Full Description
The cultural and narrative turn has had a considerable impact upon research in the social sciences as well as in the arts and humanities, with Ken Plummer's Documents of Life constituting a central text in the turn towards to narrative, biographical and qualitative methodologies, challenging and changing the nature of research in sociology and further afield. Bringing together the latest research on auto/biographical and narrative methods, Documents of Life Revisited offers a sympathetic yet critical engagement with Plummer's work, exploring a range of different kinds of life documents and delineating a critical humanist methodology for researching and writing about these. A rich examination of the methods and methodologies associated with contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities, this book will be of interest to those concerned with the use and importance of biographical and narrative sources and documents of life investigations. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, social anthropologists and geographers, as well as scholars of cultural studies and cultural history, literary studies and library, archive and cultural management, social policy and medical studies.
Contents
Introduction Documents of Life and Critical Humanism in a Narrative and Biographical Frame, Liz Stanley; Part I After the Posts: Reconceiving Methods and Methodologies; Chapter 1 Lies and Truths: Exploring the Lie as a Document of Life, Clair Morrow; Chapter 2 Critical Humanist Thoughts on the Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiography: 'Nobody wages war with Dostoevsky or Dickens', Claire Lynch; Chapter 3 The Essential Subject? The Very Documented Life of Myra Hindley, Helen Pleasance; Chapter 4 Whites Writing: Letters and Documents of Life in a QLR Project, Liz Stanley; Part II On Tellings and Retellings: Analysing Stories, Audiences and Constructed Lives; Chapter 5 The Diarists' Audience, Sally Fincher; Chapter 6 Someone Telling Something to Someone about Something? Stories in Olive Schreiner's Letters and Nella Last's Diary, Andrea Salter; Chapter 7 Between Diary and Memoir: Documenting a Life in Wartime Britain, Cate Watson; Chapter 8 Forgotten Memories? Silence, Reason, Truth and the Carnival, Heather Blenkinsop; Chapter 9 Dear Mrs President: Children's Letters to the President of Finland as Documents of Life, Ulla-Maija Salo; Part III The Ordinary, Virtual, Untimely, Sacred: Critical Humanist Knowledge-Making; Chapter 10 Identifying The Quotidian in the Heterotopic Universe of Olive Schreiner's Letters, Helen Dampier; Chapter 11 Documents of Life and the Undead: Online Postmortem Photographs and Critical Humanist Ethics, Sue Wise; Chapter 12 Writing Water: An Untimely Academic Novella, Mona Livholts; Chapter 13 Everything Speaks: A Multidimensional Approach to Researching the Lithuanian Jewish Past, Shivaun Woolfson; Part IV Stories and Storied Lives: A Manifesto; Chapter 14 A Manifesto for Social Stories, Ken Plummer;
