A Case for Auto/Biography

Abstract

to convene the British Sociological Association's Auto/Biography Study Group in 1992. The group was committed to understanding lives because, as Stanley (1993a: 2) notes:Lives are an interesting place to be, partly because there are so few areas of work in the social sciences and humanities which do not involve auto/biography in one form or another, but perhaps mainly because the auto/biographical forms a radical departure -truly a reconceptualisation -in the way we think and work as well as in the subject matter we deal with.At the time, Stanley suggested that auto/biography was essential for the social sciences as:..maximally it mounts a principled and concerted attack on conventional views that 'works' are separate from lives, that there can be an epistemology which is not ontologically based. That science can be objective. Auto/biography intends an epistemological revolution within the social sciences (Stanley, 1994: i).In order to initiate this 'revolution' the group convenors began publishing a bulletin in 1992 and held a conference that led to a special issue of Sociology in 1993. The bulletin became a self-published journal in 1994 and was then picked up by a publisher in 1998. In 2007 the publication changed to the Auto/Biography Yearbook. The work of the group sat alongside, but discrete from, the developing fields of narrative, biography, and life history, amongst others.The material in the journals has consistently been rich, interdisciplinary and challenging in nature, edited from 1998 to the present day by Andrew Sparkes whilst Jenny Byrne, Gill Clarke and Michael Erben have led on maintaining the pattern of two conferences a year. Alongside this there have been a range of significant books, including monographs published by the study group, that have contributed directly and significantly to the field of auto/biography (Stanley,

Saying something with nothing: Refusal, avoidance and resistance in participant non-response

“…The combination of these intrapersonal and interpersonal relational processes makes autobiographical writing a polyvocal conversation (Jackson, 2017). Within narrative studies, the hybrid concept of ‘auto/biography’ reflects the interconnectedness of self and other in personal and social worlds (Parsons, 2019; Stanley, 1993). Multiple perspectives converge within the text, as authors move between alternative narrative versions, discursively repositioning themselves (Davies and Harré, 1990) and speaking to different audience members (Polster, 1995).…”