Methodology Of Biography Research Articles

For Hannes Adonis: Demolishing Walls

The study aims to indicate how the lives of religious people can serve as a source of theological knowledge and beliefs. This study engages the life and work of Hannes Adonis through the methodology of biography as theology. A key characteristic of Hannes Adonis's life and work is the dismantling of all walls of division in church and academia. First, the methodology of biography as theology is discussed. Secondly, Adonis’s contribution to the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (DRMC)/Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa (URCSA) is engaged. Thirdly, Adonis’s impact on academia, particularly the South African historiography, is discussed.

Belonging as flickering and in flux in academic work: a collective biography

In this article, we explore the concept of belonging and its utility as a means for understanding academics’ experiences of working in the academy. Transformative changes have reorientated academic work in recent years and continue to do so as we grapple with what it means to work and live in a post-digital, post-covid, world. We engage a collective biography methodology to highlight the embodied spatial-material assemblages in which belonging can be (un)made, the ways in which belonging may stick, slip and slide, as well how we might support colleagues to deal with the fragility and fluidity of academic work. Collectively, we sketch a portrait of the currents, spaces and relations of belonging that sit uncomfortably alongside common conceptions of belonging as linear, or as an internal, individual, emotion. This study therefore offers new possibilities for enhanced understandings of belonging as mobile, flickering and processual, that are generative within education and beyond.

Researching in fragile contexts: Exploring and responding to layered responsibility for researcher care

Researchers face multiple risks working in fragile contexts such as forced migration, where complex engagements in the field and uneven power dynamics can yield sensitive data. The literature has long identified tensions around participatory methods, emotional labour, vicarious trauma and the need for tailored training and debriefing, with calls for more institutional responsibility seemingly unheeded. This paper draws on the research experiences of three Australian forced migration scholars to explore the lived experience of researching in fragile contexts. It examines strategies to mitigate risks of harm to researchers, particularly through listening as a methodology. We draw from a two-year collective biography methodology using triadic interviews, and from this we discuss the significant emotional and embodied impacts on researcher wellbeing. Our consideration of the layers of responsibility for care led to recommendations at three levels: greater institutional responsibility through the provision of targeted research and ethics training for fragile contexts, community responsibility through the development of a community of ethical inquiry and individual responsibility through debriefing and self-care.

Household curricula during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A collective biography

AbstractHouseholds with school‐aged children worldwide were affected by school closures caused by COVID‐19. Using a sociomaterial orientation and collective biography methodology, this study examined the household curricula of diverse families in Ontario, Canada with children in pre‐school through Grade 12. It found two distinct curricular phases to the pandemic, each with its own networked constituents, movements, and effects. Phase I involved learning at home during the lockdown in Spring and Summer 2020; Phase II involved online and face‐to‐face learning in the Fall of 2020. The constituents involved in curriculum making in Phase I were expansive and unexpected. Multiple timescales, modes, languages, and knowledge disciplines assembled to (re)configure households as learning spaces that produced novel opportunities for children's knowing, doing, and being. The makeup and movements of the Phase II assemblages were more of a return to the normalized boundaries of implemented school curricula that demarcated subject areas, languages, learning/play, learning/assessment, and body/mind. Concerned with questions of equity in/through curriculum, this study suggests a curriculum paradigm that foregrounds learners' and teachers' engagement with sociomaterial lifeworlds and their ethical relationship building with the more‐than‐human and the world.

Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900–1925 by Brian Horowitz

Reviewed by: Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900–1925 by Brian Horowitz Vassili Schedrin Brian Horowitz. Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900–1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 271 pp. In recent years, historians of modern Europe have increasingly turned to biography to reclaim overlooked and unknown historical actors and revisit well-known and studied ones. In the introduction to her volume on the role and methodology of biography in modern historiography, Simone Lässig wrote that "the reconstruction of individual life courses helps to discover more about the context."1 However, Lässig argued, the goal of such reconstruction is by no means a recounting of a coherent, purposeful "life," because "every 'life' is in some way fragmented and every person combines several changing roles, and that these roles in turn express themselves in different, mutually competing fields."2 Therefore, Brian Horowitz's assertion that his new book on Vladimir Jabotinsky is "not strictly a biography," but rather "arguments and evidence to explain the arc of Jabotinsky's development" (7), makes perfect sense. As a biographer, Horowitz focuses on Jabotinsky's "development, changing, and becoming" during his "Russian years," that is, in the Russian political, cultural, and literary contexts that shaped his life and thought (1). Jabotinsky's life, in fact, his parallel lives as a cosmopolitan multilingual journalist, Russian writer, and Jewish politician, were intertwined with the context of the Russian Revolution, World War I, shattering empires, and emerging nations. Horowitz argues that this context—Jabotinsky's formative years in Russia—has been largely neglected by scholars. He aims to [End Page 211] show that, paraphrasing Jabotinsky himself, "it was easier to take Jabotinsky out of Russia than Russia out of Jabotinsky" (231). Jabotinsky's political ambitions became evident very early. In the summer of 1903, in his articles reporting from the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, Jabotinsky already presented himself, albeit indirectly, as a leader, seeking to take the movement to the next level. Horowitz demonstrates that because Jabotinsky moved with more confidence in Russian political circles rather than in Jewish ones, he became a proponent of Synthetic Zionism, engaging with political life in the Diaspora. Horowitz makes a solid case that the 1905 Russian Revolution was a factor of paramount importance in modern Jewish politics on all sides—liberal, nationalist, socialist, and autonomist. For Jabotinsky, it was a life-changing encounter with Russian politics and an invaluable firsthand experience of making history. Initially, he was optimistic about making an alliance with Russian liberals who supported equal rights for the Jews. Eventually, frustrated by the liberals' opportunism and indifference toward the wave of pogroms that flooded Russia during the revolution, Jabotinsky came to the conclusion that the Russian Revolution was not good for the Jews, but Zionism was. At the same time, the revolution was in his opinion a positive experience as a "school for the new Jewish spirit" (66). According to Horowitz, the fact that Jabotinsky was a member of a disappointed generation of Russian Jews who had put their hopes on the 1905 revolution but were bitterly betrayed, has gone unnoticed by historians (79). Russian liberals, whom Jabotinsky once considered natural political allies, ended up easily switching sides and embracing nationalism, and Jabotinsky came to believe that the only path for Jews was separatism, that is, Zionism. Jabotinsky was also tempted to explore nonliberal political alternatives and became acquainted with leaders, ideologies, and tools of the radical Right. Pride in the ability to defend oneself physically became for Jabotinsky the sine qua non of Jewish national consciousness. However, Horowitz emphasizes that Jabotinsky was the first Zionist to see the army as an essential instrument for achieving national and political goals, not merely a means of protection. Gradually, Jabotinsky's thinking about the actual situation of the Jewish minority in Russia shifted to the imaginary situation of a future Jewish majority in Palestine. Referring to times when Jabotinsky found himself at a crossroads, especially from 1920–1922 when he lived in Mandate Palestine, Horowitz observes that Jabotinsky's "behavior is difficult to parse in terms of timing and intention" (171). To find and explain connections between his subject's various aspects, Horowitz explores Jabotinsky's duality...

The Matter of Tears: Translucent Entanglements With/In Counselling Encounters

Tears have long been documented in human culture. Tracing their history reveals the very different ways culture has shaped their expression and meaning. In more recent history, human tears have been thought to signify an internalised psychological state, with displays ruled by particular constraining forces within Western society. In this essay, I propose a reconceptualising of tears instead as intra-active cultural, political, social, material and affective phenomena (Barad, 2007). This reconceptualization is stimulated by (and in the context of) the social practice of counselling, and within that, the process of becoming a counsellor. I draw on data gathered with a diverse group of counsellors-in-training over the period of one year using a collective biography methodology. Engaging in a diffractive, rather than reflexive, process of data analysis, which marks a decentring of the individual subject of inquiry, and instead requires an opening up to the intra-active flows, matter, and material-discursive practices, I document how tears came to matter, both as an object of analysis, and for counsellors-in-training, in relation to the multiple forces enacting them.

Reflections on a collective biography journey

This Intervention discusses an eight-year collaboration among four feminist geographers using a collective biography methodology to investigate the academy. Beginning from an epistemological-ontological direction rather than a topical one, we used joy as our way “in” to issues around subject formation, intimacy, flows of power, and the care of the self. Using a question and answer format, as though we were being interviewed about our work, we engage with questions about positionality and reflexivity alongside the ways we took up and generated new knowledge using collective biography. We discuss the ways that an affirmative politics informed our research and our ways of working together. We hope that the paper will offer readers new ways to think about auto-ethnographic research practices and autobiography in life writing, feminist selves in the academy, and the intimate nature of close, collaborative work.

Leaning in: A Historical Perspective on Influencing Women’s Leadership

The term “lean in” was popularized by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, via her #1 Best Seller encouraging women to defy their fears and dare to be leaders in their fields. She received criticism because although admitting to external barriers contributing to the gender gap in leadership, the scope of her book focused on the internal shortcomings of women. She asserted that women are hindered by barriers that exist within themselves, and provided practical tips, backed by research, to equip women with strategies to proactively progress in the workplace instead of shying away. Sandberg is not the first to raise concern about gender inequality. Other women in history like Susan B. Anthony and Maggie Lena Walker also challenged lopsided gender roles through their words and actions. Using the critical biography methodology, this paper explores these women’s experiences, philosophies and contributions, reflects on Sandberg’s insight, and develops a framework, based on the theory of planned behavior as well as the ethical principles of utilitarianism and corporate social responsibility, that links internal factors (e.g., self-efficacy, leadership ambition etc.), organizational external factors (e.g., culture, support etc.), and societal external factors (e.g., societal expectations, public policy etc.) to intentions to lean in and leaning in behavior. Thus, via critical biography, this paper examines both internal and external factors, showing how they are linked, and how they may impact leaning in intentions and behavior. The paper also discusses how leaning in may influence both individual and gender mobility for women, and ultimately, increased gender equality.

Formation of Creative and Professional Dialogue of the Avant-gardists of the World: Interpretational Model by Bengt Jangfeldt

The article analyses fundamental study Stake is Life by the profound Swedish writer, scholar of Slavistics and translator of Russian poetry of the first half of the 20th century Bengt Jangfeldt in which the main attention focuses on the personality of V. Mayakovsky and his milieu. The article shows how the Swedish scholar proposed personal view of the role and place of futurism within the logics of Russian avant-garde establishment and development. Timeliness of study B. Jangfeldt’s viewpoint is motivated by the fact that the material he used in his work is of relevance to the history of Ukrainian futurism. Methodology of the study is stipulated by the specific character of the article theme and based on historical and chronological methods, as well as on the personalization principle as structural element of biography methodology. The study aims to introduce existing research space to a wide circle of both scholars and readers who are keen on theoretical understanding of avant-garde. The novelty of the study lies in a broad representation of scholars’ interpretational model concerning the place and the role of futurism in the logic within establishing and development of Russian avant-garde compared to out-of-dated and traditional approaches to Russian futurism. Actual importance of the study lies in analyzing creative and professional dialogue formation between European and Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde. Conclusions. It is noted that timing of appealing to B. Jangfeldt’s view is provoked by the fact that the material researched by the author is relevant to Ukrainian futurism history.

Understanding race and educational leadership in higher education

The dearth of representation regarding Black and Ethnic Minorities (BME) in senior educational leadership roles within higher education (HE) has become a salient issue as egalitarian notions associated with equality and diversity continue to be contradicted by university institutions, despite increased calls for greater diversification. Educational leadership in higher education within the United Kingdom (UK), particularly when aligned to the primacy of race, remains oblivious to some of the organizational barriers encountered by BME academics attempting to navigate a career trajectory towards senior leadership. The diversification of senior leaders within the Academy in the UK has increasingly become an issue that, although prevalent, has stagnated owing to the lack of visible BME senior leaders and penetrative change to address the disparity regarding recruitment and promotion of more BME academics to leadership hierarchies. This article draws on a collective biography methodology, which will utilize narratives from three BME academics in senior leadership positions within higher education in the UK, in an attempt to illuminate the challenges that saturate the Academy, concerning leadership opportunities and career pathways for BME academics. The issues drawn upon identify synergies between constructions of race and leadership, whilst considering the interplay between these two vehicles when situated within a higher education context.

Discourse appropriation and category boundary work: casual teachers in the market

ABSTRACTWith the increasing casualisation of the teacher labour force, there is little written on the experiences of casual teachers and the challenges they face in brokering professional identities within constantly shifting and uncertain work contexts. Being a category bound casual teacher (a product of category boundary work) is a complex subject position. The aim of this article is to advance our understandings of the identity work inherent in casual relief teachers (CRTs) performativity. Anti-essentialist theories support this exploration of CRT subjectivities and processes of discourse appropriation. Using collective biography methodology as re-storied memory work, this article speaks back to neoliberal politics of casualisation. The stories draw attention to how both experienced practitioners and newly graduated teachers might ‘do’ category boundary work within the complexity of school politics as they navigate the uncertainty of gaining and maintaining employment in the Education market.

Examining Management History Through The Lens Of Critical Biography

This paper builds a case for using the qualitative methodology of critical biography to illuminate the life, times, and contributions of pioneers in the field of management history. First the importance of management history is discussed and the critical biography methodology is described. Then, the methodology is applied to management history through examining several articles using the methodology including articles about Mary Parker Follett and Rhona Rapaport. Pros and cons of using the methodology are discussed including approachability and high interest level as pros and necessity to make inferences and the close interplay between researcher and research as cons. Implications for future research are presented.

Imagining Social Justice

This article examines how creativity and the arts can assist teachers who teach from a social justice perspective, and how knowledge built through meaningful experiences of difference can make a difference. Just as imagining is central to visual arts practice, so too is the capacity to imagine a necessity for social justice. The authors ask what art can do, and how art can work, to bring about greater understandings and practices around social justice and the early years. A version of social justice that is built on a recognition of differences requires the capacity to be sensitive to the multiple voices that need to be heard, and the ability to imagine how lives might be lived differently. The arts can provide powerful means for thinking social justice, and the experiences described in this article can have application in addressing social justice in the professional preparation of prospective teachers. Three teacher educators who teach from a social justice perspective apply a collective biography methodology to their stories of art activity. Data was collected from three sites: transcripts, notes and digital images from a salon evening; ethnographic observations, field notes and artefacts from a school classroom; and a/r/tographic data generated in a university art classroom. The data was analysed using Foucault and the conceptual work of other post-structuralist philosophies in order to explore how aesthetic and creative artistic activity could excite imaginations and open up multiple possibilities for richer forms of educational outcomes — for teacher educators, their students and, ultimately, for young children.

The politics of contested narratives: biographical approaches to modern European history. Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Judt and Snyder Judt, Tony and Snyder, with Timothy. 2012. Thinking the Twentieth Century, New York: The Penguin Press. [Google Scholar], Thinking the Twentieth Century, xiii. 2. GRACEH (Graduate Conference in European History) 2010, ‘Biography and Identity: Dilemmas and Opportunities’, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, 6–9 May 2010. The conference was organised by Ilona Dénes, Emily Gioielli, Uku Lember, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Zsófia Lóránd, Caroline Marburger, Divna Manolova, Oana Sînziana Păltineanu and Piotr Wciślik and sponsors for the event included the CEU Departments of History and Medieval Studies, the Gerda Henkl Stiftung, the European University Institute (EUI) and the CEU Student Activity Fund. This conference was the fourth of an on-going conference series sponsored by the CEU, EUI and, most recently, the University of Vienna. 3. The interest in the concept and methodology of biography was inspired in part by issues of Ab Imperio which focused on the role of ‘imperial biography’ as a way to ‘bring together the rapidly disintegrating fabrics of imperial society’, as well as the American Historical Review, which published a round table on the historiographical potential of biography as it has been redefined by interdisciplinarity and increasingly popular non-national approaches to the past. See special issue of Ab Imperio, I. Gerasimov et al. Gerasimov, I., Glebov, S., Kaplunovski, A., Mogilner, M. and Semyonov, A., eds. 2009. “Narrating the Multiple Self: New Biographies for the Empire”. In Ab Imperio Vol. 1, [Google Scholar], eds., ‘Narrating the Multiple Self: New Biographies for the Empire’ (2009) and The American Historical Review, ‘AHR Roundtable’ (2009). 4. Banner Banner, Lois. June 2009. Biography as History. The American Historical Review, 114(3): 573–661. “AHR Roundtable”[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], ‘Biography as History,’ 580. 5. Banner Banner, Lois. June 2009. Biography as History. The American Historical Review, 114(3): 573–661. “AHR Roundtable”[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], ‘Biography as History,’ 580 6. Banner, ‘Biography as History,’ 581. 7. Judt Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, New York: Penguin Books. [Google Scholar], Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, 5. See also Wolff Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar], Inventing Eastern Europe, and Todorova Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans, New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], Imagining the Balkans. 8. Judt and Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, xiv.

Review: Salmond: Against the Odds

David Torrance's biography of Alex Salmond is the first on the SNP leader, though earlier books on Salmond had been planned by journalist Alan Taylor as well as by a celebrity biographer but never delivered. It follows on from other biographical works by Torrance on Conservative figures such as George Younger, Noel Skelton and Mrs Thatcher. Torrance is all too aware of the pitfalls of biography and discusses the nature and methodology of biography in the acknowledgements chapter of the book. Torrance has become an accomplished biographer, though some of these other subjects were made easier by access to material that does not exist in Salmond's case.

Friendship's Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England by Richard Dellamora (review)

YES, 36.2, 2006 273 presentation of the writer, particularly in relation to the mysterious gaps in her life. Alan Rawes examines Benita Eisler's treatment of a similar mystery in Byron's life, demonstrating how her emphasis on the poet's incestuous relationship with his half sister (of which there is no decisive proof) is influenced by Byron's own fictions and by the Romantic model of poetry as self-expression. Similarly, Gerard Carruthers highlights the Romantic elements in Lockhart's biographies of Burns and Scott, revealing, for example, that 'Lockhart's Scott-unforgivably in a biography-is very much a version of Scott's Scott' (p. io6). Of the remaining essays, two address issues of gender. Drawing on the work of Anne Mellor, Julian North considers the gendering of biography, particularly in terms of the shifting attitudes of biographers to the myth of the heroic masculine genius, while Jennifer Wallace compellingly shows how the contemporary focus on Keats's body feminized and etherealized him. Finally, Arthur Bradley examines the structure and methodology of biography more generally, using the work of Jacques Derrida to show how the dialectic presentation of the relationship between Byron and Shelley has excluded other ways of thinking about their creative friendship, finding in the winged laughter of 'Julian and Maddalo' a figure for an alternative mode of biography that resists dialecticism. Like many contributions to this excellent volume, Bradley's stimulating essay not only offers a powerful critique of the structures and methods of Romantic biography as it has existed for the last two centuries but, in its proposals for its future direction, reveals the continuing value and importance of the form. LANCASTER UNIVERSITY SIMONBAINBRIDGE Friendship's Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England. By RICHARD DELLAMORA. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. ii+ 264 PP. $47.50. ISBN 0-8I22-3813-3. This is a challenging and complex book, which begins with the question: 'What is the connection between citizenship and friendship inVictorian fiction?' (p. i). It focuses especially on the theme of anxiety around the corruptibility of male friendships, jux taposing concerns about the influence of Jews and homosexuals in British political and literary life from Dickens to Oscar Wilde, with Marx, Disraeli, and Gladstone as the key political polemicists. Discussion of canonical texts, such as Oliver Twist and Daniel Deronda, alternates with close readings of the less familiar, such as Dis raeli's novels Tancred and Alroy. The result is an intellectually demanding argument to which it is difficult to do full justice in a short review, but which uncovers the intimate undercurrents of homophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric underlying political and literary friendship networks when Victorian democracy was cautiously unfolding. The crucial starting-point, for Richard Dellamora, is the story of Lot, told in Genesis, which links together three core preoccupations of the Victorian establish ment. These are the concept of a chosen people; then that group of 'others' against whom the chosen group is defined; and finally, what Dellamora terms Lot's 'unseemly cosmopolitanism' (p. 4) in choosing to settle in Sodom, a place associated with 'unna tural' desires. Dellamora, however, develops aportmanteau interpretation of the term 'Sodomite', which encompasses not just homosexual practices, but a construction of the national subject dependent on 'a shadowy, abjected Other, namely the S/sodo mite'. As he goes on to demonstrate, with itswide-ranging implications, 'Sodomitic rhetoric has been a general feature ofWestern religio-political discourse' (p. i8). Perhaps the best way to give a flavour of the discussion is to focus on two stages of its development, from themore familiar texts. The chapter on Oliver Twist focuses on 274 Reviews the articulation of desire between men and boys, and the parody ofmentorship, which Dellamora connects with the values of citizenship. His discussion here includes ana lysis of George Cruikshank's famous illustration of 'Oliver Asking forMore', which, he argues-through Bumble's 'splayed stance' and Oliver's outsize spoon-hints at sexual impurities implicit in the text: a theme continued in the Fagin episodes, which begin with Oliver longing for relief from his bodily self. By the time we come toDaniel Deronda, Dellamora's argument has incorporated farmore of the...

Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: religion, individuality, and philosophical method

Relevant biography methodology problems of application implications for religion echoes and repercussions now I can go on.