Narratives of Identity and Place

Stephanie Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415655699
• eBook ISBN: 9781135193775
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Changes of residence are common in contemporary Western societies. Traditional connections to birthplaces, home towns and countries are broken as people relocate and migrate, yet where they live remains significant to people's identity and stories of who they are. This book investigates the continuing importance of place for women's identities, employing a theoretical and empirical approach based on previous work in narrative and discursive psychology.

Through an analysis of women's talk, the book examines how commonsense meanings shape and limit people's identity-work to establish a connection to place. It argues that talk about place, and especially place of residence, enables a complex positioning of self and others in which identities of gender, class and national identity intersect. It shows how a speaker's multiple interpretations of where she lives remain central to her life narrative, and to her fragile and idealized definition of 'home' as the place in which she may position herself positively.

Narratives of Identity and Place presents a unique and valuable integration of the popular methods of narrative and discourse analysis, compellingly demonstrating the value of these approaches for research on identity.

1
The meanings of place for identity

1.1 Introduction: The contemporary importance of place

In the early twenty-first century, our connections to place might appear to have lessened in importance as people have become more mobile. Migration ‘has never been so pervasive as it is today’, according to the anthropologist, Toon van Meijl (in press, p.11). Movement within nation states has also become common and unremarkable. In many Western countries, including the United Kingdom, changing where you live has become a way-marker for an adult life course, especially a middle-class one. Young people aspire to leave their parents’ home and move to a place of their own, probably a rented flat, and then to get a foot on the housing ladder by becoming first-time buyers. The next step is to afford a family house with a garden, perhaps changing again to what my local paper describes as an ‘executive home’. In retirement, people may downsize, for instance to a bungalow, with a possible final move to sheltered housing or retirement accommodation. Linked to this focus on changing residence, there is enormous interest in the housing market and fluctuating property values. At the time of writing, there is considerable discussion about the effects of a slump in property prices linked to the general economic downturn. However, there are still numerous television programmes which celebrate people selling and buying houses, sometimes even to move to another country, for example, to Australia or New Zealand for a more prosperous or leisured family life, or idyllic surroundings somewhere in continental Europe for retirement.

Although there have always been people who have left the countries where they were born to escape persecution or extreme hardship, for many contemporary migrants from affluent Western societies the reason for moving is less negative, as these programmes indicate. van Meijl writes that ‘A search for employment no longer seems to be the main reason to cross national borders…people migrate more and more for a whole range of other reasons, including cultural reasons associated with differences in lifestyle as disseminated by multiple global media’ (p.11). As his succinct account indicates, for the privileged at least, changing country, like changing residence within a country, has become an active choice, rather than something forced by unbearable circumstance, and it is a choice to live in a particular way, to pursue one lifestyle over other options.

What are the implications of all of these changes of residence for people’s connections to place? It might be supposed that mobility has weakened the kind of traditional ties to place invoked in references to a native land, a birthplace, a home town or region, or a local community. However, Sarah Ahmed and others (2003) suggest that home and movement are not necessarily directly or neatly opposed; people’s relationships to place are more complex than either ‘rooted belonging’ or ‘rootless mobility’ (p.3). Certainly, it seems that despite the mobility I have described, place, and especially where someone lives, retains a special contemporary relevance for identity. For instance, there is still a widespread assumption that a connection exists between a place and the people who inhabit it. This appears in references to local identities (being a Londoner or a Geordie, for example), and also perhaps in people’s interests in family history and ‘roots’ (Nash, 2003). My aim in this book is to explore the relevance of place for women’s identities in contemporary Western societies.

Of course, the progression up a hypothetical property ladder which I have just described is not part of everyone’s experience and indeed, may not be anyone’s in all the details. As a recognizable sequence or established narrative for adult life, it overlaps with other narratives of a life course, for example, of people moving from childhood to single adulthood, (heterosexual) coupledom and then parenthood (which Reynolds and Taylor (2005) call the ‘dominant coupledom’ narrative). The power of these narratives is that they are not descriptive but normative, including heteronormative. They are closely implicated with class and gender. The empirical work I present in this book explores how these kinds of narratives linked to place provide rich and flexible resources for women’s identity work, including for the construction of a situated biographical narrative as part of an ongoing personal identity project.

1.2 The contemporary importance of identity

Why is identity important? It has a topical relevance for academics in the social sciences, including social psychology. This is because theorists have suggested that living in a ‘late modern’ or ‘postmodern’ or ‘globalized’ society involves a substantial change of experience, including a change in the nature of identity. Features of this contemporary social world include changed social and political institutions, and innovations linked to technology, for example in communications and transport, as well as the kind of mobility I have already referred to. In addition, identity itself is now said to be different because, as Anthony Giddens (1991) puts it, in this contemporary society ‘we live “in the world” in a different sense from previous eras of history’ (p.186). If this theory is accepted, then understanding ‘who I am’ is more difficult and therefore more important, for everyone, including for the academics who are interested in people and their lives.

More generally, the topic of identity is important because it is central to the classic concerns of social scientists, including social psychologists. Identity is about the interface between what might variously be characterized as the macro and the micro, the exterior and interior, the peopled social world and the individual person within it, as well as other people’s views of ‘who I am’ and how I see myself. However, despite the shared interest, there is little agreement about the nature of that interface or the dichotomies which I have just referred to. All (macro/micro, exterior/ interior, social/individual, others/self) imply tidy distinctions which have been challenged, and this lack of agreement is a further reason why identity continues to be a topic of study and debate.

There is sometimes assumed to be a division of labour between disciplines, especially psychology and sociology. According to this view, the individual is the concern of psychologists who accordingly understand identity in individualistic terms, while sociologists consider collective and social identities.¹ However this is an over-simple account of the differences between the disciplines. It also ignores the long history of dialogues across disciplinary boundaries, especially those of sociology and social psychology. There are many contemporary social psychologists (such as, in the UK alone, Nikolas Rose, Margaret Wetherell, Valerie Walkerdine, Ann Phoenix and Wendy Hollway) whose work has been influential in both disciplines. More importantly, this assumed division between psychology and sociology misses the central argument of the tradition of work which this book follows, that personal and social identity are inseparable. As Steph Lawler (2008) puts it, ‘identities are socially produced’ and ‘there is no aspect of identity that lies outside social relations’ (p.143). A major part of this social production, I will suggest, is linked to what Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell (1995) (citing Antonio Gramsci) have described as ‘society’s common sense’ (p.165). This includes the aggregated ideas and theories about how the world is and should be, and the associated practices or ways of doing things which make up our shared cultural environment. In the approach I present in this book, the kinds of narratives which I have described are part of this common sense. They become resources available to people for talking about themselves and their lives. Throughout the book, I draw on sources from psychology and also from other disciplines, including sources from sociology and other social sciences which have informed later work in social psychology.

Two aspects of the book which do perhaps belong more to psychology than other disciplines are, first, the detail of the empirical work and, second, the methodological chain of argument by which that work is connected to the topic being investigated, that is, identity. My empirical work involves a close analysis of women’s talk. My methodological argument is based largely though not exclusively on work over the last two decades in discourse analysis and critical discursive psychology (e.g. Edley, 2001; Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell, 1998; Wetherell and Potter, 1992) and narrative research. The methodological strand of this book is presented as both an exposition of my own approach to data analysis and a guide for other researchers.

In the remainder of this chapter, I will introduce the research project for which I collected the interviews which are analysed in this book and begin my discussion of the importance of place for identity using the example of one interview.

1.3 Researching place and identity

Following from the arguments that people’s relationships to place and also their ways of understanding themselves have changed, the central questions addressed in this book concern the impact of these changes on women. What is the contemporary importance of place in their lives? How can they reconcile a claim of belonging and a sense of home with other identities and life circumstances, especially those which conflict with more traditional roles? Are there ‘new’ identities of place for women? I set out to explore these through a research project for which I conducted interviews between August 1998 and June 2000.²

I recruited the participants in the project through a notice in a university newspaper for part-time students. Volunteers were invited to take part in research on ‘Place and Identity’, to be interviewed about ‘their connections to the place where they live…their experiences, ideas and feelings… what creates a sense of belonging and being “home”. ‘I was careful to refer to ‘place’ without being more specific because I wanted to see how the participants themselves talked about place, for example, as a reference to a neighbourhood or town or building or just the inside of a house or flat. (In the interview itself I also avoided defining place and if someone asked what exactly I meant by the term, as a few people did, I referred the point back to them, for example, by suggesting they answer the question in whatever way seemed most obvious.)

This initial call for participants received many responses from women and men living in different parts of the UK. Research about women does not necessarily confine itself to women participants and I originally planned to compare two sets of interviews, with women and men. I abandoned this plan when I recognized the problems with the underlying assumptions that, first, people would be speaking as representatives of their gender categories, and second, that gender is a variable which can be isolated. (I discuss these problems in more detail below and in Chapter 3.) After making a further decision to interview only women for the research,³ I eventually recruited 20 women as participants and interviewed each of them for about an hour, in university premises or their homes, audio-recording the interviews for later transcription and analysis.⁴ (One interview could not be used because of the poor sound quality of the recording.) The interviews were informal. They were semi-structured, following a (flexible) list of prompt questions about the participants’ current and former places of residence, the features of these which the participants valued or found problematic, other places they considered important in their lives, and their expectations about where they would live in the future.

At the time I interviewed them, all the women were living in London or another area of the south of England accessible to the university where the research was based. They ranged in age from late twenties to early fifties. They were all in part-time or full-time paid employment, but in other respects their life circumstances varied. Some lived alone, some with a child or children, some with a partner or a partner and children. Most were owner-occupiers of flats and houses but some were tenants, one was boarding with relatives and one lived in a residence connected to her workplace. This variation would be problematic in a quantitative study which attempted to separate categories as possible variables. However, in this qualitative project I was interested in the women’s accounts of their circumstances and the ways in which they talked about them, as I will explain. I did not seek, or expect to find, participants in identical circumstances.

The women’s lives, as they described them to me, echoed the mobility and instability of residence which has been cited as a possible feature of contemporary society, as I discussed in Section 1. For instance, of the 19 participants whose interviews I used, only two still lived in or near the place where they had been born and grown up, and those two had both left and then returned. Nine of the women had lived in more than one country for extended periods, even without taking account of moves between the different nations of the United Kingdom. Two still lived away from their country of birth. Of course, these numbers, while interesting, are too small to be significant or representative and I was not conducting a quantitative analysis.⁵ As I will show in the next two sections, my interest was in a qualitative analysis of their talk. The book presents an overview of my findings and arguments based on all the interviews although only 12 participants are quoted directly.

There have been some criticisms of the use of interviews for research, especially by discursive psychologists whose work draws closely on conversation analysis (e.g. Potter and Hepburn, 2005). Much of the criticism follows from the preference of conversation analysts for the use of ‘naturally occurring talk’ as data (Schegloff, 1997). Their broad argument is that there is some artificiality about interviews and that speakers are led to talk about things which they would not discuss otherwise (this is similar to the more conventional argument against using ‘leading questions’). A further criticism, relating to both data analysis and data collection, is that the researcher imposes her or his preconceptions on the interview data rather than following what is important or salient to the speakers themselves, as indicated by what they orient to in the talk.

There are a number of possible responses to these criticisms (see Smith, Hollway and Mishler, 2005). I will mention here only the two which are most relevant to my research interests. First, the talk which occurs in a research interview does not have a completely distinctive character from the kind of ‘naturally occurring talk’ which is supposedly a better source of data. Indeed, it could be argued that a good interview is also a natural conversational encounter; it is not unusual for the interviewer and participant apparently to forget they are being recorded. The second point relates to the criticism that the researcher imposes her or his concerns on the talk. What is said in an interview, like any talk, is not a wholly original, unique production for that occasion. Speakers draw on the ideas and language which, in the terms of my approach, are part of the ‘discursive resources’ shared by members of society. They are also likely to be saying again things that they had said before, in other contexts. For example, in my interviews, when my participants talked about their lives, their experience and their plans for the future, they were almost certainly not discussing these things for the first time. Of course, their talk was shaped for and by this specific situation and interaction but for much of the interview they were probably producing a ‘version’ of what had been said before. The next few sections will show how this relates to my analytic approach.

A third point, although one which requires further investigation, is that a research topic may well be salient for the people who volunteer to be research participants. In the project I discuss in this book, a number of the people who contacted me to discuss participating (men as well as women) presented themselves as having a special reason for being interested in place and identity. These reasons, as they described them, included insecure or otherwise problematic accommodation, a plan to move in the near future, a recent or anticipated change in their life circumstances (redundancy, a partner’s serious illness), and an earlier period of life or childhood spent moving about and/or resident in another country. Of course other people volunteered for different reasons, such as an interest in research in general or because they were students who saw the project as relevant to their own studies. However, for many of the participants place was already a l...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• 1 The meanings of place for identity
• 2 Narrative in a contemporary identity project
• 3 Place, gender and identity
• 4 Places I remember: Memories and continuity in a life narrative
• 5 A place for the future? Trouble in identity work
• 6 New identities of place? Opportunity, choice and personalization
• 7 Places of my own: Residence and nationality in one woman’s identity
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index