Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces

Maria Tamboukou is Reader in Sociology and Co-director of the Centre of Narrative Research at the University of East London. Her research interests and publications specialize in auto/biographical narratives, feminist theories, Foucauldian and Deleuzian analytics, the sociology of gender and education, gender and space and the sociology of art. She is the author of Women, Education and the Self: A Foucauldian Perspective, In the Fold between Power and Desire: Women Artists’ Narratives and co-editor of Dangerous Encounter: Genealogy and Ethnography, Doing Narrative Research and Beyond Narrative Coherence.

«The most thoughtful integration of paintings and epistolary narrative that I know. ‘Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces’ shows how letters do more than depict the ‘real’ painter; the analysis problematizes the relations between visual and written texts. Insights from the author’s meticulous archival research with autobiographical materials engage dynamically with Gwen John's art work, resulting in a dialogic narrative about the complex subjectivity of a woman artist working in a male-dominated world. Drawing on contemporary theory, Maria Tamboukou offers a new analytic perspective on the relation between the visual and the epistolary, which will push the ‘narrative turn’ in social research in exciting directions.» (Catherine Kohler Riessman, Boston College)