1st Edition
Interviews as Activated Storytelling Contexts and Subjectivities
List of Contributors
Foreword: Away from Standardization
Amir B. Marvasti and Jaber F. Gubrium
Part I: Contexts
1. Interviews as Activated Storytelling Occasions
Amir B. Marvasti and Travis B. Saylor
2. Immigrant Belonging: Meaning-Making in Three Interview Modalities
Erika Gubrium, Uddhav Khakurel, and Lukundo Nalwamba
3. Life as A River: A Metaphor to Activate Marriage Migrants’ Life Stories
Hsiao-Chuan Hsia
4. Navigating Small-Town Complexities: Unraveling Attitudes Through Ethnographic Research
Amelia Paterno and Karyn McKinney Marvasti
5. Locating the Interview Content and Purpose in Shifting Interpretive Contexts
Susan E. Eichenberger
6. Contextual Dynamics in Interviewing in Institutional Settings
Andrea Leverentz
7. Activism and Artfulness as Interpretive Contexts in Interviewing
Eileen O’Brien
Part II: Subjectivities
8. Activating Subjectivities in Research Interviews
Courtney Marciá Gardner, Shannon K. Carter, Eric W. Schrimshaw, J. Scott Carter, and Lindsay A. Taliaferro
9. Researching, Interviewing, and Cowriting the Experiences of a World War II Pilot
Jared Frederick
10. Activating Prospective Hindsight Through Rehearsal Studios
Mark Luborsky
11. Role Fluidity and Interpretation Shifts in Interviews
Lara Foley
12. Minding the Whens, Whats, and Hows in Social Movement Oral History Interviews
K.L. Broad
13. Multi-Active Research Interviews
Lene Tanggaard
14. (Re)activated by Objects: Interviewing with and Beyond Unimodal Dialogue
Mirka Koro, Anani M. Vasquez, Christie C. Byers, and Amalie Strange
Afterword: Context, Reflexivity, and Standardization
James A. Holstein
Index
Biography
Amir B. Marvasti is Professor of Sociology at Penn State Altoona, USA. Amir’s research focuses on identity management in everyday encounters and institutional settings. Using a symbolic interactionist framework, he approaches culture, discourse, and social institutions as interrelated and ongoing practices that collectively shape the self in a social context. His empirical research in this area examines how people (e.g., the homeless) present themselves to others, particularly when required to explain their backgrounds and intentions; and how their self-presentations are related to whether they are helped or accepted by others. Extending his interest in identity management to the subfield of the sociology of emotions, his current research looks at how people narrate their emotions in ways that reinforce gender stereotypes.
Jaber F. Gubrium is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Missouri, USA. The working premise of his research program is that no system of social rules is robust enough to understand its everyday application. Areas of study informed by this are aging and the life course, health and illness, human service organizations, constructions of family, institutional selves, and narrative analysis. Applying a critical constructionism, the goal is to make visible the assemblages of meaning that rationalization erases. Centered on the comparative ethnography of human service settings, he continues to explore and document novelty and pattern in troubles/problems reflexivity within the framework of what Erving Goffman called the “interaction order” and in tandem with a concertedly local brand of Michel Foucault’s concept of “discursive practice.” Jay is also a founding and former editor of the Journal of Aging Studies.
