Using biographical methods in social research

This book represents a sustained interdisciplinary dialogue between two colleagues, one steeped in a more sociological understanding, the other, more psychological. Our argument is that using auto/biographical narrative methods has the power to illuminate complex particulars in lived experience (however problematic representation can be), in unique ways, but also forces us to straddle disciplinary boundaries in interpreting narratives. The book encompasses the theory and practice of the methodology - reaching back to the Chicago School of Sociology and C.Wright Mills. We consider how research can be used to create a more collaborative ethos. The values informing the process draw on feminism, working with, rather than on, our 'subjects', in respectful dialogue. The approach, in the notion of auto/biography, draws too on psychoanalytic insights as well as feminism, to interrogate what the researchers bring to the process, at every stage, by reference to power and unconscious dynamics.