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This chapter provides an overview of existing biographical methods in health studies. The focus comes from the author's own efforts over the past few years to draw together a picture of some potentialities, challenges and possibilities of using biographical methods in health studies, both in research with marginalised groups and individuals, and in university teaching. This chapter came initially from the British oral history work in two different but highly politicised areas of HIV and AIDS, and prostitution work that the author undertook as a health promotion practitioner. Hence, in broad terms, the focus of this chapter is on oral history, life history and narrative approaches. Discussion in this chapter includes: the rise of biographical methods in health; the contribution of biographical methods in health; inherent tensions in the usage of biographical methods in health studies; interdisciplinary dialogue between professionals working in health disciplines and non-related-health fields; biographical approaches as therapeutic intervention; and health databases.

This chapter examines how biographical approaches can be used to enrich intercultural and anti-discriminatory practices and the ways in which racialised identities can be reproduced and challenged within healthcare services. It uses the case study of Maxine, a black Jamaican service user. The chapter begins by outlining some of the limitations in current approaches to professional practice in multicultural contexts and makes explicit how biographical narratives might be used to address and overcome these limitations. It also presents an analysis centred upon biographical accounts of the physical care of Maxine. In this analysis, the chapter links themes in biographical accounts of gendered and racialised violence, reports of Maxine's anorexia nervousa, and portrayals of her anxiety about being touched, lifted and washed in while in the care of the hospice. This chapter looks at the interrelations of the body, emotional and social, and how these narrated, produced and performed in biographical accounts, contribute to the understanding of the complex relations between white staff and service users racialised as ethnic minorities. The chapter ends with a discussion on how biographical narratives may be used to connect different sites of experience and to gain insight on the racialised experience in health care.

This chapter discusses the growing interest in the use of auto/biographical approaches in the social sciences. Narrative research and narrative analysis are umbrella terms that refer to data available in a variety of forms and produced for a variety of purposes. Such data can be spoken, written or visual. Narrative approaches are not allied to any one set of methods of data collection or analysis. Meanwhile, life history methods are guided by the aim to elicit life course transitions, their ordering, and their relationship to historical processes, social structure, and social institutions. Biographic-narrative interpretative methods and similar methods need to be supplemented by more conventional forms of interviewing if they are to address a study's objectives and research questions. The chapter then describes the life histories of two men, which illustrate changes in fatherhood across family generations. Ultimately, the type of approach examined in this chapter suggests the complex interplay between the way people speak about their experiences and the structures against which such talk needs to be understood.

One of the aims of this book was to outline a method-in-practice and to illustrate how it is possible to construct in-depth case histories from a qualitative longitudinal archive. This chapter begins with a discussion of the biographical methodology, outlining the value and importance of biographical and longitudinal approaches and explaining how case histories can be formed from the data archive of repeat in-depth interviews. It also formulates some of the challenges faced by those working with repeat interviews, and explores the boundaries between primary and secondary analysis that marks longitudinal research. The chapter then outlines the design of the original Inventing Adulthoods study, before describing and evaluating the analytic strategies employed in producing the case histories presented from Chapters Four to Seven.

This chapter examines four 19th-century biographer-critics of Emerson in order to address the notion of canonicity as it applies to the Gilded Age and, by implication, as it relates to the complex forces at work in any age. Canonicity here is revealed as less a matter of monolithically enshrining the dominant culture than it is an effort to establish a framework of established authors, within which fierce cultural struggles may take place as different parties with different agenda try to establish their Emerson as a “usable” ancestor who might inspire the present to create a desired future. From the beginning of Emerson's critical reception, commentators have sought either to contain the radical energies of his prose or to release them so as to effect social change.

After a lengthy period of neglect within the field of criminology, the study of men's violence on female partners gained prominence during the 1980s as a result of feminist activism and feminist research with victim and survivors. Attention was directed to the pervasive and extensive nature of violence against women, the greater danger posed by men that women knew, the continuous relationship between physical and sexual assaults and emotional abuse, and the criminal and dangerous consequences of this abuse. Yet, it was only in the mid- to late-1990s that British government tool a developed coordinated response to the problem of ‘domestic violence’. This chapter examines the way political posturing about male violence, which is prevalent in domestic violence work, can be subverted through biographical approaches that enable a more dynamic and analytical approach to notions of masculinity, and therewith more searching and effective practice. It also shows how, in the process of giving such help, worker's own biographies are inevitably brought into play.

Lawyers make politics, and international lawyers make international politics. Yet despite a few prominent judges or academic stars, the roles which jurists play as practitioners of international politics are often underappreciated or their juristic personas take a backseat behind those of the politician and the diplomat. In contrast, this volume sheds light on how lawyers in the past 300 years have made sense of, engaged in, and shaped international politics. The introduction sets out the main themes and aims of this endeavour, exploring how historiography, international law, and legal studies have dealt with jurists and lawyers so far; conceptualizing the practices and practitioners of international politics; and presenting an overview of the case studies assembled in the volume.

This chapter brings into dialogue a number of materially astute theories and methodologies in the humanities and social sciences to consider how we might conceive of the lives of objects in international law. It begins with everyday lives—the way law and objects are woven into daily existences, drawing on ethnographies of the lived experience of law. Second, it considers the social lives of objects and biographical approaches to the lives of things, making reference to anthropological ideas, museum studies, and history, as well as ‘life writing’ and biography. Third, it considers objects as vibrant, agentive actants, drawing on ideas from Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and science and technology studies (STS), thing theory, and also recognizing the long legal history of objects as agents. The chapter deliberately seeks to unsettle the legal and ontological categories of subject and object, to provoke reflection on how they are constructed and contested in international law.