Histories and stories

1. Histories and stories So915 Week 8

2. Politics of qualitative work: • Questioning who speaks and how • Critique of dominance of interviews as providing windows to a stable state of mind, as taken for granted ways of getting data • Look more carefully at what is being done when qualitative material is gathered • Stories as important to everyday life: • Anecdotes, fiction, (auto)biographies, fairy tales, myths, metaphors, etc. • Sense-making • Self-making • Culture-making

3. Context for exploring stories • Sociology has a relationship to science (hence extensive discussions of validity, objectivity, avoidance of bias etc.) • Sociology has a relationship to the humanities • Literature and history most relevant this week • Methods (modes of data gathering e.g. individual biographies to speak to wider questions, modes of analysis: e.g. use of ‘narratology’). • Questions: similar accounts of what counts as interesting (experience, subjectivity) • Philosophy: comparable interest in what is known and knowable: memory and truth, text and construction.

4. Histories and stories • Oral history (life history): a method associated with social history that stresses ‘history from below’. • Narrative analysis: a specific version of a wider cultural and academic interest in stories as the basis for human cultures. • These are distinct (and there are many versions of each), but they can be compared to good effect.

5. What is oral history? • What kinds of past matter? • History is defined by those who write stories • And (most often) victors get to be the ones who write. • History from below • Make visible the lives of the previously silenced • Those who have been ignored or marginalised • giving voice • Valuing the oral rather than the written (the archive)

6. Archives • Access the past through national, state, local, interest group/ institutional archives • Texts, images, audio and video recordings, including a range of official and personal documents (diaries etc.) Limitations of archival documents: • Snapshots of time; purpose/ intent • Tend to reflect the experience of elites and those of global north (e.g. orientalist representations of colonial past; exclusions of class and gender). • Questions re: truth and objectivity • Who controls access? Can I trust this material? Can I get this material? Should I have access to it? • How has the information already been ordered? What frames and disciplines have been applied?

7. Oral History’s response • Record the recent past using the words of those who lived in it – before they go (Paul Thompson, The Edwardians). • Facilitated by modern recording techniques and the normalisation of interviews. • Listen to (marginalised, subaltern) voices: emancipatory aims. • Privilege the oral (and aural) over textual • Hear dialect and vernacular expressions

8. What kinds of research questions? • Historian’s question: What was life like? • Sociologist’s questions: Why was life like that? How were inequalities reproduced? How was life experienced? • Social history (often community history – oral histories of big and small events: political unrest, workplace closures, ‘whole way of life’ of a community). • May be the very recent past (e.g. Truth and reconciliation commissions in South Africa). • Stories of cruelty central to the practice of T&R, stories of these stories are used to understand participant’s experiences.

9. Sociological ‘take’ on oral history • Life history, individual biographies, work history. • Elicited by careful, fairly neutral questioning. • Can take several hours (spread over multiple visits) • Stories used to record and explain events. • Sometimes: stories used to produce theories about events.

10. Questioning oral history • How does orality compare to the written word? Is writing associated with rationality? If so, what are the implications for oral history? • What happens to ‘oral history’ when it is transcribed? • How do recordings compare to transcripts? • What makes a good transcript?

11. truthiness • Credibility of oral accounts: how can and should we assess credibility? • What challenges credibility of oral accounts? • What kind of truths does a ‘wrong’ statement contain? • What happens to ‘objectivity’ in oral history?

12. The narrator and the interviewer • How does in/exclusion of the interviewer’s voice distort what is heard? • How can an interviewer generate ‘good’ oral history? • Can oral history reach the aim of giving voice?

13. Narrative

14. Sociology’s multiple ‘narratives’ • Interviews that elicit narratives. • Found narratives/ ‘naturally occurring’ data • Narratives as extended metaphors full of indirect information. • Narrative as story: life is about stories (Plummer) • Narratives help constitute self identity • Narrative genres and representations (what kinds of stories are told in what contexts, what do they do?) • Narratives as a cultural resource for identity making • Constructed narratives (narrative as a way of writing), e.g. ethnography as narrative.

15. Using stories in sociological analysis • Becker: narrative has a role in even the most conventional analysis (e.g. analytic induction) “a well constructed story can satisfy us as an explanation of an event. The story tells how something happened – how this happened first and led, in a way that is reasonable to see, to that happening, and if all that hadn’t happened, the event we’re interested in wouldn't have happened either.” (Becker, 1994: 188) • i.e. stories don’t reveal cause and effect, but they do reveal the contingencies of outcomes (and inter-contingencies with other lives). • i.e. foregrounds temporality when trying to say WHY something happens. • i.e. coincidence matters

16. Narrative analysis • A specific set of ways of thinking about data which share a constructionist underpinning. • Useful for considering identity, subjectivity and representation. • A knowing teller (re)constructs a story of life • As a respondent to a life history interview • As a reflexive researcher • As a researcher, your interest is not in the truth of the tale, but in how it’s told….

17. Key assumptions of narrative analysis • Stories are an important means through which we communicate with one another and with ourselves • Data is dynamic and messy; meaning is contextual and constructed • Importance of temporal framing

18. Beginning a narrative analysis Stories DO something; they have a purpose • How was this made? • By whom? • Why? • What does it contain? • What identities, subjectivities are presented? • Stories are almost always subjectively true

19. Exploring narrative • What structures the narrative (events, other people, chance etc.) • What is excluded from the range of possible actions? (discarded alternatives) • What is included and excluded from the story? • What understandings of cause and effect are present? • how does temporality affect the story? • What oppositions and binaries are present (he’s a bastard, she’s thick, they’re pious freaks, we were greedy).

20. What is the narrative doing? • Search for a coherent story (of self) • Explore the gaps between versions of self. • Distinguish between event(s) and the manner of their representation. • Events predate representation, but matter in how and when they’re represented. What does the story of the event DO?

21. Example: being a bastard ‘The trouble is that, when the heat is on and you need support, Geoff will never be there. You’ll get the sympathetic look, perhaps the comment that he has always found a particular investment rule very tough, and you think: “You bastard, you wrote that rule, you’re the boss here, you could have helped and you didn’t.”’ (‘Adrian’, in Sims, 2005, ‘You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations’. Organization Studies, 2005: 26.

22. Indignation and ‘being a bastard’ • Interviewees like Adrian struggled to make sense of the behaviour of people like Geoff. • They could express indignation • Some tried to understand others’ behaviourbefore judging them, others rush to judgement. All still “experience a visceral reaction of indignation to some of their colleagues.” • We tell stories of people as ‘bastards’ when we’ve run out of other ways of accounting for them. Demonizing like this is a relief but also makes us feel guilty.

23. Questioning Narratives • What kinds of research questions could you study using narrative analysis? • What might be the differences between found and elicited narratives? • What kinds of interpretation are possible? What are the limits to interpretation? • What version of ‘truthiness’ does narrative analysis promise?

24. exercise Either Using text 1, interrogate the story to identify how it was produced and to understand how it affects the reader? What kinds of questions might have been used? What kind of truth does it contain? OR Explore text 2 using the ideas of narrative analysis. What story would you tell about the authors?