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The design and implementation of Life Story Intervention involved close collaborations with rural adults who worked in a professional capacity with children. This chapter presents the account of a community professional's experiences in conducting Life Story Intervention with two young adolescent boys in foster care because of their parents' methamphetamine misuse.

Chapters 5 and 6 draw on the same corpus of material (individual interviews with German-speakers in Hungary and the Czech Republic) but in different ways and for different purposes. In this chapter, the authors look closely at ways in which narrators make experiences with language an organizing/ structural element in their life stories: what is it about ‘my’ encounters with different languages – their evaluations, the times and places associated with their use, their possibilities and limitations/ constraints – that have made my ‘life’ what it (in my estimation) is or has become, as opposed to what it might have been?

In this chapter, the key ideas, concepts and approaches identified in the Introduction are elaborated and explained. Central to the argument here is the concept of discourses on language in social life and the interconnectedness of ideologies, policies, practices, experiences, and memories. The authors also explain here the methodologies of data gathering and analysis underpinning the study: the case studies, the data collection process (documentation, interviews) and the participants, describing in some detail the many types of background and experience of life within the corpus. The chapter shows how and why the approach in the data-based chapters (4, 5 and 6) is to explore in different ways how discourses on language are constructed: through the analysis of language policy discourses, individual narratives as life stories, and the negotiation of identities in narratives.

The second chapter seeks to put into practice the ideas expressed in the first. It takes as its basis three people for whom Superman has been meaningful in different ways. Specific folklore genres become prominent in these case studies: tattoos and life stories. Based on interviews with the three people, the chapter posits a continuum of affinity, the notion that people appreciate the character to different degrees and for different reasons. For Jeff Ray, Superman is a connection to his childhood and his family as well as a way to think through his life after completing school. For Jodi Chromey, Superman provides a mirror through which she reflects on her own position in her family. For Kristina Johnson, Superman serves as a means with which she can cope with developing neurological problems.

This chapter discusses how the life of the folk was proceeding under the Soviet rule. Based on life stories collected by the Estonian archives and Latvian oral history projects, this chapter is about deportations to Siberia and the making of collective farms and changing of peoples’ lives altogether. It is also about the context in which folklorists worked.

As in Chapter 5, the authors here look at ways in which individuals navigate their passage through the changing and sometimes turbulent circumstances of their lives through the accounts they give of their personal experiences with language but from a different angle and focusing more on processes of group identification. This entails analysing the narratives as discourses on language and identity, drawing out the relationships between language ideologies and individual practices. This analysis provides insights into some of the ways in which changes in social and political conditions are refracted through personal experience and emerge in individual narratives as expressions of personal (re)alignment with particular social groups in relation to particular times and places.

This chapter focuses on the voices of ex-legal sex workers and their narratives about their time in brothels, why they decided to leave, and how they view their past lives. The perspectives of former sex workers are often different from the women currently working in the brothels, and thus these reflections present an even more nuanced understanding of life in and out of the brothels. This is a particularly vulnerable population; some of the women have moved on to illegal prostitution while others are currently in non sex-work jobs, trying to conceal their past. The women share detailed stories and perspectives about their lives in the brothels and their current realities after leaving legal prostitution. Rather than presenting their words broken apart into themes, we present each woman, her story and her experiences together so that readers can begin to see what life is like for a few women as holistic beings.

This chapter discusses mental disability and ageing. It is based on life-story interviews with older people who have long personal experience of mental disability and of psychiatric care. The analysis reveals how the mental illness tended to become the pivot on which almost everything else in life turns throughout the lifecourse. Growing old to these mentally disabled people appeared to differ radically from “normal” ageing. The interpretations made by the informants entailed neither the qualitative down-grading suggested by the “decline ideology” of old age, nor the positive experiences proposed by “the ideology of successful ageing”. The chapter shows how the stigmatized social role of the mentally disabled seems so strongly internalised by the informants that it overshadows and outweighs other roles connected with the transition into old age. In the light of the informants' reflections on their lives, the authors discuss the extensive changes in society's way of organising care and treatment of mental illness.

The implications of language deprivation for identity development in deaf people are not frequently treated in the literature. For this chapter, a deaf anthropologist/social scientist and a hearing deaf educator partnered to explore the implications of language deprivation for deaf identities and present strategies to encourage the internalization of positive deaf identities in the face of limited linguistic input. The reader will find descriptions of the impact of language deprivation from a global perspective on two periods of the life course: early childhood and young adulthood. To counteract this deprivation, the authors describe research-based interventions that combine language and identity development using creative visual and digital approaches of storytelling and exposure to Deaf role models for both children and young adults.

The introduction explains the selection and range of countries that are covered by the book and offers a brief historiography of the field. It also discusses the use of life stories in intellectual disability history and analyses the differing roles that eugenics had placed in this history. An overview of chapters is then followed by a discussion of the complexities of language in intellectual disability history generally and in a transnational approach in particular. This section then brings some of the main themes of the book, in particular the role of families, problems of exclusion and inequality, the formation of out-groups and the question of progress. Finally the section discusses future possible transnational approaches in this field of study.

This chapter examines the self-reported stories of African American lives to extrapolate dominant themes related to worldview, self-understandings, and the dynamics of meaning-making in connection with the engagement of selected texts. Velma E. Love and her research team listen to life stories narrated by African American seminary students at a seminary, a member of the African American Hebrew Israelites, and a Yoruba/Orisha priest. Their analysis suggests that a fundamentalist orientation may meet a psychosocial need for certainty and stability when faced with change and uncertainty and represent a form of agency and self-empowerment, a redemptive strategy and form of rejection of mainstream society. In other words, the group found that the “texts” that constitute scriptures were used to sustain these students and help them reconfigure their world when necessary.

This chapter looks at the last of the four memory communities that dominate the public discourse of collective memory about the civil war in El Salvador. This fourth group, comprised of rank-and-file members of the guerrillas, as well as two low-ranking army soldiers, is defined by a common narrative that emerges from its members’ life stories. The narrations come almost exclusively in the form of testimonials (testimonios), life stories usually delivered orally by poor and illiterate people to outsiders who oversee their publication. The narrators celebrate the joys of collective action, but they see themselves as facing distinct challenges, and therein they separate themselves from the comandantes. They reject the comandantes’ vanguardism; they describe the darker sides of the war that the comandantes gloss over; and they are more pessimistic about the post-war era. Thus, the life stories of former army soldiers and former guerrilla combatants share many narrative traits.

Do monuments have lives that justify writing their biographies? And if they do, are their lives punctuated by events and structured by relationships, similar to human lives? Do they have an identity of their own, and does this identity change over time? In addition to introducing the Çemberlitaş Hamamı briefly and providing a literature review of the topic of hamams, the introduction takes up these questions and examines the notions of individuality and biography within the Islamic and Ottoman context. Furthermore, it justifies applying the format of a biographical narrative to the history of the hamam.

This chapter looks at the first of four memory communities that dominate the public discourse of collective memory about the civil war in El Salvador. This first group, comprised of civilian elites, is defined by a common narrative of the war that emerges from the elites’ life-story narrations, either self-written memoirs, or autobiographical interviews that have been published. Adhering to a rigid version of economic libertarianism, the members of the civilian-elite memory community see themselves as an aggrieved minority that has been subjected to the expropriating tendencies of left-wing insurgents and anti-communist reformists. The elites’ narrative explains their disproportionate wealth as having been rightfully earned in a free market place. Thus, they describe anyone who wants to undermine their earnings or structure society differently as being tantamount to a thief, including their own military governments and modernizing segments of the U.S. government.

Barbara K. Seeber argues that Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering feminist theorist, also offers considerable insights into the relationship between human beings and nature. Wollstonecraft sees commonalities between human beings and other animals; she attributes sentience and emotion to animals and accords them ethical consideration. Anticipating ecofeminism, Wollstonecraft sees cruelty toward animals as part of a broader matrix of gender, class, and species oppression; tyrannical behavior toward animals and toward other human beings is mutually reinforcing. However, Wollstonecraft’s perspective on nature goes beyond moral consideration for animals: her written observations of the Scandinavian landscape assess the environmental degradation wrought by human beings and also break down the distinction between subject and object, as she immerses herself in an interactive, reciprocal relationship with the natural environment and also sees agency in the landscape’s nonhuman inhabitants. Incontesting the subject/object distinction, Wollstonecraft also criticizes, as patriarchal and oppressive, the ideal of the detached observer of nature.

This chapter looks at the third of four memory communities that dominate the public discourse of collective memory about the civil war in El Salvador. This third group, comprised of former guerrilla commanders (comandantes), is defined by a common narrative of the war that emerges from the comandantes’ life story narrations, either self-written memoirs, or autobiographical interviews that have been published. This chapter covers the comandantes’ lives up to the start of war in 1980/81. The narrators focus on their youth, their decision to join the guerrillas and their efforts to build their militant organizations. They unfold a series of expositions and complications, including factionalism within the left, fear of detention, the joys of collective action and their relationship with their rank-and-file combatants. Their narrations are unified by a description of El Salvador as needing revolutionary change, which they, as vanguardists, see as their duty to lead.

This chapter looks at the second of four memory communities that dominate the public discourse of collective memory about the civil war in El Salvador. This second group, comprised of former officers in the Salvadoran military, is defined by a common narrative of the war that emerges from the officers’ life-story narrations, either self-written memoirs, or autobiographical interviews that have been published. The officers’ narrative revolves around a main premise: defending the armed forces as an institution. Thus, all officers, regardless of their differences, narrate the civil war in similar wars. The officers’ narrative is defined by a recurrent state of contradiction: they defend economic reformism as necessary, and criticize it as being communist; they accuse civilian elites of causing the war, and celebrate them as fonts of capitalist modernity; they hail the United States for aiding El Salvador, and accuse it of meddling in their affairs.