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"The stories people tell about themselves are interesting not only for the events and characters they describe but for something in the construction of the stories themselves. The ways in which individuals recount their histories--what they emphasize and omit, their stance as protagonists or victims, the relationship the story establishes between teller and audience--all shape what individuals can claim of their own lives. Personal stories are not merely a way of telling someone (or oneself) about one's life; they are the means by which identities may be fashioned."--from the Introduction In this provocative book, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists analyze interviews with a ran...
In this groundbreaking work, Lois Presser investigates the life stories of men who have perpetrated violence. She applies insights from across the academy to in-depth interviews with men who shared their accounts of how they became the people we most fear--those who rape, murder, assault, and rob, often repeatedly. Been a Heavy Life provides the discipline of criminology with two crucial frameworks: one for critically evaluating the construction of offenders’ own stories, and one for grasping the cultural meta-narratives that legitimize violence. For social scientists generally, this book offers a vivid demonstration of just how dynamic and contingent self-narratives are.
The narrative approach is a relevant and enriching technique for uncovering, describing and interpreting the meaning of experience. This collection explores the challenges of performing narrative work in an academic setting, writing about it in an ethical and revealing fashion, and drawing meaningful conclusions. This stellar collection of scholars examine such topics as: how the larger construct of `personality' can read out of a life story; the development of multicultural identity as a dynamic process; the transition away from delinquent behaviour; the importance of cultural continuity for understanding loneliness in elderly refugees; race relations and how it relates to the meaning of the decade in which the interviewee
Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History is the first book to provide serious scholarly insight into the methodological practices that shape lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer oral histories. Each chapter pairs an oral history excerpt with an essay in which the oral historian addresses his or her methods and practices. With an afterword by John D'Emilio, this collection enables readers to examine the role memory, desire, sexuality, and gender play in documenting LGBTQ communities and cultures. The historical themes addressed include 1950s and '60s lesbian bar culture; social life after the Cuban revolution; the organization of transvestite social clubs in the U.S. m...
In Recording Oral History, Second Edition, Valerie Raleigh Yow builds on the foundation of her classic text with a fully updated and substantially expanded new edition. One of the most widely used and highly regarded textbooks ever published in the field, Yow's updated edition now includes new material on using the internet, an examination of the interactions between oral history and memory processes, and analysis of testimony and the interpretation of meanings in different contexts. It will interest researchers and students in a wide variety of disciplines including history, sociology, anthropology, education, psychology, social work, and ethnographic methods.
This book incorporates the author's personal experience and scholarly work concerning ritual, sacred space, self-identity, and narrative.
While the United States is often called the Land of the Law Suit, in reality Americans hardly sue at all. In fact, when it comes to physical injuries, over 90% of the time, we--as David M. Engel points out in his engaging and provocative book--simply lump it, making no claims against either the injurers or their insurance companies. Bringing to bear an impressive array of research and data, Engel firmly and persuasively demolishes the pervasive myth of the litigious American. But why don t most people sue whey they have been wrongfully physically injured? We have in fact a mystery, what Engel calls The Case of the Missing Plaintiff. The solution his investigation leads us to is as fascinatin...
In her examination of neglected diaristic texts, Anne-Marie Millim expands the field of Victorian diary criticism by complicating the conventional notion of diaries as mainly private sources of biographical information. She argues that for Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin, Edith Simcox and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the exposure or publication of their diaries was a real possibility that they either coveted or feared. Millim locates the diary at the intersection of the public and private spheres to show that well-known writers and public figures of both sexes exploited the diary's self-reflexive, diurnal structure in order to enhance their...
Contributors from five countries, in fields including criminology, literature studies, nursing, psychology, and sociology, explore issues such as how to make meaning of narrative interviews by considering the problem of interpreting what is not said, how cultural meanings about gender are transmitted across generations, and uses of the transformati.
Tense Past provides a much needed appraisal and contextualization of the upsurge of interest in questions of memory and trauma evident in multiple personality and post-traumatic stress disorders, child abuse, and commemoration of the Holocaust. Contributors examine the historical origins of memory in psychiatric discourse and show its connection to broader developments in Western science and medicine. They address the new links between trauma and memory, and they explore how memory shapes the way traumatic events are put into narrative form. They also consider the social and political contexts in which sufferers speak and remember.