Doing Collective Biography: Investigating the production of subjectivity

by Bronwyn Davies

“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.

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Bronwyn Davies is an independent scholar based in Sydney, Australia. She is also a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

The distinctive features of her work are her development of innovative social science research methodologies and their relation to the conceptual work of poststructuralist philosophies. Her research explores the ethico-onto-epistemological relations through which particular social worlds are constituted. She is best known for her work on gender, for her development of the methodology of collective biography, and her writing on feminism and poststructuralist theory.

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was stretched as well as engrossed and at times excited. On one level (the one that stretched me) it was about post structuralism's capacity to decompose the hold that certain constitutive discourses (esp neo-liberalist) have in its challenge to the idea of a humanist subject. I was also pushed to think more about what unconsciously shapes our behaviour from without ( our situated, languages contexts), where I'm more used to thinking in Jungian/Hillmanian terms about the unconscious within). I got excited thinking about my experiences over the past 40 years with processes related to collective biography (Tavistock work, Social Ecology at UWS, academic collaborations and a recent collective involved in fiction writing), and the potential to re-experience some of this. And I was engrossed by the narrative, of a group of like-minded women wrestling and writing about issues to do with embodiment, language, ethics and power while at the same time actually experiencing and making sense of their own power relations to each other, and issues to do with desire and belonging. I love brainy and embodied/earthed stories like this one.