Doing Collective Biography

“At last a book that not only describes what collective biography is but also explains how to use it … The book describes how to set up collective biography workshops in which participants examine how discursive structures and power relations have both enabled and limited the conditions of possibility for their lived experience. Focusing on a more complicated reflexivity than is usually described in social science research, collective biography, inspired by Frigga Haug and refined by Davies, will no doubt be used increasingly by researchers interested in the production of subjects in a postmodern world.”
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, University of Georgia, USA

This book introduces the reader to collective biography, an innovative research methodology for use in education and the social sciences. The methodology of collective biography overcomes the theory/practice divide, by putting theory to use in everyday life, and using everyday life to understand and to extend theory.

Doing Collective Biography provides guidelines for developing a collective biography project and demonstrates how these guidelines emerged from and were shaped by projects on such topics as subjectivity, power, agency, reflexivity, literacy, gender, and neoliberalism at work. Each chapter gives a detailed example of collective biography in practice, showing how a group of students and/or scholars can work collaboratively to investigate aspects of the production of subjectivity, and clearly demonstrates how poststructural theory can be elaborated and refracted through the experiences of ordinary everyday life.

This is key reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students on Education and social science courses with a research element, as well as for academics and professionals undertaking research projects.

Jenny Browne is the Midwifery Program Coordinator at the University of Newcastle, NSW. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney, NSW, looking at the work women do to constitute themselves as midwives.

Phoenix de Carteret's PhD research at the University of New England focused on women's experiences of discourses that shape classed and gendered subjectivity. She used collective biography as a research method.

Professor Bronwyn Davies is Professor of Education at University of Western Sydney. Her work focuses on gender and poststructuralist theorising and on body/ landscape relations.

Suzi Dormer is a psychologist in private practice in Townsville, Queensland. She is particularly interested in the workings of desire in women's lives.

Anna Britt Flemmen is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Tromso in Norway. Her doctoral research focused on how women's fear of sexual violence influenced their activity space and her current work is on close relationships.

Susanne Gannon lectures in Education at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Her doctoral research focused on poststructural theory and transgressive writing and research practices.

Eileen Honan is a lecturer in Education at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her Ph.D. thesis was a poststructural rhizoanalysis of the interactions between teachers and syllabus texts.

Lekkie Hopkins teaches women's studies at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. Her work is feminist, poststructuralist, and cross-disciplinary. Her doctoral thesis explores the uses of narrative in re-storying the self in the training of women¹s services practitioners.

Cath Laws is Principal of Fowler Road School, Sydney, Australia. Her doctoral research focused on children who are marginalised at school, particularly those children who are marginalised as behaviourally/ emotionally disturbed.

Hillevi Lenz Taguchi is assistant professor in Education and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stockholm Institute of Education, Sweden. Her research concerns feminist pedagogies in higher and in early childhood education.

Helen McCann was a lecturer in Education at the University of Southern Queensland, Hervey Bay, Qld, Australia.

Babette Müller-Rockstroh is a medical anthropologist and a midwife. She is currently working on a PhD project on ultrasound in Ghana and Tanzania through the University of Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Margaret Somerville lectures in Adult Education at the University of New England, NSW, Australia. Her doctoral work focused on body/ landscape relations and her current work also encompasses bodies in workplaces.

Eva Bendix Petersen lectures in Education at Charles Sturt University, NSW, Australia. Her doctoral research at the University of Copenhagen focused on the constructions of scientificity and researcherhood within the humanities and social sciences.

Danielle Stewart is a teacher in Queensland, Australia. She was a BEd (Hons) student at James Cook University at the time of the project included in this book.

Sharn Rocco lectures in education at James Cook University, Townsville, Australia. Her doctoral research investigated women’s desire for heterosexual marriage.

Barbara Watson is an adjunct lecturer in education and psychology at James Cook University, Townsville, Australia. Her doctoral research was a critical pragmatic analysis of parent's living with a child with an intellectual disability.

Monne Wihlborg is a lecturer in education at Lund University in Sweden.