Advances in Biographical Research – serie

What are the building blocks of the new societal architectures after COVID-19? What are the evolving lifestyle patterns, social connections and relationality, and what can biographical research bring to explore these unprecedented societal circumstances?This first book in the new series Advances in Biographical Research focuses on the place of biographical research in analysing and shaping social futures characterised by physical distancing and isolation, social fragmentation, trauma and vulnerability, including breaks in biographical trajectories. Written by experienced and early career researchers, it demonstrates how biographical research responds to new societal architectures: theoretically and empirically.

Drawing on decades of pioneering research – including his celebrated study of Parisian family-run bakeries – Daniel Bertaux demonstrates how asking participants to narrate the concrete details of their daily work reveals the tacit knowledge, relationships and processes that sustain entire ways of life. Clear, rigorous and richly illustrated, Life Stories equips readers with the theoretical grounding and practical tools to integrate this method into their own research. It shows how to collect, analyse and present life stories, from single-case investigations to comparative studies, demonstrating their power to illuminate broader social realities.First published in French in 1998, Bertaux’s classic text has been translated into several languages but has never been made available to English-speaking audiences. This new and updated English edition will help sociologists in the English-speaking world gain deeper insight into the lived experiences that shape our societies.

The early 2020s brought a torrent of disruptions – COVID-19, war-amplified inflation and migration blockages – that reshaped global labour in uneven and deeply unequal ways. Across the Global North and South, vulnerable workers faced deteriorating conditions, fractured livelihoods and growing distrust as chronic uncertainty was compounded by socio-economic and political shocks.Moving beyond policy-driven models focused on human and social capital, this edited collection offers a variety of novel biographical and relational approaches to studying resilience that all centre on workers’ lived experiences, histories and networks. Drawing on rich fieldwork across multiple countries, the authors show how past crises, care obligations and collective ties both enable resilience and generate new burdens.Bridging biographical research methods, social reproduction theory and development studies, this book shows that resilience is a relational process shaped by inequality, gender, migration and labour struggle.