Full Description
Challenging the sanitized view of participants in standardized surveys, Interviews as Activated Storytelling contends that interviewing is a meaning-making process producing useful but context-sensitive knowledge. Through a series of case studies, the book illustrates that participants are not simply there for asking and answering, but inquire and respond in terms of attendant interests and social worlds. Interview interaction and interpretation must take these into account against standardization. In two parts, chapters explore how conditions of the interview process (contexts) and conceptions of interview participants (subjectivities) narratively inform and shape—activate—interviewing and its results. Together with the previously published book Crafting Ethnographic Fieldwork: Sites, Selves, and Social Worlds, insights into the full range of procedural issues in qualitative research are offered.
Contents
Introduction Part I: Contexts 1. Interviews as Activated Storytelling Occasions 2. Immigrant Belonging: Meaning-Making in Three Interview Modalities 3. Life as A River: A Metaphor to Activate Marriage Migrants' Life Stories 4. Navigating Small-Town Complexities: Unraveling Attitudes Through Ethnographic Research 5. Creating Meaning Together: Researcher as Participant, Collaborator, and Interpreter 6. Contextual Dynamics in Interviewing in Institutional and "Free" Settings 7. Activism as an Interpretive Context for Interviewing Part II: Subjectivities 8. Activating Subjectivities in Research Interviews 9. Researching, Interviewing, and Co-Writing the Experiences of a World War II Pilot 10. Activating Prospective Hindsight Through Rehearsal Studios 11. The Active Respondent 12. Minding Whens, Whats, and Hows in Social Movement Oral History Interviews 13. Multi-Active Research Interviews 14. (Re)activated by Objects: Interviewing with and Beyond Unimodal Dialogue Afterword
