Positioning Theory and Life-Story Interviews: Discursive Fields, Gaze and Resistance

Abstract

This chapter suggests that we take an approach to life-story interviews which moves beyond an exclusively micro level analysis (examining, for example, the minutest of features of spoken language, such as pronoun use or accent) or an exclusively content-based analysis (which, in essence, plays the story told in the interview back to the reader). The author proposes that we take fully on board how interviews are social events, sociohistorically embedded in multiple phenomenological layers. A point of departure here is that while this view of interviews is by now fairly well accepted in principle, many narrative researchers still fail to take it fully into account. However, the aim here is not to make concrete recommendations about how to incorporate this more socially sensitive view of interviews into narrative research; rather it is to further discussion in a debate opened long ago by scholars such as Jerome Bruner, who wrote about interviews as social events, sociohistorically embedded in multiple phenomenological layers. The chapter starts with the presentation of a life-story interview excerpt, which is, it is argued, interpretable only if we take an expansive approach to analysis. The chapter then discusses positioning theory as a means through which we can make sense of interactions taking place during interviews. An extension of positioning theory, that draws on authors such as Judith Butler, Mikhail Bakhtin, James Paul Gee, Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, is presented as a working model through which we can understand interviews as social phenomena. The author links an interview excerpt presented at the beginning of the paper to the layers that are added to the emergent model of analysis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some issues arising in all research involving life-story interviews.