Kip Jones talks about Biography, Auto-biography, and Creativity

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.  

*This article appeared by invitation of the editors in Sage Publications’ MethodSpace special issue on Creativity, June 2019.

The Big Night

I was assisting Trevor in a fitting for a white formal shirt attached to boxer shorts. Supposedly, these are designed so that the shirt doesn’t ride up making one look untidy over an evening. It’s the sort of thing that the male dancers on Strictly* wear, I am told. I didn’t quite understand why moral support was needed for this fitting, but then yards of piqué cotton tugging at your nether region might be a bit disconcerting. At least for the first time.

I then rang Fiona as requested. After a bit she answered.

“Who is this?” she said in a disguised voice, but I knew it was her.

“It’s Kip about your to-do list”.

There was a deep sigh from the other end.
“Oh! We’re under high security alert and have been told to be particularly careful on the telephone!”

“I’m sorry to hear that”.

She was often overly dramatic, sometimes without reason.

I tried to calm the situation. “I have completed all the tasks on the to-do list that you gave me”.

Fiona loved to-do lists almost as much as she loved talking on the phone. I dislike both. She wasn’t going to let me off lightly this time though.

 “Oh, you’re a star!” “What a champion!” “You make us so proud!” She gushed these phrases, which she was known to use frequently, like verbal hashtags.

I escaped further conversation (and the next to-do list) by feigning that something was wrong with the phone line. I think I even made silly static sounds into the mouthpiece like I’d seen on TV.

The Big Night was upon us!

*Strictly Come Dancing is a BBC entertainment programme where B and C list celebrities try to raise their status by dancing with professional ballroom dancers on TV. Some do become more famous, some even marry their dance partner.  A lot of legs akimbo hanky-panky does go on after rehearsals. Or so we are told.

Redefining What Gender Means for Universities in the 21st Century

Generation Zed: “fluid” and “ambiguous” are watchwords

 

A blog piece entitled, “Thoughts on Gender in the 21st Century University Environment” is live on Sage’s Social Science Space from today. The article was inspired  by the recent FHSS Research Committee’s call for dialogue on Gender and Research and informed by an earlier Workshop on Gender and Sexuality in the 21st Century held at Bournemouth in 2017.

 

In the article, Kip Jones asks academics to pause for a moment and reconsider our definition of gender at a time when the very concept of gender is becoming more fluid for many in the wider population, and particulary amongst youth. The article suggests that “it may be time to redefine the terms by which measurements are made concerning gender in the university workplace. Vocabularies need to reflect more precisely the cultural changes in gender that are taking place both within and outside of the University”.

 

Jones and the Project Zed team have formed a working group for a proposal for a study to engage GenerationZ teens in developing their own stories on gender, sexuality, and socialisation. The teens will then create a YouTube broadcast series of their own design and production. The Project Zed team includes members from FHSS and FMC, working across several disciplines.

Kip Jones Revisits: "What is the Essence of Qualitative Research?"

Written almost fifteen years ago now, I return to "What is the essence of Qualitative Research?" in an era rife with qualitative researchers and wannabes in a hurry to get qualitative work done. Using terms such as 'analysis' makes them feel important and scientific, possessing special abilities that others can only aspire to.

No, qualitative research has always been particularly about being human. By being human I mean sometimes unsure, befuddled and even confused. That's all okay. It's about a humanness that speaks to being alive and searching for aliveness in others through the work that we do. 

In qualitative research, the tyranny of numbers is abandoned for the enigma of words. It is often seen as rooted in a non-tangible domain, fundamentally experiential and intuitive. 

 _____________________________________________________

Qualitative work is in constant, dynamic flux, but moving toward some end-point in an evolutionary way.

 

There are efforts by the mind to concretise meaning and the qualitative dimension has an integrative function for the researcher.  Unity provides context and meaning and it is toward such unity that the researcher is striving.

Qualitative efforts make use of that part of the person concerned with meaning, truth, purpose or reality—the ultimate significance of things.

Not mere exercises in truth or falsehood, however, these investigations are polyvocal attempts at interfacing with cultural/relational/linguistic accounts of the real.  They are, therefore, interpretations and not truths in the positivistic sense.  The potential of intuition is ultimately a great advantage to this very process. 

‘The social sciences need to re-imagine themselves, their methods and, indeed, their “worlds” if they are to work productively in the 21st Century’ (Law & Urry 2004).

Qualitative research is no longer the poor stepchild of quantitative enquiries.  Over the past twenty years, qualitative research has come into its own, particularly in terms of wider acceptance in academic and policy communities.

• Qualitative research is always about story reporting and story making.
• Narrative is a democratising factor in social science research. 

Interpretations of narrative stories strive to capture meanings behind life events at the individual and family levels, often illuminating the social contexts of health, ill health and social care needs. Stories become data within other fields as well, including business, media and even hard science.

One of the virtues of qualitative research is its inclusionary nature and ability to give people a voice, both through the research process itself (for example, through a wide range of qualitative social science practices that include participatory action research, in-depth interviewing, ethnographic studies, visual anthropology, biographic narrative studies and so forth) and in reports, documents and presentations. The importance of this kind of research cannot be overemphasised, particularly when dealing with the disadvantaged and/or the "seldom heard voice". 

An anthropological approach to social science studies

Definition: Anthropology is the science of the nature of humankind, embracing Human Physiology and Psychology and their mutual bearing.

Narrative is a core element of anthropology because it provides access to people’s life worlds.

Adopting a narrative rather than an empirical mode of inquiry allows investigators to get closer to the phenomena studied in several ways:  

1. First, the narrative provides access to the specific rather than the abstract; 

2. Secondly, narratives allow experience to unfold in a temporal way; 

3. Thirdly, everyday language and its nuances are encouraged; 

4. Finally, narrative permits dynamics to reveal themselves in the actions and relationships presented.

Anthropology advances knowledge of who we are, how we came to be that way and where we may go in the future.

We see the lives of others through lenses of our own grinding and they look back on ours through ones of their own’—Geertz 

Anthropology seeks to uncover principles of behaviour that apply to all human communities.

Social constructionism, as described by Kenneth Gergen (1985), maintains that knowledge, scientific or otherwise, is not obtained by objective means but is constructed through social discourse. No single point of view is more valid than another, because all points of view are embedded in a social context that gives them meaning. ‘Such a view does not obliterate empirical science; it simply removes its privilege of claiming truth beyond community’ (Gergen, 1997). 

   

All truth is local

·        If truth is local, then knowledge can be mined

·        in the self,

·       the family,

·       the community

    

An era of emergent knowledge

We occupy ‘a world that enacts itself to produce unpredictable and non-linear flows and more mobile subjectivities’ (Law & Urry 2004)

French educator Pierre Lévy (1991; c. 1997) believes that profound changes are occurring in the way we acquire knowledge and supports the potential collective intelligence of human groups through emerging spaces of knowledge that are continuous, evolving and non-linear.  Lévy states that since the end of the 19^th Century the cinema has given us a kinetic medium for representation (Lévy, 2003b: 3).  In fact, ‘we think by manipulating mental models which, most of the time, take the form of images.  This does not mean the images resemble visible reality, they are more of a dynamic map-making’ (Lévy, 2003b: 4). 

Rethinking our relationship within communities and across disciplines such as the arts and humanities offers up opportunities for us to move beyond imitation of “scientistic” reports in dissemination of our work and look towards means of representation that embrace the humanness of social science pursuits.  This creates a clearing in which meaningful dialogue with a wider audience is possible, feedback that is constructive and dialogical in its nature becomes feasible, and dissemination of social science data transforms into something not only convivial, but also even playful.  Presentations can then evolve into ways of creating meaningful local encounters and performances, in the best sense of these words. 

Collaborations offer us opportunities for meaningful dialogue between disparate communities, opening up unknown possibilities for future dialogues and associations.  Co-operation itself, therefore, becomes a creative act, often stretching the boundaries of our understanding and prodding us to come up with fresh and innovative ways of overcoming practical obstacles in knowledge transfer. 

 Knowledge-sharing is sought that is

Emergent

Collaborative

Local

Producing knowledge that is

Inquisitive

Performative 

Sensuous

Emotional

Kinaesthetic

‘A fluid and decentred social science for knowing the world allegorically, indirectly, perhaps pictorially, sensuously, poetically…’ (Law & Urry 2004).

‘I seek an interpretive social science that is simultaneously auto-ethnographic, vulnerable, performative and critical’ (Denzin 2001).

Credits

Clifford Geertz Anthropologist

Thomas Scheff Sociologist

Yvonna Lincoln Educationalist

Norman Denzin Sociologist

Mark Freeman Philosopher of Psychology 

John Urry Sociologist

Pierre Lévy Anthropologist of Communication

Rom Harré Philosopher of Psychology Science Language and Thought

Kenneth Gergen Social Psychologist

John Law Sociologist

Mary Gergen Social Psychologist and Feminist

 

Creative Writing for Academics Workshop

RUFUS STONE Screened at Arts Festival

The award-winning, research-based biopic RUFUS STONE was recently screened three times daily at the Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival.

My co-author and co-editor on several occasions, Trevor Hearing, took these photos of the film being watched (or not as these things go) at the Festival.

 

 

Trevor and I wrote about the process of creating the short research-based film, RUFUS STONE here 

Eight years on, the continuing interest in RUFUS STONE is astounding.