Narrative, Memory & Everyday Life
N. Kelly, C. Horrocks, K. Milnes, B. Roberts, and D. Robinson (eds) (2005) Narrative, Memory and Everyday Life, pub. University of Huddersfield.
The theme of ‘everyday life’ had been selected as an broad term to explore how individuals narrate the self and interpret past experiences as part of their daily experiences in ‘ordinary' settings.
Copyright for chapters remains with individual authors at all times and permission should be sought from the author for any reproduction other than for personal use.
List of contents
Section One: Methodological Issues and Techniques
- Chapter 1 Narrative Analysis Catherine Kohler Riessman
- Chapter 2 The Verismo of the Quotidian: A Biographic Narrative Interpretive Approach to Two Diverse Research Topics Everton Bolton, Zaheera Vorajee (née Essat) and Kip Jones
- Chapter 3 A Reflection Upon Interpretive Research Techniques: The Problem-Centred Interview as a Method for Biographic Research Elisabeth Scheibelhofer
- Chapter 4 The Use of Narrative to Explore Risk in Everyday Life Niamh Moore, Nick Pidgeon, Peter Simmons and Karen Henwood
- Chapter 5 Working Life, Sustainable Health and Retirement for Women. A Qualitative Analysis from a Longitudinal Study Katriina Hugosson
- Chapter 6 What is Life Story Genre? Ivo Cermák and Vladimír Chrz
- Chapter 7 Subjective Perception of Personal Change Marek Blatný and Terezie Osecká
Section Two: The Construction/Reconstruction of Identity and Coherence
- Chapter 8 Biography and Narrative in the Times and Places of Everyday Life Ian Burkitt
- Chapter 9 Biographical Certainty in Reflexive Modernity Jens O. Zinn
- Chapter 10 Identity Trouble and Place of Residence in Women's Life Narratives Stephanie Taylor
- Chapter 11 Contingent Narratives: Fears and Tremblings David Hiles
- Chapter 12 The Habit that is Englishness Rudy van Kemenade
- Chapter 13 Walking and Work: Narratives of Polio and Postpolio Syndrome Ruth Bridgens
- Chapter 14 Becoming Disabled Through Sport: Embodied Memories of Pain Brett Smith and Andrew C. Sparkes
- Chapter 15 Public Conveniences, Private Matters: Retrospective Narration of Adolescent Daily Life with Inflammatory Bowel Disease Sally J.E. Sargeant, Harriet Gross and David Middleton
- Chapter 16 (Re)writing Memories: Childhood Sexual Abuse and Everyday Life Jo Woodiwiss
- Chapter 17 Storytelling and Subjectivity in Cyberspace: Personal Accounts of Bipolar Disorder Raya A. Jones
- Chapter 18 Speaking of the Everyday: Psychosis and Writing Brendan Stone
- Chapter 19 Social Work Tales: Client as a “Talking Problem” Mojca Urek
Section Three: Narrative Approaches to the Understanding of Everyday Life at Work
- Chapter 20 The Treatment of ‘Everyday Life' in Memory and Narrative of the Concentration Camps of the South African War, 1899-1902 Helen Dampier
- Chapter 21 Narratives of Service Provision: A Dialogical Perspective on the ‘Support’ of Asylum Seekers Philip Brown
- Chapter 22 Parallel Worlds: ‘This is How I Remember it … This is How it Was. It Could Have Happened to Anyone’ Helen Dilks
- Chapter 23 Encountering an Uneasy Child Eero Suoninen and Arja Lundán
- Chapter 24 Defining Moments in Medical History – Nurses' Narratives of their Everyday Experiences of a Key 20th Century Historical Event – the First Use of Antibiotics Graham Thurgood
Notes on Contributors
Please note that the information contained in this section was correct at the time of publication - April, 2005.
Marek Blatný
Marek Blatný is a research worker at the Institute of Psychology of Academy of Sciences in Brno . In his work he focuses on the role of personality predispositions in perception of the self, psychology of well-being, life-span development and personality coherence. He is author of two monographs – Self-concept in context of personality and together with Alena Plháková Temperament, Intelligence, Self-Concept. Since 1998 he lectures psychology of personality on Masaryk University in Brno .
Everton Bolton
Everton's professional background is in mental health social work. He is currently practising as an Approved Social Worker (ASW) in a community mental health team (CMHT) in Hertfordshire. His undertaking of a PhD in Mental Health at De Montfort University in Leicester was, for him, a natural progression – having completed an MSc in Care, Policy and Management at Guildhall University , London . His PhD research examines how individuals with severe and enduring mental illness reconstruct their personal identities in relation to their lived experience of multiple readmissions to psychiatric hospital.
Ruth Bridgens
Ruth Bridgens is currently finishing her PhD in medical sociology at Cardiff University , School of Social Sciences . After earlier degrees in art history and art, in 2000 she gained an MSc in Science (Open University) which led on to the PhD focusing on narratives of people who had polio and are now experiencing postpolio syndrome. Her research interests include narrative, chronic illness, disability, and contested illnesses. Future research interests include a generational study of the effects of disability in families, and societal attitudes towards people with chronic illnesses and subjective symptoms.
Philip Brown
Philip has a degree in psychology from the University of Huddersfield and has just submitted his doctoral thesis at the University of Huddersfield . His doctoral research takes a narrative-dialogical perspective in exploring the narratives of asylum seekers in dispersal in the UK . He has worked within both Social Services and Housing Services Departments providing support for asylum seekers and refugees for a number of years. He has been a lecturer within the Division of Psychology and Sociology for the University of Huddersfield for three years and has recently taken up the post of Research Fellow at the University of Salford in the School of Community , Health Sciences and Social Care.
Ian Burkitt
Ian Burkitt is a Reader in Social Sciences at the University of Bradford . His main research interests are in social and social psychological theory, the social construction of the self, and the relation between culture and forms of human embodiment. He is the author of Social Selves: Theories of the Social Formation of Personality (Sage, 1991) and Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity (Sage, 1999).
Ivo Cermák
Ivo is a director of the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic and associate professor at Masaryk University in Brno . He is the author of two books in Czech - Human aggression and its contexts (Fakta, 1998) and Job: An Actor - The Critical Moments in Theatre Actors' Life (Vetrné Mlýny, 2000, in collaboration with Jitka Lindén). His major research interests are narrative and hermeneutic psychology, qualitative methodology, and psychology of art.
Vladimír Chrz
Vladimír is a researcher at the Institute of Psychology , Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic . He is also a senior lecturer at the Charles University and at the Writers' Academy of Josef Škvorecký in Prague . He published a book Metaphors in Politics (1999) . His interests include narrative research in psychology.
Helen Dampier
Helen Dampier is currently completing a PhD in Sociology at the University of Newcastle . Her research concerns women's testimonies of the concentration camps of the 1899-1902 South African War and their political aftermaths.
Helen Dilks
Helen has worked in the private business sector for a number of years and completed her PhD at Nottingham University in 2003. During the course of her career as employment rights advisor, she has become interested in the narrative ability of the individuals who work in the shopfitting industry. Their fascinating stories have been the focus of her academic research, and continue to provide new insights into employment relationships. She is currently a member of a newly formed group within the BSA which hopes to represent the sociological contribution of an increasing number of non-academic based researchers.
Harriet Gross
Harriet Gross is a psychology lecturer at Loughborough University . Her research interests include women's health and well-being, in particular pregnancy as it impacts on women's working lives.
David Hiles
Dave is principal lecturer in psychology at De Montfort University, and also has trained as a transpersonal psychotherapist. His research interests are concerned with psychology as a human science, including the development of a model of disciplined inquiry, and discursive/narrative approaches to counselling practice, grief and loss, recovered memory, and the self-management of chronic illness.
Katriina Hugosson
Katriina is a qualitative researcher interested in gender and life history. The scientific question she would like to elaborate is, What is it that influences peoples different choices in life? She works as a senior lecturer at the School of Health Sciences in Jönköping.
Kip Jones
Dr Kip Jones has been a Research Fellow at De Montfort University for three years. His interest in the biographic narrative interpretive method began during his PhD research at De Montfort when he trained with Chamberlayne and Wengraf in the Method. He is currently interested in finding ways to use tools from the Arts and Humanities in the presentation and dissemination of social science data. Kip is Associate Book Review Editor of the online, social science qualitative journal, FQS (http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-eng.htm) where he recently wrote a biographic narrative interview piece with Mary Gergen, scholar, author and feminist.
Raya Jones
Raya A. Jones, PhD, is a lecturer in Psychology at Cardiff School of Social Sciences. Her most recent work concerns points of divergence and convergence between Jung's theory and social constructionist, narrative, and dialogical approaches to the self. She currently serves as a member of the executive committee of the International Association for Jungian Studies and advisor to the Journal of Analytical Psychology . Earlier work concerns children's identity constructions and emotional and behavioural difficulties in school settings, and the social construction of the ‘pupil with problems' in British education. She is the author of The Child-School Interface (Cassell, 1995).
Arja Lundán
Arja Lundan has recently completed her doctoral dissertation on interaction between a child and an adult in kindergarten. She works as a researcher in the Department of Education at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her main research interest is to analyse adult-child interaction in the dialogical frame of reference.
David Middleton
David Middleton is an Honorary Reader in Psychology at Loughborough University . His research interests concern the social use of remembering and forgetting vernacular and institutional settings, particularly in issues of succession and change in work settings.
Niamh Moore
Niamh Moore is the Qualitative Research Laboratory Research Associate at the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester . She is particularly interested in drawing on ethnography and oral history to explore (the overlapping domains of) feminist, environmentalist, queer, ecofeminist and global justice activism.
Terezie Osecká
Terezie Pilátová Osecká is a research assistant at the Institute of Psychology of Academy of Sciences in Brno . She is currently a PhD student at the School of Social Studies in the field of development psychology. She is interested in development of personality and the ethnic minorities education. She cooperated on evaluation program for Ministry of Education and Sports.
Catherine Kohler Riessman
Cathy Riessman's research examines interrupted lives, where events have disrupted expectations of continuity. Over a long career she has studied and compared the narrative accounts that women and men develop to make sense of biographical disruptions (chronic illness in mid-life, divorce and infertility). She examines personal accounts of these life events as stories that illuminate the social sources of “private troubles”, drawing connections between biography, history and society. Her research examines how social identities are constructed narratively, through storytelling. Her work builds on and extends recent interdisciplinary developments, and the burgeoning field of narrative theory in the social sciences and humanities.
Elisabeth Scheibelhofer
Elisabeth Scheibelhofer is a sociologist working in the areas of migration research, interpretative sociology and qualitative methods. She is a junior faculty member at the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna .
Sally Sargeant
Sally Sargeant is a graduate student in the Department of Human Sciences at Loughborough University . Her current PhD research examines how young people learn to live with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, and how narrative can reveal and possibly facilitate this. She is a qualified medical librarian, and has also published in this field. Her other research interests include the relationships between narrative coherence and psychological well-being, and the provision of evidence-based information in clinical settings.
Brett Smith
Brett Smith is a lecturer in the Qualitative Research Unit in the School of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter . His current research focuses on men, sport and spinal cord injury and he is developing work on the lived experiences of becoming disabled through sport.
Andrew C. Sparkes
Andrew C. Sparkes is Professor of Social Theory and Director of the Qualitative Research Unit in the School of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter . His research interests are eclectic and include: performing bodies, identities and selves; interrupted body projects and the narrative construction of self; the lives of marginalized individuals and groups; and sporting auto/biographies. His most recent book published in 2002 by Human Kinetics Press, explores new forms of representation in the social Sciences and is entitled Telling Tales in Sport and Physical Activity: A Qualitative Journey .
Brendan Stone
Brendan Stone is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English Literature at the University of Sheffield . His PhD was entitled ‘Starting to Speak: Madness and the Narration of Identity' and focused on the ways in which individuals living with chronic distress employ narrative to negotiate and construct a sense of selfhood. His other research interests include trauma and its representation; memory and narrative identity; and the intersections between fiction and autobiography.
Eero Suoninen
Eero Suoninen is an Assistant Professor in social psychology at the University of Tampere, Finland. In his doctoral dissertation and some other publications he has concentrated on qualitative research methodology, especially so-called discourse analysis. In his recent research work he has applied the methodology into practice by analysing institutional interaction and family interaction.
Stephanie Taylor
Stephanie Taylor is a Lecturer in Psychology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. She previously lectured in Sociology at Goldsmiths College , University of London and has extensive experience working with adult learners as a language and study skills tutor. Her research employs narrative and discursive methodologies and theories of identity to explore speakers' identity work. She has also written on ethnography and discourse analysis. She is a New Zealander who has lived in Britain for over a quarter of a century and is still working on her own identity with relation to place.
Graham Thurgood
Since 1972 Graham worked in a variety of nursing roles in hospital and as a district nurse. After becoming involved in nurse education he moved from Birmingham to work as a nurse tutor at the Huddersfield Royal Infirmary School of Nursing in 1989. Since 1997 he has been studying the history of nursing in Halifax and Huddersfield for a PhD involving archival and oral history data. He is currently a Senior Lecturer, School of Human and Health Sciences, University of Huddersfield , where he created the West Yorkshire History of Nursing web site in December 2000.
Mojca Urek
Mojca Urek is an Assistant Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia . Her PhD was on “Narrating in Social Work” . She has undertaken research in the field of community mental health, women's studies and storytelling as a social work method and has taken an active part in the deinstitutionalisation of mental health services in Slovenia since its beginning in the mid-1980s. She is an activist in the feminist movement and co-founded the Women's Counselling Service in Ljubljana . Relevant research projects include: Planning of psychosocial services on the basis of mental health users' long-term needs in Slovenia (1992-1994), Exploring psychosocial needs on the basis of life (hi)stories of women – patients in a psychiatric ward in the psychiatric hospital in Ljubljana (1992-1994), Contextual Methods in Social Work (2001-2004), History of Social Work in Slovenia (2004-).
Rudy van Kemenade
Rudy was born in the Netherlands but lived in South Africa from the age of four. After a period of training with the Jesuits he took a first degree in Sociology and Philosophy at Rhodes University and later a masters degree in Sociology at the London School of Economics. He taught at several institutions including Rhodes University and Bolton Institute of Higher Education before joining the University in 1975. His special interests are social philosophy, the history of ideas and nationalism. In 1991/92 Rudy followed a masters course in European Studies at Bradford University .
Zaheera Vorajee (née) Essat
Zaheera is a third-year full-time PhD candidate at the Mary Seacole Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester. After completing her BSc in Midwifery and before registering for a full-time PhD, she worked as a midwife and research assistant. Her research interests include migrant women's birth stories, working closely with the biographic narrative interpretive method.
Jo Woodiwiss
Jo Woodiwiss completed her PhD in the Centre for Women's studies at the University of York in December 2004. Entitled ‘Stories to live by, selves to live with: Constructing the self through narratives of childhood sexual abuse’, her thesis explored women's engagement with sexual abuse narratives. This links in with Jo's research interests around the social construction of women's health and well being; social violence against women and children' identity, biography and narrative.
Jens O. Zinn
Dr Jens O. Zinn is Research Fellow in the ESRC network Social Contexts and Responses to Risk (SCARR, http://www.kent.ac.uk/scarr/index.htm) in the School of Social Policy , Sociology and Social Research (SSPSSR) at the University of Kent , Canterbury . His research interests include theorizing on risk, uncertainty and social change, research on life course and status passages, method combination/triangulation and qualitative and biographical approaches in sociology. Recent publications in English: 2005: The biographical approach – a better way to understand behaviour in health and illness? in, Health, Risk and Society; 2004: Health, risk and uncertainty in the life course, in Social Theory & Health; 2002: Conceptional considerations and an empirical approach to research on processes of individualization, in FQS.