The
following is a transcript* of Kip Jones’ contribution to interviews on
biographic research conducted by Joanna Thurston and Louise Oliver, Jones’ colleagues
at Bournemouth University. The pair interviewed Jones for their film, "It's not
research, it's just stories!" first screened at the British Sociological
Association Auto/Biography Study Group Conference, in December 2018.
Interviewer: How did you first become involved with
biographical methodology?
Kip Jones: Using biography as a method started with my PhD.
I studied the
Biographic
Narrative Interpretive Method with Tom Wengraf and Prue Chamberlayne.
At the time, I was having a kind of
methodological panic because people at the university were trying to convince
me to explore new approaches to research. Nonetheless, I thought I needed to
have a method that was strong and that I could defend. In my previous life as a
painter, I did very narrative paintings so the narrative component, at least,
made some sense to me.
I: How do you face any challenges that come up when
conducting biographical research?
K: Well, when I started out, I was a scared PhD student and
studying the method at the same time as starting to do the interviews. This
made it very difficult to do anything out of the ordinary. I wasn’t initially
aware that perhaps the people whom I was interviewing were not going to follow the
method exactly as I had been taught! Sometimes that became a problem. One woman
said, “I’m not going to answer your (‘single narrative-inducing’) question
because it’s against my religion” and she basically tried to shut the interview
down. So that was challenging, believe me. I got an interview, but I was
panicking during most of it!
At first, I had a very Pollyanna approach to the subject of
my PhD interviews, informal care. My assumption was that what informal carers
did was out of compassion and altruism. In most of the cases, that wasn’t true
at all. It was like “a can of worms” would open up at every new interview. The
interviewees would go into their stories of very complex backgrounds,
particularly in their childhoods. It turned out that the people whom I
interviewed all had one thing in common: they felt unloved
as children. That was really counter to what I had expected and a
disappointment in a lot of ways for me. It was difficult at first to accept
that my premise had been wrong. Nonetheless, I really was learning a great
lesson: we do research to discover what we DON’T know, not to prove what we
already know or think we know.
I: How do you justify your use of the methodology and how do
you justify your choice?
K: Well now I don’t worry about justifying it, I really
don’t. I’m driven by my passion for what I’m exploring; that’s what’s important
to me. I’m still, however, conscious of being methodologically sound, but not
in a prescriptive way. I’ve really learned to trust my instincts in terms of
things like
ethics.
Any good researcher learns to do that, I think.
That’s the stuff that really matters to me. I find it unfortunate that
some researchers don’t develop that ‘sixth sense’ around ethics. They would
rather go to a committee and have them tell them what’s ethical and what’s not.
In doing social research, you’re always going to come up against complex
situations. You have to be prepared to deal with that using the skills that you
have developed and, yes, your intuition. There will always be choices involved.
We really must develop our own ethical compasses.
I’ve become very interested lately in a concept that I call
“audience”—that could be a reader of a book or a journal article, or someone
viewing a film, or a student in a classroom, or someone in a conference hall.
We have a real responsibility to the end-receivers of the work that we are
doing. It’s something that’s really important to take into consideration—who’s
going to be at the other end of all this research? Do we take the audience into account when
building the dissemination of our research?
I: Can you tell us about your last ‘triumphal experience’ of
conducting biographical research?
K: Well, of course the film,
RUFUS STONE. When I was beginning to
develop
Performative
Social Science, or using tools from the arts in research, particularly for
dissemination, I became interested in the possibility of working with
film.
That developed out of experimenting
with (or abusing!) PowerPoint and later video. I think that because of my art
background the visual was very important to me at that juncture. It still is.
Our team submitted a research proposal for a
project
on older LGBT citizens who had experience of living in the British
countryside. We were successful and got the money for the project, which
included the budget to make a film. That was ten years ago and today, the film
still has legs, which is amazing. People continue to ask me to show it, do
Q&As at various venues, and exhibit the film. The irony is that RUFUS STONE,
which is not only about older people, but also older people 50-60 years ago, is
seen as relevant to youth today. This fact has inspired a
project
on Generation Z, sexuality and gender that we are just beginning to get off
the ground.
I: How do you feel that biographical research has evolved in
the wider research community in terms of acceptance?
K: Once again, I think it’s about story and story is, more
and more, a big part of people’s lives. The one thing that became clear to me
through this process was that even when I’m telling someone else’s story, I am
telling my own story. It’s very important as a researcher to keep that in mind
and remember that. Just the simple fact that there is something about us or in
our background that makes us interested in a subject or a person whose story we
want to hear, what we’re going to include, not include—things like that—it’s so
much about us! For example, a situation that
happened to me was a real break-through, an ah-ha moment. A guy started telling
his story and when he got about 20 minutes in, I realised that he was telling
my story. This is very freaky when that happens and particularly with a method
where you can’t say anything! Like, “please stop!” Or “How dare you be telling
my story!” I then began slowly to realise was that my own story was part of all
of the stories I was hearing. I had to
look at my own past as well. That’s when I started writing about my own life. Because
the story of RUFUS STONE is so emotional, I needed to find the poignant components
in my own life so that I could imbue the characters with the emotive aspects of
their lives for the film’s narrative.
For instance, I started writing about the
back-story
of the characters, using things that had happened in my childhood. I was writing
about Rufus and his grandparents (who are not in the film at all). I thought
about my own grandfather and I remembered sitting on my grandfather’s knee, his
grandfather clock ticking away in the background. I wrote about that experience
of mine as part of Rufus’ memories. I added the fact that the clock would then end
up in his parents’ farmhouse where Rufus grew up. In this way, the clock became
a central ‘character’ in the film. That all came from my story, my biography,
not from any specific person whom we interviewed. Yet, it fit a theme in the
film’s story: inheritance (both physical and psychological) from generation-to-generation,
the passage of time, and how things change or don’t change over time. So, the
whole idea of my ‘self’ being involved creatively in my writing—I’m very
comfortable with it now.
I: How would you advise an early career researcher or
someone considering using this method for the first time in their research?
K:
In terms of the
Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method, I would say, ‘Take the training’.
It’s a complicated method and you will feel more confident as a researcher if
you have the training behind you. It’s odd, I’m a very creative person and yet,
I’m very methodical in the way that I do things. Knowing the rules is necessary
in order to be creative. If I get all the ‘instructional’ stuff out of the way,
I won’t have as much anxiety. “Am I doing this the right or wrong way?” Eventually,
I am confident enough to ask myself, “What would I change? How would I do it
differently?”
Remember: you can’t change
anything unless you know the rules first. That’s what
creativity
is all about.
