Works in Progress #3

 

November 2020

Our second event for 2020 was again a Zoom-event, this time organised around presentations from our members. For this session we had three great speakers from three different departments at the University of Melbourne share their work in progress.

First up, we had Sarah Strauven (Social Work), who gave a methodological paper entitled ‘Grappling with poststructural ideas in qualitative research: A narrative practice approach to data collection, representation and analysis’. Sarah’s approach opened up new ways for us to think about decentring the researcher and co-creating narratives with research participants.

The second speaker was Jo Higginson (Education), who spoke about ‘The intergenerational “capital of biographical experiences”: student and family narratives of global mobility’. This is based on Jo’s PhD research which draws on qualitative case studies of secondary students and their parents, who have experience of life and schooling in both Australia and other countries, examining these in relation to sociological theories of globalisation.

Our last speaker was Professor David Goodman (History) who presented on ‘Making a narrative of bits and pieces – using autobiographical fragments in writing a history of ordinary Americans’ involvement in the debate about WWII 1937-41’. David’s presentation took us into the engine room of his ongoing work on American history and ‘ordinary’ Americans by sharing dilemmas relating to the fragmentary nature of archival data and how a research narrative can be drawn up from this.

The three presentations generated a lively discussion and exchange. We hope that our next event in 2021 will be face-to-face on campus!