in the novel is oriented towards the end’
(p. 49). That is, the text invokes in the reader the desire to know what happened next and how it
will all turn out. It is this desire that keeps us as readers turning the pages. Such narrative desire
is not, of course, limited to the novel, in that this is what also keeps us watching a film or play,
playing a narrative-based computer game, or listening to research participants tell stories about
their lives. For Barthes (1974), reading (in the widest sense of the term) is a process of determin-
ing the clues that will lead to the story’s resolution. If we take the example of the murder mystery
novels, the reader is invited to proceed as detective, identifying genuine clues and dismissing red
herrings, discerning between truthfulness and mendacity and so on, in an attempt to identify the
murderer. While the reader might take a number of positions on ‘who did it’, the novel (and the
reader) proceed on the expectation that there is a traceable trajectory that will lead to the novel’s
resolution. We see such a trajectory in much academic work as authors lead their readers from
abstract to introduction to background, methods, findings, discussion and finally conclusion, a
trajectory that raises ethical issues in that it purports to lead the reader from the data so some sort
of authoritative (if limited) ‘truth’ about how the world works without necessarily accounting
for what is done to the data in the process. The relationship between data and narrative is not
uni-directional but is a complex interaction (see, for example, Clandinin & Connelly, 1999, for a
discussion creation of research texts). Data are thus not pure, but become functions of the process
of authorship, and it becomes possible to tell a persuasive, authoritative, and finalisable narrative
even in the absence of fact (see Baldwin, 2005).
In tension with this teleological approach to writing and reading is Barthes’ (1974) notion
of dilatory space, ‘the space of retard, postponement, error and partial revelation’ (Brooks, 1984,
p. 92). The delay, deferral and displacement inherent in dilatory space creates (at least a tem-
porary) disruption of narrative desire by creating intimations of meaning and resolution while
thwarting their capture.
Ironically, although we conceptualise narrative as having a beginning (that establishes or pro-
vokes narrative desire), a middle (in which that desire is guided, more or less strongly) and an end
(designed to satisfy that desire), “We enter storytelling mostly often in the middle, and have little
clue about any beginning or where it is going to end, which it never does. We enter into what
is already in motion, and do not stick around to see how it all works out, if it ever does” (Boje,
2008b, p. 99). Similarly, the coherence, on which the prompting of narrative desire supposedly
rests, is an artefact of the narrative process of constructing an NC narrative rather than the cause
542
of that NC narrative. With Boje I am inclined to agree that “my living story is in fragments, and
my encounters with others’ living stories are equally fragmented” (Boje, 2008b, p. 110). If this
is so, then the construction of NC narratives can be seen as a process of corralling and limiting
dilatory space. While this process may well bring with it advantages and insights into the lives of
individuals, and enable the author to transmit those advantages and insights to the reader through
the generation of narrative desire, it does so at a cost – that of simplification and monology.
In contrast we might construct narratives that encourage exploration, in the manner of Megan
Heyward’s Of Day, of Night, a multimedia narrative in which “the reader to some extent is driven
and played by chance” (Rustad, 2009). In Heyward’s work there are places at which hidden words
and opportunities are revealed by the movement of the mouse/cursor over the text, thus chal-
lenging the reader’s expectations of recognisable patterns and predictability. Thus, according to
Rustad, the reader is encouraged into reading not primarily for meaning but the seeking out of
new experiences and new underlying texts. In this way, the reader is placed in the same position
as the protagonist, Sophie, who is exploring the storyworld, “searching for objects and words
that might be of relevance, and their search is more or less led by chance” (Rustad, 2009). In this
way dilatory space is extended.
Representation of ambiguity and ambivalence

In his poem Why? Bob Flanagan responds to questions about his lifestyle – a lifestyle involving
extreme masochistic pain – by giving reason upon reason upon reason, falling over themselves
as explanations of his life. Some reasons may be understood through discourses on childhood
trauma (“because I was alone a lot/ because I was different/ because kids beat me up on the way
to school/ because I was humiliated by nuns”), or the notion of individual pathology (“because of
what is inside me/ because of my genes/ because of my parents”), or religion (because of Christ
on the cross, . . . / because I’m Catholic/ because I still love Lent) or mental illness (“because
I used to think that I was part of some vast experiment/ and that there was this implant in my
penis that made me do these things/ and allowed them, whoever they were, to monitor my activ-
ities”). Others, however, need to be understood differently – perhaps allegorically – (“because
of mutiny on the Bounty/ because of cowboys and Indians/ because of Houdini . . . because of
Morticia Addams and her black dress with its octopus legs”). What emerges from the poem is a
sense of multiplicity, ambiguity, contradiction, that whatever explanations one might prefer, there
are other possibilities, stated with equal force, and that it is impossible for the NC approach to
reconcile these.
In the social sciences, according to Law (2004), the “Euro-American assumptions about what
is out-there make it difficult to think of this or talk of it as non-coherent or multiple” (p. 92).
Direct representation of a straightforward world is the preferred modus operandi:
Method, as we usually imagine it, is a system for offering more or less bankable guar-
antees. It hopes to guide us more or less quickly and securely to our destination that is
taken to be knowledge about the processes at work in a single world . . . The implica-
tion is that method hopes to act as a set of short-circuits that link us in the best possible
way with reality, and allow us to return more or less quickly from that reality to our
place of study with findings that are reasonably secure, at least for the time being.
(Law, 2004, pp. 9–10)
The problem with method, for Law – and with NC narrative, for our purposes here – is that it
may restrict possible worlds/representations through its insistence that the world (or experience
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Clive Baldwin
or life or whatever) be accountable to method (or one particular notion of narrative). In so

insisting, other possibilities are rendered incoherent, akin to the decoherence resulting from the
attempt to measure quantum superpositions. In other words, by constructing and following
one narrative pathway (for example, the NC pathway), other narrative pathways that were pos-
sible prior to our privileging of the NC one become less convincing, desirable and coherent.
For example, in privileging psychiatric narratives of hearing voices as ‘auditory hallucinations’,
combined with the increasing secularisation of Western society since the Enlightenment, the
possibilities for a coherent narrative in which such a voice is that of God or of the dead are
diminished. Similarly, given the master narrative of compulsory able-bodiedness (see Campbell,
2009), the narrative possibilities for transability (the desire for disability) become channelled into
those of pathology (see Brugger, Lenggenhager & Giummarra, 2013; Money et al., 1977; Sedda
and Bottini, 2014) or sin (see Dilloff ’s and Teeruss’ comments in Archer, 2006).
There are some interesting studies in which ambiguity or ambivalence has been represented
through the notion of multiplicity. Mol, for example, in The Body Multiple (Mol, 2002) discusses
the multiple atheroscleroses that are to be found in the ‘doing’ of atherosclerosis in a Dutch uni-
versity hospital. Similarly, Singleton and Michael (1993) explore the ambiguities of a UK cervical
screening programme that are below the surface of the official success story and Law’s account of
the Ladbroke Grove train crash (Law, 2004), a collision that ‘crafts and depicts the non-coherences
that produced it, the ramifications of a messy organisational and technical hinterland’ (p. 97).
The multiplicity found in such texts creates spaces in which subaltern voices might speak and
be heard.
A further means by which we might achieve the disruption of the monology imposed by the
NC approach is to think about how paraconsistency might help us appreciate the messiness of
everyday life. Paraconsistency is the attempt to deal with contradiction in a way that does not
subordinate one element of the contradiction to the other and is well illustrated in the story of
Sylvan’s box (see Priest, 1997) in which Graham Priest, while going through the papers of his col-
league Richard Sylvan following the latter’s death, came across a box that was both entirely empty
while containing a statue. This sort of paraconsistency is found in Pavi’s novel (Pavić, 1989),
which describes the conversion (singular) of the Khazars to Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The
lesson to be learnt from such paraconsistency is that the acceptance of contradiction may enrich
experience and understanding rather than undermine the possibility of finding ‘historical truth’.
Of course, Pavić’s work is fiction and so we may allow it more consideration than we might than
if it claimed to be true. However, there are phenomena that may be better expressed paraconsist-
ently, and here I turn to my own research into the experience of transableism.
Transableism is described as the desire or need to move from able-bodiedness to disability
through choice rather than happenstance. Within the medical sphere the explanation for such
has moved from its original location amongst the paraphilias (termed apotemnophilia; see Money
et al., 1977) to one within neurology (termed body integrity identity disorder; see, for example,
McGeoch et al., 2009) to a social neurological disorder (xenomelia; Brugger et al., 2013). What
each of these has in common is the construction of a singular coherent narrative concerning the
basis for the desire for disability. However, data from approximately 30 individuals who define
themselves as transabled (or as having BIID) suggests that transableism is multiple – that no single
explanation is sufficient to cover the range of experiences and desires – and that disability, contra
society’s meta-narrative of its being at best misfortune and limiting, is experienced as positive,
liberating, and empowering. Participants in the research report being able to engage in activities
while disabled (either during the times they ‘pretend’ – for example, use a wheelchair – or follow-
ing amputation) in which they would not have engaged while able-bodied (for example, sports
activities). A number of participants also report improvements in their psychological well-being,
544
self-esteem and confidence. In order to attempt to articulate such experiences I propose paracon-
sistent analytical concepts such as disabling ability, enabling disability and ambulant paraplegia.
Ambiguity, ambivalence and paraconsistency all provoke a degree of uncertainty and thus
leave space within texts for the reader to actively engage in the process of making sense, and it is
to this engagement that I now turn.
Extending the role of the reader

In addition to extending the role of the reader by extending dilatory space (see above), thus forc-
ing the reader to explore rather than seek any particular resolution to the narrative, there are other
ways in which we might encourage the reader to interact with our narratives, most obviously
through developments in digital media. If we take seriously Boje’s notion of Tamara (that there
are many possible tellings of a story, that depending on the route one takes into that story one’s
understandings will be different, and that it is almost impossible to know the ‘complete’ story) we
might turn to hypertext representations in which the reader is involved in deciding the narrative
pathway to follow. While such hypertexts have been predominantly works of fiction, there have
been more academically oriented works, such as Kolb’s Socrates in the Labyrinth (Kolb, 1994).
Hypertext works allow for multiple (albeit still linear) pathways in readings of a text and thus
for multiple understandings of the text. While not a hypertext, the example of Tamara, given by
Boje (1995), is illustrative. In the play Tamara, the audience are forced to choose where to follow
the action. At various points the actors split up and different parts of the story are acted out in
different parts of the venue. As it is impossible for any individual to see more than one enactment
at a time, the reader must choose how to follow the story. An individual might choose to follow
one particular character, or remain in one place to see who comes, what happens and who goes,
or may choose to visit different sites at random (or according to some sort of plan). In so doing,
the individual’s understanding of the play is shaped by her/his choices. So too with hypertext.
Presenting our work in hypertext, then, may, in certain circumstances, have certain advantage.
By blurring authorial and readerly control of the text, we can open up the experiences we have
researched to multiple interpretations, providing a space in which non-standard narratives of
experience can be explored and the ‘living story’ (that is, the story before it becomes fixed by
the narrativisation process) can breathe. In this way the reader becomes actively engaged in the
sense-making process, rather than being simply the recipient of the author’s sense-making.
Of course, hypertext and digital media are not the only ways to extend the role of the reader.
In content and form we can create challenges and threats to standard readings of our texts, and
opportunities and openings to other ways of reading. I have already touched upon the use of
ambiguity and ambivalence as a means of articulating messiness, and these also serve as a means to
further engage the reader as they force the reader to interpret our text or to fill the gaps or simply
to live with the ambiguity/ambivalence as they disrupt our default expectations and readings of
texts, as being primarily the articulation of some ‘reality’ by an author concerned with deliver-
ing her/his analysis of the data. While this approach to readerly disruption is best illustrated by
fictional works such as Phillips’ A Humument (2005), which robs the reader of both the notion
of authorship as “we’re given no keys, no clues to unravel the creator’s process” (King, 2012) and
the possibility of relying on default ways of approaching a text: “Every bias, down to the physical
operation of scanning the page, was called upon to explain itself ” (King, 2012). Similarly, Brooke-
Rose’s Thru (1975), through its non-standard presentation (see above), both disrupts the normal
way of reading, causing the reader to stumble through the merging of content and form, theory
and story, and the use of words, half-words and deformed words, and also expresses a double
ambiguity – that of representing ambiguity and that of being ambiguous.
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Clive Baldwin
Of course, there are gentler ways of challenging our readers to engage with the texts. Though
probably not written in this spirit, Latour’s Aramis (1996) is, at least to my mind, of this ilk. In
Aramis, Latour combines conversation, documents, observations, reflections, more standard social
scientific analysis and so on in telling the story of a (failed) public transportation project in
France. Through the changing perspectives presented in the text multiple truths are displayed,
leaving the reader to decide how best to respond to them. Alternatively we might consider pre-
senting our work in the form of poetry (Prendergast et al., 2009) or in a graphic novel in the vein
of Maus (Spiegelman, 2003), or in Talmudic form (Rodgers, 2009), formats that invite the reader
to fill the gaps or make links in less linear or more intuitive ways.
However we choose to present our work, we should, I think, have an eye to engaging the
reader in the sense-making process. Multiple readings can only enrich the process of understand-
ing and can serve as a useful antidote to the fixity that is the inherent danger of the NC approach.
Concluding remarks
In contrast to much that is written about the relationship between life and narrative, it has been
my contention throughout that some lives resist the form of sense-making generated by the
construction of linear, realistic, mimetic, internally coherent, self-consistent, emplotted narratives
at times so favoured by many narrative researchers (myself included). When faced with such the
temptation might be to impose “counterfeit coherence and order on otherwise fragmented and
multi-layered experiences of desire” (Boje, 2001, p. 2) imposing narrative as “a tyranny of truth, a
preference for structure over lived content” (Boje, 2008a, p. 3). This is, I suggest, is a form of Lev-
inasian violence, the subjection of the Other to the totalising desires of the Self, and undermines
the very claims of narrative to provide a unique understanding of lived experience.
Of course, there are some lives that are rendered more comprehensible through the NC
approach, but not all, and so, in the interest of ethics, it is necessary to find ways of representing
such lives in other ways. I have discussed some of these above. Within our representations we
might deliberately attempt to capture ambiguity or express indefiniteness, or extend the dilatory
space by playing with or defying narrative conventions. Similarly, we might choose different
formats for our representations in order to invite readers to interact with these by juxtaposing
multiple interpretations leaving readers to do what they will with these interpretations, disrupt-
ing the expectation to be on the receiving end of an authoritative interpretation. Or we might
invite readers to bring their imaginations into play through filling the gaps we deliberately
leave in the representation (such as in graphic novels where readers are expected to fill the gaps
between the frames as they read). The interplay of the data, our authorial processes and the
reader’s interpretation leads to multi-layered understandings of what is being presented. Just
as William Greaves embedded ambiguity and uncertainty into his film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm:
Take One (1968) by having three camera crews each documenting different aspects of the overall
picture – one filming the actors, one documenting the first film crew, and a third documenting
anything (including passers-by) that they thought fitted into the overall theme of sexuality of the
project – and editing the films to portray at times all three perspectives at once in split screens,
we may, through quasi-aesthetic representations (Readings, 2000), find new ways of generating
insight into the lives of others.
This is, of course, dangerous ground as to tread that pathway involves giving up a degree of
authorial control, laying aside many of our academic habits. Such articulations, rather than clos-
ing down narrative possibilities and finalising the story that can be told, need to create a space
in which multiple narratives can flourish. These multiple narratives may be contradictory –
as in Bob Flanagan’s attributions of causality in his poem Why? – or deliberately ambiguous,
546
generating multiple possible meanings, but this is not a failure of the narrative enterprise. Indeed,
it is through the proliferation of alternative narratives and their interactions that we enrich the
narrative environment and our understandings of that environment. Ultimately, the ethics of
representation concerns our relationship with what Boje (2011) calls the ‘living story’, the story
that cannot be entirely captured by or in narrative form.
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42
THE DOOR AND THE DARK
Trouble telling tales
Malcolm Reed
university of bristol, uk
Cold whispers under the warmth of the hallway. I fetch my bicycle from the garage, mount in
the road, and freewheel down a terraced street to work. Daylight is struggling up across the city
as if through smoke.
The top floor of the education block of the university is quiet on the Friday. Trainee teachers
are home polishing lesson plans in anticipation of their first school experience, and children are
preparing for Halloween at the end of the half term holiday. It is a sensible time to hold a viva.1
I check the room and see it is already organised with a seat for the candidate close to the
entrance and two more opposite for the examiners. Behind the candidate is a place for the super-
visor, so there can be no eye contact or collaboration. As chair of proceedings, my role will be to
ensure fair play. There is no place set for me, so I pull up a seat at one side, like a tennis umpire.
And there is no water. Someone always forgets the water.
I turn to fetch a jug, catch sight of the cityscape and stop, beguiled. Your eyes just have to
drink that panorama, from the beacon on the hill ridge, across warehouses and dockland, over
the blitzed and rebuilt medieval centre, tracing the spear tips of steeples up again to houses that
teeter over the shunting yards of the station.
Then I look inward, returned in time to before this classroom was built. I am standing sharing
a cigarette in the technician’s room beside the same window with the same single-glazed pane
set in its age-warped metal frame and hear the sigh of air through the seal it will never make and
the story of the man who jumped out here in some state of mortal despair the full four floors
into the parking lot below and lived.
Minutes later, downstairs by the desk of an administrator, I scan hurriedly the examiners’ pre-
liminary reports. At this juncture each is suggesting a pass, subject to confirmation according to
the outcome of discussion during the viva itself. The external is familiar, since she has examined
on a number of occasions for our doctorate of education programme. She has a well-deserved
reputation in the field of qualitative inquiry and is known to be rigorous. She enjoys creative
research writing that takes a different tack to the habitual, though it will need to get the basics
right – she’ll certainly pick up on that. And the internal – need to be careful here – likes, let us
say, anything that lines his nest. Operates at something of a tangent. As I have heard it remarked
on more than one occasion in the post-viva debrief, ‘I don’t object to the point he was making,
but has he actually read my work?’
550
The door and the dark
Sonya, the candidate, I don’t really know – a part-time student I think I taught on one of
those modules run like a variety show where eight different people turn up over two days to
‘talk about research’. Intriguing title, mind you – ‘The Door and the Dark: A Ghosted Inquiry’.
Presented as a layered text apparently. I hazard a guess at what that might entail. Ghosted inquiry
is a new one to me.
The phone rings somewhere off and there is a muffled conversation, followed by, ‘Well, let’s
hope it’s all OK.’ It transpires that the supervisor has been clobbered by a car on her way in – her
leg is a mess and the bike is a write-off. Possibly concussed and waiting in the Infirmary for
x-rays. And this is supposed to be a cyclist-friendly city.
So Sonya Morris will be all on her own today. Barely thirty minutes until the viva starts and
she must be fretting outside her supervisor’s office. One of the admin team heads off up the stairs
to explain the situation. Not sure if I should get involved, so pick up the Dictaphone and some
plastic cups and go to fill that jug.
At eleven o’clock I am waiting in the viva room when Sonya appears, smiles cautiously
and says, ‘What a to-do, eh? Oh well, I’m sure I’ll survive.’ We must be fairly close in age,
middish-fifties. Warm to her immediately. Stretch out a hand to introduce myself when the
examiners enter the room.
The internal, Don Roper, scowls. ‘You should be waiting outside – we haven’t given you
permission to come in yet!’
I reply, ‘It’s all right, Don, you were slightly late, and . . .’
The external steps across Roper. ‘Good morning, Sonya, I’m Abby Farfield. Must be unset-
tling for you that your supervisor couldn’t make it. Look, let’s make the best of this and just
get on with the main event, which is talking about your very engaging research. How about
you sit over there and Don and I will sit here? Are we all alright with that? Now, Malcolm,
would you get the formalities over with and explain to Sonya how this process works, and
also figure out how to switch on that Dictaphone so we have a record to refer back to in case
we need it.’
Five minutes later, the opening question from the external comes as no surprise: ‘Just to get us
into the flow, could you explain to us the backstory to the research – how it all came about – and
in particular what your title signifies?’
Sonya relaxes, her hand rising off the cover of her dissertation, which is tagged with slips of
Post-it. Clearly she has rehearsed the possible questions and marked out key quotations.
‘Let me start with the title, since explaining that will contextualise the problem I am address-
ing and also help to frame the research project. “The Door and the Dark” is a play on two
titles – that of a poem and that of a collection of poems.’
She flicks to a page in her dissertation. ‘Robert Frost has a poem called “The Door in the
Dark” (1928), which describes walking into a door in the dark of night, which:
hit me a blow in the head so hard

I had my native simile jarred.
So people and things don’t pair any more
With what they used to pair with before.
‘Bit of a tongue-twister, I know, and when I first read it I did look twice to see whether it said
‘simile’ or ‘smile’. I was grabbed by the conceit, in a literary sense, of double vision that Frost is
re-presenting here . . .’
‘Don’t you mean, representing?’ Don Roper asks.
551
Malcolm Reed
‘No, as I said, re-presenting – making present again – how writing creates our imagination in
the present’ (Denzin 1995; Lapadat & Lindsay, 1999).
‘Those two different uses of “pair with” in the final line are, I would argue, a deliberate dou-
bling.’ She pauses. ‘And also somehow troubling – a circumstance in which “people and things”
no longer quite fit. This resonated with my life story.’
Abby Farfield asks, ‘And the other poem?’
‘Seamus Heaney – his second collection, Door into the Dark (1969, p. 19), which is a quotation
from the opening line of “The Forge”: “All I know is a door into the dark.”
‘He is remembering being a boy back in Bellaghy, County Derry and making sense of what
is in the gloom behind the forge door. It is another subtle effect of doubling, this time playing
off sense and imagination against time – Heaney employs a historical present, “All I know is,”
and this brings his past, an event of his youth, perpetually into the now. But even in the now –
and this to me is the beauty of the poem’s imaginative projection – what is present is forged
by memory:
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,

Horned as a unicorn
‘“The anvil must be . . .” Do you see? The poem acts out re-presentation so the boundary
between what is real and what is imagined is blurred. Maybe here, like Frost says, the simile of
reality has been jarred. Of course, Heaney traverses the real into the fantastic when the anvil
becomes “horned as a unicorn”.’
‘Couldn’t that just be a figure of speech?’ Don Roper again.
‘That’s it. That’s exactly it, an appearance or attitude of speaking, of making a world in words.
That’s what “figure” means. Look it up. And did you know that “figure”, “fiction” and “feign”
share the same Latin root, fingere (Bruner, 1998, p. 19)?
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning “to form or shape”.’
‘Not clear where we are going here?’
‘Well, this is my argument – the dissertation is about re-presenting experience through mem-
ory. Shaping memory is the work of fiction – making worlds out of words, figures, ideas. We can
only look into the past as if into the dark behind a door, and we illuminate that dark with words –
meanings we fashion from different kinds of sign available to us.’ She pauses. ‘In discourse.’ Sonya
hesitates again. ‘Maybe. Haven’t totally made up my mind on that.’
‘And why do you think we make these meanings?’ Abby Farfield prompts.
‘Well, it is inherent to the practice of living. Which is why I am hesitating, because there isn’t
a perfect match between being and discoursing. I know that it is argued that discourse allows us
to make meaning, and therefore it is the tool we create historically and culturally that lets us be
ourselves (Barthes, 1975). But. . .’
She stops herself. Looks past us all and out of the window.
‘But, what?’
‘But, it’s all too, too . . . definitive – you know, opening line of St. John’s Gospel: “In the
beginning was the Word and the word was,” et cetera. I don’t believe in nothing but words, or
in words over all. What about us – surely we are more than purveyors of meaning? I mean, at
our human best we shine a little light, but at our worst we seem to eclipse even a glimmer of
goodness. Maybe we are made more of dark than light. Sorry, probably misquoting Milton there.’
552
‘This is all very literary and philosophical – bordering on the arcane, even.’
‘I’ll take “arcane”, Dr. Roper. In Italian un’ arca is a chest, or an ark. A place of safekeeping,
where in medieval times we kept grain. Also a container of the holies. The arcane is where we
store physical and spiritual succour.’
She laughs to herself. ‘Sorry. I get like this – too much time on my own.’ Then she is off again.
It is like watching a yacht tacking against a stiff wind.
‘Do you remember the Fourth Thesis on Feuerbach?’
Sonya reads:
Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human2 essence. But the human essence
is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of
the social relations.
(Marx & Engels, 1970, p. 122)
‘Interesting. So?’ Don Roper asks.

‘So, everything! Humankind creates gods to people the dark inside us, to give us a creative
divinity, and to provide an architect for the void beyond ourselves – remember the ‘darknesse
that was upon the face of the deepe’,3 in the Bible? We create metaphysical beings because we
are lonely and world-weary, but in reality this is us selving ourselves. Maybe that should stand as
a definition of narrative inquiry!’
‘A remarkable way of putting it, for sure. Though that’s not quite what you write in your
dissertation.’
‘I’m just trying to answer your questions. Am I doing something wrong?’
‘Not at all. You are highly persuasive, poetic even.’
‘My first degree is in English literature, so I tend to equate the symbolic with the social. Some-
times I wonder whether literature hasn’t been doing social science forever. Isn’t it all imagination,
even if it’s sociological?’
Again she reads, ‘This is C. Wright Mills:
The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical
sense in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external careers of a variety of
individuals.
(1959, p. 5)
Don Roper intervenes, ‘But Wright Mills is advocating a critical method, a scientific way of
interrogating society. The literary doesn’t overrule the scientific.’
Abby Farfield asks, ‘Isn’t Wright Mills’ argument that we need a critical and social method to
dispel the false consciousness that arises from an individualistic perspective? Doesn’t he explain
sociological imagination as what “enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations
between the two” (1959, p. 6)?’
‘And doesn’t literature give us something similar?’ Sonya responds. ‘Doesn’t, for example, the
life story of Tess in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) grasp unforgettably the intersection of
history, class and gender? How a good woman is driven to murder by the predatory actions of a
so-called gentleman?’
‘Yes, but Tess is a fictional character – a product of Hardy’s imagination. That’s hardly scientific
or strictly speaking sociological.’ Roper’s voice becomes agitated.
553
Malcolm Reed
‘And Hardy’s imagination is a product of what? Fairy dust? No woman was ever defiled by a
member of the ruling class – that’s just imagination is it? Sounds like false consciousness to me!’
Dr Roper looks angry, but says nothing.
‘To return to my original question,’ says Abby Farfield, ‘What is the backstory here? We hav-
en’t yet resolved the issue of why this research is pertinent.’
There is a notable pause, before Sonya says, ‘Something happened in my family, a long time
ago. Something that was never really discussed, that I found out about – a skeleton in the cup-
board, in a manner of speaking.’
‘And why is this a project appropriate to doctoral research in the field of education?’
‘Writing about the past is like writing in the dark (van Manen, 2002). I know that sounds like
a cliché. In fact, it is a big problem for inquiry, so I argue that this issue is a worthy topic because
it gets at the methodology of how we reclaim situations.
‘The problem is that the past is always imbricated by the present. Therefore, the past is being
made up.’ Sonya dips into her dissertation. ‘Let me find it – this is what Järvinen (2009) argues,
drawing on George Herbert Mead (1932/1959):
From the point of view of the present, there is no objective past in the history of
individuals, institutions or societies. There is no past to be captured, understood and
described in its pure essence. There is only a past – or a plurality of pasts – constructed
from the point of view of an ever-changing present.
( Järvinen, 2009, p. 320)
‘Järvinen’s argument is that the past does not cause the present, since when that past experience
occurred it was not causally connected to any present. The present is causally connected to the
past by virtue of us always being in the now – consciousness and being are only constituted as
presence. This is what I figure as the (k)now – bracket-k-bracket-n-o-w – in order to show how
knowledge is constructed in the moment of knowing.’
‘Yes, I saw that. Clever.’
Sonya carries on, ‘Järvinen makes this terrific observation:
The present is always in some sense new and abrupt, but once it has occurred, we start
on the arduous task of reconstructing the past in terms of it. The abruptness of the
present is mitigated by our new perspective on the past, a perspective from which the
emergent becomes understandable.
( Järvinen, 2009, p. 323)
‘Järvinen helps me organise the emergence of any past through a present consciousness, a
(k)now, which of course is never a single moment and never a single strand of knowing. We are
always stuck in the middle of the process of retrieving the past in the (k)now, which is always slip-
ping backwards and away. I suggest that we think of this process as a fair description of memory
work. I’m arguing that we need to educate ourselves about the practice of memory work – its
methodology, its doing. So that’s my claim to what is educational in the research.’
‘OK. This conversation has already anticipated some of our questions. Let’s just explore fur-
ther your theoretical framework, then – tell us who else’s writing you review?’
‘Well, Derrida – and, to be frank, I find Derrida difficult. I came at him through a reading on
one of our EdD units on narrative research. Carol Rambo Ronai introduced me to the idea of a
‘layered account’, which basically describes how:
554
impressions from the world become internalized and layered on the existing stocks
of knowledge, shifting how that knowledge will affect current and future lived
experience.
(Rambo Ronai, 1999, p. 115)
‘So through the process of writing layering revisits something of the psychological process
of accounting for an experience that Järvinen explains. It picks up on the way in which the
physical process, rather like figure-drawing in Rambo Ronai’s explanation, is full of erasures –
edits, crossings-out, ditched attempts. As she puts it: ‘a constant process of correction’ (1999,
p. 115).
‘And here’s the clincher, for me:
Writing in layers reflects the structure of consciousness. As each layer of text is super-
imposed on the others, each layer contributes to the understanding of the other layers
as well as to the overall picture of social life that the text conveys.
(1999, p. 116)
‘The layering process is really attractive, but I needed to be more sure of myself with regard to
the theory Rambo Ronai is drawing from. She references Of Grammatology (Derrida, 1976), so I
looked it up.
‘We’d been talking in class about how a number of papers in narrative and qualitative inquiry
stress a postmodernist approach, without really situating that in a philosophical tradition. We
don’t find out what the postmodernists are arguing about.
‘Actually, Rambo Ronai’s debt to Derrida is neatly explained, and we all really liked the way
she produces provocative layered accounts – for instance, the way she summons up her grand-
mother, Anny Re (Rambo, 2005). In this paper, Rambo (by now she has dropped the Ronai
surname) draws a connection between the work of consciousness and that of identity:
Identity, a process dependent on consciousness, likewise, is always left with traces of

what went before. Every identity we have experienced is neither fully present nor fully
erased. Accumulating impressions from these identities lie beneath the surface influ-
encing the creation of the emergent picture of self. These impressions, as they build up,
provide a relatively stable sense of self.
(Rambo, 2005, p. 564)
‘So this is leading us towards a stable self that we identify through writing, which I think is
another way of describing how the social sits behind the literary text – how writing re-presents
aspects of social reality. Writing allows us to be – this is not a direct connection with reality but
with a sense of being-in-the-world.
‘Derrida (1991) is responding to Heidegger – so his argument concerns the nature of being,
ontology, and the way writing grasps or textualises over time some meaning of ourselves that
spoken language, being ephemeral, doesn’t. Although this grasping for significance is always
diffident and impermanent.
‘As I understand it, Derrida is having a go at structuralist accounts of . . .’
Don Roper shifts uncomfortably on his chair and looks at Abby Farfield. ‘Do we really need
to go into this much detail? We still haven’t got to the nub of the dissertation, or even answered
our first question, and we are already a good way through the viva.’
555
Malcolm Reed
‘I’ll be quick,’ Sonya replies. ‘Probably the foundational paper in narrative research is Roland
Barthes’ “An introduction to the structural analysis of narrative” (1975),4 where, following Sau-
ssure, he relates the structure of the sentence to the structure of a higher order, called discourse:
Discourse would then be a large “sentence” (whose units do not necessarily have to
be sentences) in the same way that a sentence, allowing for certain specifications, is a
small “discourse.”
(Barthes, 1975, p. 240)
‘This is all in pursuit of presenting the origin of language within some idea of an organizing
system, so the argument being made is that humankind produces a “secondary, self-multiplying”
system, a language of language, or a tool to make a tool, as Barthes explains (1975, p. 240).
Meaning isn’t made by sentences alone, or by discourse alone, but in their interplay. So Barthes
suggests that meaning “does not lie ‘at the end’ of the narrative, but straddles it” (1975, p. 243).’
Roper has stopped making notes and is gazing, glass-eyed, at the window. Outside the wind
is rising and rain is beginning to tap against the pane.
‘OK, OK – overload of theory. Basically Derrida is arguing that Barthes’ idea of a superordi-
nate organizing system returns us to some metaphysical explanation of being, driven by a model
of spoken language that assumes that signs sit out there in the ether, so to speak, and guide our
every utterance. We’ve recreated a god-like explanation that seems to lie beyond ourselves.
‘Just like I explained with Järvinen earlier, the past is not a remote actuality, so all signs are
fractured and broken and are made in the present and in the moment. Writing is a better model,
at least as a metaphor, to get at the actuality of being-in-language, and of knowing-in-the-now,
because it holds us to the idea of having to make our meaning in linear time, of writing and
re-writing ourselves, of always escaping any origin, of leaving traces and erasures in our wake,
and constantly covering them over without hope of recovery.
‘Derrida has this wonderful expression for writing, “as an adventure of relationships between
the face and the hand” (1991, pp. 47–8). Writing allows an adventure of identity-making – the
power to make beings from ourselves whilst finding out about ourselves. And that’s the adventure
on which I set out, which ends up in something of a ghost story.’
Sonya stops, looks relieved, and reaches for her water.
‘Perhaps,’ says Abby Farfield, ‘Now would be a good time to talk about “The Dead Letters”.’
At which point I make my only effective intervention in the whole proceedings. ‘Is there any
way – and I apologise for seeming a bear of very little brain, but the chair of viva is not given a
copy of the dissertation – I might have explained what it is all about? In a nutshell?’
Sonya drains her cup. ‘Of course. It’s about . . .’
The rain slaps the window and a low howl issues from the frame.
‘This is all rather dramatic, isn’t it?’ Roper remarks. ‘Perfect setting for a ghost story!’
‘Chapter 4 centres around a series of letters that I received one day, in a bundle marked “Dead
Letters”. The letters had been sent to an address I left years ago and were forwarded, until it
seems the trail ran out. Then at some point, the Post Office identified my current address and . . .
and . . . there they were.’
‘And who are the letters from?’ I ask.
‘The letters are from someone in my family. From two prisons up north – I won’t say where.’
She looks down at her hands, then raises her palms and rests them over her eyes, scrunching
the heels into her cheekbones as if erasing tears.
‘Later, when I’ve worked out the story – a horrible bloody story – I wish I had burnt them
the day they arrived and then they might never have haunted me.
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‘But, for now, I don’t know what to do. So I don’t do anything.

‘For five years they sit in a big brown envelope in a drawer. I try to forget them. I go to work.
I come home. And every time I go near that desk in the spare room I look at that closed drawer
and think about those letters.
‘One day I decide enough is enough. I’ve started my doctorate and I want to use the spare
room properly as my study. So I open the brown envelope and arrange the letters according to
the dates franked on them.
‘I slit the top of the first. There is no address, and no “Dear Sonya,” just a single side of writing.
‘At first the forms swim there without meaning. All I can imagine is this bastard’s face. I am
shouting, “I don’t know you and I don’t want to know.” I picture excuses tumbling out, and as
fast as they spill, I deny them.
‘Then the words on the letter gel. It’s a description of lights out in a cell. Throughout a prison
block the lights are switched off. Beyond the cell window the dark falls. But there remains a crack
of light seeping through the hatch in the door.
‘The writing is crafted, clearly fashioned for effect and forged over time. At a symbolic level
it suggests an urge to forget, or, more accurately, it captures a failure to forget. There is no final
darkness of forgetting, and there is always this sliver of light searching out the cell.
‘These letters are written like illuminations. Never the whole story, or the whole truth, but
glimpses, incidents, projections, one might say, in which those shafts of light from behind a dark
door illuminate a well of being. More exactly the being that was, which is a kind of not-being –
present absence, perhaps. Definitely somewhere in between being and not being. I suppose in
cinematic terms it would be like seeing the shadow projected by a body that is out of shot. Or
in a paranormal sense, an apparition.’
‘You never give us the letters, though, do you?’ Abby Farfield says. ‘Why is that?’
‘Well, I give you my take on them – their appearance to me – the ghostings, as I call them.’
‘Explain “ghosting” for us. Why is a “ghosting” a substitute for the thing itself?’
‘Just as a word is never the thing itself, but its name, and an aspect of our world of meaning,
so the text is never the act itself but a similitude. Remember Frost’s simile that gets jarred in the
poem I quoted earlier, and how people and things don’t match anymore? That’s the impression –
no, impression is wrong because it conveys a sense of being acted on, pressed on from without,
and this didn’t feel exterior – maybe phenomenon is better, since it points at the act itself and
the way it seems. Doesn’t phenomenon mean “appearance” in Greek?’ For a moment she looks
worried, as if she has backed herself into a corner and can’t yet see her way out.
‘Carry on – you’re making sense – go back to the idea behind ghosting, possibly?’ Abby
Farfield helps out.
‘Alright – I’m going to have to have a run at this.
‘Behind Derrida is Heidegger, who has this obsession with word meanings, which I rather
admire. This probably comes from the tradition of philology, or word-history. For Heidegger,
language is more than communication:
But language is not only and not primarily an audible and written expression of what
is to be communicated. It not only puts forth in words and statements what is overtly
or covertly intended to be communicated; language alone brings beings as beings into
the open for the first time.
(Heidegger, 1993, p. 198)
‘Root words are expressions of philosophy, of how we struggle to know who we are. What I take
from Heidegger is the idea that something fundamental about our being lies in the roots of the
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words we use to express our existence. The roots of some words open out what is meaningful to
us in our histories as beings.
‘More than what a word means, I want to understand its trajectory – how it has built up and
shifted significance over time, and how that might reflect differences in how we understand our-
selves and our position in the world.’
‘The word “ghost” is a case in point. Look in the OED Online, and you will see the etymolog-
ical speculation that the root comes into Old German from Sanskrit, or Indo-European heritage,
and derives from a word meaning “fury, anger”. In non-Germanic languages the sense might
go back to that of “to wound, tear, pull to pieces”.5 So “ghost” isn’t a word that our ancestors
believed reflects phantasms and figures of the imagination, but one which channels raw emotion
and violent action – the kind of event on which one would look aghast.’
‘When I reflected back, after opening and reading the letters, I realised that a ghost was strong
in them. I could piece together a train of actions and the events full of fury – an A-Z of cause,
crime and punishment.
‘In turn, “ghosting” felt right to describe the process of responding to the being behind the
events the letters convey – especially my anger at a carnage that could have ceased at any time if
some self-control had just been found.’
Sonya stares out of the window into the grey downpour.
I shift on my seat. There is a nasty draft and appositely the viva seems to have blown itself out.
‘So,’ I ask, ‘These “dead letters” that Dr Farfield says you didn’t actually give in the dissertation –
sorry, but I don’t think I have quite got to the bottom – well, how do we know what actually
happened?’
Roper laughs. ‘Wrapped in mystery, those letters. I mean – there’s no real evidence where
they come from or if they even exist. There are no facsimiles or anything that validates this
correspondence.’
Abby Farfield turns to him. ‘Are you raising a problem concerning ethical procedure, Don?
You seem to be insinuating there is a question to answer here, so maybe you should carry it
through.’
However, Sonya seems more than ready for the question. ‘I know it requires some suspension
of disbelief, but I needed in some way to disguise the originals, not open them to public scrutiny.
I do have ethical reasons for not divulging that information directly. I don’t see any reason in
leaving a paper trail that could lead back to, or upset, anyone.
‘I do give the reader a sequence of virtual components for a crime – infatuation, rejection,
rage, rampage, realisation, remorse, retribution and remand. I also explain the Deleuzian theory
whereby memory actualizes events by drawing on virtuality:
In memory the past exists virtually as a collection of past instants or percepts in a state
of ‘relaxation,’ i.e., in a condition in which these percepts are not organized in any par-
ticular way with relation to each other. They exist as a dissociated set of singularities.
That is, they are virtual. Furthermore, this past is not something apart from the present
but something that is contained in the present. The entire past (as memory) is part
of each present. Recollection is a process of actualizing this virtuality, of differentially
repeating the percepts along a particular series, a series that arranges or organizes them
in a particular manner, a way of bringing the past to bear on the present.
(Colwell, 1997, p. 11)
‘I do, therefore, signal a relationship that points you in the direction of the objectivity of the
events, although I do not give actual events.
558
‘I’m not sure that validity is an issue. I mean, that’s the conundrum, isn’t it – how does one
validate a ghost?’
Roper responds, ‘Oh, I don’t know – there is something about this ghosting business that
disturbs me.’ He laughs. ‘I mean, accepted, Sonya – the paper trail point – public getting hold
of – well, I can see that – but isn’t there still an issue of veracity, even if we can’t stretch to valida-
tion? Why rewrite the letters? Doesn’t that damage their truthfulness, or displace some element
of their reality? Why not just leave them as they are? Why all the literary sleight of hand? It all
seems unnecessarily postmodern and contrived to me. Sorry, Abby, I held back from mentioning
it in my report.’
‘Postmodern isn’t a term I employ, and that is deliberate. There’s a good part of my penulti-
mate chapter that deals with my disquiet with postmodernism.’
Abby Farfield sighs, ‘This really isn’t going the way I’d hoped. Perhaps, Don, we could stick to
the questions we agreed?’ She eyes him, quite fiercely in my opinion.
Roper sets his jaw, but says nothing.
‘Sonya, explain the reasoning behind Chapter 4, where we read your ghostings of the actual
letters, and then your replies. Your methodological reasoning, I mean.’
‘I needed some way of foregrounding the subjective lens of inquiry and backgrounding
the objective. I don’t want to oppose subjective and objective here, so I take Ratner’s concern
seriously:
Objectivism is the highest form of respect for the subjects we are studying. It respects
their psychological reality as something meaningful and important which must be
accurately comprehended.
(Ratner, 2002, p. 14)
‘However, if the objective view prioritises the kind of validation and verification issues that Dr.
Roper is raising, then, given my ethical concerns and needing to find a way around, I reasoned
that drawing attention to the subjective – that is, placing the potential reader alongside the
researcher – would loosen the bond with what actually happened and strengthen it in terms of
how I interpret the letters.
‘So, my ghostings of the letters denote the angry remains of what I feel this other person feels
in relation to what has been done. In turn, this raises other spectres – that is, the anger I feel at
re-voicing another’s anger.
‘This is a process I call ghosted inquiry, in which I subsume the other’s emotional remains, so
to speak, through my writing. The original body of words might have slipped out of existence,
but not the feelings they provoke.
‘Calling Chapter 4 “Dead Letters” is a methodological joke – a way of playing with the jarred
simile at the heart of the meaning of the chapter title, and with the process of constructing the
past from the vantage of the present. Ghosting describes the different emergences of the past at
different points of (k)nowing.’
‘But you use a doubly artificial means of organising this succession of ghostings, don’t you?
Explain that.’ Roper demands.
‘I wouldn’t call it artificial. I do term it “aesthetic”, though. This reflects my reluctance to call
what I am doing “postmodern”. I mean, nearly everyone on my course leapt on postmodernism
as if it offered a licence to tear up the rulebook.’ She grimaces. ‘You find out fairly quickly that
ripping up the rules doesn’t stop you from being judged.
‘I’m getting ahead of myself. On my reading spree of a literature review I thought it was
important that I try to fathom out what postmodernism entails – partly set off by a friend who
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took a degree in philosophy rolling her eyes and muttering, “So passé!” every time I brought up
the subject.
‘We’d been introduced to the idea of making different kinds of “judgement calls” (Speedy,
2008, p. 55) in order to be able to reflect on the merit of a particular written or visual rep-
resentation of lived experience. So I do recognize the necessity of entering into some discussion
of whether what I have presented is good enough in terms of connecting us with the feelings
evoked in the events of the letters. From a literary perspective, and from my belief, as I stated
earlier, that literature can provide a powerful medium for apprehending experiences formed
in social reality, I buy into Speedy’s criterion of “aesthetic merit” (2008, p. 56). I am also
mindful of her warning that, “Different aspects of these criteria wear their cultural history
differently” (2008, p. 57), so this reinforced my need to dig around in the cultural history of
postmodernism.
‘I discovered that many of the writers invoked in the cause of postmodernism – Lyotard,
Foucault, Deleuze – don’t refer to themselves as postmodernists, nor do they necessarily oppose
modernism with postmodernism, but argue their interrelation and progression (Aylesworth,
2013; Habermas, 1980; Peters, 1999). Then, as I dug deeper, I discovered that judgement itself:
must be aesthetic insofar as it does not produce denotative knowledge about a determi-
nable state of affairs, but refers to the way our faculties interact with each other as we
move from one mode of phrasing to another.
(Aylesworth, 2013, p. 6, referring to Lyotard, 1985, 1988)
‘Obviously, this gave me pause for thought, since it implies that in these “faculties that interact
with each other” there is something else proposed as existing beyond utterance – something that
looks very like some kind of abstract and internal structure that postmodernism rebels against.’
Sonya finds a page near the end of her dissertation. ‘Habermas points out how radical move-
ments in modernist Art (painting, literature, music, and so on) have frequently rebelled against
the aesthetic norms of an age or practice, and how “to retract all criteria and to equate aes-
thetic judgement with the expression of subjective experiences” constitutes an experiment in
“nonsense”:
These experiments have served to bring back to life, and to illuminate all the more
glaringly, exactly those structures of art which they were meant to dissolve.
(Habermas, 1980, p. 1755)
‘Habermas returns us to appreciation of the potential social contract art forges with experience.
Aesthetic merit, for example, in my appropriation of his argument, still needs to do justice to the
human condition.
So lurking behind – the ghost at the banquet, so to speak – is a very post-Hitler, post-Stalin
concern for the means and control and expression of justice in social life. No supreme being, no
dictator, no father- or mother-figure, but the ideal of justice worked out through communication.’
Sonya looks both her examiners in the eye. ‘I like that,’ she says. ‘I aspire to that re-presentation
of justice. We need it. I need it.’
She turns back to her dissertation. ‘I like these words from Ursula Le Guin’s acceptance speech
at the National Book Awards’ (2014):
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alter-
natives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive
560
technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll
need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.
‘This is what I want from writing and research – that it helps us realise a larger reality.’
It is one of those definitive moments in any viva when one knows that the candidate has won
the day.
A familiar voice cuts through. ‘Still haven’t really answered my question. Why did you feel
the need to rewrite the letters?’
An intake of breath. A smile as thin as fishing line.
‘In order to confuse the trail leading back to the original experiences, I needed to become
a kind of ghostwriter. And the best model for that kind of rewriting that I could think of was
through a literary analogy with what poets do by reconstructing experience through heightened,
sometimes symbolic language, framed by a particular form. Like in the Heaney poem, I wanted
to look through the forge door and illuminate the dark. Like Heaney, what I am imagining is
already familiar and known, so it is a projection of experience as a re-presentation.
‘When I first saw “dead letters” written on that bundle, what immediately came into my head
was a poem. It’s by Gerard Manley Hopkins. One of what are known as the “terrible sonnets”
(Reeves in Hopkins, 1953, p. 25). So when I finally opened the letters I knew I had a kind of
simile of experience – a very close equivalent, which would allow me to make a ghosting.
‘I can quote the first octet – I learnt it by heart in the sixth form:
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! What sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! Away.
‘There were four letters, and I arranged them – I mean, like a musical arrangement – in a series. I
narrativised them, would be another way of putting it. There was a set of events being reported,
which I plotted and composed under headings taken from the lexis of the sonnet:‘dark fall’;‘black
hours’; ‘with witness’; ‘years mean life’. Then I wrote four back at them: ‘dearest’; ‘deep decree’;
‘flesh filled blood’; ‘spirit, see’.
‘You have to know the second sestet to appreciate the battle of sentiment:
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
(Hopkins, 1885/1953, p. 69)
‘That’s it, really – that’s my way of doing myself justice in terms of my feelings. And – this is
my hope for my research argument – that it does justice to how one might go about such inquiry,
theoretically and methodologically.’
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‘Well, I like it,’ says Abby Farfield. ‘Perhaps it is a little premature to be giving you feedback,
but this is original and provocative work. I like your tendency to raise notes of disquiet.’
‘Thank-you.’
‘Well, let’s not count our chickens before they are hatched. Perhaps you could just sum up
for us by explaining your connection of ghosting with layering – why is this a layered text, as
you claim?’
‘OK – so contrary to popular belief, layered writing isn’t about patching together different
pieces of inquiry or types of text. If I read Rambo Ronai (1999, 2005) right then layering is a
reflexive and cyclical process of revealing experience by stripping back, deconstructing, whilst
building up – much as one might do whilst drawing and painting: ‘As I draw and erase, the pro-
cess becomes one of continuous exploration, adjustment, and correction’ (Rambo, 2005, p. 564).
‘Therefore, the paradox, both in existence and in writing, is that for every layer of meaning
one peels away another is being laid down. Even as we seem to be moving backwards into the
depth of our recovery of experience, we are actually moving forward in our re-experience of it.
This is why I argue that inquiry writing is a haunting process.
‘Actually, what I’d like to do is read you the closing page of the dissertation, since I believe
it does sum up what you are requesting, and I could not do the argument justice in trying to
recall it.’
Sonya reads. ‘Ghosts are likenesses, similitudes, similes of our uncertainty regarding the
unknown and what comes before and after life. Ghosts are like questions and answers of whether
and what and why commingled. Ghosts are fears and furies and feelings that return, remains that
will not rest.
‘If we can only be real through our senses and our words, working away at our experiences
with tools, like language, we have made to mine our modes of apprehension for their lodes
of meaning, then we live excavating layers as fast as they settle. We live drowning in now and
knowing it, endlessly seeing our own selves as spirits retreating just as we summon them anew.
‘We live in the middle, always in the middle, blanketed by our recollections of what is passing
away and our premonitions of what might come. Life might start and life might end but we
live in medias res, in the midst of things, not in a narrative and at best just capable of narrating
ourselves.
‘Lyotard argues: “The only thing absolutely certain, and to say this is not to do ontology, is that
there are phrases” (Lyotard & Larochelle, 1992, p. 405). For sure, it is impossible to think without
signs, but maybe we mistake utterance for being, discourse for knowing? Is Habermas (1980)
perhaps suggesting that we need to strip back more layers of our modern sensibility and question
the deeds that lie beyond the horizon of our words? Isn’t what we say a ghost of what we do?’
I look up suddenly – not towards the window but through the opaque glass wall that separates
our room from the corridor. A shadow – not sure whether male or female – moves along the
wall and seems to rest there. Nobody else notices, not directly facing that way. We have been
examining now for quite some time. It is already well into lunch break and I wonder whether
someone else has the room booked for the afternoon.
Sonya continues reading. ‘Like Badiou, I am still wedded to a sense of being. One of the touch-
stones of my argument is this passage I read some time ago and have been puzzling over ever since:
One could say, with Deleuze: beyond the one and the multiple, beyond identity and
difference, beyond time and eternity. But “beyond” obviously does not signify either a
synthesis or a third, transcendent, term. “Beyond” means: in the middle; there where in
the rhizomatic network virtualisation and actualisation are exchanged into each other.6
Being is that which activates the essential falsity of the true and virtualises the truth of
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the false; being is that which lets the goodness, the infernal goodness of evil, emerge,
and also that which lets the terrible malevolence of the good unfold.
(Badiou, 2000, p. 194)
‘Maybe I have struggled too long with not being good enough and need another way of thinking.
Maybe I need a way of judging myself that realises imperfection. Maybe the realisation of imper-
fection is a more valid project personally and socially than the perfection of truth. Maybe in order
to be at all, and certainly to be true to ourselves, we have to look for good in the bad in the world
and anticipate bad in our good. Maybe that is the only way to our larger reality, now that hard
times are upon us. Maybe our only blessing lies in those peacemakers who survive the depravities
of our warmongering. Maybe in the larger beyond our only hope is to realise reconciliation.’
It is an impressive conclusion and I see that Don Roper is looking convinced. He swings back
in his chair and announces, ‘That sounds like an ending to me, Sonya. What do you think, Dr
Farfield?’
‘Actually I do have one final question.’
‘OK.’
‘I do have a worry regarding the ethics of your research.’
‘Oh?’ Sonya looks anxious.
‘I presume you were required to seek approval of your research intention through your uni-
versity’s ethics’ procedure?’
‘Yes – I did. There is a long section on ethics in the final chapter in which I reflect on the
issues raised by the research.’
‘Yes. I read that. However, I note that the education department expects you to have had an
ethics’ conversation with your supervisor and that the summary of that conversation is submitted
as an appendix to the dissertation. I don’t see it.’
‘No. Sorry – it is an oversight – I was in quite a rush to meet my final deadline for submission.’
‘Did your supervisor have an opportunity to check your dissertation before it was submitted?’
‘No – as I say, I was right up against it. To be honest, I didn’t even show her the final draft.’
‘My concern is for this family member, whose letters you use. Did you seek permission to
use the letters? Have you sought informed consent? Surely you and your supervisor must have
thought of this?’
‘Well, it is difficult. The family situation is difficult. And the person in question is no longer
around.’
‘Life history research tends to be difficult – especially if it involves family. Did you not think
about Sikes’ (2010) warning about the possibility of people being upset by reading researchers’
portrayals?’
‘Well, I have thought about that, but I don’t think there is much chance of this person reading
my writing, to be honest.’
‘Well, not thinking that there is “much chance” is your judgement call of at least some prob-
ability, rather than a categorical “no chance”, surely? You seem to be tacitly acknowledging that
these experiences, that we are led to believe are those of somebody in your family – even though
you have taken great pains to disguise the trail, as you said earlier – might still reflect someone’s
private life without their approval or consent.
‘Let me just remind you what Sikes writes:
[H]ow we describe people’s lives is how they appear to, and in, the world through our
writing, however much any depiction is the result of our own auto/biographical inter-
pretation, the product of our vocabulary and our skill with words, the outcome of our
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Malcolm Reed
concern to use the life/lives to support a particular argument and/or our theorising,
and so on.
(Sikes, 2010, p. 15)
‘Somewhere out here in the world is the potential for someone to be hurt because you are
claiming their experiences for your argument. This isn’t a ghost we are talking about. This isn’t
a figure or conceit in a clever poetics of methodology. This is a real person in this larger reality
you mention, and they deserve justice.
‘My worry is that – for all your cleverness and sophistication with ideas, which I cannot fault –
you have overlooked the blindingly obvious.
‘Have you really considered how this other person might feel to have these experiences inti-
mated to the wider world?’
We all look at Sonya, who is trembling. The room seems suddenly very cold. Sonya looks at
me, ‘Could you turn off the Dictaphone, please?
‘I knew I wasn’t going to get away with it,’ she says ruefully.
The shadow outside the room lifts off the opaque glass wall. Momentarily, a woman’s face
appears at the door and glances in. Whatever she sees seems to satisfy her, and she leaves. It is
nobody I recognize. I hear her footsteps retreating as she goes.
‘It was a long time ago – over thirty years. I have changed my name. I have changed the
details. I have no family that owns me now. Nobody can make connections because I no longer
am as I was.
‘I’ll tell you only what I have told my supervisor. You cannot pass this information on, so it
stays in this room between us. I will not tell you my original name. You will have to accept that
what I am about to tell you is truthful, if not the whole truth.
‘I was training to be an English teacher. Not here. I fell in love with another teacher during
my Spring term placement. She was married. I got my first teaching job at her school. It all went
wrong. I lost it in the car park one evening. Her death broke her husband too and he tried to
kill himself.’
In the window, Sonya’s reflection seems to stare back at her and moan.
‘I paid over many years. In prison the only friends I had lived in books and songs. There was
one that seemed to sing endlessly in my head:
Just when I think I’m winning

When I’ve broken every door
The ghosts of my life
Blow wilder than before
(Sylvian, 1981)
‘So when I got parole, when I started sorting out my life outside, I couldn’t go back to teaching,
but I could keep on studying – Open University, extramural courses, that sort of thing. Working
full time and taking it bit by bit. And eventually, I found a place in myself where I wanted to reach
back into my dark. And this narrative research seemed to offer me the chance to make a door.
‘But concealment is everything – erasing the footprints and covering over the traces, so the
track leads back but never arrives, so people and things don’t pair any more – this is the only kind
of inquiry I can honestly commit to.’
Sonya laughs, ‘Right from the start I knew I would end up doctoring my doctorate.
‘So it comes down to providing a piece of paper from someone that shows informed consent
in order to pass this viva, does it?’
564
She traces the title page of her dissertation with her fingertips.
‘Sonya – this is who I am now – Sonya. Sonya Morris is the author of this work. What’s to
stop me giving this other “me” permission? I don’t have to give my real name, and nobody will
know who “I” was – I just have to consent to being the other member in a family, which no-one
except us will know really numbers one.
‘Where’s the lie in that?’
*****
Coda
Coda is the Italian word for “tail”; as a formal device in music and literature it supplies a conclu-
sion, an end. For Labov (1997), the coda of an oral story returns the utterance to its present as a
way of finalizing the narrative act. My tale already has an ending, so this other tail I am writing
must be returning us to someplace other than the time and world of Sonya’s story. Some other
genre, with an uneasy connection to the institution of writing in the social sciences (Bazerman,
1988; Watson, 2011), is becoming written into being.
In general, I am loath to reflect beyond a tale itself, because I believe it should have sufficient
backbone to support its own weight of interpretation, and will do, if it is well enough crafted.
However, I realise that a handbook designed for narrative inquirers does expect some rationale
concerning the craft of research, so although I won’t be telling you (and me) what ‘The Door
and the Dark’ means, I would like to discuss my intention. My single caveat is that intentionality
(Crotty, 1998; Jacob, 2014) reaches out to ideas and possibilities that are discovered in the tracks
and their obliteration by which writing proceeds. Whilst writing ‘The Door and the Dark’, and
later writing this coda, I did not work forearmed with what I wished to state – it emerged in
the work itself.
I wanted (here is intentionality plain as day) to write a tale that could serve an academic
argument whilst remaining a piece of fiction. As a university teacher of research methods that
explore that panoply of approaches we might call “narrative inquiry”, I have tried here to
journey in my professional world. However, my process of inquiry is not simply directed by
experience – I do not think my method is to drive forward in an act of extension from historical
actuality, starting with facts and reworking them artistically to create a non-fiction (Sparkes,
2002, p. 155). ‘The Door and the Dark’ is not a fictionalisation of a real event any more than it
is a realisation of a fictional idea – it is a mess of both and more besides. It summons a textual
world, which could only happen in writing – a semic world (Peirce, 1906) of layers that peel,
wear away, stratify and buckle, to reveal no more reality or permanence than written culture
and its institutions afford. The ‘writer’s problem’, according to Van Manen, is that ‘every word
kills and becomes the death of the object it tries to represent’ (2002, p. 244). This is the irreality
that fiction makes.
The novelist Richard Flanaghan (2014, p. 22) asks: ‘But what reality was ever made by realists?’
There is lived experience at play in the tale, particularly Sonya’s history as a student of English
literature and teacher of English, which is my background – both of us are unruly lay members
of the sociological and psychological churches that tend to organise worship in the form of
educational research. The Bristol location is my take on where I live and work and the university
building is portrayed fairly accurately as it is now and as it was over twenty years ago. I name
check the programme I teach. I do examine doctoral theses and dissertations and I do sit in the
vivas of my supervisees when they are examined. On the other hand, I have never come across a
dissertation even remotely similar to Sonya’s. I have never experienced as supervisor or examiner
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Malcolm Reed
the problem my tale unravels. All the names and events are made up and are not actual people
cunningly disguised.
All that you have read drifts in that somewhere between what is and what if (Reed, 2011) that
is no place at all. Only in a world fabricated through imagination have I been there in that room
with Sonya. Yet I have been in and around that imagined room for days and weeks.
Arthur Frank explains that: ‘Research is, in the simplest terms, one person’s representation of
another’ (2005, p. 966). Frank explores, through the work of the Russian critical theorist, Mikhail
Bakhtin, the concept of dialogicality – how all utterance necessitates discourse with an other, even
when talking to and of one’s self. Frank is arguing the ethics of research writing, that ‘in a dialogical
relation, any person takes responsibility for the other’s becoming, as well as recognizing that the other’s
voice has entered one’s own’ (2005, p. 967). Writing has a powerful act of responsibility for becoming
others, and what and whom one becomes, yet these acts of representation and re-presentation are
necessarily unfinalized, never fully finished, never complete in meaning or truth or reality:
[T]he researcher never understands a person as fixed in any representation of his or her
words. Instead, the meaning of any present story depends on the stories it will generate.
One story calls forth another, both from the storyteller him or herself, and from the
listener/recipient of the story.
(Frank, 2005, p. 967)
For me too, Bakhtin has been one of those thinkers with whom over the years I ‘engage in a run-
ning conversation’ (Crotty, 1998, p. 216). Dialogicality is artfully, actively, in its ethical sense even
wickedly at play in ‘The Door and the Dark’. However, the question I think that I am asking,
both of myself and through what the tale inquires, is from where this calling forth of others that
are and are not ourselves happens? If one’s first bat in the game of inquiry through writing is not
at experience and one is not creating a nonfiction, then the alternative field on which to start is
aesthetic rather than experiential. Of course, this other starting-point is frequently explained as
a field of aesthetic experience through reference to what one has read, and of course these rich
fictive worlds of imagination and their texts come out to play in Sonya’s dissertation. Which of
course is just a pretend dissertation after all, isn’t it? But aren’t there places beyond factual and
literary experience from which to write – places, that is, within the process of writing itself?
Which is to speak of writing as a place and process of self – perhaps a procession of selvings?
And solvings. And dissolvings.
Steeped in Russian language and literature, one of the first scholars to introduce Bakhtin’s
work and ideas to the West was Tzvetan Todorov. Foremost among them is one to do with cre-
ative activity, which Bakhtin would call aesthetic activity:
Bakhtin asserts the necessity of distinguishing between two stages in every creative act:
first the stage of empathy or identification (the novelist puts himself in the place of his
character), then the reverse movement whereby the novelist returns to his own position.
This second aspect of creative activity is named by Bakhtin with a new Russian coinage:
vnenakhodimost, literally “finding oneself outside,” which I shall translate, again literally,
but with a Greek root, as exotopy.
(Todorov, 1984, p. 99)
Finding oneself outside and returning to oneself. Finding oneself outside and not being able to
return to oneself. Is this Sonya’s dilemma? And by extension is this the danger of all writers and
inquirers who set off to explore worlds of self and realms of experience?
566
And when it succeeds, this seeing ourselves, is it reality we reach? According to Bakhtin:7
‘When it [seeing oneself from the outside] succeeds, what is striking, in our external image, is a
sort of strange void, its ghostlike character, and its somewhat sinister loneliness’ (Bakhtin, quoted in
Todorov, 1984, p. 95).
Notes
1 A viva voce is an examination ‘by live voice’ in defence of one’s dissertation or thesis, usually for the award
of a doctorate. In the British university system this normally entails a closed meeting in which the candi-
date is questioned on his or her written dissertation (submitted to examiners in advance) by an external
and internal examiner (one expert appointed from outside the university awarding the qualification, and
one appointed from inside). The candidate’s academic supervisor is normally invited to the viva in a
non-speaking capacity. In some universities an independent chair is invited to oversee the process. When
the examiners are satisfied that sufficient questions have been asked to explore the candidate’s claim to
having achieved a doctoral level of research, the candidate and supervisor withdraw and the examiners
decide their recommendation, which is told subsequently to the candidate face to face. It is usual that
examiners recommend a pass and also require the candidate to make corrections and changes to the writ-
ten dissertation within a strict time period, after which the degree may be awarded by the university’s
examinations’ committee. Different countries have differing traditions and practices regarding the viva –
in many European contexts the oral defence is a public event.
2 In this article, any use of italic in a quotation is given in the original.
3 King James Bible (1611) Genesis, 1.2 http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1611_Genesis-Chapter-1/
4 First published in French in 1966.
5 ‘ghost, n.’. OED Online. September 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/
Entry/78064?isAdvanced=falseandresult=1andrskey=w3m0tqand
6 Badiou, A. (2000) Of life as a name of being, or, Deleuze’s vitalist ontology. Pli. 10. pp. 191–199 is a
translation from the French. The English text actually reads ‘virtualisation and actualization are exchanged
into each other being is that which activates . . .’ This is an oversight in the editing of the paper and I have
proposed a more logical punctuation based on a different translation to be found in Badiou, A. (2006)
Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology; trans. ed. and intro. N. Madarasz, Albany: State
University of New York. p. 65.
7 Bakhtin’s works are not listed in my references since in this instance I am referring to Todorov (1984),
who is quoting from a Russian publication that is not available in English.
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43
“STYLES OF GOOD SENSE”
Ethics, filmmaking and scholarship
Kip Jones
bournemouth university, uk
Since the question of ethics is a question of knowing and thinking as well as choosing and
everyday action, our subject matter concerns the ways by which we customarily establish bodies
of knowledge and patterns of reflections, our way of producing and maintaining certainty, and
our styles of good sense.
(Scott, 1990, p. 5)
Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press
Figure 43.1 Crew shooting early scene for the short, research-based film, Rufus Stone.
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Kip Jones
Introduction
Ethics is the practice of integrity in human relationships.
I am getting old enough now that I finally realise that certain times/moments in my
life were pinnacles, not predictors of things to come. I recall the dizzying heights of
firsts: the initial film that spoke to me personally, the foundational book that changed
my thinking, that earliest piece of music that clutched my heart and made me cry. I
thought that such moments would continue throughout life ad infinitum. Never mind
a love that I thought would last forever, a body abused that I assumed would always
recover, the promise of undying friendship that simply withered away. Indeed, I now find
myself no longer astonished when people lack integrity, but am surprised that I still have some.
(Jones, 2010)
The key difference between ethics in the everyday narrative research of the Social Sciences (ESRC
Research Ethics Framework: ‘integrity, honesty, confidentiality, voluntary participation, impartiality
and the avoidance of personal risk to individuals and groups’ [ESRC, 2005, p. 26, cited in Wiles et
al., 2008]) and research using filmmaking as research and/or dissemination is a shift in emphasis
to the viewer or, in Performative Social Science terms (Jones, 2014a), the audience. This emphasis
on the “end-user” or viewer is a development of the more traditional ethics in journalism (and,
therefore, documentary filmmaking) where the journalist’s driving concern is with the truth-
fulness and accuracy of what is reported and, therefore, read or seen by the public. The ethical
considerations for journalists appear to have a quite different focus and emphasis than those typ-
ically considered in Social Science studies. For example, ethical expectations of journalists from
the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists (1996):
• Honest, fair and courageous

• Respectful of sources and subjects
• Obligation only to public’s right to know
• Accountable to readers, listeners, viewers and each other
In terms of research using filmmaking for academic scholarship, the ethical emphasis must remain
balanced between the two: the active research participants and their worlds, and multiple viewing
audiences and their worlds. This is the key fundamental shift in ethical protocols for filmmaking
as an arts-based academic research method.
The ethics conundrum

Narrated stories turned into written text (the vast majority of the outputs of the Social Science
interview culture) beg for a fresh approach. The constructed memories that are the building
blocks of narrated accounts, like dreams, are simultaneous layers of past and present – the visual
and the spatial – and these added dimensions, beyond the purely temporal, demand further atten-
tion, perhaps an expansion into new and unknown territories.
Like you, I believe in public scholarship and making our work accessible to broad audi-
ences. I believe there is an ethical and practical mandate for getting our work beyond
the academy. And frankly from a personal point of view I think about the overall impact
of my work and the further we disseminate our work the higher the impact.
(Leavy, in Jones & Leavy, 2014, p. 3)
570
This unease within the familiarity of narrative research, its procedures, “rules and regulations”,
and constant textural outpourings, convinces some to turn to new methods of construction and
diffusion. We review, therefore, the very heart of arts-based research: its aesthetics and its ethical
procedures.
Where do we find an aesthetic and an ethic in which to base this new attention to narrative
and its performative, arts-based possibilities?
The criteria for evaluating qualitative work . . . are moral and ethical. Blending aesthet-
ics (theories of beauty), ethics (theories of ought and right) and epistemologies (theories
of knowing), these criteria are fitted to the pragmatic, ethical and political contingencies
of concrete situations.
(Denzin & Lincoln, 2002, p. 229)
Ethics, much like aesthetics, is often misunderstood as something effusive, illusive and somehow,
decision-making by the few on a rarefied echelon, involving pronouncements of grand moral
impact and/or sophisticated discrimination. For these kinds of reasons and to avoid potential
headaches, it is often assumed that checklists and committees will be far better at making such
decisions than mere individuals.
A word of warning, however: inherent dangers remain in the ever-increasing scholarship-
by-management system:
As our skills at in-depth interviewing continued to develop, we become better and

better at acting as but “silent witnesses” to the lives of others. Ethical considerations
and sensitivities become ethical procedures and limitations over time. As the subtleties
of the interview environment become more familiar, at the same time, our encounters
with strangers become more constrained by committees and the management culture
pervading academia. These drive narrative researchers further into taking the position
of the “neutral observer” and the disengaged participant.
(Jones, 2015, p. 86)
For example, Fenby-Hulse (2015), in an article titled “Arts projects need research ethics”, admit-
ted that there are no simple answers to these questions, but then proceeded to recommend that ‘it
is important to have ethics committees commenting’ and ‘the right safeguards . . . put in place’
(Fenby-Hulse, 2015). For Fenby-Hulse, it seems important to ensure that these discussions take
place in advance of involvement of the research relationship. The concept of an on-going, work-
ing relationship developing between researcher and participant is absent here. In contrast, the
Statement of Ethical Practice for the British Sociological Association (BSA, 2002) begins its ‘Guidelines’
by reminding associates that
the purpose of the statement is to make members aware of the ethical issues that may
arise throughout the research process and to encourage them to take responsibility for their
own ethical practice. The Association encourages members to use the Statement to help
educate themselves and their colleagues to behave ethically.
(BSA, 2002; emphasis mine)
The truth remains that the seeds of moral maturity and good taste, or both ethics and aesthet-
ics, are imbued in us culturally as children and develop over our lifetimes through our relation-
ships both within communities and through exposure to objects of worth or merit. Far better
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Kip Jones
than sending the novice researcher off to an ethics committee would be to start the dialogue or
narrative that will help the neophyte to continue to develop her/his moral compass and aesthetic
judgment. Such conversations produce worthwhile tools useful at all stages, particularly for arts-
based research and dissemination processes, and certainly central to research such as film and the
craft of filmmaking itself.
The development of sensitivity to issues of integrity and responsibility to others, or Scott’s
‘good sense’ (Scott, 1990, p. 5), takes time and practice.
Learning to name things anew, to become alert to exclusions and to forgotten aspects in
a people’s history, to overhear what is usually drowned out by the predominant values,
to rethink what is ordinarily taken for granted, to find out how to hold itself in quest:
these are aspects of the thought of the question of ethics.
(Scott, 1990, pp. 7–8)
Relational humanism (Jones, 2009) in research ethics is developed in this very way and means
that personal autonomy, dignity, liberty and responsibility are considered positive values for con-
sideration throughout the on-going dialogue created through the research process and in its
dissemination.
Moving from traditional research, to using film to both answer research questions and dissem-
inate data, holds the promise of vast horizons opening up for the academic. Indeed, particularly
within the audience’s interaction with film, opportunities arise for meaningful communication
through images conjured up – a kind of theatrical, magical dialogue that takes place in the cin-
ema. Emphasis is on shared cultural and societal resources or the ‘habitus – our second nature, the
mass of conventions, beliefs and attitudes which each member of a society shares with every other
member’ (Scheff, 1997, p. 219). It is in these moments of shared, extended reality that we connect
to what it means to be human and, therefore, reach a higher plane of mutual understanding and
a blurring of individual differences. A relational humanism urges us as theorists, human scientists
and practitioners to seek ways – multiple ways – of generating these integrative conversations
through publications of course and naturally through presentations, but especially through films.
By extending our gaze beyond the status quo, to new technologies and modes of presentation,
we open doors to new understandings and resources.
It is within this communicative process that I will now address my own personal experience
with, and ethical participation in, extending the boundaries of narrative research by making a
short research-based film. It was through such practice itself that aesthetic and ethical issues were
confronted and addressed. This process covered participation ranging from researcher to film-
maker, author to producer, from overseeing the conduct of interviews and subsequently creating
composite characters to encouraging full audience engagement within a cinematic reality.
Researching and making Rufus Stone: The ethics of fictive reality in film
It’s very simple to get a cross section of society within a village; you get a microcosm of the social macrocosm.
(Haneke, Director, The White Ribbon [2007]; cited in Jablonski, 2010)
The two questions concerning ethics and making the film Rufus Stone (2012) that come up most
frequently in Question & Answer sessions following screenings are: “Is it ethical to combine par-
ticipants’ interviews into composite fictional characters?” and “How was combining your own
auto-ethnographic story with those of the participants ethical?” Both questions recall the BSA
advice: ‘ethical issues . . . may arise throughout the research process’ (BSA, 2002). I will try to
572
explain in depth how the circumstances for both of these practices developed over time through
the research and filmmaking processes (the whole process took seven years – from applications
for funding through the research process to finally shooting, editing, screening, and distributing
the film).
Rufus Stone began with stories, stories collected using several research methods, including the
Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (Jones, 2001), which are outlined elsewhere (Jones
et al., 2013).
These stories, along with other rich data from the focus group and the visual ethno-
graphic study, were foundational in creating the film. The research team and advisory
panel used this material to inform the development of the film’s composite characters,
treatment and script, creating the “fictive” reality that resulted in the story and charac-
terisations for the film, Rufus Stone.
( Jones et al., 2013, p. 18)
Allowing the characters to develop over time and through several versions of the story in col-
laboration with the filmmaker provides an example of the joint effort necessary in developing a
“fictive reality”. A fictive reality is conceived as the ability to engage in imaginative and creative
invention while remaining true to the remembered realities as told through the narrations of
others. For example (and a frequent device used in Rufus Stone), several interviewees may recount
a similar incident. When these reports are combined into one person’s story, a “fiction” is born.
Later, I realised that I had been working on this concept for some time, perhaps as early as 2002
for a conference presentation and later, published as a script (Jones, 2012c). I produced a confer-
ence multi-media presentation that described an imagined conversation between psychologists
Klaus Riegel and Ken Gergen on a train in 1976. This dream-like production, supported by
narrative biographical theory, extended the illusory biographies of these two scholars and con-
structed and created by an imaginative projection of my “self ” onto their worlds. In terms of the
approval or disapproval by research subjects, Gergen wept after viewing the presentation.
I continued to develop fictive reality in earnest in writing the treatment for Rufus Stone (2012).
One example was the character “Abigail”. Her make-up began from two directions – initially
she was the contemporary neighbour of Rufus. The role of young Ellie, Rufus’ sister (who came
to me in a dream), was a separate character developed early on. Then, at the suggestion of the
director, Josh Appignanesi, Ellie and Abigail became one person and the triangle between the
teenagers Rufus, Flip and Abigail was born. The dialogue for Abigail was, in part, taken from a
transcription of an interview with a woman that I had done many years earlier. When comment-
ing on her string of disastrous marriages, she said, “Oh, well. Some day my Prince will come!”
This comment stayed with me over the years and ended up spoken by Abigail to Rufus, when
she encounters him all those years later (Rufus Stone, 2012).
What of the second query, the involvement of your personal story in creating the story for
Rufus Stone?
When writing auto-ethnography, I endeavor to remain a minor character and/or a

conduit to a time, place, and other people. I become fictionalized through writing. I
am the sorcerer who reminds audience of themselves. In terms of visual representation
of such stories, I become the keen observer, allowing cultural images to become private
and iconic. These remembered images twist and turn and eventually morph in various
ways to be included as my own graphic memories. These visual “mash-ups” are truly
Ethno-Graphic. Indeed, our visual memories can become imbued with both intense
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Kip Jones
cultural and personal meaning. This is the visual auto-ethnography that I hope to rep-
resent in my work.
( Jones, 2012a, p. 14)
How this autobiographical practice moved into the writing of the treatment for Rufus Stone
began almost by stealth and in stages.
I began to comprehend that I had to rely on myself, my own background, and my

own story, if I was ever to put flesh on the bones of the players and their tales. I always
expected that the inhabitants of the film would be “composite” characters – that is,
the interwoven and combined biographies of several people whom we had inter-
viewed separately for the study. I then, however, began to realise that my own story
was an additional one that I could potentially mine for detail. “Bonus material!” I
initially thought. By beginning to recall some of the physical settings (the three-di-
mensionality) of various scenarios from my own life, I was able to start to imbue the
writing for the film treatment with a sense of place and detail that might otherwise
be missing.
( Jones, 2013, pp. 7–8)
But was this “ethical”? Should I have asked the interviewees if they wanted their stories
portrayed in this way, to be combined with each other’s backgrounds and narratives, and even
embellished with events from my own story? What convinced me that it was “ethical” to proceed
in this way?
I listened to the devastating stories from the men in our study who were accused of
unsubstantiated sexual acts in their youth, then threatened with incarceration or worse
and often shunned by family and community (see Jones et al., 2013). My own youthful
experience became a resource that breathed propinquity into such tales as they were
subsequently woven into the plot of RUFUS STONE. My own tale of the mother with
a knife, full of vitriolic condemnation, made it possible for me to reinvigorate the similar
stories that I was hearing for the film.
The naïveté of same-sex attraction and young love, too often forbidden and mis-
understood love, was a story reported over and over again in our study and, therefore,
became central to the plot of the film. By compositing these stories in RUFUS STONE,
at last we remember them together, finally gaining strength in each other for something
misunderstood and condemned from our isolated youthful experiences.
( Jones, 2013, pp. 10–11)
Writing the past meant mining my own experiences for detail and validity, for visual refer-
ences that would fill in detail and bring the stories we had been told to life cinematically. Not
certain at first, but as the writing of the back-stories progressed, I realised that I was mining the
emotional content of my own life. I needed it to relate to the stories that had been told to me
and so I searched my own life for clues (Kubler, 1962). Mining the tunnels of the past, to find
not only the gems, but also the very construction of the tunnels and mines that the past leaves
behind. The mother-load for story is in these artefacts. The difference between this approach
and earlier narrative interview reports is that the personal embedded in the process now becomes
more transparent, is acknowledged and even used in storytelling. I have learned, in this way,
to let the characters lead the writing and come to life through me. In terms of the research
574
participants, their stories become enriched and, ironically, more clearly delineated, through this
fictive embellishment.
If we plan to work in film to create story from research, we must be willing to move into new
territories and ways of working. Leaving trepidation behind, the creative impulse now drives
the stories to their natural fruition. Film is an observable medium – the stories must be visual.
As we witness throughout life, certain cultural images become private and iconic. We recall and
utilise the ‘Ethno-Graphic’ (Jones, 2012a, p. 14) mentioned earlier. The lines between the cultural
and the personal become blurred – much like the lines between what we hear from others and
what we remember ourselves. Bravely, we incorporate these images into our storytelling to give
it resonance. These are the mother loads from mining the tunnels of our pasts, which become
the leitmotifs and Gestalt shaping our own narratives and contributing to the narratives of others.
I continue to explain how this affected the risk-taking involved in creating Rufus Stone:
That’s not to say that the research wasn’t very, very in-depth and well-constructed. Cer-
tainly, any project that takes place over three years is almost a gift these days in terms of
an opportunity to carry out substantial research. To be able to do in-depth interviews
and follow-up interpretation by citizen panels, then to conduct focus groups and to
use theatrical interpretation of some of the data – all this wealth of data added to the
richness of the story that we finally were able to present as a treatment of the story to
the filmmaker.
It was a risk in the sense that it was doing something that hadn’t been done at this
level before. There certainly have been films made involving social science projects and
they tend to be a film of a theatrical production put on by participants in a project. No
one has gone to the next stage, which is, in a sense, fictionalising the research – and that’s
what we’ve done here. By using composite characters we’ve created a fiction in the
end. They’re still true to the research and even lines that they say in the dialogue often
are verbatim lines that people said in the interviews. The story, however, is fictional – it
didn’t really happen exactly as it is told in the film to any one person.
Using fiction we were able to enhance not only the interpretive utility of the
research, but also the entertainment value, and by entertainment value I mean that in
the strictest terms of entertainment as something that makes people really think and
makes them think at a very deep level.
( Jones & Hearing, p. 186, 2013)
You mentioned a synchrony between aesthetics and ethics – how come?

Our intentions need to consist of conveying the human sciences and the social sciences from “scientistic”
paradigms to ethical–aesthetic paradigms.
(Guattari, cited in Bourriaud, 2002, p. 96)
We recall that when we were children, we learned how to view the world and how to treat
others around us. In this way, principles evolved – in both how we developed a sense of taste
for the things in the world around us, and our ethical compasses. ‘Each of us have an ethical
orientation and a reservoir of resources, values, and attitudes upon which we draw when we
reflect and act on moral issues’ (Stadler, 2008, p. 3). Performative Social Science (Jones, 2012a;
2012b), the method of arts-based research and dissemination that I have developed, is theoretically
based in Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002). Relational Aesthetics is conceived of in terms
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Kip Jones
of co-operation, relationship, community and a broad definition of public spaces. Bourriaud’s

theory offers a post-modern, contemporary framework that allows social scientists, particularly
those with an interest in arts-based research such as filmmaking, to think about aesthetics and
means of dissemination in fresh ways. Relational Aesthetics also forms a structure on which we
can begin to think about a “performative” Social Science – a science that includes more emphasis
on collaborations with our research participants as co-authors, co-producers or co-performers
themselves. It is here that Ethics and Aesthetics become intertwined and support one another.
It also provides a platform on which to base the production values of our dissemination efforts
and gauge the effects that our fabrications have on our audiences as well, allowing for their own
participation in a dialogical, creative social exchange. This allows for the ethics of journalistic
accountability to viewers and audiences rights to know.
There are aesthetic values that come into play when creating arts-based research or Perform-
ative Social Science as well. I have often remarked that it is a mistake, I believe, for academics to
assume the mantles of artists, poets, dancers, actors or filmmakers and that the best arts-based
research involves collaboration with professional artists and crafts people. Still, there is no reason
that the academic cannot develop a more refined aesthetic sense through efforts in arts-based
research, particularly learning through collaborations. For example, I learned an immense amount
during the shooting of Rufus Stone. I also knew, at the same time, to stay well out of the way of
the director and other professionals who were skilfully representing the story I had written that
they were crafting in film. This is the stage in collaborations where things can frequently go awry,
with researchers not being able to ‘let go’ of control of the project, and allow the collaborator to
do what she or he does best (see Jones, 2013).
The academic interested in pursuing film as an outlet might begin by engaging in creative
writing practice. As academics, we are used to writing in a very scholarly, formal, somewhat
stilted style. This sticks, and after some time it is difficult to break the habit. It is certainly not the
prose that film scripts are made of. I sometimes suggest that narrative researchers begin by more
creatively writing reports of interview materials as a starting point. Instead of disjunctive patches
of ‘dialogue’ lathered with interjected ‘scholarly analysis’, why not try to tell a better story from
the research data itself? How about a narrative with a beginning, middle and end? When we pro-
ceed in this manner, we have the beginnings for a film, or another creative output for our efforts.
This may be the very point at which the Ethics Monster begins to nag: “But have you asked
your participants if you can write a ‘creative story’ about them or their experiences? How have
you alerted them to the fact that you may playfully embellish certain aspects of their stories, in
order to better reach and engage an audience? Is using your ‘imagination’ a scholarly practice?”
The answer is to bring the participants along on your journey. At each stage and transformation,
allow them to be informed of how things are progressing, where you are taking their materials
and why. Allow them to be part of the process. No, they are not suddenly critics or included in
the process to give “permission”, nor are they holders of the artistic license. They are included
in order to keep them informed of the transformations taking place and to make them feel that
something worthwhile is being created from their input and openness. Both of you are taking
part in a community. Hopefully, you are embellishing their story in order that it is better heard
(and seen). Using this method, their contributions continue to flow, only enriching an already
rich research process.
The following is a touching example of this that I often share. The stories of Rufus and Flip
were composited from the narratives of several of the gay men who were interviewed in depth
for the research project. All involved in the interviews were asked if they also would like to be
involved in the Advisory Committee for the project, a focus group that was held, etc. Several
continued to be involved right up to the premiere of the film and continue to be involved in
576
dissemination of the film. Neither Flip or Rufus were based on any single interview nor were
the key moments of their stories specifically something that had occurred in the lifetime of one
interviewee. Nonetheless, each major plot turn was something that we had heard in at least two
stories, sometimes more. Much of the dialogue that ended up in the final script was word-for-
word narrative heard in the interviews.
The film was enthusiastically received by an audience at a première of nearly 500 at Bourne-
mouth University in autumn 2011 and went on to win two awards at the prestigious Rhode
Island International Film Festival a year later. After the screening, two of the interviewees came
up to me, each separately, and thanked me for “telling their story”. Each believed that the film
was about them! To me this represented the “universality” of the story for these particular men
and its strong emotional pull.
Narrative integrity in human relationships

It is an essential characteristic of narrative to be a highly sensitive guide to the variable and
fleeting nature of human reality because it is, in part, constitutive of it. This makes it such an
important subject of inquiry for the human sciences in general . . . Narratives are both models
of threshold and models of the self. It is through our stories that we construct ourselves as part
of our world.
(Harré, 1997, pp. 278–9)
As human beings we love stories, particularly when they are told to us, or narrated. There is a
magical quality to listening to and/or viewing a story. We listen and watch because we want to
know how a life can be different from our own or how it can be exactly the same. Stories compel
us to pay attention. When I, as a researcher, look for stories to tell, there is another overarching
story to tell in how I came to be in this particular landscape in the first place. What was it about
me (my peculiar interface with society, policy, trends, and conventions) that led me on this par-
ticular path? If I disclose this half of the circle then the second half makes sense. It is within the
fullness of this circle that the hermeneutic process becomes complete. Only when I can find
myself in an ‘other’ can I begin to understand what is unique and individual about an ‘other’ and
ultimately what is distinctive about myself. It is in these moments of shared, extended reality that
we connect to what it means to be human and, therefore, reached a higher plane of understand-
ing and a blurring of individual differences (Jones, 2001, p. 181). This is the precise theoretical
thinking that puts me at ease in utilising my own story to enhance the stories of others.
The intuitive aspects of shared culture, coupled with a more universal response to life’s tribu-
lations and injustices (and, therefore, artistic expressions of these emotive components), compete
for resolution with the more rigid academic ethical frameworks and methodological constraints
served up by traditional dissemination possibilities available for academics. By developing a
trust in instinct and intuition and the naturally expressive and moral potential of our personal
resources, research involving people’s stories can become richer and more human, if we only
are willing to jettison some of the baggage of the old academic rigor and dry procedural ethics
(Jones, 2012a, p. 17).
An ethical position in terms of a relational humanism in dissemination means that per-

sonal autonomy, dignity, liberty and responsibility are considered values for consideration
throughout the connections to community created by the research itself, its dissemina-
tion and in affecting meaningful change in that very community. Humanising research
methodology means consideration of any community’s part in the overall process and
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Kip Jones
building community participation into the overall plan. A relational humanism urges
us as theorists, artists, human scientists and practitioners to seek ways – multiple ways –
of generating integrative conversations. “How might these research narratives reach
beyond the boundaries of the scholarly community to serve the needs of those who do
not research, of those who have not yet seen or heard?” (Gergen & Gergen, 2011, draft).
( Jones, 2012b, p. 4)
We examine ethics in filmmaking and the concepts of continual ethical negotiations in film as
post-modern scholarship. This produces scholarship originating in ethnographic and sociological
ethical principles, but influenced and expanded by inclusion of the ethics of journalism and, in
turn, documentary filmmaking. I turn to documentary filmmaker, educator and my frequent
collaborator, Trevor Hearing:
The application of documentary filmmaking as a performative and auto-ethnographic

method of scholarship raises ethical issues that go beyond the generic and institutional
moral obligations of conventional academic research, or what Guillemin and Gillam (2004)
describe as the “procedural ethics” familiar in a university context. Documentary film
making in a scholarly pursuit places additional demands on the researcher to take respon-
sibility for what Guillemin and Gillam (2004) denote as “situational ethics”: the practice
prompts continuous, morally-based decision-making that arises from working in the field
with a camera and a subject, or in an edit suite constructing a narrative. As Ellis notes,
“Much ethnographic and auto-ethnographic research is emergent” (Ellis, 2007, p. 23) and
this is particularly true in the application of documentary practice, where the uncertainty
of the circumstance (there is no script) is inherent in the method. Therefore the creative
use of documentary film requires the scholar to pay persistent and close attention to the
additional responsibilities incurred by the documentary process as a qualitative method.
(Hearing, 2015, p. 104)
It may seem ironic that one should look to narrative to study ethical life, rather than
face the raw experience of life directly. But experience is never raw, it is always mediated
through the filters of affective and sensory perception, language, and conception. . . .
film has the advantage of being able to show us how we see, whereas in life we are only
able to see what we see. By looking, for instance at how perception works in film and at
how it is expressed, we may realize something previously overlooked abut how it works
in life, and also see more clearly the relevance of perception to ethics.
(Stadler, 2008, p. 6)
When all is said and done, Art and Science are strange bedfellows. Or so it would seem. I have
always believed, however, that the impulse to investigate and produce scientific discovery is the
same compulsion that moves artists to create. My father, who was a scientist, dismissed the inter-
ests of his children in the arts. As a child himself, he had lived through the Great Depression and
became fearful of any pursuit that would not guarantee an income. Nonetheless, he returned to
painting and poetry at the end of his life. To those who refuse to accept my case for the utility
of the arts to the sciences, remember that I developed a resilience and resistance to that argument
at the knee of a very powerful man.
In my defence, who best to translate the excitement of scientific discovery to an audience
but an artist? How better to take sometimes dry and tedious data and transform it into story
and action? Who better to help to achieve impact on a wider public with our research findings
578
than those who are capable of entertaining (‘instilling interest or consideration in an audience’ [Jones,
2014b]) through art? This is the premise behind my filmmaking efforts. A side benefit is that,
through the process of creating film (and for me, late in my career as well), I am picking up some
additional skills that include enriched and extended ethical and aesthetic approaches to narrative
research. I often have said, “Creativity is the uncanny ability to change boundaries whilst work-
ing within in them”. This necessitates knowing the rules; it also demands the opening up of dry
procedural ethics to the possibilities of change and innovation and a lot less rigidity by commit-
tees and academic management. Expanding research through film requires a reconfiguration of a
modus operandi that includes the on-going participation of research participants and a willingness
to truly produce film that stimulates dialogue with its audience, even instils contemplation and
reconsideration of their own ethical positions. Indeed, ethics holds a key to the practice of integ-
rity in human relationships through such production.
NORMA DESMOND (to newsreel camera)
You see, this is my life! It always will be!

Nothing else! Just us, the cameras, and those
wonderful people out there in the dark!
(From script for “Sunset Boulevard”,
Wilder et al., 1950)
References
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Bournemouth University, UK. Available from: https://vimeo.com/109360805.
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44
LINGERING ETHICAL TENSIONS
IN NARRATIVE INQUIRY
university of new brunswick
Those using narrative approaches frequently find themselves in a moral fix with traditional eth-
ical practices being called into question by mandatory research ethics policies (see Hammersley,
2009; Israel & Hay, 2006). They may also struggle with fears around “betraying” research par-
ticipants because the story that is eventually created and retold is not always the same story that
research participants have entrusted to them. This chapter hopes to sketch some of the ways that
researchers can handle this ethical matrix. Ethical tensions will linger, but they might prove, in
the end, to be a powerful source of reflexion about narrative research practice. And it is worth
noting at this point that narrative researchers have traditionally been particularly, even exception-
ally, concerned about the welfare of research participants.
This chapter traces this concern by first highlighting human relations as being at the heart of
ethics and narrative inquiry. It then focusses on the mandated ethics codes that are increasingly
invading the ethical and moral space of narrative inquiry. Mandated consent forms, the exagger-
ation of risk, and member-checking constitute particular challenges for narrative researchers. The
chapter also avers that the rich tapestry that constitutes narrative inquiry and the various stages of
inquiry involved in any study, make it impossible to design a generic ethics template that could
guide all narrative researchers in their research and writing decisions. Other concerns reside in
issues of ownership, rights and responsibilities that, in the end, bring the findings of inquiry to
the light of day.
I shall be drawing on my research for a book on women in cartography, Map Worlds (2014),
to consider the ethical issues I faced both during the project and after the research had been
completed. For example, I will be reflecting on the ways in which my interviews interrupted the
normal course of events during conferences where I spoke with the women, and also on how I
did not sufficiently recognize the wider collegial system in which they were located. Throughout
the research I also became aware of a tendency to be ethnocentric when seeking research partic-
ipants: for instance and for ease, inclining towards participants from particular parts of the globe
who spoke the same languages as myself. In the same vein, I aimed to ensure that my vignettes
of women cartographers was as representative as possible – a difficult, but important task. I also
became aware how my intention to undertake fuller life histories was not feasible. Finally, while I
was not naive around professional rivalries, I was not prepared to witness on-going disparagement
by male peers of the accomplishments of women. This disparagement continued long after my
581
book was published, whereupon a woman cartographer informed me that such-and-such man
had always diminished her work or wanted to take credit for her contributions.
Human relations is the heart of ethics and narrative inquiry

Narrative inquiry calls for a high degree of self-abnegation (not self-absorption) and, ideally, a
de-centering of the self (Brill, 1995) because the researcher is not only required to privilege the
interests of interview participants but also needs to bear in mind how findings resonate with read-
ers. Narrative research often taps into intimate experiences. How exposure of these details may be
understood by readers requires researchers to carefully consider how findings and their re-presenta-
tion may go on to influence the life of the research participant. Ruthellen Josselson (2007, p. 537)
reaffirms that “[e]very aspect of the work is touched by the ethics of the research relationship. It
is self-evident that narrative researchers have an ethical duty to protect the privacy and dignity of
those whose lives we study to contribute to knowledge in our scholarly fields. But, in the particu-
larities of practice, this self-evident principle is fraught with dilemmas of choice that attend ethics
in all relationships.”
Some, like Carolyn Ellis, believe that researchers should make ethical decisions the same way
they make them in their personal life (Ellis, 2007, p. 23). No one can disagree that research
should “not negatively affect the lives and relationships . . . ” (Ellis, 2007, p. 25). Such a dic-
tum entails the belief that human relations stand at the heart of narrative inquiry, and those
relations are best served by the researcher slipping “the cloak of authority” (Etherington, 2007,
p. 600). Michael Karlberg (2004; also cited in Boser, 2007, p. 1062), advocates mutualistic
power relations where no party in the research relationship has sway over the other (see also
Atkinson, 2012). Etherington (2007, p. 602) not only underscores this principle but also asks
researchers to be “sensitive to the rights, beliefs, and cultural contexts of research participants
as well as their position within patriarchal or hierarchical power relations, in society and in
the research relationship.” In the case of my own fieldwork, I attended numerous cartographic
conferences to interview research participants. It soon became apparent that colleagues of
these participants were constantly interrupting the interviews. However I came to realize that
it was the interviews that were the interruption. Professionals attend conferences to renew
acquaintances, share ideas, and listen to papers. My interviews, I gradually learned, got in the
way of this. It was only the cartographers’ willingness to be involved that prevented their par-
ticipation from being an entirely desultory experience since in all fairness, my stints with the
interviews disrupted their conference participation. From their accounts it seems that many
narrative researchers believe that relational ethics stands as the keystone of their practice. Boser
(2007, p. 1064), for one, believes that “social relations are complex” and that “ethics needs to
follow” this presumption.1
Self-abnegation in narrative inquiry is not always easy to come by. If social change is a goal
of narrative inquiry, no matter how committed researcher are to “represent” the research par-
ticipant’s side of things, there might be a residue of their own perspective that gets in the way.
In the attempt to privilege the voice of the research participant, some researchers engage in
“member-checking” as a means of grounding and correcting transcribed interview texts (this
chapter later explores more fully the notion of member-checking).
Acknowledging the importance of human relations as the heart of narrative research is vital.
When I was making a list of women pioneers in cartography, I had to ensure that experts in the
field agreed that my list was as representative as possible – a difficult and nearly impossible task
given the widely divergent opinions as to what constitutes significant contributions in the field,
especially in one that undergoes rapid technological changes.
582
Lingering ethical tensions
There are also narrative researchers who see liberation as the goal of their project (although
such a view is controversial). Barton (2011), for example, studied gay Christians with the aim
of providing a space for marginalised stories to be told and heard. This emancipatory paradigm
is firmly set in the architecture of Paulo Freire (Boser, 2007, p. 1064). If narrative researchers are
doing liberatory research, they should be seeking out the marginal voices, but, of course, not all
researchers work within this framework (Smythe & Murray, 2001, p. 197). Self-abnegation of the
researcher is particularly critical because the research participant might have no wish to frame
their narrative in the same manner as the researcher.
If a narrative researcher seeks to reclaim history, some research participants may balk at such
use of the interviews. In my own work about women in cartography I found that a number of
people were reluctant to be included in such a “recovery” exercise if I did not accord sufficient
recognition to their co-workers and other colleagues in the field.
Tracing generic personal or social processes can constitute yet another goal of narrative
research. A narrative researcher trained in psychology, therapy, or social work may be drawn to
tracing personal processes, while sociologists focus on social processes. Many ethnographies fall
into this latter category, although not all exhibit narrative inquiry as the main thrust of their
work. Becoming an Ex (Ebaugh, 1988), Good Days, Bad Days (Charmaz, 1991) and By Himself (D.
van den Hoonaard, 2010) and numerous others have garnered a special place in narrative inquiry
for the attention they have given to research participants’ accounts of their lives and trying to
make sense of those accounts in terms of larger, cultural, and social issues. Those accounts are
increasing in importance in light of the rise and persistence of neo-liberalism in contemporary
society with its emphasis on hyper-individualism and personal growth. Foregrounding these
concerns and issues might well be a significant ethical task for narrative researchers.
Mandated habits of thinking that invade the ethical

space of narrative inquiry
Self-abnegation and following your own sense of what might hurt others may be enough of a
criterion for conducting ethical research, but today’s researcher is also faced with the reality of
ethics committees. External ethical validation has little to do with one’s ethical poise and practice
in narrative research (see Bosk, 2001). Narrative researchers are now caught between traditionally
practised self-regulating ethics AND formal codes. Mandatory research-ethics regimes originate
in bio-medical paradigms of research (Bach, 2005, p. 264; Boser, 2007, p. 1060; Schrag, 2010).
Failure to recognise research approaches outside that bio-medical frame has, in the view of many
commentators (including Bach, 2005; Boser, 2007; Smythe & Murray, 2000), blurred the ethical
vision of members of such boards What compounds the problem is the lack of moral guidelines
that might help resolve the fracture between the mandated ethics-review outcomes and the eth-
ical stances of one’s own field of research.
Some narrative researchers have described the approach required by formalised ethical review
as “procedural ethics” or “dutiful ethics”(e.g., Etherington, 2007, p. 601). Let us explore three
examples of procedural ethics, namely 1) the required use of signed consent forms, 2) the exag-
geration of risk, and 3) the often-mandated practice of member-checking.
Signed consent forms

Many narrative researchers take particular issue with “informed consent” forms and the
often-mandated practice of using a “signed consent form.” These days, it seems unlikely that
researchers would think of carrying out their research without consent, or without relying on
583
maintaining ongoing consent (Ellis, 2007, p. 23); nonetheless, mandated informed-consent forms
have been the subject of countless critiques across the disciplines (see, e.g., Barton, 2011; Bhat-
tacharya, 2007; Bosk, 2001; Crow et al., 2006; Duster et al., 1979). Kirsten Bell (2014), for
instance, claims that the doctrine of informed consent given at the start of a study has not served
anthropologists well.
Miller and Bell (2002), to take another example, give us an overview of problems with
informed consent: members of socially excluded or marginal groups “are unlikely to formally
consent” (p. 54), being suspicious of signing forms or of providing detailed information about
their lives (p. 65); final research aims may not resonate with initial research goals (p. 54); demo-
cratic participation in the research by interview participants may turn out to involve more than
what was expected in the consent stage (p. 54); the role of gatekeepers often complicates consent
process and one cannot ignore the potentially coercive aspect of the consent process (pp. 56); and
there is often a lack of clarity about what being “informed” means.
Smythe and Murray (2000, p. 319) also note that: no one can predict how research will unfold,
and that the use of the signature can compromise anonymity and confidentiality (p. 320). Rus-
sel Ogden’s research on euthanasia and assisted suicide led to a coroner seeking the identity of
research participants. However, Ogden’s ethical commitment led him to defy a court order to
reveal names (Palys & Lowman, 2014, p. 16). In this case, signed consent forms could have been
subpoenaed – which could have had devastating consequences for participants who had been
promised anonymity and confidentiality.
One of the earliest critics of the use of consent forms, Murray Wax, speaks of the “paradoxes of
consent” (Wax, 1980). Laden in that assessment is a view of consent forms as a means to “seduce”
research participants to take part in the research, even though researchers are aware of the possibil-
ity of “betrayal” when the findings get published (Smythe & Murray, 2000, p. 330). At the outset,
research participants often have no expectations of what the researcher will make of their narrative.
Etherington (2007, p. 611) suggests that the researcher should not only be more transparent with
the research participant and explain, as clearly as possible, the role of the researcher in that regard,
but also acknowledge the potential vulnerable context of the situation.2 Reflecting on this problem
can point, according to Gemignani (2011, p. 701), to the way in which “a researcher’s emotional
reaction . . . can be an important source of reflexivity and data as well as creativity, motivation.” No
less significant, the researcher needs to sensitize the research participants to the potential for mul-
tiple layers of meaning to be re-presented and described in narrative research Smythe and Murray
(2000, p. 330). Moreover, Smythe and Murray (2000, p. 331) endorse the idea that the researcher
should make it clear that interpretive authority rests with them. It is difficult to visualize at what
point the researcher will need to make this idea clear. Would such a statement send an unintended
warning signal about what is to be done with the narrative?
Where multiple levels of meaning become problematic and unworkable is when the researcher
may feel obligated to expose an untenable situation (such as industrial pollution). As Murray Wax
asks, “[d]o we suspend moral judgments when we research populations whose evil work must be
exposed?” (Wax, 1980, p. 277). Exposing such wrongdoing could violate the theory and practice
of research where the sole object is to feature the research participant’s narrative. It would be
disingenuous to pretend to follow that perspective while one’s real intent is to uncover unethical,
immoral, illegal, and harmful practices and intentions. In that case one alternative would be to
adopt and declare a critical, standpoint position. Another stance would have the researcher leave
the readers of the narratives to make their own decisions.
In my initial approach to my research participants, I believe I may have promised more about
the interview than was actually realised. The research participants and I entered the interview
expecting something along the lines of a life history. The unexpected interruptions by colleagues
584
of my research participants at conferences and the linguistic diversity of the participants rendered
the interviews much shorter than anyone had expected, falling short of my life history aim.
The exaggeration of risk

Ethics committees are keenly aware about risk to research participants, sometimes to the point
where they may exaggerate risk. Consent forms reflect this exaggeration and may, therefore,
unintentionally convey the idea that the research is more risky than it actually is. Kathryn A.
Becker-Blease and Jennifer F. Freyd (2006, p. 219) are concerned about the “inflammatory”
language imposed by ethics committees. They say, that “[o]verly alarming language may create
anxiety for participants and/or set up the context for a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Narrative researchers are acquainted with the requirement to offer such statements as, “you
can stop the interview at any time without repercussions,” “the tape will be destroyed,” “the transcript
will be kept under lock and key,” “if you become upset, I know a therapist who can help you . . . ”
Judging from the literature, narrative researchers know that ethics committees are apprehen-
sive about the potential harm issuing from in-depth interviews, but it is equally clear to research-
ers that typically no harm does result (Corbin & Morse, 2003, p. 336).
Formulaic warnings about the implied danger of the research, especially when the focus is related
to suspected abuse or violence, can lead to researchers being reluctant to ask about abuse, violence,
or trauma, fearing that participants will want to drop out of the study. There are findings to show
that such a belief is unfounded (Becker-Blease & Freyd, 2006, p. 221). There is also the belief that
asking participants about abuse will expose them to “unusual, upsetting stimuli.” Again, there is no
evidence that such upset regularly happens (Becker-Blease & Freyd, 2006, p. 221). Participants, more-
over, will find it strange that, given the stated focus of the research, a researcher avoids asking about
abuse or trauma, thus confirming that these are stigmatized topics. In the end, such avoidance of the
topic does nothing to dispel the secrets of abuse, violence, or trauma (Becker-Blease & Freyd, 2006,
p. 223).3 Tellingly, Becker-Blease and Freyd (2006, p. 218) suggest that “when researchers do not
measure abuse history, they obscure the role of abuse and overestimate the weight of other factors.”
No doubt, problems sometimes do come from “airing dirty laundry” (Smythe & Murray
2000, p. 321, citing Gwen Etter-Lewis, 1996). It is also true that some research participants are
nervous about social-science interpretations of their story (Smythe & Murray, 2000, p. 321).
This nervousness is not an atypical problem of re-narrating, but a researcher can go a long way
in allaying those fears when they adopt an approach which acknowledges narrative meanings
(Smythe & Murray, 2000, p. 329).
The feelings researchers have about re-narrating stories can be quite real. Smythe and Murray
(2000, p. 323) write frankly that, “I am using their lives in the service of something else, for my
own purposes, to show something to others. I am guilty about being an intruder and then, to
some extent, a betrayer.” A novice researcher moves quickly from being naive about research to
one where he or she realizes that both seduction and betrayal has taken place (see also Josselson,
1996, p. 70). “Multiple role entanglements” are a known presence in narrative research (Smythe
& Murray, 2000, p. 322) and ethical researchers to interrogate themselves regarding the nature
and authenticity of their relationships with participants.
Member-checking
Ethics committees are increasingly insisting that researchers use member-checking/respondent
validation of data. One of the attractions of this strategy is based in the – contested – belief there is
a fixed truth residing in data and that researchers need to “get it right” (Sandelowski, 2008, p. 501).
585
Originally conceived to clarify and correct the interview transcript (see Harper & Cole, 2012,
p. 511) member-checking constitutes a dimension of quality control and a form of triangulation.
Harper and Cole (2012, p. 511) aver that it serves “to decrease the incidence of incorrect data
and the incorrect interpretation of data” which would lead to authentic and original rendering
of the interview. While they admit there are some drawbacks (namely that it could recall painful
memories [p. 514]), the more serious drawback relates to researcher’s inadvertently conveying to
participants that the interview constitutes the sole basis of the research whereas, in fact, the often
researcher relies on multiple stories to construct his or her findings.
Cultural and gender-specific context can also demonstrate how member-checking can be an
unreasonable goal. For instance: Kakali Bhattacharya (2007) in her study of young Indian women
found it impossible to ask her research participant to closely read the interview transcript: the
participant treated her like an older sister – not an uncommon phenomenon in Indian and other
cultures. Bhattacharya found it difficult to move from her position as an “older sister” to become
a researcher discussing research-related questions about the transcripts. Participants in Deborah
K. van den Hoonaard’s research (2005) were more concerned whether their part of the interview
measured up to her expectations than about checking the veracity of the transcripts. Graham
Crow et al. (2006, p. 92) found that participants would change things in the transcript once they
were asked to check it. Such changes are not necessarily problematic: for instance, it could sim-
ply be that participants felt they had not expressed themselves adequately. However, Crow et al.
found that in organizational settings, interview participants would, during the member-checking
process, sometimes realign what they had said to conform to the party line of the organization.
They also found that some participants would withdraw from the study because they had sec-
ond thoughts about the research or about what they had said during the interview. When I first
attempted to send ‘my’ cartographers transcripts of the interview (more as an acknowledgment
and for them to have a copy of their story as told to me), I did receive one note in which one
woman stated that she did not remember ever having been interviewed. That closed the door on
any attempts for member-checking.
A stumbling block in the way of developing a shared and generally accepted ethics frame-
work that the majority of narrative researchers would be happy with is that narrative is used by
researchers from the range of disciplines, each with their own traditions, beliefs and values. More-
over, all researchers face a “vertical-ethics” structure (W. van den Hoonaard, 2011), which per-
meates journals, academic units, and administrative bodies within universities, in addition to local
ethics committees and federal guidelines where these exist. These venues of ethics are diverse.
The tension not only resides in the mazeway between “procedural ethics” and “ethics on the
ground,” but also in the prevalence of the diverse sources of information that narrative researchers
normally make use of.
The rich disciplinary tapestry that constitutes narrative inquiry

According to one researcher (McCabe, 2008), the journal Narrative Inquiry contained contribu-
tions from at least 15 disciplines.4 While the existence of such diversity would alone defy any
attempt to create an integrated ethical approach, the various sources of information and the
diversity of populations and of participating disciplines constitutes the strength and rich tapestry
of narrative inquiry. This matrix of diversity permits cross-pollination of ideas and practices.
At the same time, the respective attachments of these disciplines to their own ethical standards
makes it challenging, even impossible, to create one ethics “template.” This situation leaves the
researcher to consider their own ethical practices against requirements of ethics committees (who,
586
themselves, can be quite diverse in their understanding of narrative research) and then decide on
a course of action that may still leave them dissatisfied.
If we compare these diverse sources and approaches as constituting a Russian doll, each embed-
ded doll produces a different ethical challenge. Each of these “dolls” (use of photos, interviews,
etc.) stand separately, but, on the whole, constitute narrative inquiry. The inherent ethical aspect
of each “doll” is singular to that doll and cannot always holus bolus be transferred to another
method within narrative inquiry.
As if these ethical challenges were not enough, narrative researchers work with a diversity of
populations. Many researchers appreciate that ethical approaches vary across types of populations,
ranging from the marginal to the elites and in varying ages, let alone how each individual research
participant partakes in research.
Many stages in narrative inquiry

Narrative research passes through various stages with each stage exemplifying a different ethical
or moral turn. These differences might not be drastic, but they force researchers to take an active
note of varying ethical requirements. The ethical requirements when recruiting research partic-
ipants are different from those when writing up and publishing findings. Let us roughly explore
how each of these stages is punctuated by varying ethical preoccupations.
Negotiating entry and recruiting

Narrative researchers ask participants to share more personal information and identity-laden data
than in almost any other type of research. In their enthusiasm to secure participation, they may
make a “seductive” offer: here is someone vitally interested in their life story whose telling can
make a difference in the world. The risks are more speculative than real. The research process
may seem vague to those who are not familiar with the approach, and the researcher may omit
to mention onerous details. Smythe and Murray (2000, p. 329) and others have pointed to the
need to explain that the researcher may have other intentions in order to forestall later compli-
cations when analyzing and writing up the data. They go as far as stating that researchers “must
be prepared to exclude” participants who have difficulty understanding the notion of multiple
narrative meanings (Smythe & Murray, 2001, p. 197).
Representing experiences
Ideally in narrative research, the researcher co-constructs the narrative with the research participant.
Perhaps the most intense form of co-creating one’s life story would entail the researcher sitting
side by side with a participant and working on the narrative together, checking and re-checking
the account, word by word. Going through a photo-album together represents another way
of learning about the research participant’s experiences. Not everyone has the opportunity to
develop such a close relationship and may need to rely on personal archived papers, photographs,
and diaries. Smythe and Murray (2000, p. 331) recommend that the researcher maintains consent
throughout the process. They also suggest that the researcher needs to be confident that they
are aware of what participants are really willing to share. In this connection, as Maddrell (2009,
p. 21) argues, the researcher needs to ask research participants about the “off the record” stories
they may tell. She suggests that those stories should not enter into the account unless the research
participant is willing to have them shared more widely.
587
Analyzing and writing up the data

Analysing and writing lives raises many ethical concerns. For example, I became painfully aware
how important it is for the researcher to understand their participants’ meanings when I was
doing the research for Map Worlds. Participants came from 22 countries and spoke, among them,
some 15 languages. Moreover, I often was not able to render common expressions in English into
equivalent ones in other languages. The ethical dilemma would have been more pronounced if
I had chosen the research participants based on the languages I was familiar with, and the find-
ings of the research would have based on a narrower linguistic basis of selecting the participants,
resulting in a more ethnocentric analysis of the data.
Exiting
The principle of being a good guest uniquely applies to the status of the researcher. The least-in-
terventionist approach would leave participants in the same position they were in before the
research. Therapists who also do narrative research may well disagree with this approach, proving
that it is not possible to possess a single ethics template for narrative research. Still, being a good
guest is something that many researchers can strive for (see also Morse, 2008, p. 439, regarding
informed consent and inductive research).
As briefly stated in the introduction of this chapter, I found it unsettling that even when the
results of the research appeared, some men continued to disparage the women they worked with,
countering their claims and contributions. When one thought that all would be done and over
with, the resentments continued to percolate.
Ownership, rights, responsibilities, and obligations
Ownership
Smythe and Murray (2000, p. 324) point to the “central ethical problem in narrative research”
being narrative ownership. “Ownership” conjures up several meanings, but here I am focusing on
the faithfulness of the story or the text. It is the poverty of Western civilization that the discourse
is usually around “ownership” of “products”, of “owning knowledge” (Brown, 2004, p. 4). With
humility and faithfulness, researchers can regard their “narrative encounter as an act of service”
(Beuthin, 2014, p. 132). Both the research participant and the researcher need to back away from
the neo-liberal discourse on individual ownership of text, take a moral and conceptual leap, and
genuinely see themselves as co-constructors of a life history.
It may be that in some cases the participant feels that the researcher has not “captured” his
or her life fully. From the perspective of the researcher, the text is faithful to what the partici-
pant has shared, but the researcher would also be concerned to be faithful to the ethos of their
discipline.
It is difficult to know how many narratives are subject to such divided faithfulness. Starting
from the assumption that “we must live with several narrative meanings,” Smyth and Murray
aver that narrative meanings do not trump each other (Smythe & Murray (2000, p. 325). They
co-exist. During the interaction with the research participant, the researcher can, if possible,
discuss the relevance of having several narrative meanings and offer to share the meanings the
researcher has arrived at. Carolyn Ellis (2007, p. 24) states outright that the researcher does not
own the story, but such an assertion may not resolve the depths of understandings held by research
participants and researchers.
588
In gauging the degree of faithfulness to narratives, we must, according to Smythe and Mur-
ray (2000, p. 327) conceive of different kinds of narratives. For example, we owe faithfulness of
personal narratives expressed as contemporary biographies and autobiographies to the original
storyteller. Then there are “typal narratives” which “bear on psychological and social themes.”
Under those circumstances, the researcher may have a commitment to be faithful to the broader
conceptual types that interest social scientists to engage in the larger conversation with others in
the field or discipline.
Rights
Perhaps a more significant challenge in my own research was having come to such a technological
field as cartography in an unprepared fashion. In my early twenties, I worked as a cartographic
assistant editor, but having left the field and worked in other occupations for some 30 years, I was
not aware of the numerous and fundamental changes in cartography. Coming into a setting to
interview cartographers with sketchy awareness of these changes, I felt that I was doing a disser-
vice to the interview participants and to the work I was engaged in. Was I wasting their time?
Was I too inarticulate in understanding their fields of knowledge? What was I trying to do? My
unfamiliarity with the modern developments in cartography, I now realize, probably proved to
be an irksome burden to the research participants who might have been able to share more about
their expertise and fields of knowledge if I had been more familiar with the technical aspects of
cartography.
Rosanne E. Beuthin (2014) drew our attention to some elements of the interaction between
the researcher and the research participant which addressed tensions that have a bearing on the
rights of researchers. The narrative researcher, as a student of someone else’s life, must remember
that it is the research participant that bestows those rights. If there are rights that the researcher
derives from the discipline, those rights are soft-spoken and are secondary in importance. As
Beuthin remarks, she felt “the weight of privilege” to be in the presence of her research partici-
pant (p. 123). Researchers are inclined to say that there ought to be a balance of power between
them and the research participants (see, e.g. Beuthin, 2014, p. 128), but, in reality, the research
participant does normally have the power and can decide not to engage in the research.
However, as Smythe and Murray (2000, p. 324) aver, there are “no widely accepted standards
and procedures for such debriefing” involving when or how research participants should be
involved with analysis, clarification, etc. The reader has the right to form his or her own judg-
ment about the published text. Interview participants, researchers, and readers carry responsibil-
ities that reinforce the above-mentioned rights.
Responsibilities
Researchers are obliged to contribute to the life, knowledge, or community of the interview
participants, while presenting their narrative in such a way that allows readers to make up their
own judgment about the published narrative. Beuthin speaks of the “weight of responsibility
that rushes in, that call to research work and the responsibility to now do justice with the new
story we constructed” (Beuthin, 2014, p. 130). The research participant trusts us in this task and
the responsibility of the researcher is accordingly given a place of honour in the research (cf.
Beuthin, 2014, p. 130).
Only through writing can you discover additional ethical issues (Ellis, 2007, p. 24). In the
arena of narrative and qualitative research, the stage of writing up and publishing the data repre-
sents an ethical litmus test. Experienced researchers can be expected to anticipate some of these
589
ethical issues arising “at the end” of a project, but given the variety of topics, disciplines, and
the lives of research participants, one cannot be fully prepared. For instance: How do you refer
to “third parties” mentioned in narrative? Do you gloss over secrets? Is there ever a time when
you can “let go” of the writing without feeling the need to check something, one last time, with
the research participant? How do we explain to our research participants that there are intermi-
nable obstacles in the way of publishing the narrative(s)? What if publication is extraordinarily
delayed or doesn’t happen? The ethical tensions associated with the research do not dissipate. If
anything, they have become part of the researcher’s persona, weighing them down to a husk of
self-doubt . . . perhaps.
Rosanne E. Beuthin (2014, p. 131) speaks from experience when she described that phase like
entering “deep dark water” and confronting existential questions:
where does influence end and agency begin, and do we ever have experiences that are
truly personal and created? Can an individual ever rise above the myriad of influences
that are part of life? Can we change our story? Can an interviewer rise above the con-
text and come to accept a constructionist view as one way to understand the world?
Like soil and water combining, the dialogical and constructionism feel muddy at times
and I find myself needing air, wanting to add a lightness to the mixture. And I do.
Conclusion
There will always be lingering moral and ethical tensions in narrative research. Traditional,
personal, ethical practices now rub against mandated ethics-review processes. One of the chief
worries relates to the researcher’s perception that participants may be “seduced” into participating
in the research, and that, in the end, the narrative “betrays” the trust of the participants.
The much-needed disposition of personal virtues relates to self-abnegation, humility, faithful-
ness, and a spirit or service. Relational ethics are at the heart of doing narrative research where
there is no place for the cloak of authority of power.
When examining the means to conduct ethical research, researchers become aware that con-
sent forms are legalities, rather than instruments of ethics. The formal notions of risk seem to
encourage risk rather than dissipating it; these ideas about risk are the seeds of real harm and fear.
Member-checking has its shortcomings, too.
Given the diversity of sources of methods and data, of populations, and disciplines, it is not
possible to develop a single template for ethical narrative research. There are, however, various
means that can contribute towards an ethical framework. Researchers need to make sure that
participants understood the idea of multiple levels of narrative meanings. They can also maintain
on-going consent and be mindful of elements of stories that should not be made public.
For narrative researchers, the litmus test of ethical research resides in the writing up of the data
and of the manuscript itself where there is an on-going need to reflect on the potential impact of
the published narrative on participants, where issues of “ownership” of the narrative need to be
considered, and where the narrative researcher must write in such a way that he or she respects the
dignity of the readers by allowing them to make up their own mind about the offered narrative.
In short, the narrative researcher must be a “good guest,” who values humility and faithfulness
in working with the research participant, and who does not intrude on freedom of the readers to
judge the narrative on their own terms. External ethical validation has no bearing on whether
the research is ethical or not; the ethicality of the research resides in the personal virtues of the
researcher and in the well-established practices of the disciplines of narrative inquiry.
590
Notes
1 Lisa M Tillmann-Healy (2003, p. 729) believes that friendship as a method has strengths in qualitative
research. Indeed, friendships are entirely tuned in to such complexities in relationships.
2 I prefer using the term “vulnerable context” rather than “vulnerable people.” The former can be inhab-
ited by people who have managed to bring personal strength (or resilience, the current parlance); the latter
expresses a prejudicial attitude.
3 Becker-Blease and Freyd (2006) have produced a succinct and well-researched discussion about the
researcher’s asking questions about abuse. Their treatise also deals with some of the practical steps a
researcher can take when facing this widely misunderstood issue.
4 Linguistics, psychology, education, English, language studies, sociology, anthropology, (oral) history, med-
icine, nursing, health studies, communication studies, journalism, geriatrics, and political science. Else-
where, the list would also include philosophy.
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45
PURPOSE BUILT ETHICAL
CONSIDERATIONS FOR
NARRATIVE RESEARCH
Broad consent or process consent but not
informed consent
Martin Tolich
ontago university
Ethics creep (Haggerty, 2004), moral panic (Van den Hoonaard, 2001), travellers and trolls
(Pritchard, 2002) are common stories social scientists use to characterise their uneasy relationships
with the formal ethics review that are mandatory in many countries. Although named differently –
institutional review boards (IRBs) in the USA, research ethics boards in Canada, Human Ethics
Review Committees in Australia – this chapter uses the generic term IRB yet it acknowledges
that ethics review is not mandatory in each country, and some narrative researchers, especially
autoethnographers, deem themselves exempt from ethics review. Israel and Hay (2006) story
the relationship as “social scientists are angry and frustrated, their work is being constrained
and distorted by regulators of ethical practice who do not necessarily understand social science
research.” While mindful of these critiques, my contribution to this literature on social science
ethics has focused less on outward critiques but inward toward the ethical considerations of qual-
itative research itself. Additionally, for most of the past fifteen years I have served on IRBs mostly
as chairperson, and recently I established a not for profit company operating a non-institutional
IRB. The New Zealand Ethics Committee review applications gratis, from researchers in local
and central governments, NGOs and community researchers routinely disenfranchised from
formal ethical review.
Looking inward, rather than outward, means asking a core question: namely, is qualitative
research so epistemologically unique that it deserves its own code of ethics? In Tolich and Fitzger-
ald (2006) we characterised qualitative research as a round peg trying to fit within the square hole
of the IRB. We asked what would an IRB review look like if governed by a qualitative episte-
mology? Would a qualitative IRB be as, if not more, interested in finding out how the researcher
planned to address ethical issues that emerged in the field that neither the IRB nor the researcher
could predict ahead of time? This is what Guillemin and Gillam (2004) call ethics in practice.
Two decades ago Punch (1994) articulated a similar pressing need for qualitative researchers to
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understand ourselves and our own ethical dilemmas that occur in the field and to consider how
isolated researchers might address them. Punch (1994, p. 89):
[they] often have to be resolved situationally, and even spontaneously, without the lux-
ury of being able to turn first to consult a more experienced colleague. [Moreover], the
generality of codes does not help us to make fine distinctions that arise at the interac-
tional level in participant observation studies, where the reality of their field setting may
feel far removed from the refinements of scholarly debate and ethical niceties.
This line of inquiry continued in Planning Ethically Responsible Research (Sieber & Tolich, 2013),
suggesting researchers should see procedural ethics (submitting to an IRB) both as a fait de complet
and but one stage in an ethics journey which requires researchers to plan ahead to address ethical
issues likely to arise for the researcher in the field.
My introverted stance is a pragmatic acknowledgement that social scientists are limited in what
they can control about ethics. Research governance (Iphofen, 2009; Stark, 2012), protecting the
institution rather than protecting the research participants, certainly would seem to be an IRB’s
primary obsession. On top of this IRBs continue to be dominated by a biomedical agenda that is
unresponsive to social science epistemology (Gunsalus et al., 2007) and their anger and frustration.
What social scientists can control is a renewed focus on ethics in practice requiring social scientists
to tell stories about how they addressed ethical issues that confronted them in their research. A
second control strategy would be to take an anthropological strangeness gaze at different meth-
odologies qualitative researchers use questioning if these assorted methodologies, underpinned by
a generic epistemology, generate specific ethical issues. Do focus group interviews generate the
same ethical issues as unstructured one on one interviews? My writing on research ethics has or is
suggesting different qualitative research methodologies, such as narrative research generates unique
ethical considerations that researchers, rather than IRBs, must contain. These insights include:
• Ethnography’s use of confidentiality is a ham fisted term, especially when participants know
each other, as in a study of a family or co-workers. The ethnography may protect the iden-
tity of the participants from strangers but not from relational informants. Internal confi-
dentially (Tolich, 2004) provides nuanced confidentiality assurances not found in any ethics
code.
• Focus group ethical considerations are usually treated as harmless, yet the term caveat emptor
(let the participant beware) (Tolich, 2009) best exposes the threat posed by this innocuous-
ness. The unwieldy and porous nature of focus groups discussions make informed consent
meaningless and confidentiality a hollow assurance undermined by the internal confidenti-
ality of group members. Researchers have little control over the direction these discussions
take or regarding what group members divulge to others outside the meeting.
• Mixed methods has experienced exponential growth in the past two decades (Bryman,
2007), yet mixed methods scholars Hesse-Biber and Johnson (2013) report their surprise
“that Journal of Mixed Methods Research has not yet published an article centred on ethical
issues in conducting mixed methods research.”
• Until recently there were no published ethical guidelines for autoethnography (Tolich,
2010), and it would seem that some exponents presumed that because their research was
about themselves, consent was not necessary (Sikes, 2013). Yet researching the self is rarely
solitary. No man (sic) is an island and rarely does this form of research include only one self,
yet IRBs normally treat autoethnography and oral history as exempt from mandatory ethics
review.
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Purpose built ethical considerations
In this chapter the focus is on the various forms of narrative research. “Narrative research
comprises multiple and often overlapping variations, including auto ethnography, biography,
cultural biography, life story, oral history, [life history], and testimonio ” (Tierney & Clemens,
2012, p. 266). I myself am not an exponent of narrative or life history research but a curious
outsider, which provides an interesting perspective. At first glance narrative research seems to be
a round peg trying to grapple with the IRB square hole. It may resemble ethnography – both
use unstructured interviews – but the two methodologies are sufficiently distinct in a number of
subtle ways, especially in terms of their respective practice of informed consent, that they require
different ethical considerations. Ethnographers conduct multiple interviews with informants, but
this is not the norm as it is in narrative research. Multiple or staged data collections feature in
Goodson’s life history research design (Sikes et al., 1996). He labels the research stages narration,
collaboration and location. These stages manifest unique ethical issues for narrative research, few
of which IRBs or researchers can currently address ahead of time. It seems to me that narrative
researchers typically address their ethical considerations with an unsophisticated use of the con-
cept of informed consent. Purpose built concepts like broad consent or process consent may be
more applicable.
A participant who gives broad consent is gifting their data (or human tissue) to the researcher
for this immediate research and frequently for any unspecified research in the future. Once given
the participant abdicates their rights to the data (Hansson et al., 2006). Broad consent or blanket
consent comes close to one of the two sets of ethical guidelines on narrative research outlined in
this chapter. Josselson’s (2007, p. 543) use of informed consent is ephemeral given she claims the
participant can withdraw from the project at any time and is candid in her response to this proce-
dure claiming the participant’s right to withdraw from the research “strikes terror into research-
ers because it means just what it says.” However, Josselson simultaneously limits the impact the
participant has over the research process once the data has been extracted from the interview. A
suggestion made in this chapter is that narrative researchers must provide a more explicit form
of informed consent; if the participant’s involvement in the research process is limited to gifting
data only, the term broad consent may be more applicable.
The second set of narrative research guidelines widely cited in the narrative literature are
Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) statement that ethical considerations can and must be nego-
tiated throughout the research process. There is nothing inherently incorrect in this descrip-
tion, yet it too relies on the ethical vagueness manifest as the participant’s right to withdraw
from the research at any time. This is a passive construct. Although anonymous reviewers of
this chapter claim they know of participants who have withdrawn from projects, this right
to withdraw is poorly operationalised in the literature. If the participant in narrative research
can truly negotiate their participation in the project at any time, as Clandinin and Connelly
(2000) suggest, then formalising the consent as an active construction known as process con-
sent would enhance the quality of this negotiation. The autoethnographer Ellis (2007, p. 24)
defines a researcher using process consent as “checking at each stage to make sure participants
still want to be part of the project.”
Process consent is an active form of consent and takes the participant’s right to withdraw
beyond a passive construction. Rather than leaving it up to the participant to withdraw at any
time, the narrative researcher should repeatedly invite the participant to volunteer to be part of the
next phase of the project. Without process consent the right of a participant to withdraw from
the research project initially written in the consent form appears to be written in disappearing ink.
Multi staged narrative research opens a Pandora’s Box as different ethical issues must be
addressed at various stages. The question considered in this chapter asks whether the risks associ-
ated with participation in narrative inquiry are borne equally by the researcher and the participant.
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Martin Tolich
Is it a level playing field? The use of broad consent or process consent equalises risk between
the researcher and the participant and addresses the unique ethical considerations required by
a research discipline that deliberately seeks, for genuine reasons, to establish a passive minimalist
informed consent process in recruitment and the initial interview phase. Goodson’s (Sikes et al.,
1996, p. 38) explanation of passivity is essentially a minimalist form of informed consent. He says:
So while I start passive, I would think one would get more and more active as the process
went through . . . the interview is passive in that first period where they are eliciting
that prime narration, the first narration . . . later stages – collaboration and location
you ask a series of questions about that first narration of the life story which seemed
to locate it, challenge it and interrogate it and position it sociologically and historically.
This chapter examines a clutch of related ethical concepts that fall like dominos when narra-
tive researchers use a standard version of informed consent. These dominos include conflict of
interest, deception, and debriefing, which together make narrative research practice of informed
consent a unique formation. For example, the lack of a fulsome informed consent process in
the initial narration or recruitment stage of the project represents something akin to a form of
deception as neither the researcher nor the participant can predict the shape of the research. If
this is so, it is not an unfathomable problem if the researcher acknowledges how it can be seen
as a necessary ruse, knowing this omission can be rectified later in the collaborative stages of the
research, when all is revealed?
As with any research involving deception, debriefing becomes a major stop gap measure.
Yet debriefing exposes a natural conflict of interest and explains the source of Josselson’s (2007,
p. 543) terror because the participant’s right to withdraw means what it says. Debriefing provides
traction on a slippery ethical slope. Much of the slick surface stems from researchers’ unresolved
conflict of interest favouring their rights to scholarship over the rights of participants, some who
are called co-researchers. To acknowledge and address this inherent conflict of interest shores up
a weakness inherent in narrative research’s unique formation as a multi staged research project.
Process consent reinvigorates Clandinin & Connelly’s notion of the continual negotiation of
ethical issues throughout the project by safeguarding both the researcher and the participant from
potential harm. It assures the participant that the initial consent to take part in an interview on a
broad range of known and unknown topics will involve an additional consent process reviewing
this on-going participation, following the interview and analysis. The participant knows they
will be invited to continue to take part in the research during or after the interview and prior to
publication. If data collection is not multi-staged, as Josselson and Chase claim below, and the
participant is not a co-researcher, broad consent should suffice.
Overall, this chapter permits an outsider to narrative inquiry to consider ethical issues from
the perspective of the research participant. The ethical considerations documented in this chapter
are robust, not passive.
The ethics of collaboration

Goodson’s description of the researcher-participant relationship in narrative life history research
as enhanced collaboration in distinct stages of narration, location and collaboration (Sikes et al.,
1996) captures the unique nature of multi-staged narrative research but also its need to address
the ethics of collaboration.
Narrative researchers are mindful that their “unscientific research may not contribute to
generalizable knowledge” (Tierney & Clemens, 2012, p. 275) making them often exempt from
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IRB approval and that the staged, inductive research design may be incomprehensible to IRBs.
Muchmore (2002) captures the essence of the unwieldiness of the collaboration for all parties
inclusive of the IRB, participants and researchers:
Because life history studies typically involve the formation of human relationships
that are far more complex than the limited, impersonal, business-like transactions that
characterize traditional studies, their ethical dimensions cannot be effectively addressed
through typical standardized procedures, such as simply using pseudonyms or obtain-
ing the approval of an Institutional Review Board. Instead, ethical issues must be
continually dealt with at every phase of a life history research project, with the recognition
that every study is unique and there are no universal prescriptions for ensuring ethical
behaviour.
(p. 11, my emphasis)
The square hole of IRB review has more utility when research is predictable in advance as found
in deductive, linear projects whose research questions and research design are established at the
beginning of the study (Tolich & Fitzgerald, 2006). A standard bank of survey questions given to
each respondent under the same conditions is predictable. Narrative research is not predictable,
and researchers like Goodson and Muchmore want it that way. Narrative researchers cannot rely
on IRBs to establish protections, and IRBs if they understand the narrative protocol must give
researchers the ability to take responsibility for the unfolding nature of their project’s ethics and
use broad consent or process consent.
When IRBs do review a narrative project that has enhanced collaboration at every phase of the
research project, how useful can they be? Muchmore (2002) claims it is incumbent upon narrative
researchers to think deeply and continually about the ethics of their work, with the full realization
that the IRB process may not be particularly helpful in this regard as what is signed is not the
study. Schroeder and Webb (1997, pp. 339–40) captures the dilemma.
The university’s expectation that participants who sign a research agreement at the
commencement of a study are fully informed as to what they have consented to implies
that the research project has been fully explicated prior to the commencement of
the study. The reality of collaborative research with participants, however, is that the
research tends to change over time. The participant’s role in the research may change
during a study to include being a data collector, data interpreter, and even a co-writer.
IRBs threaten narrative research. The review process is likely to disrupt the enhanced collab-
oration by prematurely formalizing a relationship in its embryonic stage. This is a chicken and
egg situation not uncommon in qualitative research; community based participatory researchers
(CBPR) suffer the same dilemma (Ross et al., 2010). The conundrum here is who has the ability
to create the research question? In CBPR does the researcher seek approval from an IRB with
a fully elaborated research question or does the researcher wait to meet the community and
together they begin this enhanced collaboration to decide the nature of the research question. In
CBPR this is a pivotal question and its chief grievance with IRBs. The same situation arises for
narrative research and it is incumbent on narrative researchers, not the IRB to resolve. Clandinin
and Connelly (2000, p. 170) conceive of the dilemma as a catch 22.
Obtaining ethical approval for our research works against the relational negotiation that
is part of narrative inquiry . . . This places narrative inquiry in a catch 22 position. They
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should not approach participants until institutional ethical approval [yet] some aspects
of the inquiry are no longer able to be negotiated.
A fully developed informed consent process with an extensive information sheet and a for-
malised interview guide may not be in the best interests of a narrative research project. Ampli-
fying this uncertainty is the practice of not fully describing the research topic to the participant
in advance for fear of producing a leading question (Holloway & Jefferson, 2000). Formal ethics
review can unravel the trust essential in multi staged research undermining the delicacy of the
embryonic study. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) claim that IRBs can be overly bureaucratic
making them a disruption at the outset of the research project. Bean (2006, p. 362) is of the
same mind “for qualitative researchers especially, complying with written informed consent can
damage the trust required to conduct a study.” Tierney and Clemens’ (2012, p. 267) description
of life history feature the necessity to build trust with the co-construction of the research:
Life history is a dynamic and recursive process between researchers and participant.
The two parties jointly construct a narrative via multiple data sources, including inter-
views and documents. Data collection and analysis occur simultaneously wherein the
researcher develops and tests codes, categories and theories. The final document is a
contextually bound representation of the participant along with his or her relationship
with the researcher.
Narrative research is a round peg in a square ethics hole and IRB review cannot provide
much guidance given the unique features of narrative inquiry. The ethical problem that narrative
researchers must face alone is how to address ethical considerations that deliberately begin with
a paltry form of informed consent and involves a multi staged evolving relationship. Narrative
researchers 1) want depth, 2) want a tabla rasa research site, 3) want to use the recruitment phase
to vet the suitability of participant for collaborative research, and 4) must address the uncertainties
inherent in any qualitative research stemming from the emergent nature of the research question.
Muchmore (2002, p. 10) describes the importance of depth, saying life history typically
involves
the establishment of deep and sometimes prolonged interpersonal relationships that

continually change and evolve over time. In this kind of research, there is often a great
deal of uncertainty about how a study will evolve and what kinds of risks the par-
ticipants will ultimately face, and it is simply impossible to obtain informed consent
through a single a priori encounter.
Narrative researchers, like Goodson (Sikes et al., 1996) mentioned above, seek a tabla rasa research
setting, and here he is caught in the same dilemmas as CBPR researchers of not wanting partic-
ipants arriving at the first meeting with a clear grasp of the research question not least because
there may not be any question beyond ‘what is your story’. This positions narrative and life
history research on a collision course with IRBs who may require a fulsome informed consent
statement.
The initial interview serves a second purpose. Smythe and Murray (2000) describe the first
interview with a participant as a vetting process – “the multiplicity of narrative meaning” –
allowing the researcher to assess the potential participant’s comprehension of and comfort with
this academic retelling of their story. Smythe and Murray couch this moment in ethical terms; the
researcher must be prepared to recognise the potential for a conflict of interest and be prepared
598
to exclude individuals who they believe might have considerable difficulty dealing with the
academic retelling. Goodson (Sikes et al., 1996, p. 39) also uses the first interview to vet the
participant’s suitability.
I would want to work with people who had that as a belief that they wanted to pursue,
that they want to come to understand their life, their life history better. I wouldn’t be
working collaboratively with people because clearly they wouldn’t collaborate.
Goodson also uses the recruitment stage to vet the suitability of the participant yet he is
reluctant to describe the collaborative process fully as that too is a leading question and takes the
participant into analysis when Goodson seeks only narration of a story at first. He says
laying out what collaboration is about is actually jumping the gun. Because many peo-
ple might not go to stage two . . . [I] define this as something which is about enhancing
their understanding or working with them towards understanding, which is the way I
prefer to put it.
(Sikes et al., 1996, p. 40)
A fourth feature narrative researchers are cognizant of is how the informed consent process is
undermined by the emergent and iterative research design making for an ethical minefield (Jos-
selson, 2007). Chase (1996, p. 57) describes as this as an “unfolding process, the results of which
we cannot anticipate or guarantee”. Clandinin and Connelly (2000, p. 170) also highlight the
staggered unfolding of ethical issues:
They are not dealt with once and for all, as might seem to happen, when ethical review
forms are filled out . . . Ethical matters shift and change as we move through an inquiry.
They are never far from the heart of our inquiries no matter where we are in the inquiry
process.
Narrative researchers’ minimalist informed consent is based on their desire to gain in-depth
information, to establish a tabla rasa setting avoiding leading questions, to vet persons to take part
in a collaborative multistage research process without describing the process in great detail and
working with a research design where the research question emerges inductively. A minimalist
informed consent process is not a deliberate deception but a necessary ruse. Josselson (1993,
pp. xii–xiii) astutely limits the informed consent process warning “the concept of informed consent
is a bit oxymoronic, given that participants can, at the outset, have only the vaguest idea of what
they might be consenting to”.
Narrative research has generated two standalone sets of ethical guidelines. Josselson’s (2007)
“The ethical attitude in narrative research: Principles and practicalities” and Smythe and Murray’s
(2000) “Owning the story: Ethical considerations in narrative research”. Smythe and Murray
claim “traditional, regulative principles of research ethics offer insufficient guidance for research
in the narrative study of lives” (Smythe & Murray, 2000, p. 311). Muchmore (2002, p. 9) claims
the same:
There is no set of hard and fast rules for ensuring ethical behavior in life history . . .
only guiding principles. Because ethical dilemmas are usually deeply embedded within
the contexts of the situations in which they arise, what may be ethical behavior in one
circumstance may not be ethical in another.
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Martin Tolich
Tierney and Clemens (2012, p. 276) offer five considerations:
1 Explain clearly and exactly the purposes of and time commitment necessary for the research
project and included all information in a consent form, of which the informant and research-
ers keep signed copies.
2 Recognize the power dynamics that exist between researcher and subject. Do not coerce or
place the subject in difficult circumstances by developing a reflexive relationship.
3 Prioritize the subject’s wellbeing above the research project.
4 Protect the subject’s identity and privacy.
5 Present data accurately and obtain feedback from the subject throughout the writing of the
text.
One additional source of ethical guidelines for narrative research is the much cited Clandinin and
Connelly (2000) statement that ethics must be negotiated and re-negotiated within the context
of a caring relationship between the researcher and the participant throughout the entire dura-
tion of the study. Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) advice does not square with some narrative
researchers whose ethical guidelines are biased toward the researcher and require broad consent.
Broad consent for one-stage narrative research

Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) claims that narrative research is multi-staged and its ethics
should be renegotiated at each stage are not universal. Chase (1996) limits the ongoing negotia-
tion in black and white terms as to who owns the data:
After the meeting(s) with the participants, the text belongs to the researcher, and what
we write is our interpretation of it. We take full interpretive authority for our under-
standing of it.
(Chase, 1996)
Josselson (2007, p. 550) concurs, demarcating the change between ethics in the recruitment stage
and ethics in the publication stage. This demarcation undermines the participant’s autonomy and
highlights that terms like co-researcher would need to be established in a consent form and not
presumed.
I think it is foolhardy to foist our writings on our participants, although we should make
them available . . . If we do send our work to them, we need to caution the participants
that our interest in writing was about the topic for which we made use of their material
but that they are unlikely to find a faithful representation of themselves since that was
not our purpose.
If informed consent is an oxymoron, as Josselson (1993) suggests, and limited to the data col-
lection part of the research, this limit should be stipulated in the initial information given to the
participant as broad consent and, most importantly, the right of the participant to withdraw from
the project at any time should be stricken from the information sheet. In their post interview,
Smythe and Murray (2000, p. 330) distance themselves and the data collected from the participant:
[The debrief] can help alleviate the common misunderstanding among narrative
research participants that the researcher will ultimately convey the participant’s own
600
story just as the participant understands it. Specifically, prospective participants should
be made aware that their personal narrative will be re-narrated by the researcher in the
course of the analysis.
Smythe and Murray and Josselson’s narrative research is patently different from Goodson’s,
whose life history recruitment seeks to establish in-depth relationship that endures throughout
the research project. Josselson (2007, p. 545) seeks limited rapport with participants, and this
honesty too should feature in the broad consent statement. She says:
With such participants, it is probably better to schedule an interview in a single sitting.

Multiple interviews over time are more likely to encourage the fantasy of a continuing
relationship.
Josselson makes firm assumptions about the participants’ resilience, which are found nowhere
else in the research ethics literature. What follows could, in some circumstances, question the
need to gain consent from participants at all. Josselson (2007, p. 551) overstates participant
autonomy.
In general, people will only tell researchers what they want to tell, and it seems to me
that there is no need to warn them that they might become upset. I believe it infan-
tilizes and thereby denigrates participants to tell them that they might become upset
while talking or that they may have some distress days later following the interview.
Interviewees control what they share, and experiencing painful feelings in an interview,
while distressing, may for them be in the service of integration and growth.
The author of this chapter found these assumptions particularly callous and unfounded. How-
ever, if Josselson sought broad consent at the outset of the project and limited the participants’
role to gifting their story with no illusions of halting the process, it would represent a clearer form
of consent. In this extended description, Josselson (2007) justifies her practice that reads when
italicised as a justification for using broad consent:
The researcher is interested in a more narrow aspect of the participant’s experience than
the initial statement of purpose states seems to me to be not unethical, although it is
ethically important to discuss with the participants at the end of the meeting the more
focused areas of particular interest the researcher began with so that participants will
not feel surprised or deceived later on if or when they may read the published report.
One also has to bear in mind that the nature of the researcher’s interest in the material
may change as the study proceeds. Therefore, more general statements may be advisable in
order to encompass the potential for discovery of avenues of exploration of the data unforeseen at
the time of the interview or observation.
The most ethical approach is to explain to the participant at the close of the inter-
view that what I will write about his or her interview will depend on the general con-
clusions I make about the whole group. I tell them that what I will write will probably
not feel to them as though it is fully about them since I usually highlight certain themes
in the text to make whatever point about the whole topic seems to me to be important
to make . . . I offer to send them a summary of my general findings from the study if
they would like to see what I have learned from doing the project. I then try to write
about each person with great sensitivity to how they might feel if they were to read it,
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Martin Tolich
but I take some comfort in knowing that, for most participants, it is highly unlikely that
they will ever read what I publish.
(p. 540–1, my emphasis)
Josselson (2007) may be correct. Few participants will read the output, especially if it is in obscure
journals. Yet this should not presume that other academics would not read it and comment on
this data grab as research on and not with (Hammersley, 2014). Moreover, postgraduate students
may mistake the obscurity of publication as a mask of ethics. One PhD student (Adams, 2008,
p. 180) writes openly about his research shielded from academic retellings, not by virtue of ethics
protections, but the family’s inability to read or engage with print medium.
With the exception of the daily newspaper and the random magazine, most members of
my immediate family do not read. They are literate but do not have any desire to engage
with books or write anything beyond the occasional letter. When I intimately write
about my family, I know that they will not and cannot respond to me via print. Many
of them do not have the resources (i.e. time, money, skill, desire) to engage the print
medium. In terms of narrative ethics, I realize that every time I write my story, I escape
textual debate with the people I textually implicate . . . During the writing process, I
try to account for and implicitly acknowledge my narrative privilege: My father does
not have a computer and does not have the grammatical and linguistic tools to write
academically. I know he cannot personally respond via print and academic publishing
outlets. I can thus portray my father any way I choose. Here, ethical (re)presentation
becomes crucial: I must understand, as best I can, how I may (re)present him, tempering
any demonizing feelings I have while still allowing my story to unfold.
Obscurity is not an ethical principle in narrative research. Yet a similar sense of ethical invisi-
bility was found in another form of narrative inquiry where senior autoethnographers – Carolyn
Ellis (1996), Carol Rambo (2007), Laurel Richardson (2007) – provide explanations of why the
persons caught up in their “own” stories do not need to get permission for their stories to be
included (Tolich, 2010).
Conclusion
Two established sets of ethics guidelines for narrative research have been reviewed in this chapter
and neither provides sufficient assurances for participants. First, Chase (1996), Josselson (2007),
and Smythe and Murray (2000) appear to restrict the participants’ involvement post interview.
Even though the participant can withdraw at any time, how they would do that is not made
clear in what they write about how to proceed. In these circumstances, informed consent is
not an option based on the vagaries of how the research question evolves in narrative research.
The best option for these researchers is broad consent. The researcher explains the limits of the
process and the participant gifts their one off or multiple interviews to the researcher for future
unspecified research.
Josselson’s guidelines on narrative research ethics are not universal. A second set of ethics
guidelines by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) claim that ethical issues in narrative research
are continually negotiated and re-negotiated during multi-staged narrative research. But how
active is the claim that participants have the right to withdraw at any time? Clandinin and
Connelly (2000) provide some examples of participants who exercise their right to withdraw
from the study at any time, yet narrative literature indicates this right is not sufficiently explicit
602
in the participant information sheet. Narrative research adopts the minimalist informed con-
sent process.
Process consent would be one’s means of achieving a level playing field for researcher and
participant. Process consent would address the unique features of narrative research – its desire to
extract depth, to begin tabla rasa, to vet participants for their suitability and willingness to partic-
ipate plus the usual qualitative wrinkle that the research question emerges in the field. Together
these genuine reasons produce a weak informed consent process that move consent issues to
the end of the research. Without an explicit statement on process consent narrative research is
open to claims of deception. There are no ethical problems with deception if the participant not
only has the right to withdraw from the project but they also have the right to negotiate and
renegotiate their consent throughout the project. Process consent means that the participants
can veto their contribution prior to publication. In other words, the story the participants tell
is their own, the analysis is the researchers, but the final sign off is the participants. If this is not
achieved, those who construe their work as “giving voice” to participants, imagining them to
be fully collaborative in the research endeavour, are in part deluding themselves with their own
self-serving narrative.
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46
A RELATIONAL ETHIC FOR
NARRATIVE INQUIRY, OR IN THE
FOREST BUT LOST IN THE TREES,
OR A ONE-ACT PLAY WITH MANY
ENDINGS1
Norman K. Denzin
university of illinois at urbana-champaign
My goal is to outline a code of ethics, and a set of ethical principles for narrative inquiry for the
global community of qualitative researchers. I want a large tent, one that extends across disciplines
and professions, from anthropologists to archaeologists, sociologists to social workers, health care
to education, communications to history, performance studies to queer and disability studies.
Following the arguments of Christians (2007), Madison (2009) and the Human Rights Coa-
lition of AAAS (2009), this code will be informed by a human rights, social justice agenda. This
interdisciplinary code will reflect the concerns of a core transnational constituency. It will exist
alongside specific disciplinary codes. It will offer an alternative to state-sponsored regulatory
systems, including Institutional Review Boards (IRB)2 in the United States and IRB counter-
parts in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Scandinavia and elsewhere (see Becker, 2004;
Dingwall, 2008; Haggerty, 2004; Halse & Honey, 2007; Hammersley & Traianou, 2012, p. 5;
Hedgecoe, 2008; Israel, 2015; National Research Council, 2014; Sikes & Piper, 2010). It will be
positive, not negative.
This will be an ethical code based on a research contract, a relational ethics, an ethics of care.
It will use process consent agreements, rather than traditional informed consent forms (Ellis,
2009, pp. 308–10).
Such a code will serve the following purposes:3
(1) Identify and implement a set of core values on which research is based. These values include
social justice, human rights, integrity, a belief in the dignity and worth of the person, com-
passion, love, and empowerment, resistance, dialogue.
(2) Summarize the broad ethical principles that embody and enact these core values. These
principles outline our ethical responsibilities to ourselves, to our students, to stakeholders,
clients, those we study, the broader society, other professionals, as well as our conduct in
practice, performance and research settings.
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Norman K. Denzin
(3) Clarify and distinguish the relationship between guidelines framed by federal, national,
and institutional regulatory agencies and specific disciplinary codes (see Hammersley &
Traianou, 2012; Sikes & Piper, 2010).
(4) Distinguish between federal, national, and institutional regulatory agencies guidelines and
guidelines grounded in human rights, social justice considerations.
(5) Establish a set of specific ethical standards and procedures that should guide the research
activity of all qualitative scholars.
(6) Provide ethical standards to which the general public and public officials can hold qualitative
scholars accountable.
(7) Socialize scholars new to the field to these values, ethical principles and ethical standards.
(8) Articulate standards that qualitative scholars can use in defense of their work.
This code serves to implement the primary mission of the global qualitative inquiry community;
namely to use the methods and principles of critical qualitative inquiry for social justice purposes.
Members of this community seek an ethics of justice framed by human rights agendas, under-
standing that ethical decision-making is a dialogical process. However, code of ethics cannot
guarantee ethical behavior (Stake & Jegatheesan, 2008; Stake & Rizvi, 2009).
*****
The flaws in the current regulatory ethical apparatuses are well known, and have been extensively
reviewed by others. The past is littered with controversy, acrimony, and struggle (see Denzin,
2009, pp. 284–95 for a review; also American Historical Association, 2008; Lincoln, 2009;
Lincoln & Guba, 2013; Speiglman & Spear, 2009). I do not want to become embroiled in conflict
or critique, only to note the sites of tension. (There is even a humanities and IRB blog4 where
complaints are aired.)
Conflict has centered on the following topics:
1 Mission or ethics creep, or the over-zealous extension of ethical review procedures and
regulations to interpretive forms of social science research, has been criticized by many,
including Haggerty (2004), Gunsalus, and Associates (2007), Dash (2007) and the American
Association of University Professors (AAUP, 2006).5
2 In the USA communication and education scholars have contested narrow applications of
the Common Rule and the Belmont Principles of respect, beneficence and justice (Pub-
lic Welfare Department of Health and Human Services, 1974; Christians, 2005; Lincoln,
2009; Office for Human Research Protection [OHRP], 2009). Respect is achieved through
informed consent agreements, beneficence through perceived risks or harm, and justice
through assurances that subjects are not unduly burdened by being required to participate in
a research project. But respect involves caring for others and honoring them. It is more than
agreeing to sign an informed consent form. Beneficence cannot be quantified, and justice
includes more then being randomly selected to be a subject in a research project.
3 Oral historians have contested the narrow view of science and research contained in current
U.S. regulations (American Historical Association, 2008; Shopes, 2011; Shopes & Ritchie,
2004).
4 Anthropologists and archaeologists have challenged the concept of informed consent as it
impacts ethnographic inquiry (see Fluehr-Lobban, 2003b).
5 Journalists argue that blanket insistence on anonymity (often required by regulatory bodies)
reduces the credibility of journalistic reporting which rests on naming the sources used in a
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A relational ethic for narrative inquiry
news account (Dash, 2007). Dash, for example, contends that IRB oversight interferes with
the First Amendment rights of journalists and the public’s right to know (Dash, 2007, p. 871).
6 Indigenous scholars Battiste (2008), Smith (2005) assert that Western conceptions of ethical
inquiry have “severely eroded and damaged indigenous knowledge” and indigenous com-
munities (Battiste, 2008, p. 497).6
*****
With respect to the USA it is clear that the existing Belmont and Common Rule definitions have
little, if anything, to do with a human rights and social justice ethical agenda. Regrettably, these
principles have been informed by notions of value-free experimentation and utilitarian concepts
of justice (Christians, 2005). They do not conceptualize research in participatory terms. In reality
these rules protect institutions and not persons, although they were originally created to protect
human subjects from unethical biomedical research. As currently deployed, these practices close
down critical ethical dialogue. They create the impression that if proper IRB procedures are fol-
lowed, then one’s ethical house is in order. But this is ethics in a cul de sac.
A path forward
A path through the current ethical maze must be found. Researchers are invited become to
become involved in the ethics review process within their own academic and research settings.
For instance, I am the Institutional Review Board (IRB) officer for the College of Media, Univer-
sity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This came about in the following way. In 2004 I asked our
campus IRB officer if the 2003 Oral History Association (OHA) IRB exemption7 was recognized
on this campus,8 and if so, could it be extended to interpretive research in my college.9
Our campus officer replied that the UIUC IRB generally upholds the OHA and American
History Association (AHA) positions on this. As such, the UIUC typically considers oral histo-
ries as exempted from IRB review, unless there are severe extenuating factors of some sort (e.g.,
interactions involving deception) that may increase the level of review.10
I then stated that interpretive media research involves historical research and open-ended, oral
history interviewing. This research does not fit the type of research defined by federal regulations,
namely: “A systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation,
designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.”11
I contended that much of the research in my college is based on case studies, open-ended
interviews, life histories and life stories. Each individual case is treated as unique. This cate-
gory of social science research has historically been called idiographic or emic. Emic studies
emphasize stories, narratives, collaborative performances and accounts that capture the meaning
persons bring to experience. Nomothetic studies, in contrast, conform to the federal definitions
of research. Researchers seek abstract generalizations, test hypotheses, and use random sampling
techniques, quasi-experimental designs, and so forth.
I requested that the Oral History exemption apply to interpretive research in the College of
Communications, with these provisos:
1 The research is not federally funded;

2 The research does not place subjects at risk or harm;
3 Researchers demonstrate that this exclusion should be granted, because the research in ques-
tion does not involve research as defined by the federal guideline. An exemption could be
granted, if research does meet this definition.
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Norman K. Denzin
4 Scholars define their work as scholarship, not research, and locate it within an artistic,
humanistic paradigm, including: critical pedagogy, arts-based inquiry, narrative or perfor-
mance studies (see below).
This request was granted. I then created an IRB website, linked to the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign College of Media website. I included the text of the original (2003) Oral
History exemption, as well as application forms modeled after those used at the campus level.
And today the College of Media IRB office annually processes 8–10 requests for expedited or
exempted IRB reviews. Concerned students and colleagues come to our office, asking if they
have to go to the campus IRB. I direct them to our website, and ask if their project conforms to
the oral history guidelines. I also ask if their work is federally funded, and if it places subjects at
more then minimal harm or risk. I ask them if they are doing oral history inquiry, arts-based, or
performance inquiry. I ask if they are testing scientific hypotheses, drawing random samples, and
using experimental or survey-research designs. Thus has getting IRB approval become one more
step in the dissertation project in my college.
*****
Since 2004 many North American–based scholarly and professional societies have followed the
Oral History and American Historical Associations in challenging the underlying assumptions in
the standard campus IRB model. A transdisciplinary, global counter-IRB discourse has emerged
(Mertens & Ginsberg, 2009). This discourse has called for the blanket exclusion of non-federally
funded research from IRB review. The AAUP has gone so far as to recommend that:
exemptions based on methodology, namely research on autonomous adults whose

methodology consists entirely of collecting data by surveys, conducting interviews, or
observing behavior in public places should be exempt from the requirement of IRB
review, with no provisos, and no requirement of IRB approval of the exemption.
(AAUP, 2006, p. 4)
The executive council of the Oral History Association, endorsed the AAUP, recommendations in
its October 2006 annual meeting. They were quite clear: “institutions consider as straightforwardly
exempt from IRB review any ‘research whose methodology consists entirely of collecting data by
surveys, conducting interviews, or observing behavior in public places’” (Howard, 2006, p. 9).
This recommendation can be extended:
neither OHRP, nor a campus IRB has the authority to define what constitutes legitimate
research in any field, only what research is covered by federal regulations.
Since the 2003 understandings it was assumed that oral history researchers could proceed with
their interviews without submitting protocols for review by an Institutional Review Board
(Shopes, 2011).
Trouble in oral history land

This was an erroneous assumption (Jones, 2007; Townsend, 2006, 2007a, 2007b). Townsend’s
(2006) report on an American History Association (AHA) staff survey of IRB policies at 252
colleges and universities found that the 2003 oral history agreement was not being followed.
608
Staff members surveyed the IRB policies posted on 252 web sites. On almost 95 percent of the
sites oral history was still subject to review. Only eleven sites discussed the oral history exclusion
agreement. As a result, oral history continues to be conducted under a legal cloud of conflicting
policy statements from OHRP and the American Historical and Oral History Associations.
On October 26, 2007, OHRP posted a new set of provisional guidelines for “Protection of
Human Subjects: Categories of Research That May Be Reviewed by the Institutional Review
Board through an Expedited Review Procedure.” They requested written comments on a pro-
posed amendment to item 5 of the items that may be reviewed by an expedited review pro-
cedure. Oral history documents and procedures were folded into these revised guidelines. The
new language (Townsend, 2007b), excluded oral histories from exemption. Thus the 2003 path
around IRBs was closed.
Jones, writing on behalf of the American Historical Association (AHA) is quite clear on the
issues at hand. The proposed changes would unravel the 2003 exemption for oral history inquiry
(Jones, 2007, p. 8):
We write on behalf of the 15,000 members and 3,000 institutions

We represent to express our concern about the changes proposed in expedited review
category 5, and ask that ‘oral history’ be removed from the language in expedited review
category 7 . . . we find the proposed changes deeply troubling . . . if implemented,
the changes would severely limit our ability to collect information about the present
and recent past for historians in the future . . . the change . . . appears to remove the
exemption . . . and to invite further . . . oversight . . . the proposed change also seems
to contradict current regulations, insofar as they sate that ‘research involving the collect-
ing of existing data’ is exempt from review (paragraph 46. 101 (b) (4) . . . Over the past
seven years, the AHA has made a number of efforts to clarify or reverse the policy of
using IRBs to regulate oral history . . . Historians’ deepest responsibility is to follow the
evidence where it leads, to discern and make sense of the past in all its complexity; not
to protect individuals from the possible repercussions of past mistakes or misdeeds . . .
we are akin to journalists . . . We believe that ‘oral history’ should therefore be removed
from category 7, and explicitly exempted from IRB review . . . we side with the recent
recommendations of the AAUP.
Townsend and Jones feel that the only solution is the one offered by AAUP – full exemption,
no provisos, no requirement of IRB approval of exemption! Clearly scholarly societies in the
United States must organize around the AAUP recommendations.
*****
Ethical practices: A one act play

Characters
Speaker One
Speaker Two
Staging Notes: Performers are seated around a seminar table on the third floor of Gregory Hall,
a four story, 125-year-old brick classroom on the campus of the University of Illinois. There a
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Norman K. Denzin
twenty-five chairs along the walls and around a forty-foot long wood table. Two large nature
paintings on loan from the art department hang on the north and east walls of the room. There
is a pull-down screen at the south end of the room for projecting video. Overhead lights are
dimmed. Sun streams in through the two north windows. It is 1:00 in the afternoon. The time
is the present. There are two voices, speaker one and speaker two. The text of the play is handed
from speaker to speaker. The first speaker reads the text for speaker one. The second speaker reads
the text for speaker two, and so forth, to the end.
Act one
Scene one: Getting unstuck

(This dialogue starts stage left; then two speakers step forward, one at a time.)
Speaker One: We gotta get out of this place. I have a serious headache. I thought we had a way
out with that oral history exemption and the AAUP recommendations. Now I’m
not so sure.
Speaker Two: We have to be aggressive. We are on the side of justice. We are researchers com-
mitted to positive social change. We are social workers, health care and educational
researchers, anthropologists, critical performance ethnographers, sociologists,
archaeologists, activists. Ethics, politics and justice cannot be separated.
Speaker One: There needs to be significant regulatory reform at the national level. The scholarly
societies must organize to make this happen.
Speaker Two: We have to be hopeful. The existing ethical regulations give us directions on
where we do not want to go. We need to formulate our version of the Belmont
principles.
Speaker One: Okay. We can learn from the existing IRB models. If ethics cannot be separated
from politics and power, then whose power, whose knowledge, and whose history
is shaping what we are doing? Are we really on the side of the angels?
Speaker Two: We must be critically self-reflective, and hold to the highest ethical values.
Researchers put subjects at risk. Researchers lie, misrepresent, break promises,
cheat, squander funds, misappropriate intellectual property, steal. No ethical code
can prohibit this kind of conduct.
Speaker One: Ouch! So you’re saying researchers with little integrity can always find some ethi-
cal principle to justify the violation of some other ethical principle (Stake & Rizvi,
2009, p. 531).
Speaker Two: Yes!
Speaker One: Ethical conduct has to be guided by an inner voice, by one’s conscience. Ulti-
mately researchers are forced to rely on personal, situational judgments. Codes and
institutional reviews cannot protect us from the need to be ethical, from the need
to address complex ethical dilemmas (Stake & Rizvi, 2009, p. 531).
Speaker Two: We need a transdisciplinary, feminist communitarian ethical code, a normative
model, a dialogical code that enables community transformation, empowers
the oppressed, enacts a politics of resistance, recognition and difference, a code
informed by human rights initiatives (Christians, 2005, pp. 157–8).
Speaker One: Your ethical model embodies a set of methodological directives for conducting
critical interpretive inquiry, so now methodology, ethics and inquiry are folded
into one framework
610
Speaker Two: Ethics in this framework generates social criticism. This leads to resistance and
empowers persons to transformative action.
Scene two: Core values

Speaker One: Remember, our mission is rooted in these interdisciplinary core values: service,
social justice, the dignity and worth of the person, the importance of human rela-
tionships, integrity, and competence. We respect the inherent dignity and worth of
the person, we honor people and their material culture (see Fluehr-Lobban, 2003a,
pp. 264–5).
Speaker Two: We must do no harm! But this is complicated. Journalists, for example, have First
Amendment protection and a commitment to their profession, and to the public
to tell the truth. That means they may harm people, because the truth can hurt
(Dash, 2007).
Speaker One: This does not preclude having honest relationships with those we engage in crit-
ical inquiry.
Speaker Two: Performance ethnographers worry about the four ethical pitfalls identified by Dwight
Conquergood: “the Custodian’s Rip-Off,” “the Enthusiast’s Infatuation,” “the Cura-
tor’s Exhibitionism,” and “the Skeptic’s Cop-Out” (Conquergood, 1985, p. 4).
Speaker One: Custodians ransack their own and our past, searching for texts to perform for
profit. Enthusiasts visit our cultures and become superficially involved, trivializing
who we are. Skeptics are cynical and detached, acting as if they own our worlds.
Curators sensationalize our worlds, staging performances for the voyeur’s gaze.
This is the “Wild Kingdom” approach, the fascination with the exotic other, the
Noble Savage (Conquergood, 1985, p. 7).
Speaker Two: We want a dialogical ethic, texts, performances and inquiries that speak to and
with the other. We want works that reengage the past and bring it alive in the
present. The dialogic text attempts to kept the dialogue alive, to keep the conver-
sation between performer, inquirer and the audience ongoing and open-ended.
The dialogic text enacts a dialogical ethic. It involves more than empathy: it inter-
rogates, criticizes, empowers, and creates languages of resistance.
Speaker One: We want a dialogical ethic that honors the essential human freedoms of expres-
sion, worship, the freedom from want, from fear of violence. We want a code that
is sensitive to the basic human rights , the rights to housing, health, the rights of
indigenous people, of peoples with disabilities, the rights of children, the rights of
workers, the right to sexual and gender self expression, language rights, cultural
rights, environmental rights, the rights of prisoners, the right to freely participate
in democracy.
Scene three: A relational ethics

Speaker One: As an autoethnographer, I need a relational ethic. When I write autoethnography,
I write about my own life and the lives of others who are close to me, intimate
others. I have a responsibility to them. How do I tell the truth, do no harm, and
honor and respect our relationship at the same time?
Speaker Two: These issues are not acknowledged by IRBs! These are difficult ethical issues and
no simple mandate or universal principle applies in all cases, and of course ethical
work does not end with IRB approval (Ellis, 2009, pp. 307, 310).
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Norman K. Denzin
Speaker One: Right, there is a range of responses. Let’s make a list (holds up bulletin board with
the following items listed:
1. Do not publish, or delay publishing, potentially harmful or painful material;
2. do not publish under a pseudonym, fictionalize the story, use pseudonyms or
no names for participants;
3. do not publish without approval;
4. do not seek approval after publication;
5. do not work out with participants what will be contained in the story, change,
or omit identifying details or problematic events;
6. use multiple voices;
7. seek consent beforehand;
8. use process consent (below) in addition to informed consent;
9. follow a socially contingent ethic.
Speaker Two: So which option do I follow?
Speaker One: Your conscience. I don’t always use recognizable people in my stories, other than
myself, and a few family members and public officials. I focus on places, historical
events, fictional dialogues, and performances with unnamed narrators, numbered
voices, persons wearing masks. I have to take responsibility for what I write,
whether I share or not with those I write about.
Speaker Two: I tell my students to use process consent, not just informed consent. Relationships
change during the course of a project, people change their minds, back out, stop
talking. Practicing process consent means checking at each stage of inquiry to
make sure participants still want to be part of the process. Relational ethics values
mutual respect, dignity, connectedness, being true to one’s conscience, one’s values,
an ethics of care (Ellis, 2009, p. 310).
Speaker One: This is a socially contingent ethic; it works outward from shared personal experi-
ence; it is based on care, respect, love; it respects rights, and needs, and intimacies
specific to a relational context.
Speaker Two: Taking a story back to those you write about is not like sharing fieldnotes. Special
care has to be taken when writing about thick family relations, parents, friends,
and lovers. Taking a story back to an intimate can cause harm. It can destroy a
relationship. It can place the writer in harm’s way (Bochner, 2007, p. 199; Ellis,
2009, p. 314).
Speaker One: At the relational level, it gets complicated. I have the right to write about my past,
and my present relationships. But what can I decently write about other people?
Whose permission do I have to ask? Will I change them, or hurt them? What can
I decently reveal about myself? How can I write about the past – the dead are
dead? What is the exact truth of a story, what is its emotional truth? Should I tell
the truth if it hurts someone else?
Speaker Two: Only I can decide whether or how to write about them, about me. And once I
have written about them, we are all forever changed. This is my right, to write
about the past and the present, and others have the same right. I believe in named
sources, no hiding behind fictionalized or made-up names. This keeps me honest.
Speaker One: Our ethical principles are these: (1) honor and respect the dignity of the person;
(2) assert the moral integrity of the researcher-practitioner relationship; (3) enact
the dialogical commitment to empowerment, and transformation; (4) imple-
ment the multiple agendas of social justice and human rights at the concrete
local level.
612
Speaker Two: These relational and dialogical codes redefine the Belmont principles of respect,
beneficence, and justice.
Speaker One: We implement these principles by following the Oral History Association Guide-
lines (2000). In this way, we go beyond the Belmont guidelines concerning respect,
beneficence, justice, harm, confidentiality, risk assessment and subject selection.
Scene four: Oral historians

Speaker One: I think I can be of some help. I’ve been fighting this ethics battle between IRBS
and historians for the last 20 years. Oral historians have their version of the Bel-
mont Principles and practical ethical conduct. We have our own concepts of
respect, beneficence, justice, informed consent, risk, and the selection of subjects.
Speaker Two: Oral historians respect and honor the rights of interviewees to refuse to discuss
certain topics. We never randomly select interviewees. That would be unimagi-
nable: We select people because of their oral histories and the stories they can tell.
They are never anonymous. Anonymity violates a fundamental principle of oral
history; that is, anonymous sources lack credibility. Oral history interviews are
copyrightable documents, owned by the narrator. He or she must sign over the
rights to the interview via a legal release form. This release form is akin to process
consent. It allows the narrator (interviewee) to define the terms of the research
relationship. Oral history guidelines state that researchers should guard against
possible exploitation of interviewees and take care not to reinforce thoughtless
stereotypes.
Speaker One: This is dialogical . . . a give and take, back and forth between interviewer and
interviewee.
Speaker Two: We do not want IRBs constraining critical inquiry, or our ethical conduct. Our
commitment to professional integrity requires awareness of one’s own biases and a
readiness to follow a story, wherever it may lead. We are committed to telling the
truth, even when it may harm people.
Speaker One: When publishing about other people, my ethics require that I subject my writing
to a fine-mesh filter: do no harm (Richardson, 2007, p. 170).
Speaker Two: So there we have it. A set of methodological guidelines, not regulations. The dig-
nity of the person is honored through the terms of the research contract, which
takes the place of an informed consent document. Beneficence, do no harm, is
challenged in the oral history interview, for interviews may discuss painful topics,
and they have the right to walk away at any time. Deception is never an option.
It is assumed that telling the truth about the past is of great benefit to society.
Interviewees are selected because of the value of the stories they have to tell.
The End
*****
Notes
1 Portions of this essay re-work and extend pp. 298–305 in Denzin (2009); and pp. 71–84 in Denzin
(2010). My examples draw primarily from the United States. For reviews from other national sites, see
Sikes and Piper (2010) and Hammersley and Traianou (2012).
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Norman K. Denzin
2 The Belmont principles and the so-called Common Rule regulate US IRBs (see Christians, 2005 for a
discussion and National Research Council, 2014).
3 These guidelines draw from the revised 2008 Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social
Workers (see www.socialworkers.org/pibs/code/code.asp and also Reamer, 2006; National Research
Council, 2014).
4 See the blog: Institutional Review Blog News and commentary about Institutional Review Board
oversight of the humanities and social sciences. See also IRBwatch (http://www. Irbwatch. Org/also
Irbideas.Com); also see the now four-year-old Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics
(JERHRE), which publishes research on IRBs.
5 Mission creep includes these issues and threats: rewarding wrong behaviors, a focus on procedures and not
difficult ethical issues, enforcing unwieldy federal regulations, threats to academic freedom and the First
Amendment (Gunsalus et al., 2007; also Becker, 2004; Haggerty, 2004). Perhaps the most extreme form of
IRB mission is the 2002 State of Maryland Code, Title 13 – Miscellaneous Health Care Program, Subtitle
20 – Human Subject Research § 13–2001, 13–2002: Compliance with Federal Regulations: A person may
not conduct research using a human subject unless the person conducts the research in accordance with
the federal regulations on the protection of human subjects (see Shamoo & Schwartz, 2007).
6 There is a large Canadian project on indigenous intellectual property rights – Intellectual Property Issues
in Cultural Heritage. This project represents an international, interdisciplinary collaboration among
more than 50 scholars and 25 partnering organizations embarking on an unprecedented and timely
investigation of intellectual property (IP) issues in cultural heritage that represent emergent local and
global interpretations of culture, rights, and knowledge. Their objectives are:
• to document the diversity of principles, interpretations, and actions arising in response to IP issues in
cultural heritage worldwide;
• to analyze the many implications of these situations;
• to generate more robust theoretical understandings as well as exemplars of good practice; and
• to make these findings available to stakeholders – from Aboriginal communities to professional
organizations to government agencies – to develop and refine their own theories, principles, policies
and practices.
Left Coast is their publisher. See their website: http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/front.

7 Under the Common Rule (45 CFR.46), there are two categories, expedited reviews and exemptions.
Expedited reviews are moved forward quickly because they present no more than minimal risk to human
subjects. There are several categories of expedited research, including categories 5 and 7. Category 5
focuses on research involving materials (e.g. archival) collected for nonresearch purposes. Category 7
involves research on individual or group characteristics or behavior (including, but not limited to, research
on perception, cognition, motivation, identity, language, communication, cultural beliefs or practices, and
social behavior) or research employing survey, interview, oral history, focus group, program evaluation,
human factors evaluation, or quality assurance methodologies. Exempted proposals do not have to submit
to review. The 2014 proposed revisions to the Common Rule (National Research Council, 2014) create
a new review category, for human-subjects research, “excused.” Excused research includes information
that can be observed in the public domain if individuals have no expectation of privacy, if investigators
have no interactions with individuals, as long as proper ethical guidelines for handling such information
are followed and as long as risks are minimal (National Research Council, 2014, p. 4).
8 Oral historians establish their exclusion from IRB review on several grounds. Their research does not
use large samples, nor is it designed for testing hypotheses, or forming statistical generalizations or gen-
eralizable knowledge. Unlike biomedical and behavioral science researchers, oral historians do not seek
to discover laws or generalizations that have predictive value. Oral history interviewees and narrators are
not anonymous individuals selected as part of a random sample for the purposes of a survey or experi-
ment. Nor do they respond to standard questionnaire items. Oral history narrators engage in dialogues
tailored to fit their unique relationship to the topic at hand (see Ritchie & Shopes, 2003). See Shopes
and Ritchie (2004), for later developments in this discourse, also Townsend, (2006, 2007a, 2007b), and
American Historical Association (2008).
9 There are four research paradigms or streams in my College: (1) experimental and survey-based research;
(2) oral history and interpretive inquiry that does not require IRB review; (3) standard behavioral
research that qualifies for expedited review within the College IRB; (4) journalist inquiries involving
investigative, narrative and public affairs reporting. Such work is routinely exempted from review under
614
the First Amendment. Proposed revisions to the common rule introduce a new category, excused from
review (see National Research Council, 2014, pp. 48–9). This is research involving methodologies famil-
iar to people in everyday life and where informational risk is at no more than the minimal level, when
appropriate data security and information protection plans are in place.
10 The 2014 revisions discuss the problems surrounding data protection, and risks to subjects when harmful
information is disclosed. Risks not necessarily associated with research are greater in a changing elec-
tronic technological environment where surveillance apparatuses are everywhere present. Corporate
owners of social media platforms openly admit gathering personal data and using such data for inter-
ventions with economic ends (see Bratich, in press; also Shildrick, 1997).
11 Readers outside the USA should note that this definition of what constitutes research does not apply
elsewhere. In UK universities, for example, it is usually the case these days that all research that involves
or refers to human subjects, regardless of discipline or methodological approach, must undergo ethical
review.
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47
NARRATIVE ETHICS
Derek M. Bolen
angelo state university
Tony E. Adams
northeastern illinois university
You once worked with a colleague on an essay about her father and their emotionally distant
relationship. You asked if he should have the right to read the essay; she believed that he did not
have the right to read the essay, at least at the time of writing. She soon wanted to publish the
essay, so you asked again if he should have the right to read it. She still did not think so – the story
was more hers, less his – though she was comfortable with the idea of him accessing the publi-
cation or giving him the essay in a few years. After much deliberation, and as a gesture toward
compromise, she decided to publish the essay in a free, open-access journal – one that her father
could easily access – rather than in a traditional, subscription-based journal that might take great
effort to find.
In this chapter, we introduce ethical considerations as they apply to the study and practice
of narrative research, especially narrative research that uses an author’s personal experiences. We
first offer a brief overview of ethics, narrative, and narrative ethics. We then consider ethics of
truth, memory, and working with the past, as well as issues of narrative ownership and narrative
privilege. We conclude by considering ethical responsibilities of reading narratives.1 Throughout,
we use examples from our experiences, and we demonstrate how narrative researchers can address
ethical issues in practices of writing about self/others. We do not intend for our discussion to
be prescriptive, definitive, or exhaustive but rather highlight possible ethical issues of narrative
research.
Ethics
Brody (2002) refers to ethics as “the world of human activities that have important moral con-
tent” (p. 177). Resnik (2011) defines ethics as “norms of conduct” about “acceptable and unac-
ceptable behavior” (p. 1) and notes that ethical principles “do not cover every situation,” “often
conflict,” and “require considerable interpretation” (p. 4). For us, ethics consists of the norms,
morals, and ideologies manifest in words, texts, relationships, and actions.
Three interrelated kinds of ethics pervade research practices: prescriptive ethics, situational
ethics, and relational ethics. Prescriptive ethics are norms, practices, and protocols that guide, and
sometimes dictate, beliefs about and behaviors to use before entering a (research) situation or
about research procedures (e.g., procedures established by ethics review committees). Situational
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Narrative ethics
ethics are norms and practices that cannot be determined in advance and instead emerge in, and
are contingent upon, circumstance and the particularities of context (Zaner, 2004). Relational
ethics are norms and practices of considering, including, and caring for friends, family members,
and research participants in our written representations (Ellis, 2007).
Narrative
Narratives are the stories we tell about ourselves, others, and society. “The human condition is
largely a narrative condition,” Bochner and Riggs (2014) write. “Storytelling is the means by
which we represent our experiences to ourselves and to others; it is how we communicate and
make sense of our lives” and “how we fill our lives with meaning” (p. 197). Hardy (1968) offers
a similar observation:
We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair,

believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative.
In order really to live, we make up stories about ourselves and others, about the personal
as well as the social past and future.
(Hardy, 1968)
Fisher (1984) calls us “homo narrans” – storytelling beings – and Frank (1995) calls narrative the
“self ’s medium of being” (p. 53). Not just rote facts or statements of information, narratives are
assemblages of words-in-relation – assemblages that illustrate meaning-making processes, emphasize
the significance of personal/social experience, and are tangled with intentionality/purpose, time,
context, and audience (self and others).
Narratives can serve multiple functions. Narratives recount past experiences and events,
offer an account of why a person or entity acted a certain way, and can inspire, teach, entertain,
and serve as “simulators” of social life, safely training us for the “big challenges of the social
world” (Gottschall, 2012, p. 58; see Brody, 2002). Narratives can allow others to bear witness
to tragedy, serving as a reminder of harmful social practices (Greenspan, 1998; Rogers, 2004),
and illustrate a person’s individual traits and/or establish a person’s/family’s identity (Boylorn,
2013a; Goodall, 2006).
Canonical narratives are dominant and conventional stories about proper ways to behave and
believe (Bochner, 2001), stories “readily recognizable as familiar human plights” (Bruner, 1991,
p. 12). Examples of canonical narratives could include stories about the assumed benefit of
biological family relationships, the importance of consumerism in a capitalistic society, or the
heteronormative imperative and desirability for marriage. Given such pervasiveness, challenging
canonical narratives can invoke defensiveness and uncertainty.
Narrative ethics
“When we are children,” Bochner and Riggs (2014) write, “we soak up cautionary tales that
shape and guide us. We are exposed to fairy tales and tall tales, ballads and legends, myths and
fables, epics and folklore” (p. 196). Any discussion of narrative ethics may include determining
and evaluating the maxims, moral principles, and norms of conduct inherent in, or advocated by,
these cautionary tales, particularly how these tales can “shape and guide us,” the morals for which
they advocate, and the “‘goodness’ and ‘character’” of the stories. Many of us praise or critique
canonical narratives in this way, especially given the assumed dominance these narratives have
on shaping and guiding personal/social beliefs and behaviors. Narrative ethics may also include
619
determining ways in which a story has been calibrated to an author’s intention/purpose, as well
as discerning the social/material/temporal conditions of a narrative, especially circumstances that
contribute to how audiences access, engage, and understand it.
In terms of research practice, a prescriptive understanding of narrative ethics may include
satisfying ethics review committee requirements before/during/after conducting narrative inter-
views and implementing strict protocol to enhance standards of method, accuracy, and truth.
A situational understanding of narrative ethics may recognize issues that arise in the telling of
a particular story, such as uncovering sensitive topics during an interview (Corbin & Morse,
2003), talking through different meanings of past events (Ellis & Rawicki, 2014), and/or dealing
with unexpected and painful feelings during the writing process (Chatham-Carpenter, 2010). A
relational understanding of narrative ethics may include more personally established norms and
practices about responsibly representing others such as using composite characters or fiction to
represent and protect others, or asking others for their reactions to our interpretations of their
experiences. Note that we may not even recognize the relational ethics of a narrative until we
publish it, which may then require us to later write a revision of, or a response to, the earlier
publication (e.g., Ellis, 2009, 2014), or, if the publication motivates significant relational damage,
only allow time to heal such wounds (e.g., Behar, 2013).
Truth, memory, and the past

The film Big Fish (2003) demonstrates how narratives can build (or tear apart) relationships, serve
as sense-making devices in a person’s life, and constitute a person’s – and a family’s – identity.
The film is an ideal text to illustrate ethical concerns about accuracy in our stories, especially
differences between historical truth, the facts of an experience, and narrative truth, the meaning and
significance of an experience.2
Big Fish opens with Ed Bloom, the father, telling a common story about the origin of his
marriage and the birth of Will Bloom, his son. Frustrated with Ed for telling this story at Will’s
wedding, Will criticizes Ed and refuses contact with him for three years. They resume contact
when Will learns that Ed has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Although we learn that Ed conveyed facts through his stories, the film pivots upon Will’s
frustration with not knowing many facts about his father, Will’s quick dismissal of his father’s
stories as fictional, and Will’s refusal to discern the truths in storied experiences.
In one scene, Will tries to ask Ed about the (historical) truth of Ed’s stories. “The thing about
icebergs is you only see 10%; the other 90% is below the water where you can’t see it,” Will says.
“That’s what it is with you, dad. I’m only seeing this little bit that sticks above the water . . . I
have no idea who you are because you have never told me a single fact.”
“I’ve told you a thousand facts,” Ed replies. “That’s what I do. I tell stories.”
“You tell lies, dad.”
Will struggles with the ability to discern the meaning and significance – the narrative truth –
of Ed’s stories, as well as life lessons Ed learned because of his experiences.
Two additional scenes illustrate the tension between historical truth and narrative truth.
In one scene, Sandra, Ed’s wife and Will’s mother, gasps when she finds a past letter from Ed.
“What is it?” Will asks.

“It was during the war,” she replies. “Your father went missing. They thought he
was dead.”
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Narrative ethics
“That really happened?” Will asks.

“Not everything your father says is a complete fabrication,” she replies.
In another scene near the end of the film, Dr. Bennett, the family doctor, notices the relational
distance between Will and Ed.
“Did your father ever tell you about the day you were born?” Dr. Bennett asks.
“Yeah,” Will responds, “a thousand times. He caught an uncatchable fish.”
“Not that one,” Dr. Bennett says. “The real story. Did he ever tell you that?”
“No.”
“Well, your mother came in about three in the afternoon,” Dr. Bennett says. “Her
neighbor drove her, on account of your father was on business in Wichita. You were
born a week early but there were no complications. It was a perfect delivery. Now, your
father was sorry not to be there. But it wasn’t the custom for the men to be in the room
for deliveries then, so I can’t see how it would’ve been much different had he been there.
And that’s the real story of how you were born. Not very exciting, is it? And I suppose
if I had to choose between the true version and an elaborate one involving a fish and a
wedding ring, I might choose the fancy version. But then that’s just me.”
Will replies, “I kind of liked your version.”
By foregrounding the tensions between historical truth and narrative truth, Big Fish is a good
text to think about what narratives are and how they work. Will initially disregarded the mean-
ing and significance of Ed’s stories as they foregrounded narrative truth. However, for Ed, these
stories served as a way to recount history, convey life lessons, and relate to/with others.
Related to narrative truth and historical truth are ethical considerations of memory, work-
ing with past events, and assessing how a narrative has been influenced by memory, time, place,
context, audience, and relationship. For example, in my (Tony’s) book (Adams, 2011), I discuss
a childhood memory of being spanked by my father after he found me watching a television
program that showed naked men. I was probably six or seven years old. I have remembered this
vivid and scarring moment for years. When my mother read my book, she told me that no one
had ever spanked me. No one. Ever. I told her that I remember my father spanking me a few
times. She disagreed and said that she would not have allowed him to do so.
Even though I remember the situation differently, I agreed that maybe my dad did not spank
me. However, I also told her that I remember a man spanking me often, with a brown leather
belt, in the bathroom. I believe this man was my father; besides my grandfather, he was the only
man with whom I had regular contact.
My mom continues to disagree. She may not have experienced what I remember, may not
remember these events, or perhaps feels disheartened as a parent because she did not know about
these spankings and, as such, could not prevent them from happening. When considering nar-
rative ethics, I should at least acknowledge my mother’s perspective and admit that maybe my
father didn’t spank me. Although I believe someone did spank me as a child, I cannot confirm
these memories with any certainty.
I (Derek) have a similar experience. In one of my essays, I recount the time when I came out
to my mother – that is, when I told her that I was gay (Bolen, 2014). I write that she found a
rainbow pride flag in a drawer while putting away my clothes. After the essay was published,
my mom and I recounted the coming out story to my aunt and my partner. I decry the flag
that made her suspicious. But when I finish, my mom says, “It wasn’t a flag. It was a teddy bear
wearing a little rainbow sweater.” For more than 10 years, I’ve told the story that I came out when
621
she found the flag. However, she says it was a teddy bear with a rainbow sweater. I know the
bear she’s talking about – I used to put the sweater on Bob, my cat. How can I make this story
accurate? Do I need to add a revision (Ellis, 2009)? Or was the initial story already accurate, at
least from my perspective? As Bochner (2007) writes, “our work is not about holding a mirror
to the past through memory work, or about the authenticity of our memories,” but instead about
“how we use traces to make stories that give meaning to our lives now and change who we can
be in the future” (pp. 206–7).3 Although my mom challenged the authenticity of my memory,
the meaning and significance of the event remain the same for me.
Related to the contingencies of storying memory is the ethical issue of semantic contagion –
applying contemporary words or terms to past texts or experiences (Bochner, 1997, 2007;
Hacking, 1995). For example, when I (Derek) try to contextualize my personal narratives of
masculinity and sexuality in male friendships, I quickly learn norms for male-to-male friend-
ship. Men’s friendships have – at least for approximately the past 30 years – been described as
side-by-side relationships, or relationships constituted by doing activities (e.g., playing sports;
see Swain, 1989; Wright, 1982). However, the contemporary notion of bromance – a term used
to describe close and intimate relationships between men, relationships that resemble character-
istics of female-to-female friendships (Gouldner & Strong, 1987; Wright, 1982) – troubles past
descriptions of men/male friendship. As such, if I take late eighteenth century relationships out
of their context/time and label them “bromances,” I engage in semantic contagion by misrepre-
senting these relationships through the use of a term that did not yet exist.
Narrative ownership
Researchers who recruit participants for, and who participate in, narrative projects (e.g., oral his-
tories, life story interviews) often acquire an abundance of information to analyze. For example,
if a researcher conducts ten confidential, one-on-one oral history narratives with survivors of
domestic violence, the researcher has experienced all ten narratives; the individual participants
have not. The researcher may then establish patterns and variances across all of the narratives –
patterns and variances the participants are not able to observe. Even if participants could observe
all ten narratives, they may not be able to spend as much time as the researcher to analyze them.
Further, the researcher may have familiarity with existing research on domestic violence and
maybe even personal experiences with domestic violence – familiarity and experiences that par-
ticipants may not have. The narratives and the time spent doing the research – conducting multi-
ple narrative interviews, analyzing these narratives, finding, reading, and synthesizing research on
domestic violence, and including personal experience with the topic – will inform the research-
er’s interpretation and representation of these narratives.
Given such complexity, should we, as narrative researchers, share our interpretations with par-
ticipants? What if participants disagree with our interpretations of their narratives? What if they
decide that they do not want us to use their narratives in our project?
These issues describe the ethical issue of narrative ownership – or who “wields the final con-
trol and authority” over a narrative’s interpretation and representation (Smythe & Murray, 2000,
p. 324). Narrative ownership can arise when a research participant feels a “sense of betrayal, a
feeling that the researcher has undermined participants’ authority to speak for themselves about
their own experiences” (p. 324). However, as Smythe and Murray (2000) argue, “the purpose
of narrative analysis normally is not to clarify what participants intend to say but, rather, to
interpret the underlying implicit meanings behind what they say” (p. 324). Josselson (2007)
makes a similar observation, noting our reports are often not “‘about’ the participants but ‘about’
the researcher’s meaning making” (p. 549). If participants do “find our writing troubling, it is
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usually our interpretations they object to”; they are “unlikely to find a faithful representation of
themselves,” but a “faithful representation” is not the sole purpose of narrative research (p. 550).
Although we may be relationally ethical by doing our best to involve participants in the inter-
pretation and representation of their narratives, as well as talk about how their narratives may be
used in our projects, we should also recognize the purpose of some narrative projects, which may
be to establish patterns (“themes”) across a variety of narratives or to provide an interpretation
of others’ narratives based on our experience with a topic.
The issue of narrative ownership can also apply to the use of personal narratives (Ellis, 2007).
Narrative ownership means considering which personal narratives we can share and determining
the ways in which these narratives – narratives grounded in our lived experiences – implicate oth-
ers. Must I consult with others about what I can say about myself or about how they treated me?
What if these others are too young to ask permission or unable to provide permission because of
an estranged relationship, death, or a cognitive impairment such as Alzheimer’s disease? What if
consulting with them about my experiences of/with them bring me harm?
Lamott (2012) does say, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If
people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better,” but her advice
is too simple. Many of us have behaved badly by saying or doing something we came to later
regret; fallibility is part of what makes us human. To suggest that all of our bad behaviors are
available for others’ writing makes us uncomfortable. We agree with the need and desire to tell
our personal narratives and to claim ownership of our experiences, but we should also do our
best to acknowledge narrative privilege.
Narrative privilege
Narrative privilege consists of considering who is able write narratives – that is, considering who
has the physical ability to write, the mastery of the norms of writing (e.g., grammar, spelling), and
appropriate resources such as time, money, and access to technologies that facilitate writing (e.g.,
notebooks, computers). Narrative privilege means considering who is allowed to write narratives
and whose voices count – that is, taking into account social identities (e.g., race, gender) and
institutional privileges (e.g., tenure) of sharing narratives. Narrative privilege consists of a per-
son’s ability to access particular narratives, including obtaining them (e.g., purchasing a book or
journal article), understanding the narratives (e.g., issues of illiteracy or familiarity with academic
jargon), and the ability to respond to a narrative.4 Being an ethical narrative researcher means con-
sidering these concerns when developing and sharing narratives; explicitly acknowledging these
concerns – being reflexive about the stories we tell – is an even better, often more credible practice.
For example, I (Tony) have published several essays about my father that I have not shared
with him (Adams, 2006, 2008, 2012). In each essay, I tried to acknowledge narrative privilege by
describing my purpose for representing him in my work, his inability to respond to my narratives
(e.g., his writing skills/training, lack of time, access to a computer), and by trying to seriously
consider how he might respond to what I write about him/us. I also tried to provide compli-
cated yet respectful accounts of my experience and avoid making accusations of fault and blame.
When I first started writing about him/us, I thought I would write only about the times when
my father hurt me. However, when I began writing, I realized that I might have simultaneously
hurt my father with my comments and actions. Instead of blaming him for our problems, which
I initially planned to do, I began to understand our relationship as one in which we both hurt,
and were hurt by, each other.5
Narrative privilege is more complicated if we write about people who may not be able to
respond to our writing. For example, what if my father cannot read my narrative because of
623
illiteracy or a lack of familiarity with academic writing/jargon (e.g., Boylorn, 2013a)? What if
we write about someone who has limited cognitive ability, such as autism (Zibricky, 2014) or
“mental retardation” (Rambo Ronai, 1996)? What if we write about children (e.g., Faulkner,
2012; Jago, 2011) or about people who have died (Ellis, 1993; Goodall, 2006)? These authors take
great care in representing others who do not have the ability to respond to the representation.
They accomplish such care by using reflexivity – that is, describing how they have constructed
the representation, being as transparent as possible about conflicting feelings, making themselves
vulnerable, refusing to fault and blame others, and trying to consider how the represented others
might view these representations. The authors also do not critique the absent others but instead
offer nuanced accounts of contexts, relationships, and cultural issues such as the lived experiences
of race, class, and gender (Boylorn, 2013a), disability and expectations of motherhood (Zibricky,
2014), cohabitation and step-parenting (Jago, 2011), faults in the medical industry and social
pressures of pregnancy (Faulkner, 2012), sibling relationships, loss, and grief (Ellis, 1993), and
family secrecy (Goodall, 2006).
There are other ways to accommodate narrative privilege. For example, we intentionally used
second-person narrative voice in the opening story to this chapter to suggest that either of us may
have experienced the situation. Even though we based the story on one of our experiences with
another person, we did not acquire the person’s permission to tell the story. Given that we also
assume the person could access the story, we disguised the person in particular ways: the person
was not necessarily a colleague or a woman, and the person did not necessarily complete a project
about a father. In addition to such masking, accommodating narrative privilege may include the
use of fiction (e.g., Leavy, 2013), writing under a different name (e.g., Anonymous, 2015; Carter,
2002), or creating composite characters (e.g., Ellis, 2004).6
Accommodating narrative privilege may also mean co-authoring with our participants. For
example, in response to my (Derek’s) struggles with narrative privilege, I have co-authored papers
with friends, an intimate other, and my brother and sister. My sister, Erin, and I recently consid-
ered the politics of our relationship in our collaborative writing endeavors (Pensoneau-Conway,
Bolen, Toyosaki, Rudick, & Bolen, 2014). She grapples with feeling inadequate as a writer, and
I struggle with the speech act of asking her if she’d like to write something – wondering if she
feels like she could say no, given that I am her brother. We often conclude that, despite these
feelings, we are fortunate to accommodate narrative privilege in our ability to story our experi-
ence together.7
Narrative privilege also means considering the use and influence of the representational
medium used for a narrative – that is, not only about the ways in which the form (medium)
influences the content (McLuhan, 1964), but also the access others have to using the form and to
using the form well. For example, in many Western contexts, writing is an exalted skill and the
written text is a privileged medium (Conquergood, 1998; Ong, 1982; Pineau, 2000); the better
writer and reader you are, the more “professional” opportunities you may have. As academics
working with (written) narratives, many of us are trained in the tools of text – a specialized prac-
tice not accessible to everyone. Given such bias, many narrative writers advocate the use of more
accessible language and more accessible representational forums such as blogs (Boylorn, 2013b),
as well as the use of more visual and arts-based narrative work (see Bartleet, 2013; Tomaselli,
Dyll-Myklebust, & van Grootheest, 2013).
Richardson (2000) has argued that the rigid expectations of academic writing constrain how
we write and what we can write about. Extending this critique beyond monographs written for
peer-reviewed journals, consider the institutionalized (con)text of the doctoral dissertation. Dis-
sertations vary according to discipline in ontological assumptions and epistemological approaches –
not to mention differences in scope, length, and expectations of rigor. One expectation about the
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dissertation is that it should be solo-authored (Gale, Speedy, & Wyatt 2010). However, Gale and
Wyatt’s (2008) dissertation was an exploration of relationship in/and collaborative writing. The
body of knowledge to which they sought to add – collaborative writing – necessitated departing
from the conventional, solo-authored dissertation. Although no explicit rule against a co-authored
dissertation existed, their academic institution initially supported the implicit, sole-authored con-
vention in dissertation authorship. The institution eventually altered the standards to make sure
the co-authored dissertation would be rigorous enough to constitute the work of two people.
Reading narratives
To this point, we have considered narrative ethics from the perspective of writers and ethical
issues related to writing narratives. We conclude with an exploration of narrative ethics in read-
ing narratives, the third part of the writer-text-reader tripartite of narrative texts.
In a recent autoethnography seminar course that I (Derek) taught, a group of ten students read,
discussed, and wrote personal narratives in response to the personal narratives and autoethnogra-
phies of others (e.g., classmates, published essays). As the end of the semester approached, I felt
proud of the way students embodied virtues of personal narrative and autoethnography, especially
vulnerability. Weeks of sharing their narratives aloud in class fostered connections unlike any I
had observed in nearly ten years of university teaching.
When the semester neared its end, I attended a department-sponsored poetry event at a local
bar. Arriving early to secure seating with colleagues, we watched the bar fill with students. Many
of the students from my seminar attended the event, and some even participated. Leaving our
seats in the back, my colleagues and I approached the stage and stood with many of the students.
Two students from the seminar course stood next to us – one visibly intoxicated, and one not at
all. In the commotion of the event – performances, cheering, drinking alcohol, loud bar talking –
I briefly observed the two interacting. One touched the face of the other, and the other politely
recoiled. “I am only touching your face because I know you don’t like it,” the student said. The
poetry event ended, and I did not interact with the students again that evening.
During my office hours before the next class meeting, the touched student came into my
office and closed the door. Uneasy, she explained how the other student violated her trust. She
said that she had shared her discomfort with others touching her face in a story she told in the
confidence and safety of our classroom. She felt betrayed that someone used her narrative against
her. My stomach dropped – first for not recognizing the significance of the touch, and once
more for the damage that had been done. I apologized for myself and for the other student. Still
uneasy, I didn’t know what to say to restore her confidence (in our class, personal narrative, and/
or me). All I thought to say verged on blaming her, the victim.
“If you’re interested in continuing to write personal narrative beyond our class,” I said,
“this is always a possible outcome. For all of the good that can come from telling stories,
there’s always the possibility of some bad. This probably won’t be the last time someone
uses your story against you.”
“I understand,” she replied.
We finished the class and the experience never came up again.8 But I think about the expe-
rience often, every time I write.
Once a narrative becomes public and permanent by way of text, authors lose control of where,
when, and how texts may be used and interpreted. With personal narratives (e.g., autobiogra-
phies, memoirs, autoethnographies), this lack of control can feel ever more tenuous, especially
625
if others use personal information against us. As readers of narratives, especially personal narra-
tives, we suggest doing our best to identify the ways in which we interpret the tales of others –
interpretations based on our social identities, interpretive resources, and experiences.
Given the intimacy of personal narratives, we recognize these texts as unique and delicate.
Because of the face touch experience, I (Derek) implore readers to consider the ways they treat
the stories of others because how they treat the stories of others may represent how they treat
others. And if we are our stories, how would we want others to treat us/our stories? I challenge
readers to ponder their relationships with authors and the stories they tell and encourage read-
ers to transcend impersonal readings in favor of being-with authors and stories. Relationships
between readers, writers, and texts are not fixed or finite.
Although personal experiences are not beyond reproach, they should be evaluated in particular
ways, especially if they offer struggles with stigma, resistance, and adversity, document limitations
and failures of the body, and/or aim to “assist a community of fellow sufferers” (Bochner, 2012,
p. 161); many of us write to say, “You’re not alone” and/or “I feel alone.” As such, evaluations
of personal narratives should focus less on the life choices made by the author and more on the
construction of the narrative, the values a narrative promotes, the ways the author tries to establish
connections with readers, the credibility of the narrator and the ways in which the author makes
meaning of past experiences, and the author’s (lack of ) attention to ethical issues such as narrative
ownership and narrative privilege.
Ethically reading narratives means considering the dynamic relationship between authors and
their stories. We may never be able to determine an author’s intent, but we assume authors do
not write with the hope of being harmed. Likewise, when authors render themselves vulnerable
and story their bad behaviors, we should be able to value the reflexivity required to write and
to consider how their stories contribute to different, and sometimes better, ways of living. Even
though we will encounter poorly written stories, stories that lack narrative merit, or stories that
do not attend to the ethical issues we have considered in this chapter, we advocate reading per-
sonal narratives in constructive yet considerate ways.
Conclusion
You end this chapter thinking about a colleague who wants to write about her (still living) abu-
sive mother, another colleague who wants to write about the sexual affairs he has with students,
and another colleague who gathers and analyzes written narratives about domestic abuse. You
think about the ways they could or maybe should write these narratives and about the informa-
tion they probably can and cannot share (e.g., the names of the mother, students, and survivors;
the specific locations and intimate details of the situations). You think about their impeccable
writing skills, awards, and publishing successes, their attempts at owning these experiences, and
how the people they implicate in their stories may not ever know or be able to respond. You
think about the ways readers might respond to their narratives and hope others treat the stories
the way you, the way they (srs and readers) would like to be treated – offering constructive,
considerate criticism. And you hope they consider all of these issues every time they narrate life.
Notes
1 Although many of the ethical considerations we discuss can apply to other narrative forms, such as per-
formance, art, film, and music, given space limitations we foreground written narratives. For important
discussions about the textual bias of scholarship and assumptions about what counts as worthwhile nar-
ratives/academic texts, see Conquergood (1998) and Pineau (1995, 2000).
2 For a discussion of narrative and historical truth, see Spence (1982) and Bochner (2014).
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3 Bochner (2014), Ellis (2009), and Tullis Owen, McRae, Adams, and Vitale (2009) all discuss ethical con-
siderations of working with narratives about the past and limitations and failures of memory.
4 In response to a woman’s magazine that characterized poetry as a “less ‘rigorous’ or ‘serious’ art form”
than prose, Lorde (1984) describes the inherent biases and privileges built into media use and evalua-
tion. Poetry, she writes, is often devalued because it is the most “economical” art form, a medium that
“requires the least physical labor, the least material” and a form that can be “done between shifts, in
the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper . . . A room of one’s own may be a
necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time” (p. 116). Lorde
also suggests poetry has functioned as the “major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women,”
and this connection between a medium (poetry) and its users contributes to the medium’s devaluation;
poetry (and poets) becomes a lazy, secondary, and unworthy form when juxtaposed against supposedly
more rigorous and serious prose. In this example, Lorde addresses issues of narrative privilege when she
considers who has the resources to write in particular ways, as well as which representational forms are
(not) valued.
5 This is my perspective of our relationship; my father may not understand our relationship in this way.
6 Note that these strategies are not always practical or effective. Even if a person uses composite charac-
ters, the people on whom these characters are based may still find themselves in the characters. Or an
article written under a different name may not allow the actual author to be identified. Further, these
masking techniques may be impossible if we write narratives based on our experiences with close,
intimate others. For example, it would be difficult to construct a fabricated, fictional text about my
(Tony’s) father or create composite characters based on family members, especially since I come from
a small family. I could frame my father as the father of one of my research participants, but the direct,
personal ties to my experience – ties that often add to the appeal and credibility of personal narrative –
would be lost.
7 Collaboration can also be affected by the other person’s lack of resources to write. For example, the other
person may not have the time (Irwin, 2006), ability, or knowledge of the dominant/required technological
materials or proficiencies to collaborate. Collaboration may also introduce additional issues of narrative
ownership, especially in decisions about who gets to have the final approval of a manuscript.
8 With the exception of, months later, me asking her if I can write a story about the experience. She quickly
agreed. I tell myself that it is because she, too, believes the story is an important story about telling stories.
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629
AUTHOR INDEX
Aalten, A. 150, 154 Andrews, J. 232, 234

Aboim, S. 174, 176 Andrews, M. 3, 10, 17, 21, 41, 47, 53, 58, 117,
Abrahão, M. 202, 206, 207, 211, 223 118, 124, 126, 236, 273, 275, 276, 279, 284,
Abrantes, P. 209, 212 290, 345, 354, 355, 357, 360, 362, 365, 366,
Abu-Lughod, L. 280, 287, 290 367, 368, 380, 392, 394, 395, 400, 401, 514,
Aceves, J. 205, 206, 211 516, 539, 547, 603
Adair, N. 114 Angel, J. 142
Adams, G. 306 Angrosino, M. 237, 246
Adams, T. 9, 14, 21, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 115, Anker, I. 187
154, 415, 418, 436, 442, 443, 529, 602, 603, 621, Anselm von Feuerbach, R. 536
622, 623, 627, 628, 629 Antikainen, A. 3, 131, 133, 135, 138, 139, 141, 250,
Adler, A. 35, 36, 43, 47 258
Adler, G. 383, 390 Apel, K.-O. 221, 223
Adler, J. 538, 547 Apenszaik, J. 329
Adler, N. 321 Apitzsch, U. 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 187, 216,
Agnes, F. 339, 342 222
Agustín, L. 287, 290 Appadurai, A. 190, 201
Ahmed, S. 190, 200, 369, 379 Apperly, L. 45, 47
Alam, J. 336, 342 Appignanesi, J. 573
Alber, J. 228, 234 Apple, M. 409, 416
Alexander, B. 100, 103, 113 Arad, Y. 329
Alger, H. 44 Arapoglou, E. 201
Alheit, P. 134, 135, 141, 182, 183, 187, 215, 216, Araujo, M. 211
217, 222, 223, 224, 250, 258, 259 Archer, W. 544, 547
Alibhai-Brown, Y. 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, Armstrong, N. 277, 279, 283, 289, 291, 381, 384,
200, 201 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 340, 391, 413, 418, 422,
Allen-Collinson, J. 105, 113, 436, 445 425, 428, 429
Altheide, D. 61, 70 Arnaus, R. 212
Altman, I. 329, 330 Arnot, R. 133, 394, 401
Altrichter, H. 117, 126 Aronowitz, S. 110, 111, 114
Altshuler, M. 329 Aronson, D. 603, 616
Andersen, A. 223, 224 Aspinwall, K. 151, 154
Anderson, A. 259 Atkinson, P. 581, 582
Anderson, B. 332, 342 Atkinson, R. 85, 87
Anderson, L. 103, 104, 105, 111, 114, 148, 154 Atwood, M. 62, 70
Anderson, N. 24, 32 Augustine, Saint 103, 114, 385, 386, 390
631
Author Index
Avila, E. 358, 367 Becker, H. 7, 9, 10, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32, 96, 97,
Aylesworth, G. 560, 567 100, 133, 142, 605, 614, 615
Becker-Blease, K. 585, 591
Badiou, A. 562, 563, 567 Becker-Schmidt, R. 219, 222
Baena, R 201 Beckett, S. 474, 480
Baer, A. 203, 213 Behar, R. 423, 429, 620, 627
Bagnoli, A. 508 Bell, C. 468
Bailey, D. 240, 241, 248 Bell, D. 173, 176
Bajos, N. 380 Bell, J. 390
Bakan, D. 38, 47 Bell, K. 214, 584, 591
Baker, M. 392, 401 Bell, L. 584, 592
Bakhtin, M. 64, 70, 372, 379, 480, 538, 547, 566, Bell, S. 370, 379
567, 568 Bellah, R. 444
Balán, J. 203, 206, 211 Bem, M. 319, 328, 329
Baldwin, C. 415, 536, 539, 542, 547 Bennett, W. 538, 547
Bales, R. 173, 177 Bentham, M. 14, 21
Ball, M. 26, 32, 85, 87, 104, 114, 119, 125, 126, Benz, W. 328, 329
133, 142 Berg, A. 93, 100
Ballinger, R. 527, 529 Berger, B. 169, 174
Baltes, P. 177 Berger, H. 495, 503
Bamberg , M. 157, 165, 228, 229, 234, 235, 285, Berger, P. 28, 32, 134, 142, 214, 222
291, 358, 361, 367 Bergin, J. 411, 416
Banister, P. 490, 491 Bergum, V. 424, 425, 428, 429, 438, 439, 442, 443,
Banks, A. 68, 70 461
Banks, C. 316 Berkin, G. 303
Banks, S. 68, 70 Bernadette, B. 359
Bansel, P. 506, 508, 516 Bernays, E. 10, 14
Bardige, B. 144 Bernstein, B. 119, 125, 126
Bark, J. 549 Bertaux, D. 26, 31, 32, 76, 87, 133, 142, 149, 151,
Barnett, T. 370, 379 154, 188, 203, 206, 211, 216, 222, 226, 234
Barone, S. 538, 547 Bérubé, M. 237, 243, 246
Baronne, T. 66, 67, 68, 69 Beuthin, R. 588, 589, 590, 591
Barrett, A. 52, 58 Bhatt, C. 334, 342
Barrett, S. 23, 32 Bhattacharya, K. 583, 584, 586, 591
Barringer, T. 393, 401 Bhattacharya, N. 341, 584, 586
Barthes, R. 67, 103, 114, 372, 379, 522, 537, 538, Bhavnani, K. 463, 465, 468
540, 542, 547, 556, 567 Bialowitz, P. 329
Bartleet, B-L. 624, 627 Biesta, G. 21, 114, 118, 126
Barton, L. 456, 583, 584, 591 Billet, S. 259
Bartram, C. 603 Bines, H. 447, 456
Basch, L. 188 Bingel, I. 187
Bascia, N. 78, 87 Birch, M. 592
Basilico, M. 379 Bjerén, G. 133, 142
Basso, K. 426, 429 Björkenheim, J. 230, 234
Basu, A. 352, 354 Black, P. 329
Bateson, G. 57, 58 Blackwood, E. 280, 291
Bathmaker, A. 234, 416, 469, 568 Blanchette, S. 235
Battiste, M. 607, 615 Blatt, T. 329
Baudrillard, J. 456 Blaxter, L. 85, 87
Baughman, K 75, 87 Blee, K. 438, 443
Bauman, Z. 118, 126, 503 Bloch, E. 289, 291
Baviskar, B. 352, 354 Bloch, G. 51, 58
Baxen, J. 52, 58 Bloom, H. 548
Bazerman, C. 565, 567 Bloom, P. 448, 456
Bean, J. 598, 603 Bloomfield, K. 306, 315
Beck, U. 134, 142 Bloxham, D. 329
Becker, G. 606, 614, 615 Bluck, S. 34, 43, 46, 47
632
Author Index
Blum Kulka, S. 452, 456 Brooks, G. 456

Blumer, H. 27, 33, 132, 134, 142, 251, 258 Brooks, M. 436
Blythe, R. 26 Brooks, P. 542, 548
Boal, A. 495, 504 Brooks, R. 91, 92
Boardman, T. 537, 547 Brown, J. 588, 591
Bochner, A. 60, 61, 70, 85, 87, 104, 114, 147, 154, Brown, S. 228, 230, 234, 359, 367
437, 439, 442, 443, 466, 468, 493, 494, 504, 603, Broyard, A. 471, 472, 473, 474, 478, 479, 480
612, 615, 619, 622, 626, 627, 629 Bruder, F. 323, 328, 329
Boelhower, W. 191, 201 Brugger, E. 141
Bogdan, R. 26, 32, 322, 484, 491 Brugger, P. 544, 547
Bohlmeijer, E. 165, 548 Bruner, J. 34, 47, 49, 51, 58, 62, 64, 67, 70, 104,
Bohnenkamp, B. 174, 176 114, 119, 126, 207, 217, 222, 230, 234, 260, 264,
Boje, D. 226, 234, 537, 538, 539, 542, 543, 545, 266, 269, 359, 367, 405, 416, 552, 567, 603, 616,
546, 547 619, 628
Bolen, D. 415, 618, 624, 628, 629 Bryman, A. 594, 603
Bolívar, A. 140, 202, 203, 204, 206, 208, 210, 211, Buber, M 413, 418, 419, 422, 428, 429, 468, 561
212 Buck, K. 548
Bolton, D. 315 Buckholdt, D. 158, 165
Booker, C. 6, 10, 409, 416 Bude, H. 167, 168, 176
Boos, F. 400 Budtz, C. 235
Boos, W. 400 Bueno, B. 207, 211
Booth, S. 117, 127 Bullough, R. 26, 32, 69, 70, 74, 75, 82, 87
Bornat, J. 187 Bunn, G. 491
Boser, S. 582, 583, 591 Bunting, B. 306, 315
Bosia, M. 288, 291 Burbules, N. 603, 616
Bosk, C. 583, 584, 591 Burgess, M. 316
Botkin, J. 604 Burke, D. 540, 548
Bottini, G. 544, 549 Burman, E. 491
Bourdieu, P 103, 104, 114, 175, 176, 217, 218, 222, Burnell, K. 538, 548
251, 258, 284, 354, 383, 390, 408, 416, 480 Burnett, J. 170, 176
Bourriaud, N. 575, 576, 579 Burton, A. 393, 396, 401, 402
Boylorn, R. 409, 410, 416, 436, 443, 518, 529, 619, Buruma, I. 98, 101
624, 628 Buscaglia, L. 242, 247
Brackett, C. 580 Bush, G. 4,
Bragança, I. 211 Butler, J. 62, 70, 115, 242, 247, 343, 359, 367, 372,
Braidotti, R. 481, 488, 491 379, 409, 416
Brang, D. 459 Butt, R. 8, 78
Branigan, T. 14, 21 Byers, M. 521, 528, 529
Brannen, J. 433, 436
Brassett, J. 453, 454 Cacciattolo, M. 447, 456
Bratich, J. 615 Caine, V. 413, 418, 424, 425, 426, 428, 429
Braungart, R 169, 174, 176 Cairn, S. 316
Breckner, R. 180, 181, 187 Cairns, E. 315, 316
Breidlid, A. 55, 57, 58 Callaghan, J. 394, 401
Breines, W. 393, 400, 401 Calle-Gruber, M. 106, 114
Bremond, C. 240, 241, 246 Cameron, D. 14, 15, 125
Bridges, D. 68, 70, 156, 512 Camili, G. 429
Brill, S. 582, 591 Campbell, F. 482, 544, 548
Britzman, D. 452, 456 Cancalon, E. 246
Brockmeier, J. 227, 228, 230, 234, 235 Candappa, R. 191, 196, 197, 198, 201
Brodber, E. 358, 367 Capps, L. 357, 367, 538, 549
Brody, H. 618, 619, 628 Caputo, J. 439, 493
Bron, A. 141, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256, Carbaugh, D. 227, 228, 234, 235
257, 258, 259 Carlson, J. 603
Bronner, S. 384, 390 Carr, C. 377, 379
Bron-Wojciechowska, A. 141 Carr, D. 260, 269
Brooke-Rose, C. 540, 545, 547, 548 Carr, L. 269, 462
633
Author Index
Carr, W. 416 Connelly, F. 63, 70, 149, 154, 212, 228, 235, 418,
Carrington, V. 449, 456 419, 420, 421, 423, 426, 427, 429, 542, 548, 560,
Carson, A. 239, 247 595, 596, 597, 598, 599, 602, 603
Carter, S. 88, 624, 628 Conquergood, D. 611, 615, 624, 626, 628
Carver, R. 106, 114 Conrad, J. 35, 50, 58
Casey, K. 26, 32, 66, 70 Cook, K. 525, 529
Cash, M. 580 Cook, R. 197, 201
Caspi, A. 48 Cooke, B. 367
Castañeda, C. 200 Corbin, J. 185, 189, 585, 591, 620, 628
Castells, M. 125, 126, 135, 142, 152, 154, 286, 291 Córdoba, M. 194, 301
Castillo, A. 194, 201 Cordova, V. 207, 211
Catani, D. 211 Cornwell, C. 24, 32
Cauldwell, C. 14, 21 Corsten, M. 167, 168, 175, 176
Cedar, E. 381, 390 Cortazzi, M. 117, 126
Cedar, P. 381, 390 Cory, D. 297, 303
Chakrabarty, D. 334, 342 Coser, L. 494, 504
Chalam, K. 334, 343 Cosslett, T. 469
Chamberlayne, P. 180, 187 Costa, P. 42, 48
Chambliss, W. 26, 32 Cotterill, P. 85, 87
Chamlian, H. 211 Coupland, J. 456
Chang, H. 104, 114 Couser, G. 238, 243, 246, 247
Chapman, R. 398, 402, 456 Cree, V. 358, 367
Charlton, J. 246, 247 Crick, M. 394, 402, 504
Charmaz, C. 583, 591 Crimp, D. 371, 372, 373, 379
Charmaz, K. 255, 259 Cripps, S. 401
Charon, R. 425, 428, 429, 430 Cross, B. 52, 58
Chase, S. 117, 126, 227, 228, 235, 596, 599, 600, Crossley, M. 512, 516
602, 603 Crotty, M. 565, 566, 567
Chatham-Carpenter, A. 620, 628 Crow, G. 584, 586, 591
Chauncey, G. 279, 302, 303 Crow, N. 87
Chernoglazova, R. 329 Cruikshank, J. 142
Childs, S. 345, 354 Cuff, E. 28, 32
Choi, P. 495, 504 Cummings, D. 13, 21
Christians, C. 438, 443, 605, 606, 607, 610, 614, 615 Curren, T. 492
Christiansen, H. 604 Currier, A. 438, 443
Cisneros, C. 210, 211 Czarniawska, B. 225, 226, 228, 231, 233, 234, 235
Cixous, H. 106, 114
Clandinin, D. 63, 70, 118, 126, 149, 154, 157, 165, Dabakis, M. 384, 390
212, 228, 235, 262, 269, 413, 418, 419, 420, 421, Dahlerup, D. 352, 354
422, 423, 424, 425, 426, 427, 429, 430, 516, 542, Dailey. S. 628
548, 592, 595, 596, 597, 598, 599, 560, 602, 603, Dallery, A. 443
604, 628 Dan, A. 435
Clark, A. 580 Daniels, J. 491
Clarke, B. 342, 533 Dannefer, D. 31, 32, 135, 142
Clarke, C. 353, 354 Dash, L. 603, 615, 616
Clavering, E. 485, 491, 492 Daumer, G. 536
Clemens, R. 595, 596, 598, 600, 604 Dausien, B. 181, 184, 187, 188, 215, 217, 222, 223
Clements, C. 584 Davidson, S. 325, 326, 329
Clough, P. 4, 56, 66, 70, 86, 87, 507, 510, 516, 523, Davies, B. 518, 523, 524, 529
529 Davies, K. 580
Coachworth, D. 398, 400, 402 Davis, J. 284, 291, 367
Coffey, A. 68, 69, 70, 72, 85, 87 Davis, L. 246, 247, 492
Cole, P. 548, 586, 592 Davis, M. 368, 380, 435, 443
Coleman, P. 548 Davis, R. 191, 201
Colwell, C. 558, 567 Day Sclater, S. 279, 603
Comte, A. 170, 171, 172 Day, R. 48
Connell, R. 507, 516 De Sousa Santos, B. 152, 154
634
Author Index
De St. Aubin, E. 38, 47, 48, 115 Duncum, P. 345, 354

Deakin, N. 378, 402 Durán, J. 193, 201
Delamont, S. 462, 463, 466, 468, 604 Duster, T. 584, 591
Delbo, C. 440, 444 Dutton, J. 445
Deleuze, G. 116, 117, 126, 127, 491, 560, 561, 562 Dybbroe, B. 214, 222, 223
Dellinger, K. 303, 304 Dylan, B. 12, 108, 114
DeMartini, J. 169, 174 Dyll-Myklebust, L. 624, 629
DeMille, C. 93
Demjanjuk, J. 318, 328 Eakin, P. 201
Denicolo, P. 114 Ebaugh, H. 583, 591
Dennett, D. 537, 548 Ebdon, L. 462, 468
Denney, R. 177 Edmonds, C. 525, 529
Denning, S. 228, 234, 235 Edmunds, J. 169, 174, 177
Denscombe, M. 79, 85, 87 Edström, E. 258, 259
Denshire, S. 147, 148, 154 Edwards, R. 359, 367, 436, 444
Denzin, N. 16, 17, 18, 21, 29, 32, 59, 61, 66, 67, 70, Ehrenburg, I. 329
71, 77, 85, 90, 97, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, Einwohner, R. 435, 444
110, 112, 114, 115, 126, 131, 134, 142, 144, 147, Eisenmenger, W. 549
152, 154, 155, 235, 266, 269, 409, 410, 415, 416, Eisenstadt, S. 168, 170, 171, 174, 175, 177
438, 443, 444, 447, 448, 456, 468, 504, 538, 548, Elam, Y. 495, 504
552, 567, 571, 579, 604, 605, 606, 608, 613, 615, Elbaz, F. 75, 87, 104, 114, 418, 429
616, 627, 629 Elbaz-Luwisch, F. 150, 154
Derrida, J. 13, 202, 538, 547, 548, 554, 555, 556, Elder, G. 174, 177
557, 567, 568 Elgqvist-Saltzman, I. 133, 142
Dershowitz, A. 539, 548 Elias, N. 140, 145, 146, 147, 152, 154, 155, 182
Devine-Wright, P. 306, 316 Ellis, C. 60, 70, 71, 85, 87, 104, 105, 113, 114, 115,
Dewey, J. 418, 419, 422, 426, 428, 429 147, 154, 409, 413, 431, 433, 435, 437, 438, 439,
Diamond, A. 48, 115 443, 444, 445, 461, 466, 468, 523, 529, 578, 579,
Diamond, L. 298, 303 582, 584, 588, 589, 591, 595, 602, 603, 605, 611,
Dickey, J. 534 612, 615, 619, 620, 622, 623, 624, 627, 628, 629
Dickstein, S. 548 Elmore, P. 429
Didion, J. 7, 37, 47, 109, 296, 303 Emerson, R. 44, 547
Dietz, T. 235 Empson, W. 68, 70
Diezinger, A. 187 Engels, F. 397, 553, 568
Dilley, R. 53, 58 Ensler, E. 287, 291
Dillner, J. 603 Epstein, S. 376, 379
Dingwall, R. 605, 615 Epston, D. 512, 517
Dionne, E. 93, 101 Erben, M. 26, 32, 64, 69, 70, 71, 77, 87, 104, 114
Diversi, M. 147, 154 Erikson, E. 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 46, 47, 118
Doezema, J. 287, 291 Erikson, K. 237, 247
Dollard, J. 25, 32 Escolano, A. Hernández, J. 208, 211
Domingo, J. 202, 208, 211 Esin, C. 368, 372, 379, 380
Dominicé, P. 141, 208 Esler, A. 167, 170, 177
Döring, T. 201 Estefan, A. 429
Dorling, D. 285, 291 Etherington, K. 582, 583, 584, 591
Dossetor, J. 424, 425, 428, 429, 438, 439, 442, 443 Etter-Lewis, G. 584, 591
Dowding, K. 290, 291 Ettinger, E. 382, 383, 384, 389, 390
Downs, Y. 409, 414, 416, 457, 460, 468 Ewans, R. 269
Doyal, L. 370, 379 Eyerman, R. 175, 177
Driscoll, C. 518, 519, 521, 522, 526, 527, 529
Du Toit, P. 306, 316 Fahie, D. 439, 444
Duangwises, N. 290, 291 Faris, R. 27, 32
Dubeau, M. 269 Farmer, P. 370, 379
Dubois-Arber, F. 380 Fathi, M. 379
Duckett, P. 491 Faulkner, S. 624, 628
Dudek, K. 141, 225, 232, 234, 235, 236 Fay, M. 306, 316
Dulczewski, Z. 142 Featherstone, H. 237, 247
635
Author Index
Feldman, A. 126 Fravel, D. 548

Feldman, M. 538, 547 Freeman, M. 30, 31, 32, 42, 47, 61, 70, 163, 165,
Felman, S. 445 228, 230, 235, 243, 247, 315, 316, 359, 364, 367,
Fenby-Hulse, K. 571, 579 443, 494
Fenge, L. 580 Freire, P. 117, 127, 208, 583
Fenwick, T. 256, 259 Freud, S. 35, 36, 159
Ferguson, N. 278, 305, 306, 308, 310, 312, 313, Frey, J. 79, 87
315, 316, 580 Freyd, J. 385, 591
Ferrarotti, F. 203, 211 Friedman, L. 480
Ferrer, V. 212 Frimer, J. 43, 48
Ferry, F. 315 Frisby, D. 172, 177
Field, J. 256, 259 Frisch, M. 436, 444
Field, S. 433, 444 Fritz, E. 52, 59
Fiese, B. H. 538, 548 Fromm-Reichmann, F. 238, 247
Finch, J. 467, 468 Frost, P. J. 445
Fine, M. 30, 32, 146, 154, 449, 456 Frye, N. 42, 47
Finger, M. 209, 212 Fryer, E. 504
Finkin, M. 603, 616 Fuchs, W.-H. 180, 188
Finnegan, F. 250, 258, 259 Fu-Kiau, K. 495, 497, 503, 504
Fischer, W. 149, 150, 154 Fürstenau, S. 181, 188
Fischer-Rosenthal, W. 181, 183, 185, 188 Furth, G. 549
Fisher, P. 485, 492, 549
Fisher, R. 456 Gabriel, Y. 228, 235
Fisher, W. 619, 628 Gadamer, H. 269
Fitzclarence, L. 80, 87 Gagnon, A. 333, 342
Fitzgerald, M. 593, 597, 604 Gale, K. 57, 58, 59, 625, 628
Fivush, R. 43, 47, 538, 549 Gallese, V. 269, 262
Flanaghan, R. 543, 546 Gandhi, I. 334
Flick, U. 579 Gannon, S. 61, 70, 409, 414, 416, 418, 519, 523,
Fliesser, C. 78, 87 524, 528, 529
Floud, P. 394, 396, 397, 399, 400, 402 Garcia, A. 376, 379
Fludernik, M. 228, 234 Gardina, M. 504
Fluehr-Lobban, C. 606, 611, 615 Garfinkel, H. 157, 165, 166
Flynn, T. 393, 401 Garland-Thomson, R. 247, 488, 491
Flyvbjerg, B. 480 Garro, L. 548
Fodor, M. 201 Gedi, N. 495, 504
Foer, J. 541, 548 Geer, B. 142
Fog, K. 228, 235 Geertz, C. 453, 456
Fogassi, I. 269 Gehlert, S. 604
Foley, J. 48 Gemignani, M. 584, 591
Folkenflik, R. 103, 114, 191, 192, 201, 416 Genette, G. 265, 269
Foner, N. 359, 367 Gentry, M. 114
Fontana, F. 79, 87 Georgakopoulou, A. 228, 234, 235
Formenti, L. 269 George, A. 397, 401
Fortier, A.-M. 200 Gerbaudo, P. 286, 291
Foster, J. 303 Gergen, K. 29, 33, 42, 47, 104, 114, 234, 573, 578
Fournillier, J. 414, 493, 495, 497, 499, 500, 501, Gershkovich, I. 48
502, 504 Gewirtz, P. 548
Fouron, G. 358, 367 Giardina, M. 615, 627
Fox, C. 56 Gibson, G. 260, 269
Fox, M. 280 Giddens, A. 43, 47, 106, 114, 118, 127, 134, 142
France, A. 168, 177 Gill, S. 106, 114, 118, 124, 127
Frank, A. 242, 246, 247, 370, 379, 414, 470, 473, Gillam, L. 435, 444, 460, 468, 578, 579, 593
476, 478, 479, 480, 566, 568, 619, 628 Gillborn, D. 337, 366
Franklin, B. 44, 230 Gilleard, C. 174, 177
Franzen, J. 237, 247 Gilligan, C. 438, 444
Fraser, R. 106, 107, 114, 205, 211 Gilroy, P. 199, 201
636
Author Index
Gilzean, N. 549 Grumet, M. 77, 87, 414, 416

Ginsberg, B. 328, 329 Guattari, F. 116, 117, 126, 127, 491, 575
Ginsberg, P. 608, 616 Guba, E. 85, 606, 616
Ginsburg, F. 246, 247 Gubrium, J. 140, 156, 157, 159, 163, 165, 166, 188,
Giroux, H. 89, 101, 110, 111, 114, 367 281, 291, 367, 460, 468, 538, 548, 591
Gitelman, Z. 89, 101, 110, 111, 114, 367 Guibernau, M. 342
Giuffre, P. 303, 304 Guillemin, M. 435, 444, 460, 468, 478, 579, 593,
Giummarra, M. 544, 547 603
Glaser, B. 255, 259 Guitierrez Rodriguez, E. 181, 188
Glassner, B. 232, 235 Gültekin, N. 181, 184, 188
Glazer, N. 255, 259 Gunsalus, C. 594, 603, 606, 614, 616
Glick Schiller, N. 177, 181, 188, 189, 358, 367 Guo, J. 43, 48
Gluck, S. 26, 32, 445 Gusdorf, G. 103, 114, 190, 201
Goblirsch, M. 149, 150, 154
Goeller, A. 191, 201 Haan, N. 444
Goffman, E. 165, 238 Haas, E. 187
Goldman, A. 104, 114 Habermas, J. 34, 43, 46, 47, 131, 142, 165, 221,
Goldwyn, S. 93, 100 223, 560, 562, 568
Gonick, M. 518, 529 Hacking, I. 622, 628
González-López, G. 435, 438, 444 Haden, C. 43, 47
González-Monteagudo, J. 208, 212 Hadfield, L. 367
Goodall, H. 619, 624, 628 Haggerty, K. 593, 603, 605, 606, 614, 615, 616
Goodley, D. 414, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487, Hagoel, L. 148, 154
488, 489, 490, 491, 492 Haith, M. 45, 48
Goodson, I. F. 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 21, 22, 23, Halas, E. 132, 142
26, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 47, 52, 54, 58, Halbertal, T. 41, 47
59, 60, 64, 70, 72, 75, 78, 79, 81, 87, 90, 98, 101, Halbwachs, M. 494, 504
104, 106, 114, 117, 118, 119, 124, 125, 126, 127, Hall, S. 346, 354, 373, 379
131, 133, 134, 141, 142, 393, 400, 402, 405, 409, Halley, J. 529
410, 416, 447, 448, 456, 457, 462, 464, 466, 468, Halse, C. 379, 506, 508, 516, 605
494, 495, 497, 504, 516, 595, 596, 597, 598, 599, Hamber, B. 313, 316, 317
601, 604 Hamilton, J. 306, 317
Goodwin, J. 369, 379 Hammack, P. 34, 42, 43, 47
Gopal Jayal, N. 352, 379 Hammersley, M. 33, 77, 87, 88, 581, 592, 602, 603,
Gorall, D. 548 605, 606
Gorbovitskii, G. 320 Hampl, P. 63, 70
Gordon, T. 113, 142 Handler, E. 477, 478, 480, 486
Gorman, W. 424, 429 Haney, C. 308, 316
Gottschall, J. 619, 628 Hanisch, C. 375, 379
Goulbourne, H. 358, 367 Hansson, M. 595, 603
Gouldner, H. 622, 628 Harber, C. 51, 59
Goulet, L. 604 Harding, S. 232, 235
Graham, B. 317 Hardy, B. 616, 628
Gramsci, A. 373 Hardy, M. 174, 177
Graven, M. 52, 58 Hardy, T. 553, 554, 568
Greaves, W. 546, 548 Hargreaves, A. 26, 33, 117, 127
Green, J. 429 Harinen, P. 135, 141
Greene, M. 212 Harnett. P. 234, 416, 469, 568
Greenhalgh, T. 516 Harper, M. 586, 592
Greenough, W. 603, 616 Harré, R. 230, 364, 577, 579
Greenspan, H. 436, 444, 445, 619, 628 Harrison, B. 154, 368, 380, 568
Griffin, T. 246, 247 Harvey, D. 29, 33, 90, 101, 486, 492
Griffiths, M. 61, 70 Harvey, J. 114
Grillo, R. 358, 367 Hassim, S. 352, 354
Groh, K. 234 Hatch, J. 69, 70, 71, 127
Grotevant, H. D. 548 Haug, F. 80, 88
Grounds, A. 316 Hauser, K. 536, 537, 538, 548, 549
637
Author Index
Hay, I. 581, 592, 593, 603 Huber, J. 104, 115

Hayano, D. 104, 115 Huber, M. 413, 418, 422, 423, 425, 426, 429
Hayler, M. 9, 102, 109, 111, 115, 119, 127 Huberman, M. 104, 115
Hazlett, J. 176, 177 Huddy, L. 314, 316
Heaney, S. 552, 561, 568 Hudis, P. 390
Hearing, T. 575, 578, 579, 580 Huggan, G. 191, 201
Hearne, B. 480 Huisman, K. 435, 436, 445
Heath, S. 591 Hummrich, M. 181, 188
Hedgecoe, A. 605, 616 Hunt, N. 548
Heidegger, M. 120, 127, 167, 385, 386, 387, 390, Huotelin, H. 141, 258
555, 557, 568, 580 Hurwitz, B. 443, 516
Heinen, S. 228, 235 Hyde, L. 476, 480
Heirich, M. 308, 316 Hyden, L.-C. 368, 380, 547
Held, V. 438, 444 Hyden, M. 368, 380
Helgesson, G. 603
Hendry, J. 459, 468 Iaccoca, L. 230
Heritage, J. 157, 166 Iacobini, M. 262, 269
Herman, D. 32, 59, 303 Iacovino, R. 333, 342
Hermerén, G. 254, 259 Inden, R. 194, 337, 342, 521
Hernández, F. 212, 208 Ingraham, C. 451, 456
Hernandez, J. 208, 211 Inhorn, M. 280, 291
Hernandez, K. 114 Inowlocki, L. 179, 180, 181, 185, 187, 188
Herzog, W. 538, 540, 548, 549 Iosifides, T. 150, 154
Heshusius, L. 477, 478, 479, 480 Iphofen, R. 594, 603
Hess, S. 165, 181, 188 Irani, K. 280, 291
Hesse-Biber, S. 165, 594, 603 Iriye, M. 603
Higgs, P. 174, 177 Irwin, K. 627, 628
High, S. 435, 436, 444 Israel, M. 581, 592, 593, 603, 616
Himanen, P. 135, 142
Hinchman, L. 391 Jablonski, S. 572, 579
Hinchman, S. 391 Jacenyik-Trawoger, C. 517
Hitchcock, G. 510 Jaeger, H. 170, 177
Hodges, N. 436, 444 Jaffrelot, C. 334, 342
Hoff, A. 177 Jago, B. 624, 628
Hoffmaster, C. 591 Jain, S. 244, 246, 247, 371, 379
Hoikkala, T. 138, 139, 142 Jakobsen, J. 295, 303
Holbrook, A. 517 Jameison, R. 306, 316
Holcombe, S. 435, 443 Järvinen, M. 165, 554, 555, 556, 568
Hollamby, T. 401 Jasper, J. 379
Holloway, W. 548, 603 Jaspers, K. 308, 316
Holly, M. 82, 88 Jefferson, T. 598, 603
Hollywood, I. 316 Jegatheesan, B. 606, 617
Holman Jones, S. 60, 71, 105, 113, 114, 115, 518, Jelin, E. 203, 211
523, 529, 627, 629 Jessop, J. 592
Holstein, J. 140, 156, 157, 158, 161, 166, 281, 291, Jimenez Laux, R. 181, 188
367, 460, 468, 538, 548, 591 Jin, L. 117, 126
Homewood, J. 517 Joannou, M. 62, 71
Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. 358, 367 Jobaris, R. 549
Honey, A. 605, 616 Jogiches, L. 578, 382, 383, 385, 388, 389, 390
Honner, A. 188 Jokhan, M. 358, 367
Hooks, B. 501, 504 Jönsson, S. 230, 235
Hopkins, G. 561, 567, 568 Joreen, E. 379
Horrocks, C. 547, 549 Josselson, R. 47, 48, 49, 59, 84, 88, 582, 585, 591,
Horsdal, M. 141, 260, 261, 266, 267, 269 595, 599, 600, 601, 602, 603, 604, 622, 628
Houston, C. 333, 342 Judt, T. 328, 330
Houtsonen, J. 141, 258 Juhasz, A. 181, 188
Howard, J. 291, 608, 616 Jung, C. 35, 36
638
Author Index
Jureit, U. 168, 170, 171, 175, 177 Koren, I. 41, 47

Jyrkilä, F. 143 Korte, W. 549
Koselleck, R. 170, 171, 177
Kafalenos, E. 540, 548 Kost, R. 604
Kajri, M. 352, 355 Kostera, M. 236
Kalekin-Fishman, D. 140, 148, 154 Kothari, U. 362, 367
Kalof, L. 232, 235 Kotre, J. 38, 47
Kamata, S. 237, 247 Kreigel, L. 393, 402
Kanov, J. M. 432, 433, 435 Kreiswirth, M. 537, 548
Kansteiner, W. 494, 504 Krentz, C. 604
Karakayali, J. 181, 188 Kreps, B. 379
Karat, B. 354 Kress, G. 119, 127
Karlberg, M. 582, 592 Kridel, C. 26, 32, 33, 70, 71, 87
Karvinen-Niinikoski, S. 230, 234 Kriegel, A. 169, 170, 171, 172, 177
Katz, J. 158, 166 Kristeva, J. 387, 390
Kauffman, L. 338 Kubler, G. 574, 580
Kaufmann, W. 418, 419, 429, 504 Kudva, N. 352, 355
Kauppila, J. 135, 138, 141, 142, 258 Kuhn, T. 308, 316
Kaye, J. 456 Kuncel, N. 48
Kazmierska, K. 227, 229, 235 Kunow, R. 191, 193, 201
Kealey, G. 333, 342 Kuortti, J. 201
Kearney, P. 246, 247 Kushner, T. 303, 304
Kearon, P. 379 Kwon, H. 508, 514, 516
Keen, M. 146, 148, 155 Kynaston, D. 397, 402
Kegan, R. 106, 115
Kempf, A. 181, 188 Labov, W. 465, 568
Kenny, M. 345, 354 Lacapra, D. 247
Kenyon, G. 165, 548 Lahelma, E. 142
Kerby, A. 260, 262, 269 Lakatos, I. 140, 145, 146, 152, 155
Kertzer, D. 168, 169, 174, 177 Lakoff, G. 166, 269
Kessel, F. 248 Lalonde, R. 368
Khushu-Lahiri, R. 191, 201 Lamott, A. 623, 628
King, A. 545, 548 Lamura, G. 177
King, E. 372, 380 Lancaster, R. 303, 304
Kingsley, J. 246, 247 Land, R. 119, 127
Kinnvall, C. 331, 334, 336, 342 Landman, T. 480
Kitzer, H. 187 Landow, G. 541, 548
Klandermans, B. 152, 155, 313, 317 Landsman, G. 240, 241, 244, 245, 246, 247, 327
Klein, S. 237, 247, 371, 376, 379, 380 Lang, B. 440, 445
Kleinman, A. 371, 376, 379, 380, 470, 479, 480 Langness, L. 484, 492
Klenovs, T. 223 Lapadat, J. 552, 568
Klockars, C. 26, 33 Larochelle, G. 562, 568
Kluge, A. 214, 223 Larrosa, J. 210, 212
Knapp, M. 443 Larsen, K. 214, 217, 223
Knipscheer, S. 548 Lasch, C. 16, 22, 159, 166
Knöbl, W. 170, 173, 177 Laschitza, A. 390, 483
Knorr-Cetina, K. 153, 155 Laslett, P. 169, 177
Knowles, G. 87 Lather, P. 147, 459, 463, 468, 469
Knox, C. 306, 316 Latour, B. 153, 155, 546, 548
Kohli, G. 223 Laub, D. 439, 445
Kohli, H. 191, 198, 199, 200, 201, 223 Law, J. 153, 155, 541, 543, 544, 548
Kohli, M. 149, 154, 176, 189 Lawthom, R. 141, 481, 483, 490, 491, 492
Kolb, D. 545, 548 Le Guin, U. 560, 568
Kolodner, E. 334, 343 Leal-McBride, C. 504
Komonen, K. 133, 135, 141 Leal-McBride, M. 504
Kontos, M. 181, 187 Leap, W. 456, 457
Koonce, G. 166 Leavy, P. 165, 570, 580, 624, 627, 628
639
Author Index
Lechner, E. 209, 212 Lund, D. 155

Lee, T. 549 Lunt, N. 508, 509, 516
Leeds-Hurwitz, W. 443 Lury, C. 469
Leftwich, A. 393, 398, 401, 402 Lüscher, K. 167, 168, 170, 174, 177
Leggo, C. 549 Lustiger, A. 329, 330
Leiblich, A. 88 Lutchman, J. 354
Leite, A. 212 Luther, M. 37
Leithäuser, T. 219, 220, 221, 223 Lutz, H. 181, 182, 184, 186, 188
Leitner, A. 541, 548 Lyotard, J. 50, 134, 142, 560, 562, 568
Lejeune, P. 103, 115, 192
Lenggenhager, B. 544, 547 Maane, E. 371, 380
Lenzi, G. 269 Mac Ginty, R. 306, 316
Letherby, G. 85, 87 Macdonald, M. 133, 142
Lev, M. 322, 323, 324, 330 Machalek, R. 308, 309, 317
Levine, H. 485, 492 Macintyre, A. 99, 101, 420, 421, 429, 537, 548
Levitas, R. 289, 291 Mackie, V. 290, 291
Levitt, P. 358, 367 MacLure, M. 106, 115
Levitz, M. 246, 247 Macmurray, J. 418, 419, 422, 428, 429
Lewin, E. 456, 458 MacNair, R. 310, 316
Lewin, K. 117 Maddrell, A. 587, 592
Lewis, M. 456 Madison, S. 605, 616
Lewis, O. 204, 205, 206, 211, 212 Maeers, M. 604
Lichtman, M. 580 Maitlis, S. 445
Liddle, J. 545, 555 Maiwald, K.-O. 187, 188
Lieblich, A. 47, 48, 88, 188, 603 Malec, C. 489, 492
Lilius, J. 445 Manathunga, C. 517
Limoges, C. 154 Manczak, E. 34, 48
Lincoln, Y. 29, 32, 59, 61, 66, 67, 70, 71, 85, 87, 88, Mannheim, K. 135, 140, 167, 168, 172, 173, 174,
107, 114, 115, 126, 144, 152, 154, 155, 235, 410, 176, 177, 178
416, 443, 447, 448, 456, 468, 504, 512, 571, 579, Mannur, A. 190, 191, 192, 197, 201
604, 606, 615, 616 Mansfield, E. 48, 115
Linde, C. 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 235, 426, 429, Manzanas, A. 201
538, 548 Marcia, J. 36, 47, 280
Lindemann Nelson, H. 426, 429 Marcus, L. 103, 107, 115, 218
Lindsay, A. 552, 568 Margalit, A. 495, 499, 504
Linna, V. 136, 142 Marías, J. 170, 177, 208, 212
Littleton, K. 232, 233, 236 Marinas, J. 203, 204, 212
Littré, E. 170 Marjinsky, K. 548
Lofland, J. 309, 316 Marrus, M. 330
Logan, R. 41, 48 Marsal, J. 203, 206, 212, 213
Longmore, P. 483, 492 Marshman, D. 580
Lopes, A. 209, 212 Marton, F. 117, 127
López-Galán, J. 203, 212 Marvasti, A. 591
Lorde, A. 627, 629 Marx, K. 12, 13, 90, 140, 218, 221, 331, 343, 553, 568
Lorenzer, A. 220, 223 Maslow, A. 35
Loseke, D. 161, 166 Massad, J. 287, 291
Loup, A. 604 Masumi, I. 116, 127
Loveless, A. 59, 119, 125, 126, 127, 416, 516 Mathew, G. 352, 354
Lovenduski, J. 344, 345, 355 Mattingly, C. 237, 239, 245, 247, 478, 480, 539,
Lowman, J. 584, 592 548
Luca, I. 190, 201 Matza, D. 27, 591
Lucey, H. 367 Mauthner, M. 367, 592
Luckmann, B. 225, 235 Maxey, R. 191, 193, 194, 195, 197, 201
Luckmann, T. 28, 32, 134, 142, 214, 222, 235 Mayer, K. 174, 177
Luke, A. 449, 456 Maynard, M. 85, 88, 409, 416
Lulle, T. 208, 212 Mazzei, L. 61, 71, 106, 115, 409, 416
Lum, D. 367 Mazziotte, J. 269
640
Author Index
Mbali, M. 370, 372, 380 Molnar-Szakacs, I. 269

Mbiti, J. 503, 504 Moloney, E. 315, 316
McAdams, D. 7, 8, 34, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, Money, J. 544, 549
46, 47, 48, 106, 115, 157, 166, 359, 364, 367 Montello, M. 425, 428, 429, 430
McAuley, J. 335, 342, 343 Montgomery, M. 26, 33
McCabe, A. 585, 592 Moore-Gilbert, B. 191, 192, 193, 198, 201
McCarthy, M. 390 Moreira, C. 147, 154
McClelland, D. 35, 48 Moreton-Robinson, A. 448, 456
McConville, J. 306 Moriarty, J. 104, 115
McCrae, R. 42, 48 Morin, E. 145, 146, 152, 155
McCue, G. 87 Morison, S. 401
McCurdy, D. 503, 504 Morse, J. 75, 88, 585, 588, 591, 592, 620, 628
McEvoy, K. 306, 313, 316, 317 Moss, D. 151, 155
McGeoch, P. 544, 549 Mouffe, C. 369, 380
McKenna, T. 456 Mucha, J. 146, 148, 155
McKinney, K. 591 Muchmore, J. 597, 598, 604
Mclaughlin, D. 26, 33 Mühlheisen, S. 201
McLaughlin, J. 485, 486, 491, 492 Mukta, P. 234, 342
Mclean, K. 43, 48, 34 Muldoon, O. 316
McLelland, M. 290, 291 Mulvey, L. 372, 380
McLeod, J. 51, 59, 538, 549 Munch, P. 235
McLernon, F. 315, 316 Munro, P. 7, 10, 26, 29, 30, 31, 33, 64, 71
McLuhan, M. 624, 629 Murray, M. 372, 380, 583, 584, 585, 587, 588, 589,
McRae, C. 627, 629 592, 598, 599, 601, 604, 622, 629
McRuer, R. 482, 492 Murray-Orr, A. 429
Mead, G. 25, 132, 133, 134, 140, 142, 156, 157, Musacchio Adorissio, A. 228, 236
162, 165, 166, 251, 255, 259, 290, 554, 568 Muske, C. 370, 380
Measor, L. 33, 78, 88, 143
Medford, K. 411, 416 Naipaul, V. 98, 101
Mehrhof, B. 379 Nair, R. 262, 269
Melamed, M. 548 Nardi, B. 117, 127
Mendel, G. 371, 380 Nash, L. 167, 168, 177
Menkiti, I. 502, 504 Ned, A. 142
Menna Barreto Abrahão, M. 217, 223 Negro, G. 495, 503
Merril, B. 224, 253, 258, 259, 264, 269 Negt, O. 214, 218, 223
Mertens, D. 608, 616 Nehring, D. 291
Mertova, P. 227, 228, 233, 236 Nelson, H. 285, 291
Mey, E. 181, 188 Nelson, R. 604
Meyer, J. 119, 127 Nesbitt-Larking, P. 278, 331
Michael, M. 544, 549 Nettl, J. 381, 389, 390
Michele, M. 210, 212 Ngunjiri, F. 114
Michielsens, E. 345, 355 Nguyen, V.-K. 371, 376, 380
Middleton, S. 26, 31, 33, 97, 99, 101, 133, 142 Nielsen, H. 219, 223
Mika, H. 313, 316 Nietzsche, F. 494, 504, 580, 594
Milgram, S. 308, 316 Nixon, J. 416
Millet, K. 379 Noddings, N. 421, 422, 428, 430, 438, 439, 445
Milli, E. 278, 279 Norkunas, M. 436, 443
Mills, C. 68, 71, 132, 142, 167, 177, 275, 279, 409, Norrick, N. 358, 367
411, 416, 464, 469, 490, 492, 553, 568 Novitch, M. 323, 328, 329, 330
Milnes, K. 547 Nóvoa, A. 208, 209, 212
Miner, E. 540, 549 Nowotny, H. 152, 154, 155
Ming, D. 540, 549 Nutbrown, C. 507, 510, 516
Minh-ha, T. 514 Nyman, J. 133, 140, 141, 142, 190, 191, 192, 196,
Mischel, W. 35, 48 198, 201
Mischler, E. 49, 57
Misra, K. 355 O’Hadhmaill, F. 317
Mol, A. 544, 549 O’Hagan, S. 13, 22
641
Author Index
O’Malley, J. 380 Pinochet, A. 282, 291

O’Neill, S. 315 Piorkowski, R. 48
Oakley, A. 79, 88, 410, 416 Piper, H. 62, 71, 412, 416, 459, 460, 469, 548, 605,
Obstfeld, D. 236 606, 613
Ochberg, R. 42, 48 Pipping, K. 136, 143
Ochoa, C. 208, 212 Piquemal, N. 424, 430
Ochs, E. 357, 358, 367, 538, 549 Pirkle, C. 380
Oddo, S. 549 Plascak-Hallberg, C. 548
Odierna, S. 187 Plummer, K. 26, 33, 62, 64, 71, 229, 236, 277, 280,
Odora Hoppers, C. 50, 59 281, 283, 289, 286
Ofner, U-S. 181, 188 Pohl, D. 330
Olah, S. 379 Polakiewicz, M. 329
Olson, B. 45, 48 Poletta, F. 284, 291
Ong, W. 624, 629 Polkinghorne, D. 42, 48, 52, 59, 62, 71, 108, 115,
Opie, G. 396, 397, 402 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 127, 210, 212, 260, 269,
Orbe, M. 529 537, 549
Ortega-Gasset, J. 208, 212 Polletta, F. 371, 379, 380
Osler, A. 26, 33 Pollner, M. 158, 166
Ostler, A. 52, 59 Polo, M. 48
Ostrom, E. 345, 354, 355 Popadiuk, N. 151, 155
Pope, M. 114
Page, R. 394, 402 Posch, P. 126
Paju, P. 138, 139, 142 Pottinger, A. 358, 359, 367
Pals, J. 48 Potts, A. 457
Palys, T. 584, 592 Powney, J. 79, 88
Paniker, K. 540, 549 Prados, M. 212
Panikkar, K. 337, 343 Pratt, M. 603, 616
Papaioannou, S. 223 Prendergast, M. 546, 549
Parker, I. 401, 491 Price, R. 474, 475, 476, 477, 478, 480
Parreñas, R. 359, 367 Pries, L. 179, 182, 188
Parson, T. 132, 173, 177 Priest, G. 544, 549
Passeggi, M. 209, 210, 212 Pritchard, I. 593, 604
Paternotte, D. 291 Propp, V. 227, 236
Patnaik, A. 234, 343 Prusak, L. 234
Patti, C. 293, 422, 433, 436, 437, 444, 445 Puar, J. 246, 247
Pavic, M. 541, 544, 549 Pujadas, J. 208, 212
Payne, G. 28, 32 Punch, M. 593, 594, 604
Peacock, J. 226, 236 Purhonen, S. 135, 140, 142, 167, 176, 177
Pearce, M. 126 Puri, A. 347, 355
Peirce, C. 565, 568 Purvis, D. 88, 91, 317
Pelias, R. 147, 155 Pye, M. 402
Pellegrini, A. 295, 303
Pendleton, M. 371, 380 Rabinow, P. 232, 236, 390, 444, 456
Pérez de Lara, N. 212 Radin, I. 23, 33
Perkins, D. 119, 127 Rahbek, U. 190, 201
Peslikis, I. 379 Rahman, M. 280, 291
Peters, M. 560, 568 Rai, S. 344, 352, 353, 355
Petrow, S. 303, 304 Raitasuo, K. 143
Phillips, A. 354, 355 Rajiva, M. 529
Phillips, T. 545, 549 Rakhit, A. 77, 88
Phoenix, A. 228, 236, 278, 356, 366, 372, 380 Ramachandran, V. 549
Piketty, T. 285, 291 Raman,V. 352, 355
Pilcher, J. 168, 174, 177 Rambo Ronai, C. 554, 555, 562, 568, 624, 629
Pillemer, D. 106, 115 Ramos, J. 207, 212
Pillow, W. 462, 469 Randall, W. 165, 548
Pinar, W. 456 Rao, S. 191, 201
Pinker, S. 282, 291 Rapp, R. 246, 247
642
Author Index
Rapport, N. 61, 71 Roscoe, W. 452, 456

Ratner, C. 559, 568 Rose, N. 380
Rattray, J. 358, 367 Rosen, H. 102, 103, 115
Rawicki, J. 431, 437, 442, 444, 445, 620, 628 Rosie, A. 69, 71
Raymond, D. 87, 106, 114 Rosiek, J. 424, 429
Read, R. 580 Ross, L. 597, 604
Readings, B. 540, 546, 549 Rossiter, A. 542, 549
Reagan, R. 17, 95 Rostow, W. 50, 59
Reamer, F. 614, 616 Rothstein, A. 401
Reay, D. 458, 469 Rothwell, N. 525, 530
Redwood, S. 411, 416 Rousseau, J. 90, 103, 115
Reed, M. 415, 550, 566, 568 Rousso, H. 243, 244, 245, 247
Reed-Danahay, D. 106, 115 Rubin, A. 436, 445
Reid, A. 517 Rubinstein, J. 330
Reinharz, S. 463, 469 Rudick, C. 624, 629
Renold, E. 580 Ruetzel, K. 48
Renzetti, C. 444 Runswick-Cole, K. 487, 488, 489, 491, 492
Renzi, M. 177 Ruokonen-Engler, M. 181, 182, 183, 186, 189
Resnik, D. 618, 629 Rupp, L. 438, 445
Reulecke, J. 178 Russell, M. 447, 456
Rex, J. 342 Russsell, D. 236
Reynolds, T. 367 Rustad, H. 543, 549
Rice, J. 357, 367 Rutledge, D. 516
Richards, P. 241, 247 Ryan, M. 59, 541, 549
Richardson, B. 392, 401 Ryder, N. 168, 173, 174, 178
Richardson, L. 58, 59, 66, 71, 104, 107, 111, 115,
147, 409, 411, 414, 416, 494, 504, 531, 535, 602, Saarenheimo, M. 547
604, 613, 616, 624, 629 Sachs, O. 537, 549
Ricker, K. 181, 188, 203 Sacks, H. 238, 239, 242, 248
Ricoeur, P. 31, 33, 62, 64, 71, 109, 115, 210, 212, Said, E. 50, 59, 464, 469
260, 261, 262, 265, 267, 269, 394, 395, 399, 400, Salamun, K. 308, 316
401, 402, 495, 498, 504 Saldana, J. 104, 151
Riemann, G. 150, 155, 183, 185, 187, 188 Säljo, R. 118, 127
Rifá, M. 208, 212 Salling Olesen, H. 140, 214, 215, 217, 219, 220, 223
Rifkin, J. 282, 291 Sameroff, A. 45, 48, 548
Riggs, N. 619, 627 Sameshima, P. 249
Riley, M. 174, 177 Samuel, R. 394, 397, 402
Rintala, M. 167, 169, 178 Sánchez, M. 177
Riós, A. 193 Sandelowski, M. 585, 592
Rist, G. 59 Sandino, L. 279, 392, 393, 394, 395, 397, 400, 402
Ritchie, D. 606, 614, 616 Sanger, J. 117, 127
Rivas, J. 208, 212 Santamarina, C. 203, 204, 212
Rizvi, F. 606, 610, 616 Saporta, M. 540, 549
Rizzolatti, G. 262, 269 Saraiba, B. 203, 212
Robertson, R. 286, 291 Sarbin, T. 42, 48
Robins, S. 370, 380 Sarkar, T. 338, 339, 343
Robson, C. 73, 79, 88 Sarkozy, N. 4
Rodgers, D. 546, 549 Sartre, J-P. 111, 112, 115, 216, 223
Rodman, H. 358, 367 Sathyamurthy, V. 343
Roe, M. 316 Satterthwaite, J. 416
Rogers, C. 35, 118, 127 Savolainen 137, 143
Rogers, K. 619, 629 Sawyer, R. 155
Roggeband, C. 317 Schaffer, K. 284, 291
Rohy, V. 296, 303, 304 Schank, R. 246
Rokuszewska-Pawelek, A. 235 Schechtman, M. 537, 549
Romero, M. 291 Scheff, T. 572, 580
Roos, J-P. 133, 137, 142, 143 Schelvis, J. 320, 328, 330
643
Author Index
Scheurich, J. 507, 516 Simpson, J. 92, 93, 101

Schiffrin, D. 235 Sinelnikov, A. 330
Schiller, M. 548 Singer, J. 45, 48
Schive, K. 237, 247 Singleton, V. 544, 549
Schostak, J. 117, 127 Sinnerton, H. 315, 317
Schrag, Z. 583, 592 Siouti, I. 140, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 187, 189
Schram, S. 480 Sívori, H. 290, 292
Schroeder, D. 597, 604 Sixsmith, J. 491
Schulman, S. 371, 380 Skeggs, B. 85, 88, 462, 463, 469
Schulz, B. 541, 549 Skinner, D. 240, 241, 248
Schuman, H. 175, 178 Skrbiš, Z. 358, 368
Schütze, F. 180, 183, 184, 189, 216, 219, 223, 227, Skultans, V. 516
229, 236 Sloterdijk, P. 480
Schwab, J. 419, 430 Smelser, N. 177
Schwartz, J. 614, 616 Smit, B. 52, 59
Schwartzman, S. 154 Snow, D. 308, 309, 317
Schwarztein, D. 205, 206, 212 Snyder, S. 243, 247
Sedda, A. 544, 549 Snyder, T. 322, 328, 330
Seidman, S. 300, 303, 304 Solinger, R. 280, 284, 291
Seifer, R. 548 Solomos, J. 367
Seipold, J. 127 Somekh, B. 126
Selbin, E. 277, 279, 284, 291, 392, 402 Somers, M. 260, 269
Semprun, J. 13, 22 Sommer, R. 228, 235
Senge, P. 15, 22 Sommerville, M. 259
Senior, H. 333, 343 Sorrell, G. 26, 33
Serpell, R. 52, 59 Sousa, C. 152, 154, 211
Serrano, J. 207, 212 Southall, R. 354
Sethi, M. 338, 339, 343 Souza, C. de 212
Settersten, R. 142 Souza, E. 207, 209, 217, 223
Shacklock, G. 77, 88 Sparkes, A. 26, 33, 75, 86, 88, 449, 457, 565, 568
Shamoo, A. 614, 616 Spear, P. 550, 606, 616
Shankland, G. 401 Speedy, J. 560, 568, 625, 628
Shaw, C. 7, 9, 10, 24, 25, 26, 33, 180, 189, 226, 227, Speiglman, R. 606, 616
236, 409 Spence, D. 626, 629
Sheftel, A. 435, 437, 445 Spiegelman, A. 546, 549
Shek, M. 513, 518 Spitzer, A. 168, 174, 178
Sheldon, K. 45, 48 Spradley, J. 499, 503, 504
Sheller, M. 200 Springsteen, B. 12, 13
Shildrick, M. 488, 492, 615, 616 Spry, T. 147, 148, 155, 494, 504
Shiner, R. 48 Squire, C. 58, 236, 278, 279, 308, 317, 345, 355,
Shinozaki, K. 181, 189 364, 368, 369, 371, 372, 373, 374, 376, 378, 379,
Shirlow, P. 313, 314, 316 380, 401, 603
Shopes, L. 406, 608, 614, 616 St. Andre, M. 548
Shotter, J. 29, 33 St. Pierre, E. 460, 469, 494, 504
Shuman, A. 141, 237, 239, 248 Stacey, J. 436, 445
Sidney, A. 142 Stadler, J. 575, 578, 580
Sidonie, S. 284, 291 Stake, R. 107, 115, 606, 610, 616, 617
Sieber, J. 594, 604 Stanfield, J. 507, 516
Siebers, T. 241, 248 Steedman, C. 383, 390
Siipi, J. 143 Steeves, P. 126, 424, 429
Sikes, P. 3, 8, 10, 26, 33, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, Stenhouse, L. 4, 117, 127, 409
66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84, Stephens, D. 8, 49, 51, 53, 54, 59, 126, 416
86, 88, 133, 143, 405, 406, 410, 411, 412, 416, Stipetic, L. 540, 549
417, 447, 448, 456 Stirn, A. 549
Sikes-Sheard, R. 410, 417 Stout, C. 316
Silverman, D. 188, 229, 232, 235, 236, 410, 417 Strauss, A. 142, 185, 189, 255, 259, 367
Simkin, L. 330 Strawson, G. 228, 236, 539, 549
644
Author Index
Strong, M. 628 Troya, B. 60, 80, 85, 88, 457, 604

Stuart Mill, J. 170 Tsanaka, M. 223
Stull, W. 114 Tucker, V. 50, 51, 59
Stuss, D. 269 Tuhiwai Smith, L. 57, 58, 59, 507, 616
Sugiman, T. 234 Tuider, E. 184, 186, 189
Sullivan, K. 549 Tullis Owen, J. 269
Sullivan, W. 444 Turvey, K. 10, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122, 127
Summerfield, P. 469
Sutcliffe, K. 236 Urry, J. 448, 456
Sutherland, E. 24, 32 Usher, R. 65, 71
Svensson, T. 334, 342
Swain, K. 456 Valinsky, J. 303, 304
Swain, S. 622, 629 Valles, M. 203, 213
Swedberg, R. 255, 259 Van der Veer, P. 341, 343
Swindells. J. 71 van Grootheest, S. 626, 629
Sylvian, D. 564, 568 van Manen, M. 554, 565, 568
Szanton-Blanc, C. 188 Van Stekelenburg, J. 155, 315, 317
Vargar, P. 212
Tamale, S. 287, 291 Vasconcelos, P. 174, 176
Tamboukou, M. 58, 236, 278, 317, 354, 355, 367, Vasilyev, I. 340
380, 381, 390, 401, 547 Vecchiarelli Scott, J. 390
Tannen, D. 235 Verene, D. 103, 115
Tax, M. 379 Vicars, M. 414, 448, 456, 457
Tedder, M. 114 Vicentini, P. 212, 223
Temple, B. 390, 391 Vikki, C. 591
Terkel, S. 26 Vilenskii, S. 328, 330
Terushkin, L. 328, 330 Viñao, A. 208, 213
Therborn, G. 285, 291 Vincent, J. 50, 168, 178
Thiel, A. 549 Viry, G. 177
Thiessen, D. 87 Vitale, A. 627, 629
Thogersen, J. 517 Volkan, V. 332, 343
Thome, A. 106, 115 Volmerg, B. 219, 221, 223
Thrasher, F. 24, 33 Vygotsky, L. 118, 127
Thunborg, C. 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257,
258, 259 Wafer, J. 447, 457
Tierney, W. 26, 33, 595, 596, 598, 600, 604 Wagner, W. 234
Tiffin, H. 50, 59 Wagner-Martin, L. 65, 71
Tillmann-Healy, L. 104 Waite, L. 174, 177
Tilly, C. 284, 291, 345, 354, 355 Walgrove, S. 155
Todorov, T. 67, 71, 566, 567, 568 Walkerdine, V. 446, 457
Todorova, I. 368 Wamboldt, F. 548
Tolich, M. 412, 415, 417, 460, 463, 469, 593, 594, Ward, J. 444
596, 597, 602, 604 Waris, H. 133, 136, 143
Tomaselli, K. 624, 629 Wasserman, J. 536, 549
Tomin, V. 330 Waters, T. 538, 549
Tonge, J. 335, 343 Waterston, A. 436, 445
Townsend, R. 608, 609, 614, 617 Watney, S. 376, 380
Toyosaki, S. 624, 629 Watson, C. 565, 568
Tracy, S. 432, 433, 442, 445 Watson, J. 103, 115, 192, 193, 196, 201, 238, 248
Trahar, S. 49, 58, 59, 126, 414, 505, 506, 507, 512, Watts, M. 79, 88
514, 516, 517 Wax, M. 584, 592
Traianou, A. 605, 606, 613, 616 Way, D. 432, 433, 445
Treacher, A. 279, 603 Wear, D. 480
Tremblay, M. 291 Webster, L. 227, 228, 233, 236
Tripp, D. 96, 101 Weichhold, G. 537, 549
Trites, R. 480 Weick, K. 232, 236
Troy, G. 13, 22 Weil, S. 439, 445
645
Author Index
Weiler, K. 26, 33, 96, 101 Wolcott, H. 75, 88, 502, 504
Weiner, W. 82, 88 Wolkowitz, C. 274, 279
Weiss, M. 288, 291 Wong, S. 47, 355
Weissberg, L. 387, 390, 391 Woodcock, P. 191, 201
Wellman, D. 591 Woodiwiss, J. 549
Wells, G. 96, 101 Woods, P. 33, 63, 71, 81, 85, 88, 104, 115, 133, 143
Wendegraf, T. 187 Woolf, V. 68, 71
Wengraf, T. 148 Woolgar, S. 153, 155
Wertsch, J. 118, 127, 493, 494, 495, 497, 503, 504 Worline, M. 445
West, L. 250, 251, 252, 258, 264, 269 Wright Mill, C. 68, 71, 167, 275, 409, 411, 490,
Westwood, R. 411, 414 492, 553, 568
Wheeler, M. 261, 269 Wyatt, J. 625, 628
White, M. 512, 517
Whiteside, A. 370, 379 Yamada, Y. 234
Whyte, W. 173, 178 Yamagishi, L. 87
Wickett, A. 548 Yong Kim, J. 379
Widmer, E. 177 Yoshino, K. 300, 303, 304
Wieder, D. 159, 166 Young, M. 134, 143, 424, 430
Wiener, M. 394, 402 Young-Bruehl, E. 385, 386, 390, 391
Wieringa, S. 290, 292 Yousafazi, M. 287, 292
Wilder, B. 579, 580 Yow, V. 435, 445
Wildt, M. 168, 170, 171, 175, 177 Yu, W. 507, 514, 516, 517
Wiles, R. 580, 591, 570 Yuval-Davis, N. 285, 292, 332, 343, 369, 380
Wilhelm Dilthey, W. 24, 170
Wilke, N. 548 Zalta, E. 567, 568
Willis, E. 379 Zamudio, L. 212
Wimmer, A. 179, 189 Zaner, R. 619, 629
Winchester-Seeto, T. 507, 517 Zarco, J. 203, 212, 213
Winfrey, O. 44 Zembrzycki, S. 435, 436, 437, 445
Winnicott, D. 251, 259 Zhurzhenko, T. 193, 201
Winston, C. 390, 391 Zibricky, C. 624, 629
Winston, R. 390, 391 Zielinski, A. 330
Wirth, L. 33, 224 Zimbardo, P. 308, 316, 317
Wisniewski, R. 69, 70, 71, 127 Zinn, J. 150, 155, 477
Withering, C. 87, 416 Zinnecker, J. 172, 178
Wittgenstein, L. 53, 65, 68, 71, 220 Zipes, J. 479, 480
Wlodarek, J. 132, 143 Znaniecki, F. 6, 10, 23, 24, 33, 74, 88, 131, 132, 142,
Wohl, R. 168, 170, 171, 172, 176, 178 143, 180, 203, 213, 409, 417
Woike, B. 39, 48 Zontini, E. 367
Wolanik Boström, K. 230, 236 Zorbaugh, H. 24, 33
646
SUBJECT INDEX
18th century 11, 44, 196, 622 Aimhigher 461, 462

19th century 11, 44, 50, 103, 170, 171, 194, 333, alcoholics 17, 162, 165
340, 392, 393, 395, 396, 398 America 4, 23, 26, 91–5, 103, 132, 140, 142, 143,
20th century 6, 12, 35, 46, 90, 103, 139, 170, 286, 146, 149, 161, 166, 173–2, 177, 178, 180–1,
290, 320, 340, 392, 393, 396, 408 191–2, 199, 201, 205, 207–8, 218, 225, 233,
9/11 60, 280, 282, 345, 579 244–5, 275, 277, 279, 287, 289, 290, 293, 297,
301, 303, 304, 316, 322–3, 333, 340, 358, 359,
AAUP see American Association of University 367, 371, 374, 394, 406, 409, 413, 444, 476,
Professors 482–3, 497, 593, 606–9, 615; adults 43–4;
able-bodiedness 492, 544 capital 91; cultural themes 43; media 92, 101;
ableist, curriculum and educational culture 482, sponsorship 91; styles of story-telling 92
483, 485, 490 American Association for the Advancement of
Academy 29, 57, 96, 97, 98, 225, 235, 269, 410, Science AAAS 605, 615
414, 416, 448, 453 American Association of University Professors
action potential 9, 10 (AAUP) 606, 608–9, 610, 615, 617
ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) 369, American History Association (AHA) 608–9, 615, 617
371, 373, 377, 378 analysis inter-contextual 99; political and cultural
ADHD see attention deficit hyperactivity disorder 90, 92, 95; political and social 90
adolescence 19, 36, 37, 43, 44, 46, 47, 107, 142, analytic bearings 156–7
171, 316, 320, 446, 450 Anglo-American mainstream sociology 173–4
adolescent(s) 34, 36, 40, 47, 137, 150, 315, 316, 367 Annalistes 18
adulthood 36, 37, 46, 168, 200, 297, 360, 549 anoesis 65
adult learning processes 140, 214 anomie 65
adult life course 40, 43 anthropologist(s) 6, 23, 104, 150, 204–8, 435, 456,
adult personality 46 457, 504, 584, 591, 605, 606, 610
advertising 16, 74, 400 anthropology 7, 88, 168, 203, 205–7, 291, 429, 445,
Africa(n): educational and development 49–50; 492, 502, 504, 591, 604, 616
narratives 52; oral histories 103; student and anti-narrative 474
teacher lives 53–5 apartheid 55–6, 58, 288
age group 168, 170–4, 173, 176–7, 267 Arab Spring 154
agency 4, 38, 39, 41, 43, 47–8, 52, 93, 103, 106, archaeologists 341, 605, 606, 610
109, 117, 118, 122, 127, 142, 184, 216, 251, 254, Argentina 140, 203, 206, 208, 212, 213, 288
277, 308, 313, 332, 351, 374, 375, 376, 387, 392, artist(s) 13, 390, 394, 402, 500, 576, 578
396, 400, 401, 408, 431, 457, 590, 628 arts and crafts 395
Age of Enlightenment 12, 29, 52, 103, 170, 192, Asperger’s syndrome 159
290, 456, 544 astrology 145
647
Subject Index
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) biographical space 203, 209

158, 159 biographicity 134–5, 182, 217
Australia(n) 80, 413, 489, 497, 507, 518, 519, 524, biography(ies): collective 28, 518, 521, 523, 528;
525, 526, 540, 593, 605 corporation 146; migration 182, 184; political
autobiographical accounts 23, 36, 148–9, 204, 206 and intellectual 384; transnational 181–3
autobiographical approaches 209 bio-narrativists 229
autobiographical Asian writing 190–201 Black Education Congress 229
autobiographical authors 45, 46 black identity 357
autobiographical discourse 102–3, 107 boko haram 51
autobiographical field and territories 209–11 border crossings 182, 191, 193–4, 196, 464
autobiographical interviews 215 Brazil 140, 202, 207, 210
autobiographical life story 262 Brazilian 206, 217
autobiographical memory 102, 109, 111, 261–2; Burma 196, 198
as a site of narrative construction 105–7
autobiographical narration 183, 207 Canada 277, 278, 331–42, 422, 489, 593, 605
autobiographical narratives 103, 106, 107, 190, 217, Capitalism 16, 90, 93, 100, 110, 152, 218, 219, 275,
219, 227, 261–2, 264, 266, 268–9, 358 349, 383, 482–3, 486, 512, 619
autobiographical practice 574 care-takers 243, 531
autobiographical reasoning skills 43 Caribbean 277–8, 356, 358, 360–4, 366, 371
autobiographical research 207, 209, 210, 217 case material 158–60, 226
autobiographical writing 190–201, 103, 140, 190–1 case study work 26
autobiography(ies) 17, 23, 27, 32, 44, 102, 103–4, caste 121, 125, 332, 341, 346, 349, 352
107, 110, 112, 113, 146, 190–2, 194, 196, 200, Ceylon 191, 196
203, 205, 206, 207–10, 215, 226, 230, 237, 327, Chekovian 539
405, 410, 448, 525, 533, 540, 589, 625; as text Chicago 24, 27–8, 75, 203
and life history 215–18 Chicago School 27, 132–3, 180, 183, 185, 203,
autoethnography(ies) 60, 102, 107, 108, 110, 147–8, 205–6
411, 431, 434, 437, 460, 462–3, 494, 518, 521, China 149, 286, 358, 511, 515
523, 528, 533, 535, 573–4, 578, 594, 611, 625; as Cochin 196
an example of autobiographical research 105–7; Cold War 94
as an example of narrative pedagogy 110–13; as collective biography 28, 518, 521–4, 528
narrative research 102–5 collective identity 167, 169, 176, 194, 309, 314–15,
autoethnographers 105, 119, 436, 593, 595, 602, 332
611 collective learning processes 167
collective memory(ies) 80, 175, 194, 204, 277, 318,
baby boomers 18, 136 339, 414, 493–503, 524
Bangalore 199 colonial 50, 54, 104, 182, 186, 190–3, 196, 198–9,
behaviour 4, 26, 35, 35, 45, 46, 82, 107, 117, 118, 205, 287, 289, 337, 362, 502
159, 160, 199, 203, 228, 308, 309, 313, 344, 361, coming out 63, 281, 296–302, 436, 621
369, 411, 435, 467, 503, 509, 515, 597, 599, 606, coming to know 9–10, 116, 120
608, 614, 618, 619, 623, 626 coming to narrative 10, 116–26
Berlin Wall 273, 274, 284 communist 149, 218, 318–24, 327, 349, 352
Bharatiya Janata Party 334 communities of memory 499
biographical accounts 184, 210 Confucian 508, 509, 510
biographical analysis 179, 180, 184–6 Congo 288
biographical interviewing 251, 253 consent: agreements 605, 606; broad 415, 593,
biographical interviews 183, 185, 210, 254, 255, 595, 597, 600–2; forms 415, 466, 511, 514, 581,
257 583–5, 590, 595, 600, 605, 606; informed 511,
biographical knowledge 134, 182 514, 538–4, 605, 606
biographical learning 135, 141, 249–58 content analysis 41
biographical materials 180, 218, 226, 255 context: historical 4–6, 9, 18–20, 31, 55, 116, 118,
biographical method 103, 131, 151, 180, 204–5, 122, 146, 200, 518; social 10, 17, 20, 65, 90, 95,
208, 215, 251 104, 131, 133, 135, 147, 184, 215, 221, 223, 410,
Biographical-Narrative-Interpretive-Method 424
(BNIM) 148 Continuation War (1941–1944) 136
biographical narrative research 205–6, 253, 412 corporatization 91
biographical qualifications 134 Costa Rica 140, 208
648
Subject Index
counselling 78, 159, 373, 512 educational psychology 419

Country Women’s Association (CWA) 520, 527 ego development 39
County Derry 552 elitist 175, 218, 283
course(s) of action 9, 265, 587 El Salvador 208
crisis of representation 67 England (UK) 9, 20, 26, 52, 58, 110, 112, 113, 120,
culinary border crossings 140, 190–201 121, 126, 146, 148, 149, 151, 193, 195, 196, 197,
culinary memoir 191 278, 286, 305, 356, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 366,
cultural background(s) 118, 260, 508 371, 374, 377, 378, 398, 407, 408, 409, 413, 445,
cultural borders 140, 190–2, 196–7, 199, 200 452, 460, 461, 462, 487, 506, 507, 512, 519, 524,
cultural meaning 96, 190, 574 544, 605
cultural psychologists 43 Enlightenment Project 12, 103, 192, 544
cultural psychology 41, 107 epistemological 8, 38, 39, 49, 51, 57, 60, 61, 72, 75,
cultural sciences 132, 203 79, 204, 207, 210, 250, 276, 384, 405, 410, 428,
curriculum 20, 21, 52, 54, 74, 121, 124, 231, 482 464, 507, 508
epistemology 57, 61, 66–8, 147, 232, 593, 594
Danish 214, 215, 220, 260 essentialized accounts 332
data: analysis of 215, 84–6; analyzing and writing ethical acts 460
up 588; collection of 5, 19, 409, 446, 497, 503, ethical basis 458, 461
595–6, 598, 600; contextual 32; empirical 132, ethical behaviour in life 435, 597
215, 222, 255, 285; generative 73; historical 31, ethical codes 254, 415, 506, 605, 610
100; impartiality of 226; incorrect interpretation ethical complexities 414, 453, 505, 506, 508, 509,
of 586; presenting of 86; production of 215, 218; 512, 514
recording 83; transcribing 83–4 ethical conduct 467, 468, 610, 613
dehumanization 310 ethical considerations 618, 621
Delhi 200, 286, 287, 347 ethical issues 31, 412, 414–15, 420, 425, 434, 435,
dementia 64, 124, 157, 163, 411, 538, 539, 540 438, 445, 459, 460, 463, 464–5, 467, 493–503,
democracy 205, 267, 273, 288, 335, 611 506, 508, 511, 516, 532, 571, 572, 578, 581, 589,
Denmark 136 590, 592, 593–7, 599, 602, 611, 618, 622, 625–6
Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) ethical life 578
393 ethical principles 578, 602, 605, 606, 610, 612, 618
DfID see UK Department for International ethical research 413, 435, 465, 481, 583, 585, 590
Development ethical review 415, 423, 511, 583, 593, 599, 606
diary(ies) 23, 79, 81–2, 157, 206, 387, 587 ethical standards and procedures 606
diaspora 140, 190–3, 195–6, 198, 200 ethics 618–19; care 413, 431–43, 447, 605, 612;
dictatorship 203, 205–6, 273, 560 code of 570, 593, 605–6; committees 571–2,
disability(ies) 237–46, 251–2, 285, 474, 481–3, 583, 585–6, 593; conundrum 570–2; life history
484–91, 534, 544–5, 605, 611, 624 research 414, 446–56; procedural 459, 460–1,
disablism 481, 482–4 463, 467, 577–9, 583, 586, 594; professional 418;
disablist 481–2, 485, 490 relational 431–43, 459, 461, 465–8, 582, 590,
discourse analysis 85, 186 605–13, 618–20; review 422–3, 435, 459–61,
dissidents 273, 275, 278, 481 463, 583, 590, 593–5, 598, 607, 618, 620;
drawing and painting 562 situational 460, 435, 468, 578, 618; tyranny of
narrative 536–47
East African Asian 193–4, 200 ethnicity 46, 65, 111, 133, 151, 192–3, 250–1, 285,
East Germany 273, 275 369, 489
economic crisis 4, 125, 282 ethnodrama 104
economic restructuring 9, 89 ethnographer 16–17, 104, 105, 119, 239, 436, 440,
Economic Social Research Council in Britain 447, 494–5, 503, 533, 593, 595, 602, 610, 611
(ESRC) 19, 366, 485, 570 ethnographic information 159
Ecuador 208 ethnographic study(ies) 133, 141, 481
EdD 506–7, 554 ethnographic theory 533
education: faculties of 96; marketisation of 464; ethnography 29, 60, 85, 134, 140, 147, 157, 165,
policy 9, 54, 56, 110; primary 121–2; religious 203, 409, 481, 485, 487, 494, 518, 521, 523, 528,
74–5, 82; researcher 208; sociology of 131–4, 532, 533, 535, 573–5
139; teacher 86 ethnomethodologists 157
educational generations 135, 138 ethnomethodology 28, 29, 157, 183, 185, 140
educational historian 31 ethno-religious 332
649
Subject Index
Eton 14–15, 125 histories, changing and national framing 321–2

European 50, 94, 126, 131, 133–4, 136, 171–2, HIV: depoliticisation and repoliticisation 376–7;
174–5, 180, 206–8, 250–1, 321, 333, 371, 378, personal stories 370–1; personal to the ‘political’
381, 407, 471, 558 374–6, 377–9; politics 369–70; researching
European convention on human rights (ECHR) 371–2; telling stories 372–4
126 Holocaust 148, 322–4, 327, 413, 431–8, 440
European Society for Research on the Education homosexual 113, 296–7, 300–2, 452, 455
of Adults (ESREA) 134 homosexuality 294–6, 300, 302
European Union 139 Hong Kong 506–15
Every Child 481 hospital workers 478
examiner 111, 411, 550–1, 560, 565 human relations 153, 384, 419, 581–2, 597
experience(s) 117–18; male secondary school human relationships 153, 419, 422, 513, 570,
teachers 62; personal 105, 108, 111, 146, 167, 577–9, 597, 611
184 Human Rights Act 126
Human Rights Coalition of AAAS 605
feminist 26, 31, 61, 80, 103, 147, 151, 181, 232, human behaviour 26, 35, 46, 203
284–5, 298, 344, 351, 352, 413, 421, 431, 435, human personality 7, 34–47, 325
436, 438, 459–60, 462–3, 465, 468, 481, 482, human storytelling 7, 42
525–6, 610 Hungary 398–9
film making 569–79; documentary 578
Finland 133–9, 398 Iberian Peninsula 208
Finnish 131, 133, 135–7, 139, 144 Iberoamerica 140, 202–3; biological and narrative
food, identity, and diaspora 191–3 research in 202–11
Iberoamerican countries 203, 206, 208–9
gay 41, 74, 86, 89, 113, 139, 280, 281, 284, 286, Iceland 136
287–9, 293–303, 371–2, 374–6, 378, 414, 436, identity(ies) 3, 8, 14, 19, 23, 29, 62, 64, 65, 79, 99,
446–55, 576, 583, 621 103–4, 111–12, 118–19, 124–5, 135, 138–40,
gender: roles and identities 337–9; studies 29, 139, 167, 174–5, 179, 182, 190, 198, 199, 200, 202,
186, 215 205, 209, 210, 215–16, 228, 233–4, 238, 245,
generation, social 135, 140, 167, 168–70, 171, 173–6 250, 255–6, 260, 308–9, 315, 322, 325–6, 337–9,
generational conflict 170 344, 353, 356, 358, 360, 363, 365–6, 400, 408,
generational consciousness 167–8, 172, 175 412, 414, 453, 455, 464, 488, 494, 498, 507,
generational identities 167, 174–6 532, 536, 537, 539, 541, 555–6, 562, 587, 594,
generationalists 172–3, 175–6 600, 619–20; abstract 395; Asian 191, 197; black
genocide 12, 278, 288, 437, 442 357; British-Asian 200; collective 16, 167, 169,
Ghana 53–5 176, 194, 309, 314–15, 332; communal 193;
ghosting 557, 558, 559, 561, 562 construction 257; Creole 193; cultural 140,
girlhood 518, 519–21, 527 169, 197; diasporic 195; dynamic 395; essential
globalization 91, 179, 181, 186, 190, 282, 286, 331, 424; ethic 132, 191, 332; ethno-national 332;
336 feminine 337; fluid 278; food and diaspora
golden age 171–3 191–3; formation 252–3, 256–7; generational
Google 297, 298 174–6; group 131; hybrid 200; individual
grand narratives 8, 11–13, 16, 42, 50, 52, 53, 55, 190; integrated 256; Jewish 320; learner 250;
57, 202 learning 256; migrant 190; migration 190, 374;
Great Depression 138, 578 multiple 436; narrator’s 199; national 371; non-
Great War 171, 172 hegemonic 191; personal 106, 108, 118, 325,
group: accounts of 148–9; identity 131, 231 335; political 314, 357, 399, 400; problems of
Guatemala 208 35–47; professional 74, 107, 116–17, 119, 209,
512; research participants 584; sexual 298, 447;
hermeneutic 39, 49, 52, 53, 84, 131–2, 139, 140, social 134, 171, 452, 623, 626; teacher 52, 498;
170, 171, 184, 185, 187, 202, 208, 210, 218–22, work 216, 222, 266
577 illness stories 470–9
heterosexual 293–7, 300–2, 371, 373, 451, 455, 482 imagoes 38–9
higher education 107, 120, 124, 141, 249–58, immigrant(s) 78, 94, 133, 149, 150–1, 181, 195–8,
458–66, 507 203, 208, 333
Hindu nationalism 278, 331–4, 336, 338–9, 340–2, immigration 132, 182, 196, 333, 408
353 India: parliament 344–54; quota debate 352–3
650
Subject Index
indigenous 51, 55, 57, 147, 204, 207, 208, 424–5, 264, 269, 275, 279, 283, 315, 357, 377, 400, 408,
435 410, 414, 415, 425, 436, 438, 447, 456, 493, 494,
Indonesia 280 495, 497, 498, 499, 500, 552, 587, 595, 596, 607,
information technology 139 622; analysis of 265–8; methodologies 28, 72;
Institutional Review Boards (IRB) 435, 460, 544, search of 318–28; working 225–34
593, 595, 597, 598, 605–11, 613 lifeworld 215–18, 225
interactionism 17, 25, 27–9, 103, 132, 134, 183, literary criticism 384
185, 216, 251 lived truths, quest for 144–54
interactionist 52, 133, 205, 281 longitudinal research 19; access the students
International Congress of (Auto)biographical 251; biographical work 256–7; conducting
Research 207 interviews 253–4; ethics 254–5; methodology
International Sociological Association 133, 215 250; qualitative analysis 255–6; rapport with
Internet 10, 16, 60, 284, 286, 298, 299, 443 students 251–2; research question 250; results
interview guide 598 257; saturation effect 252; starting a project 249;
interview(s): biographic-narrative 227; reflexive students’ involvement 256; theory 250–1; use of
147 interviews 257–8
Islam 51, 54, 280, 334, 336, 339, 341–2, 544 love 191, 193, 195, 199, 277, 278, 279, 283, 287,
Israel 41, 318, 321–3, 325–7, 593 296, 299, 325, 350; politics (and) 381–9
Luxemburg 381, 383, 385
Jamaica 356–7, 360–1, 363, 366
Jana Sangh (People’s Society) 334 Marx 13, 218, 221, 331
Japan 540 Marxist / Marxism 12, 13, 90, 140, 172, 214, 215,
Jerusalem 323, 327, 385 218, 381, 384, 486
Jewish 318–27, 335, 382, 422, 435–6 masculinity 280; Canadian 331–42
media 16, 61, 90, 100, 125, 139, 152, 204, 273, 277,
Kantian 422, 459 280, 284, 287, 293, 298, 299, 301, 335, 353, 372,
Karelian 133, 136 393, 540, 545, 573, 607, 608, 627; digital 545;
Key Stage 2 122, 124 media context of personal knowledge 90–5
Kiev 319, 323 memoir 103, 157, 191, 193, 195–8, 200, 625
memory(ies) 36, 39, 41, 61, 63, 80, 81, 82, 96,
Labour government 121, 461, 482, 487 102–13, 124, 136, 137, 149, 150, 151, 167, 175,
Labour Party 397 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 198, 200, 202, 204, 205,
late modern society 139 206, 207, 219, 220, 243, 260, 261, 263, 273, 277,
Latin America 92, 140, 202, 205–10, 287, 358 305, 318, 319, 321, 323, 326, 327, 332, 339, 359,
Learning Lives Project 19–21 360, 364, 384–9, 408, 409, 414, 434, 436, 440,
life course studies 133 442, 443, 493, 494, 509, 532, 533, 539, 552, 554,
life experiences 15, 27, 30–1, 44, 61, 67, 131, 132, 558, 570, 573, 586, 618, 620–2; collective 80,
135, 141, 164, 179, 202, 206, 208–9, 214, 220–1, 175, 194, 204, 277, 318, 339, 414, 493–503, 524;
238, 250, 253, 414, 420 narratives of 518–29
life historian(s) 66–9 methodological 3, 10, 18, 24–30, 53, 57, 60, 61,
life history 3–10, 19–21, 23, 24, 26–7, 30, 31, 32, 72, 87, 96, 105, 117, 140, 141, 149, 168, 174,
52–6, 58, 61, 73, 75, 99, 118, 126, 131, 133, 134, 179–81, 183–6, 204–7, 210, 215, 216, 219, 221,
136, 140, 158, 190, 214, 226, 231, 245, 362, 222, 227, 249, 254, 257, 258, 321, 351, 360, 385,
387, 395, 438, 464, 467, 581, 607; international 405, 410, 411, 415, 419, 427, 447, 448, 460, 462,
settings 49–58; narratives (and) 3–10, 116–27; 464, 466, 469, 484, 485, 487, 505–9, 511, 516,
psycho-societal approach to 214–22; research 522, 532, 559, 561, 577, 610, 613, 615
ethics see ethics; story of 23–32; techniques 72–87 methodology 5, 7, 8, 28, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72,
life history researcher 64, 73, 76, 140, 456 144, 180, 186, 206, 208, 211, 215, 220, 222, 227,
lifelong 45, 134, 209, 220, 222, 260, 267, 321, 494 250, 258, 260, 265, 267, 315, 420, 446, 448, 502,
life narrative(s) 3, 6, 8, 9, 21, 37, 39, 41–6, 53, 56, 507, 510, 511, 512, 554, 564, 608, 610; analytic
84, 103, 140, 156, 192, 193, 228; institutional 267; biographical 205; ethno 28, 29, 53, 140,
156–65; rise of 11–21; see also Learning Lives 157, 183, 185; hermeneutic 210; mixed 315;
Project modifying 144–54; narrative 206; narrative-
life story(ies) 5–10, 12, 17–21, 30, 31, 32, 36–41, biographical 203–4; problem-orientated 214;
44–7, 52, 54–7, 60–70, 76, 84, 90, 98, 99, 118– qualitative 139, 205, 249, 494, 497; quantitative
26, 132–4, 141, 148, 150, 151, 157, 161, 182, 139; relational 425; research 53, 61, 141, 424,
185, 186, 202–10, 237–40, 243, 245, 254, 260–2, 427, 507, 577
651
Subject Index
Mexico 140, 203, 206, 207, 208, 435 289, 296, 341, 373; studies 4–5, 146, 151, 174,
migrant(s) 23, 179–83, 186, 190–8, 206, 357, 362, 226, 228–9, 345, 353, 399; teller 4; texts 268,
365, 372, 374, 377 395, 493, 625; truth 620, 621; turn 3, 104, 202,
migration: serial 356–66; studies 179–87 225, 226, 227–8, 419, 537, 539; voice 106, 284,
modernism to post modernism 29–32 624; void 283; Western construction of 540;
multiculturalism 282, 332, 335 work 3, 4, 240, 289, 383–4, 624; written, verbal,
Munich 318 oral, and visual 49
Muslim 281, 287, 289, 333, 334, 336–9, 341, 342, narrative interview 41, 141, 150, 184, 185, 186,
345 227, 252–3, 254, 261, 264, 265, 267, 268, 485,
506, 509, 574, 620, 622; autobiographical 150,
narrative(s): act 565; action, of 98; activity 9; 227; biographical 183–4, 185, 186, 227, 253;
age of 6, 11, 12; analysis 5, 55, 117, 118, longitudinal 141, 249, 257–8; methods, theory
157, 261, 354, 359, 364, 365, 383, 539, 622; and ethics 260–9
approaches 23, 112, 410, 414, 505–15, 539, 581; narrative research 49, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 102,
Aristotelian thinking 53, 537; autobiography 108, 100, 126, 140, 141, 146, 147, 148, 151,
(see autobiographical); birth of 283; Canadian 153, 253, 257, 315, 371, 383, 411, 412, 415, 452,
Orangemen 332; canonical 37, 359, 619; capital 485, 491, 506, 507, 511, 537, 546, 554, 556, 564,
10, 14, 15, 116, 125, 126; chaos 473, 474; 570, 571, 572, 579, 581, 582, 583, 584, 585, 587,
coherence 537, 538, 539–42; complexity 39; 588, 589, 590, 593–603, 618, 623; education in
construction 8, 9, 10, 13, 16, 102, 105–7, 109, Africa 51–3; in Iberoamerica 202–11
158, 165, 537; counter 50, 237, 238, 240, 241, narratology 89, 226, 227, 228, 540
243, 285, 329, 392, 396, 458; data 4, 40, 52, Native American 23, 103
56, 512; desire 542–3; disability (and) 237–46; neoliberal 10, 50, 282, 376, 482
ecology 116, 117, 118–19, 124; emplotted 546; New Mexico 274, 376
entropy and death 285; ethics 415, 602, 618, New Zealand 31, 57, 413, 593, 605
626; ethnography 147, 157, 165, 460; events, Nicaragua 208
occasions, and locations 157; flow 183, 282, Nigeria 51, 286
283–5, 534; foreclosure 163; form 9, 34, 36, 42, Nokia 139
44, 58, 64, 66, 96, 239, 300, 353, 474, 480, 538, North American 180, 205, 207, 208, 290, 333, 374,
539, 542, 547, 626; gender-based exclusion, of 406, 482, 608
332; global 54; grand 8, 11, 12, 13, 16, 42, 50, Northern Ireland 277–8, 284, 306–7, 309, 312–15,
52, 53, 55, 57, 202; hegemony and routinization 335, 339
284–5; idiosyncratic 36; inquiry 418–28, Northern Irish peace process 314
587; integrity in human relationships 577–9; Norway 136, 389
learning 102, 107–11 (see also Learning Lives
Project); macro- 118–19, 281–2, 366; meaning objectivity 3, 29, 32, 105, 145, 344, 448, 463, 518,
53, 238, 585, 587, 588, 590, 598; mental illness 558
538; meso- 118; meta 332, 339, 341–2, 544; occupational therapist 478
methods 18, 39, 40, 104, 117, 206, 351, 484, Office for Human Research Protection (OHRP)
505; mobilization and community making 606, 608, 609
284; mode 51, 84, 228, 229, 230, 353, 518, 519, Open University 60, 564
522, 541; multiplying 524–8; national 191; oral historians 26, 436, 606, 613, 614
negotiation 284, 285; Northern Irish 305–15; oral history(ies) 103, 107, 133, 194, 203–5, 207,
pedagogy 9, 110–13; personal 7, 12, 17, 26, 208, 218, 237, 315, 431, 435, 436, 437, 591, 594,
51, 61, 84, 96, 105, 133, 147, 151, 237, 274–5, 595, 608–10, 613, 614, 622
278–9, 289, 332, 338, 341, 359, 365, 369–72, Oral History Association (OHA; “Ahora”) 206,
378–9, 384, 401, 484, 589, 601, 622, 623, 625–7; 607, 608, 613
place, matter, relations and memory, of 518–29; Oral History Group (GHOPUCP) 208
politics 12, 14, 15; private 284; privilege, of 286, oral story, coda of 565
366, 602, 618, 623–5; production 67, 157–8, Orangeism 322, 331, 333, 335, 338, 339
229; public 283, 289; putative 283; reading 618, Orangemen 278, 331–40, 342, 383
625–6; redemptive 359; regional 8, 49; role of Orange Order 333–4; 339–40
49, 56, 283, 481, 484, 536; scope, of 11–12;
second-person 624; self-identification, of 191; parent(s) 36, 37, 45, 52, 63, 74, 78, 81, 103, 120,
sibling 360–6; small-scale 11; social science 124, 141, 160, 168, 169, 171, 194, 195, 196, 197,
research method 541; social sciences (in) 537–47; 198, 237, 295, 298, 299, 301, 302, 309, 318,
storylines 5; storytelling 12; strategy(ies) 137, 357–60, 365, 411, 419, 422, 423, 436, 451, 455,
652
Subject Index
460, 481, 485–9, 499, 508, 510, 520, 521, 525, post-colonial theoretical discourse 502
527, 528, 536, 543, 612, 621, 624; stories about post-colonial theories 182, 186
disability 237–6 post-colonial view 199
Pechersky, A. 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, post-modern history 560
325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330 postmodernism / postmodernists 4, 29, 32, 42, 43,
pedagogy 31, 54, 102, 104, 214, 222, 448, 507, 608 50, 61, 84–90, 100, 515, 559, 560
periodisation 10, 18, 118, 119, 125 post-modernity 29, 30, 65, 190, 199, 202, 217, 559,
Peronism 206 576, 578
personal accounts 54, 227, 279, 299, 371, 414 post-modern society 139
personal experiences 34, 42, 43, 60, 67, 102, 105, post-modern turn 134–5
108, 111, 146, 167, 184, 194, 239, 277, 342, 408, post-structuralism / post-structuralist(s) 29, 31, 61,
410, 413, 415, 473, 522, 572, 612, 618, 622, 626 103
personal identity 106, 118, 190, 256, 325, 335 post-war period 137, 381, 394, 396, 397
personal ideology 36, 38, 44 post–World War II Britain 31, 196
personal knowledge 9, 17, 63, 318, 412; and the practitioner(s) 7, 27, 34, 117, 134, 420–2, 439, 572,
political 89–100 578, 612
phenomenology 49, 134; of memory 495, 498 presentist 157, 162
philosophers of science 144, 146 privatisation 51
philosophy 13, 72, 74, 110, 145, 203, 228, 290, 358, professional(s) 20, 113, 119, 124, 125, 199, 207,
386, 387, 394, 397, 440, 453, 459, 487, 495, 509, 242, 251, 481, 484, 485, 486, 487, 582, 605
515, 557, 560 professional architecture 534
Pol Pot 278 professional artists 376
Poland 227, 277, 320–3, 327, 382, 432, 437 professional athletes 161, 302
Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) 306, 314 professional autonomy 4
political activity 151, 307, 309, 313, 314 professional background 346
political agitation 309 professional biography 209
political change 575, 281, 284, 287, 308, 310, 311, professional career 231
314, 357, 365 professional conceptions 34
political consciousness 277 professional development 67, 68, 78, 80, 209
political cultural analysis (and) 90, 92, 95 professional disciplines 53
political engagement 13, 151, 300, 394 professional environment 234
political identity 284, 314, 357, 399, 400 professional ethics 419
political lives 3, 277, 311, 312, 314, 315, 331, 332, professional health 531, 534
372 professional identity(ies) 74, 107, 116–19, 124, 229,
political narratives 273–9, 332, 344, 357, 358, 362, 231, 309, 512
366, 381, 384, 389, 393–4, 398–9, 401 professional integrity 613
politics 5, 12–17, 35, 38, 40, 55, 68, 90, 95, 105, professional journey 125
112, 125, 140, 151, 194, 244, 250, 275–9, 300, professional knowledge 63
313, 321, 326, 331, 341, 357, 360, 363; access professional learning 117
346; HIV 369–79; Love (and) 381–9; narrative professional life histories 52, 151
agency in the history of the Victoria and professional life narrating 229–31
Albert Museum 392–402; narrative flow 283–4; professional live(s) 76, 225, 447
storytelling, narrative power and sexual stories professional narratives 483
280–92; structures of narration 285–9; zeitgeist, professional psychology 485
identity 167–76 professional skills 320
Portugal professional sociology 28
positivist 3, 28, 66, 132, 133, 172, 419; empirical professional staff 159
narratives 341; research 56, 84, 186, 413; sciences professional status 145
12, 51 professional teacher 122
post-colonial counter-discourse 50 professional testimony 103
post-colonial debates 287 protestant 305–7, 310, 314, 333–5, 340, 454
post-colonial era 104 psychiatrist 159, 160, 283
post-colonial Europe 191 psychoanalysis 107, 215, 218, 220, 221, 253
post-colonial life 192; narratives 193; writing 198, psychological consultants 158
192 psychological scientists 7, 34
post-colonial nationalism 289 psychologist(s) 7, 16, 34, 35, 42–6, 158, 159, 160,
post-colonial studies 190 264, 298, 419, 434, 485, 573
653
Subject Index
psychometrics 89 496, 498, 501, 502, 505, 507–11, 514, 523, 531,
psychotherapy 43, 238 538, 559, 563, 566, 571, 572, 576–8, 581–6, 587,
Punjab 198, 200, 346, 350 588, 589–90, 593–8, 600–3, 607, 610, 612, 613,
622; American 132; biographical 185, 253, 254;
queer 448–56; identity 293–302 co- 75, 78, 423, 485, 491, 596, 600; disability
490; doctoral 505–17; EdD 507; educational
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 334, 349 98, 610; ethnographic 523; feminist 26, 435;
readers(s), extending the role of 545–6 international 506, 516; life history 64, 73, 76,
Red Army 316, 321 140, 456; narrative 41, 119, 415, 491, 511, 546,
reflecting team 512 571, 576, 581–3, 585–7, 589, 590, 593, 595–600,
reflexivity 9, 85, 103, 104, 106, 110, 113, 153, 182, 618, 622, 623; personality 34, 46; social policy
184, 186, 276, 414, 453, 459, 462, 495, 508, 585, 137; sociological 24, 28, 104, 134, 145, 176, 204,
624, 626 205; student 86; teacher 98, 100
relational aesthetics 575, 576 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) 306
relational humanism 572, 577, 578 Russian Revolution 327
relativists 61 Ryazan 319, 321, 322
religion 11, 38, 75, 151, 250, 285, 287, 308, 310,
311, 331–42, 346, 543 scholar(s) 3, 5, 8, 9, 23, 26, 133, 140, 141, 144, 225,
research: academic 97, 410, 458, 459, 462, 228, 237, 244, 245, 277, 295, 300, 344, 393, 408,
464, 468, 570, 578; arts-based 571, 575–6; 409, 410, 413, 415, 424, 428, 431, 436, 440, 482,
autobiographical 202, 207, 209, 210, 217; 494, 495, 502
autoethnographic 104, 460–2; compassionate scholarship 58, 106, 161, 277, 287, 352, 383, 392,
413, 431–42; contexts 73, 77, 79, 184, 186, 216, 393, 399, 411, 415, 448, 482, 569–76, 596, 608
263; cultural 215; design 64, 78, 81, 85, 108, selfhood 37, 46, 64, 103, 106, 118, 119, 193
151, 595, 597, 599, 608; education 49, 56, 117; sexualities 286, 287, 289, 299, 369
ethics 413, 415, 419, 420, 422, 428, 459, 482, sexuality 16, 26, 86, 285, 287, 294, 295, 301–3, 372,
571, 572, 581, 583, 593, 594, 599, 601, 602; 408, 435, 447, 453, 454, 489, 546, 622
feminist 147, 151, 459; hypothesis-testing 39; sexual stories 277, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290; power
international 202; life course 19, 21, 140; life 281–2
history 5, 9, 19, 21, 27, 60–2, 64, 66, 72–81, Sierra Leone 57
86, 134, 135, 139, 140, 237, 414, 447, 453, 460, Sikh 198, 200, 335, 336, 341, 350
563, 595, 596, 598; longitudinal life-course 21; situational ethics 435, 460, 468, 578, 618
migration 179, 180, 181, 186; narrative 49, 51–8, situationist(s) 35, 42, 96
102, 108, 126, 140, 141, 146, 147, 148, 151, 153, Sobibor 278, 318–20, 321–7
202, 205, 253, 257, 315, 371, 383, 411–15, 482, social constructionism 42, 134, 502, 508
485, 491, 505, 537, 554, 556, 564, 570–2, 579, social equality 137
581–90, 594–603, 618, 623; participant 39, 117, social exclusion 152, 297, 353
232, 258, 371, 413, 419, 436, 463, 467, 468, 505, social media 152, 298
510, 512, 513, 514, 542, 570, 576, 579, 581, 582, social mobility 44, 134, 168, 458
583, 584, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 590, 594, 596; social phenomenology 134
qualitative 49, 53, 66, 67, 75, 77, 85, 144, 146, social science(s) 23, 24, 29, 30, 39, 42, 58, 60, 90,
152, 202, 203, 206, 210, 215, 221, 250, 345, 422, 104, 139, 140, 144, 145, 152, 168, 170, 171, 180,
435, 460, 494, 495, 497, 511, 531, 589, 593, 594, 183, 184, 187, 202–4, 206–8, 214–16, 225–8,
597, 598; quantitative 180, 408; research 52–3, 345, 409, 413, 414, 422, 485, 486, 490, 504, 514,
55, 57, 69, 134, 146–7, 152, 180–1, 184–7, 207, 518, 522, 537–47, 553, 565, 570, 575, 576, 585,
209–11, 215–19, 221, 249, 251–4, 257, 261, 265, 593, 594, 606, 607
406, 411, 413, 460; scientific 34, 35, 518; social- social worker 150, 158–60, 351, 605, 610, 614
scientific 184; topics 68, 76, 410, 448, 507, 515, sociological analysis 23
598; transnational 186; types of 147 sociological biography 132
researcher(s) 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 86, 97–100, 106, sociological data 74, 180
117, 118, 132, 134, 135, 138–53, 174, 183–6, sociological life history 139
207, 208, 210, 216, 219–22, 225–8, 231–3, 249, sociological method 24, 27
252–5, 258, 261, 264, 265, 266, 268, 276, 277, sociological research 24, 28, 134, 145, 176, 204, 205
298, 302, 308, 310, 313, 410, 411, 413, 414, sociological study(ies) 26–8, 136, 137, 174, 175
415, 419–26, 428, 431, 434–40, 446–52, 460–3, sociological theory 25
465–8, 480, 481, 485–6, 488, 490–1, 493, 494, sociological work 29, 203
654
Subject Index
sociologist(s) 6, 23, 24, 26–8, 31, 97, 132, 145, 146, 218, 219, 222, 284, 447, 448, 453, 456, 472, 518,
149, 180, 207, 208, 253, 410, 435, 436, 490, 534, 519, 538
583, 605, 610 Sub-Sahara 49, 51
sociology 7, 23, 27, 28, 32, 131–4, 139, 145, 148, Sudan 288
167–9, 172–4, 176, 180, 182, 183, 185, 203, 208, supervising doctoral researchers in Hong Kong
210, 214, 225, 227, 257, 281, 283, 408, 489, 490, 414, 505–16
502 Sweden 136, 137, 254
Somalia 288 symbolic interactionism 132, 134, 183, 185, 216
South Africa 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 151, 275, 284,
287, 288, 370, 378 teacher education 74, 89, 104, 113, 114, 115, 116,
South Asian: children 514; cultures 193; diasporic 120, 124, 209, 424
140, 191, 192, 193, 200; food 195, 197; migrants Tel Aviv 319, 320
190; student 515; tradition 195 Tobago 496
Southern India 196 transability 544
South Korea 508, 509, 513 transableism 544
Soviet 94, 218, 319, 320, 323, 324, 326, 327, 399 Trinidad 496, 499, 500, 502
Soviet Union 133, 136, 319, 320, 321, 324, 326, Troubles (the) 305, 306, 313–15
336
Spain 125, 140, 202, 203, 208, 288 Uganda 194, 195, 286, 287
Spanish Civil War 203, 205 UK Department for International Development
story(ies): action, of 4–6, 100, 118, 409; family(ies) (DfID) 58
347–50; personal 34, 61, 90, 91, 93, 299, 357, Uruguay 208
359, 364, 370–2, 377–9, 484, 485, 487, 573;
teachers’ 4, 96–9; types 473–5 Venezuela 140, 207
storylines 5, 12, 17, 18, 20, 14, 20, 29, 64, 66, 94–6, Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) 292, 401
116, 147, 219, 262, 284, 296, 298, 299, 301, 374, Vietnam War 92, 174
462 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP or World Council
storyteller(s) 12, 17, 18, 20, 41, 42–3, 61, 62, 66, of Hindus) 334, 336, 349
238, 239, 283, 384, 414, 433, 436, 470–9, 566,
589, 679, 689 Warsaw 231, 319, 432, 437, 441
storytelling 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 36, 42, 43, 90, 91, Washington 319, 323, 324
93, 95, 99, 100, 225, 228, 231, 232, 239, 252, Watergate 92, 94
253, 276, 277–9, 281–6, 288–90, 313, 345, 387, welfare state 136–9
409, 413, 471–4, 478, 479, 484, 501, 523, 538, William Morris Society (WMS) 392, 394, 395, 397,
542, 574, 575, 619 400
student(s): biographical learning 256; identity(ies) Winter War (1939–1940) 136
256, 257; lives in two African contexts 53–5; work–life stories, eliciting 231–3
religious education 82; teachers 80, 110, World Bank 54
121, 124 World War I 175, 180, 302, 322, 327, 385, 525
subjectivity 3, 6, 7, 10, 17, 18, 24, 29, 30, 61, 66, 97, World War II 18, 31, 50, 94, 136, 137, 196, 322,
106, 149, 152, 182, 183, 191–3, 202, 207, 210, 327, 407
655

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THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL

HANDBOOK ON NARRATIVE AND

• The historical emergences of life history and narrative study

Ari Antikainen is Professor Emeritus of Sociology of Education at the University of Eastern

General Editor: Ivor Goodson

Introduction: Life histories and narratives 3

1 The rise of the life narrative 11

2 The story of life history 23

3 How stories found a home in human personality 34

4 Narrative and life history research in international education:

5 What have you got when you’ve got a life story? 60

6 Techniques for doing life history 72

7 The story so far: Personal knowledge and the political 89

8 Always a story 102

9 On coming to narrative and life history 116

Introduction: In search of life history 131

10 The quest for lived truths: Modifying methodology 144

11 Analyzing novelty and pattern in institutional life narratives 156

12 Zeitgeist, identity and politics: The modern meaning of the concept

13 Biography as a theoretical and methodological key concept

14 Culinary border crossings in autobiographical writing:

15 Biographical and narrative research in Iberoamerica: Emergence,

16 A psycho-societal approach to life histories 214

17 Working-life stories 225

18 Culturally available narratives in parents’ stories about disability 237

19 Researching higher education students’ biographical learning 249

20 The narrative interview – method, theory and ethics:

Introduction: Political narratives and the study of lives 273

22 Immutability blues: Stories of queer identity in an age of tolerance 293

23 Northern Irish narratives of protest and conﬂict: Back and forth

24 Aleksandr (Sasha) Pechersky (1909–1990): In search of a life story 318

25 Saffron and Orange: Religion, nation and masculinity in Canada

26 The experience of politics: Narratives of women MPs in the

27 Making family stories political? Telling varied narratives of

28 The politics of personal HIV stories 369

29 Epistolary entanglements of love and politics: Reading Rosa

30 Politics and narrative agency in the history of the Victoria

Introduction: ‘But who is Mrs Galinsky, mother?’: From Nana Sikes’

31 Ethical considerations entailed by a relational ontology in

32 Compassionate research: Interviewing and storytelling from

33 Suspicious, suspect and vulnerable: Going beyond the call and

34 The ethics of researching something dear to my heart with

35 How stories of illness practice moral life 470

36 The ethics of researching and representing dis/ability 481

37 An act of remembering: Making the ‘collective memories’ my

38 ‘The path is made by walking on it’: Ethical complexities in

39 Writing the (country) girl: Narratives of place, matter, relations

40 Ethics and the writing of After a Fall: A Sociomedical Sojourn 531

41 Ethics and the tyranny of narrative 536

42 The door and the dark: Trouble telling tales 550

43 “Styles of good sense”: Ethics, ﬁlmmaking and scholarship 569

44 Lingering ethical tensions in narrative inquiry 581

45 Purpose built ethical considerations for narrative research: Broad

46 A relational ethic for narrative inquiry, or in the forest but lost

47 Narrative ethics 618

Author Index 631

Life histories and narratives

Figure P1.1 The life history

Commenting on the public life associated with these changes, he says:

Learning Lives: An example

Figure 1.1 Learning lives

Hence so much of curriculum planning is based on prescriptive deﬁnitions of what is to be learnt

Narration Initial Life Story