Our growing Sociology list has a global outlook featuring high-quality research across emerging and established areas in the field, such as digital sociology, migration, gender, race and ethnicity, public sociology, and children and families.
Our series include Gender and Sociology, Global Migration and Social Change, Sociology of Children and Families, Sociology of Diversity and Public Sociology.
We publish leading journals in the field, including Emotions and Society in association with the European Sociological Association's (ESA) Research Network on Sociology of Emotions (RN11) as well as Families, Relationships and Societies and the Journal of Gender-Based Violence.
The choosing consumer has been a prominent figure within consumption research, alternatively celebrated as enabling the expression of lifestyles and tastes or criticised for overlooking consumers as embedded in interconnected mundane practices. While sociologically oriented consumption research has explored the multiplicity of consumer roles beyond ‘chooser’, the figure of the choosing consumer persists in many research streams and in our shared cultural imagination. This article joins previous research on the ethics of consumption that has explored tensions between choosing and relational consumers. It does so by introducing the logic of choice and the logic of care to consumption research. Developed by Annemarie , these logics can be seen as ideal types representing contrasting styles of navigating decision-making, ethics, and questions of the good life. The logic of care emphasises attentive doings that aim to improve conditions in specific situations, seeking moderation rather than control, whereas the logic of choice starts out from sovereign individuals making clear-cut decisions. Using examples from a research project on everyday meat consumption practices, we develop a conceptualisation of the central dimensions of these logics within food consumption. The logics of choice and care enact particular worlds and ways of being in them, bringing forth the ontological politics of consumption. Consequently, we advocate for cultivating care in the world of consumption currently dominated by choice, since it enacts a more merciful framing of ethical consumption, emphasising our shared responsibility for ‘as well as possible’ relations without tipping over into guilt.
Stories of the lived experience of suffering or injustice can be powerful vehicles for building empathy and insight into the stigma, shame, pain and indignity of others. Stories can create a foundation on which experiential learning builds. But just as stories can draw us into proximity with each other, they can also cast a spell of mystique or exoticism. When stories evoke discomfort, or challenge our sense of how things should be, they can create distance between ‘us’ (listeners) and ‘them’ (story-holders). Stories about the lived experience of having been locked up, incarcerated, punished – for doing the wrong thing – can be such a place where imagination and indignation collide. This chapter explores this rocky narrative terrain between empathy and antipathy in the context of teaching undergraduate criminology students about the harms of imprisonment and the challenges and possibilities of penal abolition.
Working on a creative research narrative of your own family is challenging, especially if it includes memories of war, forced migration, grief and resilience. How do you illustrate a multifaceted representation of your parents when your short story is about one life-threatening event? How do you ask interview questions, knowing it always affects your loved ones? This chapter explores two challenges involved in developing the author’s creative graphic narrative book. These include the impact of telling untellable stories and the dilemma of ‘ethical’ data collection with family members.
Based on the author’s experiences writing a graphic novel about the effect of events of 1971, when East Pakistan became Bangladesh and her Urdu-speaking family migrated to West Pakistan, this chapter draws upon Marianne Hirsch’s discussion around post-memory, and Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s approach towards post-amnesia to discuss complex memory work. The chapter also discusses the toll of emotional labour, intergenerational trauma, and strength through reflections on this creative project.
Narrative Research Now addresses timely concerns about the politics of representation and the ethics of storytelling; topics that are crucial to narrative research and to broader audiences interested in the power of stories. In a time of contested realities and a renewed focus on the power of personal stories, narrative research is as relevant as ever. But ironically it is sometimes seen as a naive approach that champions people’s testimonies at all costs. The idea that stories and storytelling matter is widely accepted, yet critical engagement with such stories remains rare. In part, this is because narrative research has not always been up to the task of unpacking issues of power and representation. Indeed, while narrative has been praised for ‘giving voice’ and highlighting how individuals make sense of the social world, critics are starting to question which voices are being heard, or allowed to speak, and which experiences are made to count. Narrative Research Now picks up on these questions as it seeks to scrutinise the continued value of narrative and suggest a new agenda for narrative research in contemporary times. The book is arranged into three cross-cutting themes that reflect significant points of tension in the field – institutional authority and counter-stories; tellable and untellable stories; and the ethics of representation. With these themes, the chapters take on important concerns such as an attention to the ethics, power dynamics, and the politics of storytelling in a social world.
This chapter draws on the case study of an oral history life narrative of an elderly woman to consider the ethical responsibilities of oral historians recording the stories of people with dementia. Using a pseudonym, Joan’s story raises important questions about how we respect a narrator’s wish to be heard at a time when they are often regarded as ‘unreliable narrators’ by the people closest to them. Joan’s memories of a traumatic event do not accord with the people who now have authority to speak on her behalf. Do they have the right to stop her from speaking out? If people find the courage to tell ‘untellable stories’ later in life, who are we, who follow them, to deny them their truth?
Narrative Research Now addresses timely concerns about the politics of representation and the ethics of storytelling; topics that are crucial to narrative research and to broader audiences interested in the power of stories. In a time of contested realities and a renewed focus on the power of personal stories, narrative research is as relevant as ever. But ironically it is sometimes seen as a naive approach that champions people’s testimonies at all costs. The idea that stories and storytelling matter is widely accepted, yet critical engagement with such stories remains rare. In part, this is because narrative research has not always been up to the task of unpacking issues of power and representation. Indeed, while narrative has been praised for ‘giving voice’ and highlighting how individuals make sense of the social world, critics are starting to question which voices are being heard, or allowed to speak, and which experiences are made to count. Narrative Research Now picks up on these questions as it seeks to scrutinise the continued value of narrative and suggest a new agenda for narrative research in contemporary times. The book is arranged into three cross-cutting themes that reflect significant points of tension in the field – institutional authority and counter-stories; tellable and untellable stories; and the ethics of representation. With these themes, the chapters take on important concerns such as an attention to the ethics, power dynamics, and the politics of storytelling in a social world.
Feminist researchers emphasise the ethical importance of co-production of knowledge with research participants. Sharing the narratives of participants, especially those from vulnerable or marginalised groups whose voices are often sidelined or silenced, is also an important, higher-order feminist ethical choice for advocacy and so other women can potentially find meaning and inspiration in the journeys of their peers. However, such research involves risks to participants that institutionalised informed consent processes assume can all be known at the onset and sufficiently explained, with decisions then resting solely with interlocuters on whether to proceed. Yet, these risks may not always be fully predictable, especially in an evolving digital era in which open-access storytelling and research translation shifts the audience from narrower academic readers to multiple publics. Risks are also heightened for participants from regions with a history of authoritarianism where their narratives of challenging established power structures may attract the attention of those with the authority and influence to do them harm. Ethical narrative research thus, this chapter argues, entails balancing the interests and wishes of protagonists with the short- and long-term risks to these interlocuters through iterative reflection, consultation and collaborative (and sometimes revised) decision-making involving both researchers and participants.
The concluding chapter draws together the themes of the book and offers new paths forward for narrative research in new times. It summarises and demonstrates how the chapters have each brought new interdisciplinary dimensions to the key questions of the book around the ethics of storytelling, voice, power and representation. The closing discussion opens up avenues for future analysis primarily around the question of how scholars can bring critical perspectives to the promise of stories, without becoming too cynical about the power of narrating lived experience. It identifies further issues around time and temporality, the role of the listener, authority and tellability that call for the expertise of narrative scholars and socially engaged storytellers in our era.
This introductory chapter sets out the framework for the collection. It addresses current debates in narrative research and outlines the pressing social contexts that face narrative researchers today. It locates power, ethics, voice and representation as key issues in a time when stories of lived experience are the subject of heated social conjecture and are often instrumentalised by the uptake of narrative as a buzzword in political, corporate and media spheres. Offering an overview of the collection as a whole, this chapter also outlines the thematic sections and the guiding questions that underpin the interdisciplinary chapters.
