The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography

Julie M. Parsons, Anne Chappell, Julie M. Parsons, Anne Chappell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030319731
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030319748
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

In a neo-liberal era concerned with discourses of responsible individualism and the 'selfie', there is an increased interest in personal lives and experiences. In contemporary life, the personal is understood to be political and these ideas cut across both the social sciences and humanities.

This handbook is specifically concerned with auto/biography, which sits within the field of narrative, complementing biographical and life history research. Some of the contributors emphasise the place of narrative in the construction of auto/biography, whilst others disrupt the perceived boundaries between the individual and the social, the self and the other. The collection has nine sections: creativity and collaboration; families and relationships; epistolary lives; geography; madness; prison lives; professional lives; 'race'; and social justice and disability. They illustrate the inter- and multi-disciplinary nature of auto/biography as a field. Each section features an introduction froma section editor, many of whom are established researchers and/or members of the British Sociological Association (BSA) Auto/Biography study group.

The handbook provides the reader with cutting-edge research from authors at different stages in their careers, and will appeal to those with an interest in auto/biography, auto-ethnography, epistolary traditions, lived experiences, narrative analysis, the arts, education, politics, philosophy, history, personal life, reflexivity, research in practice and the sociology of the everyday.

Chapter 1: A Case for Auto/Biography; Julie Parsons and Anne Chappell.

Section One: Creativity and Collaboration; edited by Gayle Letherby.

Chapter 2: The Times are a Changing: Culture(s) of Medicine; Theresa Compton.

Chapter 3: Seventeen Minutes and Thirty-One Seconds: An Auto/Biographical Account of Collaboratively Witnessing and Representing an Untold Life Story; Kitrina Douglas andDavid Carless.

Chapter 4: Reflections on a Collaborative, Creative 'Working' Relationship; Deborah Davidson and Gayle Letherby.

Section Two: Families andRelationships: Auto/Biography and Family, A Natural Affinity?; edited by David Morgan.

Chapter 5: Life Story and Narrative Approaches in the Study of Family Lives; Julia Brannen.

Chapter 6: The Research Methods for Discovering Housing Inequalities in Socio-Biographical Studies; Elizaveta Polukhina.

Chapter 7: Auto/Biographical Research and The Family;Aidan Seery and Karin Bacon.

Section Three: Epistolary Lives: Fragments, Sensibility, Assemblages in Auto/Biographical Research; edited by Maria Tamboukou.

Chapter 8: Letter-Writing and the Actual Course of Things: Doing the Business, Helping the World Go Round; Liz Stanley.

Chapter 9: The Unforeseeable Narrative: Epistolary Lives in Nineteenth Century Iceland; Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir.

Chapter 10: Auto/Pathographies In Situ: 'Dying of Melancholy' in Nineteenth CenturyGreece; Dimitra Vassiliadou.

Section Four: Geography Matters: Spatiality and Auto/Biography; edited by John Barker and Emma Wainwright.

Chapter 11: "Trying to Keep Up": Intersections of Identity, Space, Time and Rhythm in Women Student Carer Auto/Biographical Accounts;Fin Cullen, John Barker and Pam Alldred.

Chapter 12: Spatiality and Auto/Biographical Narratives of Encounter in Social Housing;Emma Wainwright, Elodie Marandet and Ellen McHugh.

Chapter 13: "I Thought… I Saw… I Heard…": The Ethical and Moral Tensions of Auto/Biographically Opportunistic Research in Public Spaces; Tracy Ann Hayes.

Section Five: Madness, Dys-order and Autist/Biography: Auto/Biographical Challenges to Psychiatric Dominance; edited by Kay Inckle.

Chapter 14: Autist/Biography; Alyssa Hillary.

Chapter 15: Reaching Beyond Auto? A Polyvocal Representation of Recovery From "Eating Dys-order"; Bríd O'Farrell.

Chapter 16: [R]evolving Towards Mad: Spinning Away from the Psy/Spy-Complex Through Auto/Biography; Phil Smith.

Section Six: Prison Lives; edited by Dennis Smith.

Chapter 17: Nelson Mandela: Courage and Conviction – The Making of a Leader; Dennis Smith.

Chapter 18: The "Other" Prison of Antonio Gramsci and Giulia Schucht; Jeni Nicholson.

Chapter 19: Bobby Sands: Prison and the Formation of a Leader; Denis O'Hearn. - Section Seven: Professional Lives; edited by Jenny Byrne.

Chapter 20: Academic Lives in a Period of Transition in Higher Education: Bildung in Educational Auto/Biography; Irene Selway, Jenny Byrne and Anne Chappell.

Chapter 21: Narratives of Early Career Teachers in a Changing Professional Landscape; Glenn Stone.

Chapter 22: What Does it Mean to be a Young Professional Graduate Working in the Private Sector?; Jenny Byrne.

Section Eight: 'Race' and Cultural Difference; edited by Geraldine Brown.

Chapter 23: Now You See Me, Now You Don't! Making Sense of the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Experience of UK Higher Education: One Person's Story; Gurnam Singh.

Chapter 24: Raging Against the Dying of the Light; Paul Grant.

Chapter 25: Black Young Men: Problematisation, Humanisation and Effective Engagement; Carver Anderson.

Section Nine: Social Justice and Disability: Voices From the Inside; by Chrissie Rogers.

Chapter 26: Missing Data and Socio-Political Death: The Sociological Imagination Beyond the Crime; Chrissie Roger.

Chapter 27: Co-Constructed Auto/Biographies in Dwarfism Mothering Research: Imagining Opportunities for Social Justice; Kelly-Mae Saville.

Chapter 28: An Auto/Biographical Account of Managing Autism and a Hybrid Identity: 'Covering' for Eight Days Straight; Amy Simmons.

© The Author(s) 2020

J. M. Parsons, A. Chappell (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biographyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31974-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. A Case for Auto/Biography

Julie M. Parsons¹ and Anne Chappell²

(1)

University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

(2)

Brunel University London, London, UK

Julie M. Parsons (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Anne Chappell

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

In this chapter, we make a case for auto/biography, as it lies at the heart of the sociological imagination, emphasising as it does the links between biography and history, the public and the private (Mills 1959). We consider both auto/biography as an epistemological orientation and a methodological approach. This involves reflection on the field of auto/biography, as well as specific reflections on auto/biographical research in practice. To begin, we provide a very brief history of auto/biography as we understand it in the social sciences.

Following Durkheim’s work in 1897, in the early 1900s there was a range of academic work that started to focus on the lives of people and the different means by which those lives could be explored (Thomas and Znaniecki 1918; Thomas and Thomas 1928; Mills 1959). Erben noted this work as key within the Chicago School (1998a) in providing an important basis for the development of auto/biography as a field of study. What followed later were key works such as ‘Documents of Life’ (Plummer 1983), ‘Time and Narrative’ (Ricoeur 1984), ‘Destiny Obscure’ (Burnett 1984) and ‘A History of Private Lives’ (Prost and Vincent 1991) which explored the underpinnings of the auto/biographical in relation to different lives, the ways in which those lives were recorded, and theories for how they could be understood and subsequently represented. This work laid the foundation for Michael Erben, David Morgan and Liz Stanley to convene the British Sociological Association’s Auto/Biography Study Group in 1992. The group was committed to understanding lives because, as Stanley (1993a: 2) notes:

Lives are an interesting place to be, partly because there are so few areas of work in the social sciences and humanities which do not involve auto/biography in one form or another, but perhaps mainly because the auto/biographical forms a radical departure – truly a reconceptualisation – in the way we think and work as well as in the subject matter we deal with.

At the time, Stanley suggested that auto/biography was essential for the social sciences as:

…maximally it mounts a principled and concerted attack on conventional views that ‘works’ are separate from lives, that there can be an epistemology which is not ontologically based. That science can be objective. Auto/biography intends an epistemological revolution within the social sciences. (Stanley 1993a: i)

In order to initiate this ‘revolution’, the group convenors began publishing a bulletin in 1992 and held a conference that led to a special issue of the journal Sociology in 1993. The bulletin became a self-published journal in 1994 and was then picked up by a publisher in 1998. In 2007, the publication changed to the Auto/Biography Yearbook and, in 2019, Auto/Biography Review. The work of the group sat alongside, but discrete from, the developing fields of narrative, biography, and life history, amongst others.

The material in the journals has consistently been rich, interdisciplinary and challenging in nature, edited from 1998 to the present day by Andrew Sparkes whilst Jenny Byrne, Gill Clarke and Michael Erben, and latterly Anne Chappell, led on maintaining the pattern of two conferences a year. Alongside this there have been a range of significant books, including monographs published by the Study Group, that have contributed directly and significantly to the field of auto/biography (Stanley 1992; Morgan 1996; Evans 1999; Plummer 2001; Sparkes 2002; Clarke 2008; Abbott 2009; Tamboukou 2010c; Byrne 2012; Stanley 2013; Letherby 2014; Dickinson and Erben 2016). In addition, there have been an array of journal articles and conference presentations related to auto/biography beyond those of the Study Group, which David Morgan recently noted in an interview conducted in preparation for this book. The legacy of the Study Group is key to the work presented here. This book demonstrates how auto/biographical work continues to offer a significant provocation in social science research.

It seems fitting that in order to introduce the Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography that Anne and I say something about ourselves in relation to auto/biography. Yet, there can be problems with beginnings, with where to start. Every time we consider a beginning, we have to contemplate the ending and what purpose this particular beginning serves. What stories do we want to tell and how do we represent ourselves within them? What are our multiple subject positions, the academic self, social researcher, sociologist, feminist, lecturer, teacher, student and/or mother, wife, daughter? What needs to be known about us, as researchers in order to evaluate our research, this book and how can this be known? Or as Elliott (2011: 1) asks ‘how, as researchers, do we notice ourselves in ways which make the interpretative selves visible?’ It is through the writing of the self and the narratives that we construct about these selves that our identities are ‘forged, rehearsed and remade’ (Lee and Boud 2003: 188). It is, therefore, in the act of ‘doing’ auto/biography that connections and reconnections are made. Hence, the ‘auto’, or personal experience, and ‘biography’, or life story, are significant in re-authorising subjectivity and experience (Mintz 2016). These generative texts provide a storied reworking of the self, situated and contextualised, yet simultaneously blurring perceived boundaries between self/other and the public/private (Sheridan 1993).

In this context, auto/biography is both a method and a text; it is a noun and a verb. Moreover, the forward slash in auto/biography is deliberate and distinguishes it from autobiography. Indeed, as Liz Stanley, one of the founding members of the study group, explains:

auto-slash-biography… disputes the conventional genre distinction between biography and autobiography as well as the divisions between self/other, public/private, and immediacy/memory… (Stanley 1993b: 42)

Auto/Biography is not simply a shorthand representation of autobiography and/or biography but is a recognition of the interdependence of the two enterprises, as David Morgan (another founding member of the BSA Auto/Biography study group) notes:

In writing another’s life we also write or rewrite our own lives; in writing about ourselves we also consider ourselves as somebody different from the person who routinely and unproblematically inhabits and moves through social space and time… (Morgan 1998: 655)

Following the work of Mills (1959), an auto/biographical approach concerns the development of a ‘sociological imagination’ that enables individuals to look at the familiar in social life and see it afresh, to emphasise how ‘the social scientist is not some autonomous being standing outside of society’ (Mills 1959: 204), but is shaped by biography, history and social structure. It is therefore particularly prescient in a neoliberal era of heightened individualism that auto/biography enables analysis of ‘the self’ within its wider context. It draws on narrative analysis and epistolary traditions. It encourages reflexivity and reflection. However, whilst auto/biography might consider ‘the self’ a source of analysis, it is not self-indulgent. Instead, as Gayle Letherby argues the ‘self’ is a ‘resource for helping to make sense of the lives of others [because] it is always present and inseparable from the work we produce’ (Letherby 2003: 96). Mills (1959) argues that scholars should learn:

… to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine it and interpret it. In this sense craftsmanship [sic] is the centre of yourself and you are personally involved in every in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. A Case for Auto/Biography
• Part I. Creativity and Collaboration
• Part II. Families and Relationships: Auto/Biography and Family—A Natural Affinity?
• Part III. Epistolary Lives: Fragments, Sensibility, Assemblages in Auto/Biographical Research
• Part IV. Geography Matters: Spatiality and Auto/Biography
• Part V. Madness, Dys-order and Autist/Biography: Auto/Biographical Challenges to Psychiatric Dominance
• Part VI. Prison Lives
• Part VII. Professional Lives
• Part VIII. ‘Race’ and Cultural Difference
• Part IX. Social Justice and Disability: Voices from the Inside
• Back Matter