Understanding ‘the other’: Situated meaning-making and narrative methodology

The Hub on Global Experiences of Gender in an Age of Care Crises and Transformation is excited to announce this event where Professor Molly Andrews will be discussing her paper that takes as its starting point that our attempts to understand the life world of another is a complicated business, especially as this meaning-making is fundamentally a dynamic process.  As Les Back (2007) writes “Making the social world hold still for its portrait can seem like gross violence, reducing its mutable flow to frozen moments preserved in the hoarfrost of realist description.” This social world includes, first and foremost, ‘other others’.  This paper will identify some of the key challenges which narrative researchers encounter in our attempts to capture this complexity, examining how the situated gaze enters our scholarship and the role it plays in the analytic process.

Molly Andrews is Honorary Professor of Political Psychology at the Social Research Institute, University College London, and the co-director of the Association of Narrative Research and Practice.  Her books include Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology and Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (both Cambridge University Press), and Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life  (Oxford University Press).  She serves on the Editorial Board of five journals which are published in four countries, and her publications have appeared in Chinese, German, Swedish, Spanish, French, Czech, German, Norweigian and Finnish. For more information, see https://www.mollyandrews.co.uk

Please register to attend this event in person via Eventbrite here. 

Alternatively, please contact us here to register for remote attendance with Zoom.