Past events in 2013
If I could read your mind: bringing the personal into the critical
This presentation explored the novel's capacity to give voice to the marginalized and unarticulated consciousness of characters with severe learning disabilities. Through examples from her novel-in-progress, The Waifs and Strays of Sea View Lodge, and reflection on her poetics, Emma Sweeney, examined the inter-relationship between the personal (family, memory, experience) and the critical (both in the social sciences and in literature).
The meaning of media in everyday life routines
In this seminar Professor Sarah Pink discussed everyday life in the home from the perspective of the question of how digital media 'matter' in the routines of everyday life. She examined the role of media in the making and experiencing of environments, through a focus on daily routines of transition in the home.
Memory, fabrication & imagination: the textile self re/collected
Collecting stories, memories, materials and metaphors from a wide range of sources and focusing on the everyday textiles often overlooked by force of habit, artist/researcher,Solveigh Goett,traces the textile self in all its expressions, exploring the manifold ways of meaning making through the tacit textile knowledge we carry, quite literally, on our skin.
Narratives of adult mathematics learners
Narratives of adult mathematics learners, Tracy Part, Manchester Metropolitan University. Part of the Centre for Narrative Research & NOVELLA Graduate Seminar in Narrative Research series. Seminar presentations from and discussion with graduate students working with narrative and related methods, on narratives in everyday lives.
Narrative Analysis Workshop
This was a joint workshop on narrative analysis between NOVELLA and the The University of Exeter.
Reusing qualitative data to examine young adults' experiences of growing up with a chronic illness
As part of the TCRU/NOVELLA Seminar Series, Dr Janet Heaton presented a seminar entitled Reusing qualitative data to examine young adults' experiences of growing up with a chronic illness.
Designing a secondary analysis project using archived qualitative data
The main aim of the workshop was to help researchers interested in reusing archived qualitative data to design a study protocol for such a study. It also helped people to think generally about how to assess the quality of such applications and published reports of this type of work, and how to write up such projects. Janet Heaton is a sociologist at the newly formed University of Exeter Medical School.
Gendering the memory of work
This lecture drew on specific case studies from archival research that Professor Maria Tamboukou has conducted in a number of archives in the UK and abroad over the last ten years, informed by neo-materialist approaches in feminist science studies.
African and African-Caribbean Londoners' experiences of cancer services: A narrative approach
Marvelle Brown, University of Bedfordshire. This study was the first in the United Kingdom to use a narrative approach to gain an understanding of Black and minority ethnic (BME) cancer patients' experiences. Building ethnicity into these illness concepts provided an avenue to consider an element which plays a crucial role in healthcare interactions.
Mass Observation: looking at family lives (Workshop)
In collaboration with the Mass Observation Archive, NOVELLA hosted theworkshop Mass Observation: Looking at family lives on 20 March 2013 between 1-4.30pm.
Stories and embodied memories in dementia
Dementia is a brain disease first resulting in linguistic and cognitive challenges, later on more functions are involved and eventually resulting in death. Storytelling is ubiquitous, important in presenting and negotiating identities and important in understanding other people and the world. Professor Lars-Christer Hydén's research on dementia therefore invites us to rethink some theoretical issues such as what is memory and what does 'losing memory' mean and imply. Professor Lars-Christer Hydén comes from Center for Dementia Research (CEDER), Linköping University, Sweden.
Narratives of 'parenting' and social support in three popular websites
Joe gives an overview of his multimodal discourse analysis of the homepages and layouts of each website and presents early insights from his nascent narrative analysis of loosely structured telephone interviews with members of the management team at each website.
Narrative Analysis Workshop
This workshop focused on how to work closely with narrative data with the aim of helping participants to gain a deeper understanding of narrative research. It also aimed to allow participants to reflect on the process of conducting secondary analysis of already collected narratives and of discussing their interpretations alongside those of other participants.
Political narratives symposium
This symposium, organised in collaboration with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at Warwick University, focused on how to work closely with narrative data with the aim of helping participants to gain a deeper understanding of researching political issues using narrative research. Issues covered included reflections on the process of conducting secondary analysis, collaborating with interviewws in data interpretation, and critical examination of researchers' reflexive positioning. The presentations were delivered by Ann Phoenix, Molly Andrews and Nira Yuval-Davis.
Narratives of Self and Other in the Turkish Cypriot print media
By Bahar Taseli, Center for Narrative Research, University of East London. Part of the Centre for Narrative Research & NOVELLA Graduate Seminar in Narrative Research series.
Secondary analysis in reflection: some experiences of re-use from an oral history perspective
Looking back over ten years of engagement with the practice of re-using data, one's own and other's, this paper considers what was learned from these experiences from the perspective of an oral historian. By Professor Joanna Bornat.
Objects, Memory and Narrative
Narrative scholars have been turning to visual materials as sources and tools for understanding social life. This workshop by Susan Bell explored the use of objects in memory work. Its methodology is similary to Kuhn's (2007) 'memory work' that 'carefully builds up explanations from clues and traces extracted from readings of objects of study'.
Energy Biographies and Family Lives and the Environment
This workshop brings together two distinct but complementary studies concerned with applying narrative approaches to understanding experiences of climate change and the environment, giving participants the opportunity to work with the research teams and share in the analysis of their data.
The persistence and role of memories of violence in contemporary cultural narratives
By Ronan MacDubhghaill, University of Paris and University of East London. This seminar explored the memories, narratives, and symbols that emerged from these encounters, comparing participants' experiences of life during the troubles in northern Ireland, and how they related to them in terms of the longer temporal schema, leading to support or opposition to political violence.
Doing narrative research
The National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) hosted an 'agenda setting' event, with NOVELLA and the Centre for Narrative Research (CNR), marking the launch of the second edition of Doing Narrative Research, which has been expanded from eight to thirteen chapters. The launch was preceeded by a half day postgraduate workshop based on their writings of their habitual morning practices. Following this there was a symposium on the theme of 'Narratives of Everyday Life', with presentations from some of the contributing authors of Doing Narrative Research.
Psychiatric survivors and narratives of activism
By Jonathan Buhagiar, University of East London. This study explored the 'journeys' of survivors into activism to challenge psychiatry drawing upon a social constructionist epistemology and a dialogic/performative narrative analysis to explore identity construction amongst the participants, claims to legitimacy and the function(s) of people's narratives.
Voices and the Archive: Oral History Research and Researchers
This one day conference about using oral history data forms part of the Novella project. Through a series of presentations and audience-led discussion the conference will examine the issues raised by the creation and use of oral history archives in social science research, from the perspectives of academics, archivists and community oral historians.
Entanglements of matter and meaning: how Sudanese forced migrants and Cairo make each other
This event is presented by Steve Thorpe from University of East London. Research into urban forced migration phenomena has tended to focus on a limited range of 'refugee issues' such as livelihood strategies, access to resources and legal and psychosocial issues, with the aim of affecting policy. In Steve's paper, he explores some of the questions and implications of a research strategy that takes the intra-actions between marginalised groups and the environments in which they live seriously.