Life History 2.0: Returning Life History to Hermeneutic Theory

• In Event: Narrative Methods? Beyond Methods “Experts” in Relocating Narrativizing Philosophies in the Curriculum

Abstract

The purpose of this research reflection on life history is to relocate life history beyond narrative “methods” and emphasize life history writing and reading as the practice of hermeneutic theory.

Specifically, this reflection reviews recent life history research “methods” critiquing their tendencies toward essentializing humanisms of “subjectivity,” “experience,” “society,” and “history.” Signaling other potentials in life history, this reflection recalls poststructuralist-influenced life history literatures in curriculum theory (Cary, 1999, 2006; Munro, 1998) and the human sciences (Denzin, 1989) for what, in retrospect, seems “left on the table” in their current marginalization or partial incorporation. Analyzing these life history literatures for other potentials, this reflection emphasizes the notion of subjectivity-as-textual-production (Denzin, 1989) for advancing life history in the present. Identifying other potentials in poststructuralist influenced life history literatures, this reflection finds further conceptual support for life history 2.0 in recent understandings of narrativizing identity and contemporary autobiography. Synthesizing these conceptual supports, this reflection recapacitates life history as life history 2.0 by developing provisional narrativizing concepts: identifications, boundedness, recoding, and identification creativity. These provisional narrativizing concepts help to reorganize life history not as a research “method” that provides a special window in subjectivity, experience, society, history, and other essentializing humanist concepts but rather as the practice of hermeneutic theory that understands subjectivity-as-textual-production within broader social-political-historical discursive narratives. In this understanding, the practice of life history reading and writing is not strictly a research “method” that provides a view into essentializing humanisms of subjectivity, experience, society, or history. Rather life history refers to the careful, thoughtful, and extensive reading and situating of texts for understanding best described in hermeneutic theory (Dilthey, 1926/1992; Gadamer, 1960/2001; von Humboldt, 1836/1992).

Using these provisional narrativizing concepts as hermeneutic philosophy, this reflection provides a pedagogical demonstration to articulate life history 2.0 in-action using life story interview texts from the author’s research. Finally, this reflection describes life history 2.0’s other potentials in advancing life history 2.0 for the careful reading and writing of historically-linguistically-embedded-and-mediated identifications. In describing life history’s other potentials, life history 2.0 begins to moves beyond discussions of life history as narrative research “methods” and toward an understanding of life history as hermeneutic theory aligned with curriculum theory.

References

Cary, L.J. (2006). Curriculum spaces: Discourse, postmodern theory, and educational discourse. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Cary, L.J. (1999). Unexpected stories: Life history and the limits of representation. Qualitative Inquiry 5(3), 411-427.

Denzin, N.K. (1989). Interpretive biography. London: Sage.

Dilthey, W. (1992). The hermeneutics of the human sciences. In K. Mueller-Volmer The hermeneutics reader (pp. 148-152). New York, NY: Continuum. (Original work published in 1926)

Munro, P. (1998). Subject to fiction: Women teachers’ life history narratives and the cultural politics of resistance. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Gadamer, H.G. (2001). Truth and method. New York, NY: Continuum. (Work originally published 1960).

von Humboldt, W. (1992). Foundations: language, understanding, and the historical world. In K. Mueller-Vollmer The hermeneutic reader (pp. 98-105). (Work originally published 1836)

Author

• James C. Jupp, Georgia Southern University