Abstract
Including an interview as part of the special issue responds to one specific question that has to do with the production of scientific knowledge. During the Training School, the context in which the current special issue is framed, we highlighted the importance of creating inter-generational knowledges able to transverse across disciplines and the historicity of matter itself. The interview that we are transcribing in this journal represents this specific moment between Beatriz Revelles-Benavente (co-editor and co-organizer of the Training School together with Ana M. González) and Maria Tamboukou, a recognized scholar on new materialist methodologies.
Highlights
Beatriz Revelles Benavente (BRB): I would like to start this training school by retrieving one specific definition of new materialisms from Nick Fox and Pam Alldred (2015, p.399), “New ¿or neo? Materialism [...] concerned fundamentally with the material workings of power, but focused firmly upon social production rather than social construction [...] how desires, feelings and meanings contribute to social production.”
The narrative interest on the uniqueness of human beings is not individualistic, an important point that brings me to my second proposition of the political matrix within which narrative research is deployed
2) Narrative research is immanently situated within the political as conceptualized in Hannah Arendt’s thought: I have used the Arendtian conceptualization of speech and action as the modes par excellence ‘in which human beings appear to each other’ (Arendt 1998, p.177), revealing as it were the uniqueness of the human condition
Summary
Beatriz Revelles Benavente (BRB): I would like to start this training school by retrieving one specific definition of new materialisms from Nick Fox and Pam Alldred (2015, p.399), “New ¿or neo? Materialism [...] concerned fundamentally with the material workings of power, but focused firmly upon social production rather than social construction [...] how desires, feelings and meanings contribute to social production.” This implies conceptualizations of research and research inquiries as “assemblages”, “processual”, “affective”, and many other qualifiers that situate the kind of research that is open up by this ethic-onto-epistemological umbrella that attempts to describe how matter comes to matter. Entities—both human and non-human— emerge as an effect of these intra-actions, without having stable points or positions In this light the task of the narrative researcher is to map ‘the narrative phenomena’ she is working with and trace the emergence of entities, be they stories, themes, discourses, modes and narrative figures. In research, this question is explored on two interrelated planes: a) a theoretical plane wherein Foucauldian, Deleuzian and feminist lines of thought are making connections and b) a postnarratological plane where I chart how conventions of classical narratology are bent and how differentiations within various sub-genres of life writing, namely autobiographies, diaries and letters, emerge. What I have suggested is that the materiality, temporality and sociality of the archive is crucial for the entire research process and that as researchers we should not separate the physical, social and intellectual dimensions of the archival research we carry out
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