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What's in a story? Getting the best out of interviews, personal
accounts and life histories
Gaby Weiner
January 2013
Questions
What to do?
How useful as research method?
What are strengths?
What are weaknesses?
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What to do
• Documentary evidence (access, photocopying/scanning)
• Interviews (access, video/audio recording, transcription, ethics)
• Diaries, memoirs, memorabilia (access, photocopying/scanning)
• Similar studies • Wider literature review (access to journals,
libraries, Internet)10/04/23 Gaby Weiner 3
Autobiography: definition & sources
• History of a particular life, written by the self;• Complex interplay between the present and past life, reviewed at specific stages;• Subject has ownership of voice and text• Act of autobiography is in the present.
InterviewsLife-story tellingLife historiesOral historiesLetters, diariesJournals
sources
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• History of a particular life, written by another • Narrative structure• Act of biography is in the present.• Influence of BIOGRAPHER
Biography: definition & sources
InterviewsCase-studiesLife-story tellingLife historiesOral historiesLetters, diariesJournals
sources
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Collective biography (prosopography)
• Study of individuals belonging to the same field e.g. teacher educators (Erixon Arreman, 2005);
• Based on a comprehensive collection of data e.g. social origin, education, characteristics crucial to the field
• Same set of data collected for each individual; • Main focus on the history and structure of the field
(not the individual)
(Bourdieu, Pierre, 1988: Homo academicus. Polity, Cambridge).
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Narrative into scholarship
What makes narrative into life history (the overall picture of the informant's or interviewee's life, usually gathered by means of an interview) is a second layer and further interpretation, usually by a scholarly other. Thus, the first layer is more autobiographical and the second, biographical.
Goodson. Ivor & Sikes, Pat. Life History Research in Educational Settings (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001), 16.
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type, e.g.popularpathography – ‘digging up dirt’scholarlypolitical/critical
genre, e.g.historicalliterarypoliticalmilitaryeducational
Auto/biographical forms
focus, e.g.‘famous’ people – celebrities, villains, freakskey historical actors i.e. ‘great (white) men/women’ordinary people (hitherto)invisible people (hitherto)
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Why now as research?
• Growth of interest in the individual as subject• Wish to ’humanise’ research• Concern to acknowledge agency• Attempt to know the ’other’ – e.g. social justice,
feminism, multiculturalism/antiracism, dis/ability • Post-structural turn – rejection of the universal• Making visible the invisible• Interest in ‘why and ‘how’ as much as ‘what’, ‘when’ and
‘how many’• Interest in relationship between individuals and social
structureeee Gaby Weiner 9
Importance of interpretation
‘Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three’.
(Opening to Billie Holiday’s autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, 1956)
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Truth?
In fact:Billie Holiday’s mother, Sadie Fagan, was nineteen when she was born, and her father, Clarence Holiday, was seventeen, They never did marry, never even lived together. Billie Holiday (real name Eleanor Fagan) was not born in Baltimore, as she always said, but in Philadelphia
(Rose, P., 1993, The Norton Book of Women’s Lives. New York: WW Norton & Co: 402)
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Reflections -
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly - to ourselves (Julian Barnes, 2012)
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form, with the last instalment missing (Crisp, 1997)
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one (Carlyle, 1827)
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Reflections +
There is properly no history; only biography (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
The history of the world is but the biography of great men. (Thomas Carlyle)
Read no history--nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. (Benjamin Disraeli)
(All quotes from nineteenth-century ‘great men’)
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The Autobiographer
I do not belong to the class whose public lives entitle them to call their autobiographies “Memoirs”, generally men and women who have actions on a wider public stage to record or defend, or who have lived close to great events and those who took decisions affecting them. I have not been among them. Probably my name will figure in the histories of one or two specialized fields, such as twentieth-century Marxism and historiography, and perhaps it will crop up in some books on twentieth-century British intellectual culture. Beyond that, if my name were somehow to disappear completely from sight, like my parents’ gravestone in the Vienna Central Cemetery, for which I vainly searched five years ago, there would be no discernible gap in the narrative of what happened in twentieth-century history, in Britain and elsewhere.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2002), x-xi10/04/23 Gaby Weiner 14
Act of auto/biography
He [Bennett’s father] stopped at the bed of a sad, shrunken woman with wild hair, who cringed back against the pillows.
“Here’s your Mam,” he said.
And of course it was only that, by one of the casual cruelties that routine inflicts, she had on admission been bathed, her hair washed and left uncombed and uncurled, so that now it stood out around her head in a mad halo, this straight away drafting her into the ranks of the demented. Yet the change was so dramatic, the obliteration of her usual self so utter and complete, that to restore her even to an appearance of normality now seemed beyond hope. She was mad because she looked mad.
Bennett, Alan. Untold Stories (London: Faber & Faber, 2005) 12.
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Pictures as Autobiography
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Pictures as Biography
1923
192419281925
1940s
1950 1954 1963
‘Professional’ auto/biography
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Pictures as biography,Harriet Martineau at 31
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New autobiographical forms
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What does auto/biography offer as research?
• the truth about an event or a life?• a truth about an event or a life?• retrospective and therefore perhaps unreliable
narrative? • conscious selection from experience?• attempt to create unified subject?• complex production of truth/fiction?• Shows impact of social structure on
individual?OR ???10/04/23 Gaby Weiner 22
Issues in auto/biography as research (summary)
timeidentity
memoryresearcher
methodology
multiple, fluid, constructed
past, present, future
fallibility, accuracy, false
memory
interpretation,representation,
reflexivity, ethics
quality of evidence, validity, reliability, rigour
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Doing educational narrative or auto/biography
Write about one’s own education/life or experiences
Write about someone else’s education/life or
experiences
• What do you emphasise?• What do you leave out?• How do you shape the story?• What voice do you use?• What form of evidence do you draw on?• What ethics are involved?• What is your key message?
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Contact details and information
Email:
Website:
www.gabyweiner.co.uk
Book: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Lives: Auto/biography in Educational Settings, with Lucy Townsend, Althouse Press, 2011
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