In fact they are so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible: acknowledgements, homepages and bios. As Roland Barthes observes, “There is a prodigious variety of genres which can be used to accommodate man’s stories” (1975: 237) and in this paper I am going to focus on three which are commonplace in academic life. We need, in other words, to look at the non- fictional narratives that members of particular professional communities engage in to tell their stories. It is in our public representations that identities are recognised, modified and challenged - identity is not merely a self-representation but a public one, even if this is carefully manipulated to project the professional image we desire. The public voice is the one which is heard and when we explore identity it is how others see us, rather than what we do privately, that contributes to our persona. While I agree that we might understand, talk about and practice science in less formal and provisional ways, it is the public account which gets attention, accumulates credit and builds reputations. For them, published papers presented the “empirical” or tidied up versions of research designed for a public audience. If identity is really a performance and not an interpretive recounting then we need to explore narrative in the genres people routinely use in their everyday lives.ģ This position would, of course, be contested by those such as Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) who see interviews as a way of getting at “contingent” and therefore more authentic aspects of science. Most of the time we are not performing identity work by narrating stories of ourselves into a researcher’s microphone but claiming identities while engaged in doing something else. They have little real-world significance or consequences for the subject and are produced in a relatively formal and contrived context. The narratives they produce are a self-conscious assembling of experience for a complete stranger from the local university. Despite their popularity, however, I would argue that interviews are a poor means of understanding identity. Identity thus becomes salient and available for analysis, showing how people experience their lives as members of particular social groups. Identity comprises many narratives that a person constructs for him or herself which can vary with time and occasion.Ģ In other words, narrative theorists argue that by analysing the stories people tell about themselves we can understand how they make their lives coherent and meaningful. Giddens (1991) argues that self and reflexivity are interwoven so that identity is not the possession of particular character traits, but the ability to construct a reflexive narrative of the self. The underlying emphasis is on reflexivity and the belief that storytelling is an active process of summation, where we re-present a particular aspect of our lives. The idea is that identity can be explored through the stories we tell about ourselves, tapping into the accounts that individuals select, structure and relate at appropriate moments. Narratives in the social sciences, particularly those elicited through biographical interviews, have become the preferred method of data collection for researchers interested in identity and the connections between structure and agency (e.g. 1 Most simply, a narrative is a spoken or written account of connected events: a story.
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