Interviews as Activated Storytelling

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.

• Introduction Part I: Contexts 1. Interviews as Activated Storytelling Occasions 2. Immigrant Belonging: Meaning-Making in Three Interview Modalities 3. Life as A River: A Metaphor to Activate Marriage Migrants’ Life Stories 4. Navigating Small-Town Complexities: Unraveling Attitudes Through Ethnographic Research 5. Creating Meaning Together: Researcher as Participant, Collaborator, and Interpreter 6. Contextual Dynamics in Interviewing in Institutional and “Free” Settings 7. Activism as an Interpretive Context for Interviewing Part II: Subjectivities 8. Activating Subjectivities in Research Interviews 9. Researching, Interviewing, and Co-Writing the Experiences of a World War II Pilot 10. Activating Prospective Hindsight Through Rehearsal Studios 11. The Active Respondent 12. Minding Whens, Whats, and Hows in Social Movement Oral History Interviews 13. Multi-Active Research Interviews 14. (Re)activated by Objects: Interviewing with and Beyond Unimodal Dialogue Afterword