Epilogue : Summarizing the argumentation

Scientometrics, 2021

The long and established roots of biographical research have been well documented, over the last decades, in a rich body of reflections about the main trends, traditions and contexts of production of the field within social sciences, including the identification of milestones and turns. Most of these notable analyses mapping the field's key approaches and methods tend to be exclusively qualitatively driven, cross-disciplinary, and focused on particular research practices, national contexts. In this article, our aim is to make an innovative yet complementary contribution to the mapping of biographical research. Our contribution has a broader analytical window of observation by acknowledging not only the field's main traditions and nucleus, but also its periphery and margins. We carried out a bibliometric analysis based on 1270 sociological publications written in English (journal articles, books and book chapters) and, through multivariate statistical analyses, identified three profiles. The Precursors, the founders of the field, define the key theoretical parameters of a sociological analysis of the relation between biography and society, while testing them empirically. The Engineers are the developers of the biographical method, by creating, producing and implementing methodological tools. The Explorers have a distinctive empirical focus, with publications illustrating the implementation of the bases developed by the Precursors and the Engineers in the collection of biographical data to study specific life contexts. All profiles have a singular contribution to the definition of the field's structure, contents and dynamics in analytical, methodological and conceptual terms; thus, showing the many faces of biographical research.

Prepublication of the introductory article of an issue of _Cercles, revue pluridisciplinaire d'études anglophones_. The biographical turn, as we find convenient to call the renewed interest in biography and biographic approaches that has been taking place over the last decades, converging from several disciplines of the humanities, appears like a paradigmatic debate of sorts, that both calls for a new definition of biography in the larger sense of the term, and generates a theoretical demand.This article positions biographical studies within the perimeter of life-writing considered as an emerging crossroads discipline in the humanities. It analyses some of the causes of the so-called "resistance to theory" of biography. It argues that the very reappraisal of the central concept of the subject operated by the philosophy of deconstruction and analytic philosophy has entailed the emergence of life-writing, and created the intellectual need to theorize biography in this la...

Current Sociology, 2023

Reconstructive biographical research is a diverse and differentiated sociological field. In this introduction, we trace its interdisciplinary and transnational historical development, consider the most important theoretical influences, and characterize central research areas. In this way, we show that reconstructive biographical research is a distinct sociological approach to social analysis. It offers a reflexive access to understanding, classifying, and explaining social processes and social challenges through the analysis of experienced and/or narrated life stories.

British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 2011

Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej

Sociological, qualitative, biographical research is distinguished by its interest in the case. At the same time, this research seeks—often through case studies—to understand or explain supraindividual, repetitive phenomena which are, to some extent, general. In this article, we look at how cases are treated in biographical sociology. We present our own empirical experience, consisting in autobiographical narrative interviews with participants of a nationwide panel survey, who were randomly drawn to the panel many years ago. We show the possible consequences, both methodological and theoretical, of this way of selecting cases, quite unusual for biographical sociology. We wonder whether and to what extent the experience of the “ordinary person,” the Everyman, can be reflected in sociological works based on the biographical method.

Diálogos sobre educación

This paper seeks to contribute to the enhancement of the discussion about the study of subjects as individual entities. To address the complexity that this analytical look at social processes entails we will reflect on the circumstances that have an impact on the resurgence of the interest in individual stories. In doing this we aim to contextualize part of the scenario that gives rise to this renewed focus on learning about the lives of common people. Accordingly, since we believe that a change in the way of looking at something also calls for the use of means of understanding attuned to the levels of reality we seek to scrutinize, we include the methodological implications that accompany the development of these perspectives of analysis. In this shift towards the particular, we find disciplines that examine subjects from the standpoint of everyday life such as ethnography, ethnology, and approaches whose object of knowledge is the individual's life trajectory, among which we locate both the biographical method and its links to studies in social identity. We end our presentation with a discussion of some ideas put forth by biography scholars to address the analysis of particular subjects.

Institut for Uddannelse, Læring og Filosofi. Aalborg …, 2006

The article argues that today there is a need for biographical research in order to complement and modify the results of large-scale quantitative research. However, it is also argued that biographical sociology needs to clarify its ontological as well as epistemological position in order not to be reduced to being the harmless human face of the "evidence based "current. The author points to the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Margaret Archer as sociologists working in this line, acknowledging at the same time that a range of sociologists could be included as "tacit" critical realists. However, time has come for making this position explicit e.g. by clarifying more in detail what is meant by the concept of context.

2007

[in:] Marcin Kafar (ed.), Scientific Biographies: Between the "Professional" and "Non-Professional" Dimensions of Humanistic Experiences (pp. 7-19), series: "Biographical Perspectives", vol. I, Lodz - Krakow: Univeristy of Lodz Press, Jagiellonian University Press, 2013

The 'Biographical Perspectives' book series is a meeting place for representatives of the humanities and social sciences who situate their research practices in the auto/biographical paradigm horizon in its various guises.

This paper offers a conception of life history research on the basis of a notion of social experience and ambivalence, which sees the learning of the emerging/visible subject as dynamics of cultural and social meaning making. Referring to a tradition of empirical cultural analysis it outlines a theoretical framework to understand the relation between social practice, language and learning. The key concepts of subjectivity and experience, derived from European critical theory, are briefly introduced with respect to their intellectual background. It is a framework based in psychoanalytical and critical social theory, and suggests that the individual learning biography can best be analyzed as a recording of the individual subject's participation in language games and social practice in a specific societal situation. Based on examples from the author's research into the professional learning, the article outlines the implications of these concepts in relation to an understanding of emotional aspects of learning in everyday life and to an understanding of knowledge.