LIAS Seminar Series: Adventures with Sociological Storytelling

Join us online for a seminar with University of Leicester's Professor John Goodwin

Get Ready for the LIAS Seminar Series!

Join us online for Adventures with Sociological Storytelling. The routes into sociology are many and varied, with the process of ‘becoming’ a sociologist widely considered in the reflexive journeys that established sociologists recount. Such auto/biographical stories reveal chance encounters, fateful moments, influential authors, guiding teachers, significant experiences, and more. For the last few years, I have systematically used autoethnographic storytelling to examine social class to consider how I (a working-class school failure from a mining community) became an academic sociologist. Such autoethnographic stories can be exploratory, used as starting or end points, and revelatory in form and process. In the presentation, I will use guiding questions from C. Wright Mills (What are the specific intersections of history and biography?) and Norbert Elias (How did I get here? How did ‘this’ come to be?) to examine three stories of class: Socks on the Settee (work), Learning to Read (school), Holidays By The Sea (holidays).