Narratives of Varied Everyday Lives and Linked Approaches Conference

Description:

About NOVELLA

NOVELLA (Narratives of Varied Everyday Live and Linked Approaches) is a National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) Node. It conducts research concerned with the everyday practices of families. These are frequently taken for granted, but people's habits and their relation to society are often negotiated within families. Over nearly three years, NOVELLA researchers have conducted secondary analysis on family narratives about a variety of everyday lives and a range of family practices as well as doing some new empirical research on what people do, what they say they do on a range of substantive issues including environment, parenting, food, food blogs and qualitative ‘paradata’.
 

About NOVELLA Conference

On 7 July 2014 NOVELLA will hold a one day conference at St Catherine’s College, Oxford University to discuss showcase the findings of the research programme, their implications for family identities, practices and policies and the resulting methodological insights. There will be opportunities for both methodological and substantive discussion.

The keynote address will be given by the leading international scholar on narrative analysis, Professor Cathy Riessman. Speakers include Dr Janet Boddy, Professor Julia Brannen, Heather Elliott, Dr Rebecca O’Connell, Dr Abigail Knight, Professor Ann Phoenix, Catherine Walker and Joe Winter.
 

Keynote Lecture

‘Writing to get through it’: Narrating Cancer
Professor Cathy Riessman, Boston College

Can everyday life ever return to normal after a trauma? What happens to our taken-for-granted notions of time? Stories – spoken and written-that recount the troubled times appear to have beginnings, middles and endings, but experienced time can blur clear temporal boundaries. In a case study I explore narrative time by interrogating the writings of a cancer survivor who kept a journal over the course of her illness. She imagined audiences, which shifted over time, for her evolving narrative about the illness episode. I critically interrogate the narrative to raise questions about identity, temporality and audiencing – defining features of narrative research.

Abstracts of talks

Meanings of environment for families in India and the UK (Family Lives & the Environment)
Dr Janet Boddy, Sussex University

This paper draws on analysis conducted for the Family Lives and the Environment study. The research has both methodological and substantive aims, drawing on multiple methods, including secondary analysis of the Young Lives qualitative data set from India and narrative analytic approaches to improve understanding of the negotiated complexity of families' lives in relation to their environments. Drawing on diverse family case studies – encompassing urban and rural contexts in India and the UK – narrative analysis illuminates the ways in which place and time intersect with meanings of environment, and relationships with the environment, in everyday family lives.

Migration, memories and identities (Parenting, Identities & Practices)
Professor Julia Brannen

The Parenting Identities and practices study created a new dataset for secondary analysis from two previous studies to analyse the narratives of men who came to Britain from the Caribbean and from Ireland in the middle of the twentieth century. In this paper we consider how the experience of migration in early life reverberates through the life course. This paper considers the experiences of Irish men who came to Britain in the middle of the 20th century as young adults. It shows what a narrative analysis adds to understanding of their experiences by addressing how their lives are storied in relation to particular times and places and what they tell us about the meaning of belonging to a family lineage. The analysis suggests that from the present perspectives of informants the past is still alive and open to interpretation rather than ‘over and done with’.

Recipes for mothering? An analysis of UK blogs about feeding the family in contexts of scarcity (Recipes for mothering)
Dr Rebecca O’Connell

This paper discusses a small-scale NOVELLA study that analysed food blogs created by two mothers. It presents insights that arise from addressing a range of questions. What might researchers learn from UK women’s contemporary blogs about meals, mothering, family life, limited money, and shortages of time? How might we approach such complex materials, powerfully shaped and enabled by digital technologies, but also inflected by many other kinds of text, such as diaries and recipes, as ‘data’?

Food and families in the archives: methodological reflections on using narrative archival data to study food and family life in hard times (Families & Food)
Dr Abigail Knight, Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London

This paper starts from C Wright’s Mills’ (1959) exhortation that an historical approach in sociology is essential in furthering our understanding of the social world and the call by Caroline Brettell (1998) to carry out ‘fieldwork in the archives’. It draws on our use narrative archival sources, namely diary and oral history data, to research everyday family food practices in times of austerity. It presents analyses of two oral history archives and from the Mass-Observation Archive.

The centrality of marginalia: analysing paradata from the Poverty in the UK study (Poverty in the UK: Advancing paradata analysis and open access ESRC cross-investment project)
Heather Elliott

This paper presents analysis of paradata from Peter Townsend’s influential study ‘Poverty in the UK: A Survey of Household Resources and Standards of Living 1967-68’. These notes written by fieldworkers in the margins of the survey booklets are a product of their time since surveys are now computer assisted. From the secondary analysis of these paradata, we draw out the types of marginalia, the stories that they tell and how they can be used to re-construct the everyday working practices of research teams from the period – including ethical practices.

Becoming reflexive researchers: An experiment in research collaboration
Catherine Walker and Joe Winter

PhD students who do narrative research are frequently encouraged to be reflexive in the way they conduct their research. This paper addresses the ways in which positioning as PhD students linked to the NOVELLA research mode has afforded opportunities to view PhD work as part of a joint endeavour, allowing for collaborations at both a peer-to-peer level and with researchers at more advanced stages in their academic careers. This presentation explores the relationship between collaboration and reflexivity by presenting transcribed extracts of phone discussions where Catherine Walker and Joe Winter work together to consider and make sense of their positioning in their research practice, particularly as emerging researchers in a research culture that has been criticised for emphasising ‘competitive individualism at the expense of collegiality, collaboration, altruism and activism’ (Klocker and Drozdzewski, 2012).


* If you require accommodation for Sunday night (NOVELLA Conference is on Monday), please book through us, the charge is £70 B&B.

* If you require accommodation for Monday night (for the Research Methods Festival on Tuesday), please book through NCRM - RMF.

* Event venue: the Arumugan Building, St Catherine's College, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UJ.

* Event time: 9.30 - 17.30, 7th July 2014.

Cost:

Students £30
Students + Accommodation £100
Staff £60
Staff + Accommodation £130
Others £85
Others + Accommodation £155

Website and registration:

Region:

South West

Keywords:

Pilot Study, Secondary Analysis, Mixed Methods, Frameworks for Research and Research Designs (other), Data Collection, Visual Methods, Data archiving, Qualitative Data Handling and Data Analysis, Narrative Methods, Biographical Methods/Oral History, Visual Data Analysis, Research Ethics

Related publications and presentations from our eprints archive:

Pilot Study
Secondary Analysis
Mixed Methods
Frameworks for Research and Research Designs (other)
Data Collection
Visual Methods
Data archiving
Qualitative Data Handling and Data Analysis
Narrative Methods
Biographical Methods/Oral History
Visual Data Analysis
Research Ethics

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