CONTENTS

Overview and outline                       p 4

Programme: Four sessions               p6

Appendices                                        p22

Tutor                                                  p29

Bibliography: Reading List with web sites and resources (these will be provided as a separate document).

“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”. Gaugin
This course will look at some recent trends in qualitative research, but especially the concern with narratives and stories. Story tellings, and the narratives that accompany them, are basic human social processes. We are the story-narrating animal; human societies are always story-narrative societies. Although such story tellings are often neglected in the orthodoxies of social research, they are usually critical to every stage of the human social research process. In the broadest terms we study the stories that people tell of their lives; we connect these stories to the stories of our lives; and we ultimately represent them as our ‘social science stories’ – in essays, theses, books, films, photos, media, conferences, exhibitions. Story telling also places a critical role in shaping political debate and in ethical choices.  In short, we create, appreciate and live narratives and stories enable us to live our lives. Critical Humanistic research places the human story at the research centre and adopts humanistic values in such research. It is interested in a wide array of tools for telling these stories – including photos, self analysis, artefacts, documentaries.

STRUCTURE

This two day course will probe and investigate, amongst other things:

1. The nature and rise of what might be called ‘humanistic research’
2. The centrality and meaning of narratives and ‘story telling’ in our lives, social life and social research;
3. The multiplicities of forms and techniques of story telling (from life story/autobiography to website blog, from documentary to auto/ethnography);
4. Some key modes in which social science creates ( tells/reports/writes/presents/performs) its ‘findings’;
5. Some key tactics and strategies for appreciating (analysing/ evaluating/appraising) stories;
6. The implications of such an approach for living a life: its personal value, its ethics and politics (grounded everyday moralities/ narrative ethics and the ethics of research/political change/ the circle of sociological life)

The key background reading should ideally be my book Ken Plummer Documents of Life-2: An Invitation to a Critical Humanism (2001 – NOT The earlier 1983 edition), but it is currently out of print. It is however an e book and can be accessed via ebooks.com.

Either:http://www.ebooks.com/334374/documents-of-life-2/plummer-k/

Or:  http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book206868 .
A more detailed bibliography will be provided on the course.

Credo: My view of social research is that it not something outside of social life. I am not happy with social research that runs itself away from the people, that does not get close to them, that does not sense the complexities, contingencies, creativities, choices, ambiguities, fragilities and multiplicities of social life. I do not think all of social life can or should be measured or reduced to a statistic, a table, a logarithm, or a ‘methodology’ (though, of course, some can- but we often overuse it). Research needs always to bridge into theory and always to be dialogic, reflexive, ethically-sensitive, empathetic and politically connected. My version of research says: put people first in a globally aware universe and search for a better for world for all. Avoid grand theory and grand method

BEFORE THE COURSE

It will help if you can bring one small sample of a life document with which you are familiar to the first class as an example, and be willing to say a few words about it. This could be a piece of research you are involved with, but it could equally be photos, letters, interview, field notes, observation, or even a blog, a sentimental treasure,  a documentary film, a  passport or a favourite poem, painting or piece of music! Almost anything in fact that interests you. You might also like to think about what you hope to get from the course.

OTHER READING: But see major bibliography that accompanies course

Howard S Becker                   Telling about Society (2007) Chicago

C.Wright Mills                        The Sociological Imagination: Appendix (1962) Oxford
Ken Plummer                                    Sociology: The Basics   (2010) Routledge Ch 1, 5,6,8.
Les Back                                 The Art of Listening (2007) Berg

Adele Clarke (2005)                         Situational Analysis: Grounded theory after the Postmodern Turn  Sage

Kay Schaffer & Sidonie Smith Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The ethics of recognition (2004) Palgrave

Norman Denzin & Yvonna
Lincoln                                    The Handbook of Qualitative Research ( and its offshoots paperbacks) 3^rd edition 2005 4^th edition forthcoming in 2011
John Lofland et al (2004 4^th edition) Analysing Social Settings  Wadsworth

Narrative/ Life stories/ Autobiographical Turns

Arthur Frank                         Letting Stories Breathe (2010) Chicgao

Jaber Gubrium &
Sidonie Smith & Julia Watson Reading Autobiography: A guide for interpreting life narrative  (2001) Minnesota

James E Holstein                   Analyzing Narrative Reality (2009) Sage

Jane Elliott                             Using  Narrative in Social Research (2005) Sage
Catherine Kohler Reisman  Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences (2007) Sage

Norman Denzin                     Interpretive Biography (1989) Sage

Arthur Frank                                     The Wounded Storyteller: Body Illness and Ethics, 1997 Chicago

1. THE SOCIAL REALITIES OF NARRATIVE

: An Introduction to ourselves, humanistic research and the social worlds of narrative and story telling.

The opening session will provide introductions to our selves and our interests as well as the backgrounds to the key ideas of the course. Ken will introduce the idea of a narrative society and the central role of narrative in human and social understandings. It will briefly contrast a narrative understanding with  a ‘scientific’ understanding of social life. I will discuss briefly the nature of my own position – that of a critical humanist.  Finally, I will link into one aspect of narrative order – that of inequalities.

Overview of first session: Six tasks-

1. What is narrative , story and a narrative society?
2. What are new strands of qualitative method?
3. What is Symbolic Interactionism and what is critical humanism?
4. Introductions to ourselves
5. On The Multiplicities of Narrative
6. Method and life in the 21^st Century

The opening session will introduce my version of symbolic interactionism and show it has led me to a position I now call critical humanism.  I will show how it links to some new trends in qualitative research. My broadest concern is with developing a humanistic social science.  The main focus will be on the idea of a narrative society and the central role of narrative in human and social understandings. It will briefly contrast a ‘humanistic’ understanding with a ‘scientific’ understanding of social life, although I see them a complementing each other and not to be in tension and conflict.

What is a narrative and what is a narrative society?

Narratives and stories are among the most powerful instruments for
ordering human experience. Narrative can be expressed in oral or
written language, still or moving pictures, or a mixture of these media.
It is present in myths, legends, fables, tales, short stories, epics,
history, tragedy, drama, comedy, pantomime, paintings, stained glass
windows, movies, local news, and conversation. In its almost infinite
variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, and in all
societies. Indeed, narrative starts with the very history of mankind….”
(Barthes, 1975).

We tell ourselves stories in order to live

Joan Didion, title of her collected stories.

Stories animate human life: that is their work.

Arthur W.Frank   Letting Stories Breathe

Narrative makes the earth habitable for human beings” Frank, again: p46

We have each of us, a life story, an inner narrative – whose continuity, whose sense is our lives…. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative to maintain his identity…

Oliver Sachs  opening to The man who mistook his wife for a hat

This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were  (recounting it) telling a story.

Jean Paul Sartre Nausea

Our life is essentially a set of stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future… we ‘story’ our lives…in fact, restorying continually goes on within us

G.M. Kenyon and L.W. Randall  Restorying Our Lives

Our society has become a recited society, in three senses: it is defined by stories (Recits, the fables constituted by our advertising and informational media) by citations of stories, and by the interminable recitation of stories. 

Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984 p186

Background Position: From Symbolic Interactionism to Critical Humanism

I have long suggested four key themes:

1. 1.     Meanings: discourse, story, narratives etc…..
2. 2.     Process: change, emergence, contingencies
3. 3.     Self, Others and interaction: empathy, sympathy & dialogic
4. 4.     Empirical groundedness/ intimate familiarity (and reflexivity)

There are many versions but I think all would agree on the above. To these I have now added

1. 5.     Humanistic ethics and politics
2. 6.     Differences and multiplicities

My own position is that of a 21^st century symbolic interactionist –  one who came to it because of its critical stance to most sociology and its sense of humanism. Not all would agree.  In an early statement I said:

“a critical humanism has at least five central criteria. First, it must pay tribute to human subjectivity and creativity – showing how individuals respond to social con­straints and actively assemble social worlds. It must deal with concrete human experiences ‑ talk, feelings, actions ‑ through their social & economic, organization (and not just their inner, psychic or biological structuring). It must show a naturalistic ‘intimate familiarity’ with such experiences ‑ abstractions untempered by close involvement are ruled out. There must be a self‑awareness by the sociologist of their ultimate moral and political role in moving towards a social structure in which there is less exploitation, oppression and injustice and more creativity, diversity and equality…..And finally,  in all of this it espouses an epistemology of radical, pragmatic empiricism which takes seriously the idea that knowing – always limited and partial- should be grounded in experience.  See Ken Plummer, Documents of Life, Ch 12.

Method and Life in the 21^st Century

Generational methodologies

I would now add three significant features of the 21^st century world:

1. 1.     Differences and Inequalities – which shape all social life
2. 2.     Technologies and Cyberworlds and new media
3. 3.     Globalization

Finally: The importance of hope and utopian visions

On the multiplicities of narratives : a narrative glossary

Narrative Meaning  – which may lead to:

Narrative story, Narrative Plot, Narrative Character, Narrative Archetypes, Narrative Themes, Narrative Stages, Narrative Epiphanies & Turning Points, Narrative Memory, Narrative Hermeneutics

Narrative Others – which may lead to:

Narrative Monologue and Dialogue, Narrative Recognition, Narrative Reflexivity, Narrative Role Taking, Narrative Empathy, Narrative Sympathy, Narrative Self & Narrative Identity, Narrative Generosity

Narrative Process – which may lead to:

Narrative Time, Narrative Flow, Narrative Emergence and Narrative Entropy, Narrative Moments, Narrative Contingency

Narrative Multiplicity (or Narrative Pluralism)

Narrative Embodiment – which may lead to

Narrative Performance, Narrative Emotions, Narrative Mood

Narrative Agency – which may lead to:

Narrative Creativity, Narrative Habits, Narrative Subjectvity, Narrative Positionality. Narrative Habitus

Narrative Power – which may lead to:

Narrative Inequality, Narrative Voice, Narrative Resources

Narrative Values-which leads to:

Narrative Ethics, Grounded Moralities, Narrative Politics

And when put into a wider social contests , we soon find:

Mediated Narratives

Global Narratives

Samples of modes and mediums of stories and narratives

Diagram: The Everyday Flow of Narratives and Stories

2 CREATING NARRATIVES

: examining some of the tools of story telling
( from life story to digital blog. telling (from life story/autobiography to website blog, from documentary to auto/ethnography)

“A blank page so full of possibility”  Stephen Sondheim. Sunday in the Park with George

Overview

1. How do narratives come into being – from a blank page?
2. A mini –workshop on our own writing
3. New styles of creating social science narratives
4. An example: Ken’s auto/ethnography of illness

How do narratives come into being?  Why some stories rather than others?  What are the contingencies which shape story telling? How do we present our stories?

Four levels of answer-

1. Socio-historical: structures, history, technologies & mechanics

1. Cultural: cultural frames and ‘domain assumptions’ (Gouldner); artefacts and props; habitus; memories; inter-textualities and ‘borrowings’

1. Contextual: audiences; situations & encounters; dialogic others, significant others & generalized (imagined) communities; performance; organizational features

1. Personal: reflexivities, creativities, habits, embodiments, psychic, motivations and intent.

We could also ask about the contingencies of story making: the who , what, where, when , why and how of narratives.

“Ethnographic writing is determined in at least six ways: (1) contextually (it draws from and creates meaningful social milieux); (2) rhetorically (it uses and is used by expressive conventions); (3) institutionally (one writes within, and against, specific traditions, disciplines, audiences); (4) generically (an ethnography is usually distinguishable from a novel or a travel account); (5) politically (the authority to present cultural realities is uniquely shared and at times contested); (6) historically (all the above conventions and constraints are changing). These determinations govern the inscription of coherent ethnographic fictions

FROM: James Clifford, Writing Culture 1986 p6.

Writing poses questions of:

i.     Audience

ii.     Intent

iii.     Genre

iv.     Intrusion

v.     Intertextuality

vi.     Narrative

vii.     Rhetoric

viii.     Mechanics

ix.     Domain assumptions

x.     Medium

FROM : Ken Plummer, Documents of Life  2001  Ch8

The trouble with academia

As we move well into the twenty first century, with its wars, inequalities, cyberspace and economic and environmental crises, social research finds itself on the brink of new ways of speaking and writing the lives of others. What might be called ‘Classical Social Science Texts’ with their introduction, literature review, ‘methods’, findings, discussion, conclusion, notes and bibliography may be on their way out for more critical thinkers. Past texts are machine like and are usually written for highly specialised audiences, with all the accoutrements of ‘academia’.  And now with the RAE, citations index and the Audit Culture generally, intellectual life is now manifestly and unashamedly bureaucratized. There is now a pathetic correct way of doing everything if your work is to be judged highly!

Yet to suggest doing it any other way is often to be seen as frivolous, non academic, indulgent. But why should there be only the one approved way to present social science material? And why, indeed, if this is always an elitist and none populist mode? It seems to me that increasingly the human sciences should face the daunting task of learning how to communicate in more popular and accessible ways. There are many experiments in photography, recording, film, photographs, video, diaries, and letters that have been taking place throughout the twentieth century : and increasingly there is the growth of performance studies and hi tech worlds – Web 2 etc.

We will spend a little time exploring all this. Maybe write a poem or two? Think on.

New ways of presenting ‘data’

1. Analysing the Auto/ethnographical : taking the self seriously
2. Sensualising the Social : include body and emotions
3. Teasing the Trope: be aware of language and writing
4. Performing the Problematic: life is not all talk- look at performance too and do it
5. Caressing the Cyborg: use the machines for human benefits
6. Debating the Dialogic: always see the others and the other side

A case study: My Multiple Bodies: an auto/ethnography of illness. Ken’s recent research

This will be based on a forthcoming paper: My Multiple Bodies: Symbolic Interactionism, Auto/ethnography and The Sick Body ( to be published in Bryan S. Turner: Handbook of Body and Society ( 2012 forthcoming).

1 On Auto/ethnography

I suggest that auto-ethnographies usually have some of the following characteristics – and each brings its own problems. Auto/ethnographies:

1.write in the first person. In most social science, this breaks all rules of distanced objective science writing.

2. place the social scientist’s own self on the line: his or her voice has to come out, be discussed and situated at the forefront of the analysis. Often this is claimed to be self indulgent and can lead to awkwardness and embarrassment. Even shame.

3. explicitly connect to wider aspects of studying the culture of which they are a part. They draw from the academic traditions of cultural theory, cultural anthropology, cultural sociology, etc. They take an interest in thick – as opposed to thin- description and try to enter the culture. Often though such methods are seen as bringing their discipline into ill repute.

4. connect to matters of autobiography and documentary. They raise all kinds of methodological questions linked to the truth of the story and the life that tells it.

5. and are conducted in the very context which produces them. This context shapes their understanding, language, practices. The story is bound up with its habitus, and is part of a tradition known more widely as self reflexive sociology.

Auto-ethnographies often take on a strong political and critical stance – they provide a resistance to dominant cultures and dominant voices and narratives. Some go further and take on a performative stance – making the story telling part of the performance and drama of culture. And with the established new technologies, they now come in many shapes, sizes and forms from  the blog to the face book. At their best, they will  be dialogic, never monologic – establishing a discussion rather than a neat and uniform  text.

2  On Embodiment and Symbolic Interactionism: Some puzzles

3  A TEXT: A fragment of my own story:  my multiple transforming  bodies

A POETIC:

            NARRATIVE TEXTS                                     NARRATIVE REALITIES

form 

content

DEEPENING AND WIDENING NARRATIVE ANALYSIS

APPENDICES

Source: Ken Plummer: Sociology The Basics (2010): Table 6:1

  A VERY BASIC RESEARCH SCHEMA – how to move from one to the other?

THE PHENOMENA

events and lives in their mutliplicties and complexities, which we want to capture, describe and maybe even explain

Communication and language     ……………………………………………..research process              

                                    EPISTEMOLOGICAL ISSUES

THE NARRATIVE DATA

captured usually in some kind of text  which may be seen as a

Discourse, Narrative, Story

The need for analytic scrutiny…………………………………………..data analysis

THE NARRATIVE PRESENTATION

usually as an essay, a thesis, a report – but there could be other ways from blog to video

See the project: Writing Across Boundaries.

This is a project which gets various social scientists who have published quite a bit to reflect on the nature of their writing. It includes pieces by  Howard Becker, Harvey Molotch, Marilyn Strathborn and Liz Stanley, myself and many others: see

http://www.dur.ac.uk/writingacrossboundaries

 On this website you will also find resources relating to a variety of themes that engage writers in the social sciences. These include and Drafting and Plotting, the Data-Theory Relationship, Narrative, Rhetoric, and Representation and Hints and Tips on Writing. 

Consider web sites for research: as an example, see

Inventing Adulthood : South Bank – at http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/inventingadulthoods/