Abstract
This chapter suggests that we take an approach to life-story interviews which moves beyond an exclusively micro level analysis (examining, for example, the minutest of features of spoken language, such as pronoun use or accent) or an exclusively content-based analysis (which, in essence, plays the story told in the interview back to the reader). The author proposes that we take fully on board how interviews are social events, sociohistorically embedded in multiple phenomenological layers. A point of departure here is that while this view of interviews is by now fairly well accepted in principle, many narrative researchers still fail to take it fully into account. However, the aim here is not to make concrete recommendations about how to incorporate this more socially sensitive view of interviews into narrative research; rather it is to further discussion in a debate opened long ago by scholars such as Jerome Bruner, who wrote about interviews as social events, sociohistorically embedded in multiple phenomenological layers. The chapter starts with the presentation of a life-story interview excerpt, which is, it is argued, interpretable only if we take an expansive approach to analysis. The chapter then discusses positioning theory as a means through which we can make sense of interactions taking place during interviews. An extension of positioning theory, that draws on authors such as Judith Butler, Mikhail Bakhtin, James Paul Gee, Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, is presented as a working model through which we can understand interviews as social phenomena. The author links an interview excerpt presented at the beginning of the paper to the layers that are added to the emergent model of analysis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some issues arising in all research involving life-story interviews.
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Notes
- 1.
Crucially, as one reviewer of an earlier version of this chapter noted, I am also limited somewhat by the fact that my transcription captures minimal information about how the exchange took place: while it indicates the rhythm of what was said and pauses where relevant, it does not represent a wide range of semiotic elements such as gaze and gestures.
- 2.
Footing is ‘the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance’ (Goffman 1981: 128) and framing is the interlocutor’s ‘understanding of what it is that is going on’ and how ‘individuals fit their actions to this understanding and ordinarily find that the ongoing world supports this fitting’ (Goffman 1974: 247).
- 3.
It should be noted that there is a fourth approach discussed by Riessman, what she calls visual analysis. This approach builds on the previous three approaches and is concerned with what images are produced, how they are produced and why they are produced. It is not of direct relevance to my discussion here.
- 4.
While Elena does make reference to Germany and Germans in general in the excerpt, she is clearly talking specifically about her experiences at a Germany university in this part of the interview.
- 5.
‘Flippin the script’, or semantic inversion, ‘refers to turning a meaning into its opposite or divesting a concept of its received meaning to inscribe one reflective of the speaker’s experience’ (Richardson 2006: 11).
- 6.
One reviewer of an earlier version of this chapter pointed out that here I open a can of worms with regard to the notion of truth in narrative research (and indeed empirical research in general), noting how scholars such as Polanyi (1958) have for some time highlighted the difficulties in making sense of the personal knowledge manifested by informants in word and deed. Elsewhere (Block 2000, 2006), I have dealt with this issue in more detail (albeit with limitations), but here find that there is not ample space to do justice to this topic.
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Block, D. (2017). Positioning Theory and Life-Story Interviews: Discursive Fields, Gaze and Resistance. In: Bagga-Gupta, S., Hansen, A., Feilberg, J. (eds) Identity Revisited and Reimagined. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58056-2_2
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