Narrative research and participatory methods for social transformation

A workshop with National Centre for Research Methods Visiting Scholars, Professors Jill Bradbury and Michelle Fine,
Friday November 4, 2-5pm, Room EB1.41, Docklands Campus.

Narrative research is a dynamic and growing field in the social sciences. It frequently engages with issues of social justice and social change, particularly in the current context of global inequalities, conflict, mobility and precarity. How to address these issues in our methods, for instance through the involvement of research participants, and through relating research processes and analyses to social transformation, is a common and complex question.
In November 2016, graduate students and researchers will have the opportunity to develop their work in this field with NCRM International Visitors, Professor Jill Bradbury and Professor Michelle Fine, at UEL. Jill Bradbury: Visual methodologies are relatively commonplace as a means to collect data (e.g. photo voice or body mapping) and often used in combination with narrative interviewing, but less typically utilised in the analysis of data. Using examples from my own work, I will first show how and why these techniques are particularly helpful when stories are difficult to articulate and how they might facilitate new perspectives. Secondly, we will: 1) explore the argument around theory-method and possibilities for action; 3) study workshop data and analysis from different empirical studies, all of which are focused on transformative possibilities for marginalised groups in unequal contexts of intersectional asymmetries, e.g. Marikana youth, school leavers, black women scientists, informal women traders, young unemployed men, young homeless people, child-headed households.
Michelle Fine: Drawing on the cognitive ‘mapping’ practices of both Winnicott and then Milgram and Jodelet, we will explore how critical qualitative research can be ‘opened’ with an activity that engages the aesthetic (as in Dewey’s sense of aesthetic methods — provocative, generative), inviting the ‘IRREAL’ in Husserl’s language, and exploring the borderlands in Anzaldua’s texts - to understand identities, relations and movements over time. Cognitive or identity maps have been used in our research with women experiencing domestic violence, low income graduates from schools of concentrated poverty, immigrant youth formerly incarcerated women, and most recently students of colour in the university to trace the gifts, and the struggles, of young people
Participants will be asked to read preparatory papers from Bradbury and Fine, that we will provide, and to bring 2 pages (with ethical clearance) of transcripts or images for discussion, or to consult about other material they might bring