Overview

Session 1: Introduction to Biographical Narrative Interviewing

Session 2: Introduction to Biographical Narrative Analysis

Creative applications of Biographical Narrative strategies have played an important part in the recent debates about the development of arts based research. Incorporating a theoretically based approach to interviewing and interpretation it assumes that narrative expresses both conscious concerns and unconscious cultural, societal and individual presuppositions and processes.

Adopting a psychosocial approach, it supports research into the lived experience and reflexivity of individuals and collectives, facilitating an understanding of both the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ worlds of ‘historically-evolving persons-in-historically-evolving situations’. It especially serves researchers who need a tool that supports understanding spanning sociological and psychological dynamics, structures and situated activities, especially characteristic of a variety of socially engaged arts practices.

In as much as arts practice is rooted in a critical exploration of the artist’s internalised ‘narrative landscape’, this approach invites consideration of how such explorations in themselves might be considered to constitute a form of ‘arts research’.

These two-day workshops will outline key theoretical ideas and methodological procedures which have characterised this approach and also consider ways in which these may be adapted and developed in the context of arts based research.

John Given is a sociologist who runs training workshops in biographical narrative approaches to research and practice in the UK and Europe. His most recent publication is a chapter in: The Narrative Construction and Performance of Identity, O’Neil et al Advances in Biographical Methods: Creative Applications (2015) Routledge.

This is a two-day workshop and you must book for both dates.