Table Of ContentDocuments of Life RevisiteD
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Documents of Life Revisited
narrative and Biographical methodology
for a 21st century critical Humanism
Edited by
Liz stanLey
University of Edinburgh, UK
First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2013 Liz stanley
Liz stanley has asserted her right under the copyright, Designs and Patents act, 1988, to be
identified as the editor of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form
or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Documents of life revisited : narrative and biographical
methodology for a 21st century critical humanism.
1. Plummer, Kenneth. Documents of life. 2. sociology--
Biographical methods. 3. social sciences--Biographical
methods.
i. stanley, Liz, 1947-
301'.072-dc23
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Documents of life revisited : narrative and biographical methodology for a
21st century critical humanism / by Liz stanley.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-4289-9 (hardback) 1. Sociology--Biographicalmethods. 2. social
sciences--Biographical methods. i. stanley, Liz, 1947-
Hm585.D63 2013
301--dc23
2012040434
ISBN 9781409442899 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315577869 (ebk)
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Acknowledgements xi
IntroductIon
Introduction: Documents of Life and Critical Humanism
in a Narrative and Biographical Frame 3
Liz Stanley
Part I after the Posts: reconceIvIng Methods
and MethodologIes
1 Lies and Truths: Exploring the Lie as a Document of Life 19
Clair Morrow
2 Critical Humanist Thoughts on
the Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiography:
‘Nobody wages war with Dostoevsky or Dickens’ 31
Claire Lynch
3 The Essential Subject?
The Very Documented Life of Myra Hindley 45
Helen Pleasance
4 Whites Writing: Letters and Documents of Life in a QLR Project 59
Liz Stanley
Part II on tellIngs and retellIngs: analysIng
storIes, audIences and constructed lIves
5 The Diarists’ Audience 77
Sally Fincher
6 Someone Telling Something to Someone about Something? Stories in
Olive Schreiner’s Letters and Nella Last’s Diary 93
Andrea Salter
vi Documents of Life Revisited
7 Between Diary and Memoir:
Documenting a Life in Wartime Britain 107
Cate Watson
8 Forgotten Memories? Silence, Reason, Truth and the Carnival 121
Heather Blenkinsop
9 Dear Mrs President: Children’s Letters to
the President of Finland as Documents of Life 133
Ulla-Maija Salo
Part III the ordInary, vIrtual, untIMely, sacred:
crItIcal huManIst Knowledge-MaKIng
10 Identifying The Quotidian in the Heterotopic Universe
of Olive Schreiner’s Letters 149
Helen Dampier
11 Documents of Life and the Undead:
Online Postmortem Photographs and Critical Humanist Ethics 161
Sue Wise
12 Writing Water: An Untimely Academic Novella 177
Mona Livholts
13 Everything Speaks: A Multidimensional Approach
to Researching the Lithuanian Jewish Past 193
Shivaun Woolfson
storIes and storIed lIves: a ManIfesto
14 A Manifesto for Social Stories 209
Ken Plummer
Index of Names 221
Index of Subjects 225
Notes on Contributors
Heather Blenkinsop is a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Her interests
include belonging, storytelling and the performance of identity.
Helen Dampier is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural History at Leeds
Metropolitan University. She is a graduate of Rhodes University, South Africa,
and has a PhD from the University of Newcastle, UK. Her main interests concern
the South African past, life writings, and also historiography and its claims.
Sally Fincher is Professor of Computing Education in the School of Computing at
the University of Kent, where she leads the Computing Education Research Group.
Her work is centrally concerned with the teaching and learning of Computing,
with particular emphasis on teachers and teaching practices. She is Editor-in-Chief
of the Journal Computer Science Education (jointly with Laurie Murphy).
Mona Livholts is Associate Professor of Social Work specializing in Gender
Studies, and Coordinator of the Network for Reflexive Academic Writing
Methodologies at Mid Sweden University, Sweden.
Claire Lynch is Lecturer in English Literature and lead researcher on the Burnett
Archive of Working Class Autobiography at Brunel University, London. Her
research examines the way people write about their own lives, from traditional
novels and autobiographies, to contemporary blogs and websites. She is author of
the monograph Irish Autobiography: Stories of Selves in the Narrative of a Nation
(2009).
Clair Morrow is an ESRC-funded doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths, University
of London. Her current research explores the auto/biographical origins and impact
of telling lies about the self, with a focus on the themes of identity construction
and agency. Her research areas of interests include gender, feminism, the use of
biography and other forms of narrative in social research and the sociology of
everyday life.
Helen Pleasance completed her PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University,
using archival research, narrative theory and creative memoir to understand the
Moors murders as a historical event. She is currently researching the rise of
celebrity and real life magazines and the identity narratives they construct about
viii Documents of Life Revisited
gender, class and consumption. She is particularly interested in the photographic
representation of the female celebrity as a site of crisis. She teaches Literature and
Creative Writing for the Open University.
Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. He
is the author of Documents of Life, first published in 1983 by Allen and Unwin and
then substantially revised in 2001 to become Documents of Life 2: An Invitation
to a Critical Humanism by Sage Publications. Other books include Telling
Sexual Stories (1995, Routledge), Intimate Citizenship (2003, Washington) and
Sociology: The Basics (2010, Routledge). He was the founder editor of the journal
Sexualities. His abiding interest is with making sociology more humanistic.
Ulla-Maija Salo is a University Lecturer at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Her research interests include childhood studies, gender studies, cultural research
in education, qualitative methodologies and research writing. She is an author of
three monographs, several book chapters, scientific articles, essays, newspaper
columns and other popular texts. Mostly these are written in Finnish.
Andrea Salter was Research Associate on the Olive Schreiner Letters Project
and is now RA on the Whites Writing Whiteness project, both at the University of
Edinburgh. She combines this with also working on the Economics in the Public
Sphere project at the University of Cambridge.
Liz Stanley is an ESRC Professorial Research Fellow and holds the established
chair of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She has visiting
professorships at the University of Pretoria and the University of Johannesburg,
South Africa, helping capacity-build PhD research training. Her work-in-progress
with Andrea Salter is The World’s Great Question: Olive Schreiner’s South African
Letters (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck).
Cate Watson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Stirling,
UK. One of her main research interests is the use and development of narrative
methodology and she has applied this widely to areas as diverse as professional/
institutional identities and cricket broadcasting. She is the author of Reflexive
Research and the (Re)turn to the Baroque. (Or how I learned to stop worrying and
love the university), published by Sense, Rotterdam, 2008.
Sue Wise is Emerita Professor of Social Justice at Lancaster University. As well
as ‘The Domestication of Death’ project drawn on in her chapter in this collection,
Sue has a longstanding interest in questions of feminist methodology and has
published widely on this.
Notes on Contributors ix
Shivaun Woolfson is completing her PhD at the University of Sussex on the
Lithuanian Jewish experience through people, places and objects. She is the
author of the memoir Home Fires (Atlantic Books) and has created a multi-media
exhibition and award-winning documentary based on her research activities. She
is co-founder of the UK-based Living Imprint, a non-profit dedicated to harnessing
the transformational power of story to enliven, enlighten and educate.
