Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 1a
Futures, expectations and imaginings
Tuesday 7 September, 2 - 3.30pm
'Vital scripts?: Expectations and experiences of 'married' life' - Dr Anna Einarsdottir and Dr Brian Heaphy (University of Manchester)
Research suggests that newly wedded couples have clear expectations of marriage and are likely to compare their own with those of others. In our ESRC funded study, Just like marriage? Young couple's Civil Partnerships, we explore what young same sex couples expect of formalised commitments and the relational scripts they draw on and generate in their ‘married’ life.
Our approach is based on semi-structured interviews where couples are first interviewed together and then separately. The first part of the couple interview allows partners to intuitively tell their relationship story. This exercise has demonstrated that same sex couples have relatively limited expectations of their ‘marriages’ and rarely offer a comparison with other couples. When asked directly, couples tend to frame expectations as changes to their own relationship and for the most part, they don’t expect their relationships to turn out like other marriages they know.
In this paper we consider how our approach to interviewing generated stories of same sex married life as vital and dynamic, and of other marriages as lifeless. We explore the tensions between same sex couples’ narration of themselves as married but as different to other marriages, and link this to how claims to intimate citizenship are scripted via ordinariness and individuality.
'‘I just think of all the water and the rain washing through him’: postmortem imaginings and the practice of natural burial' - Andy Clayden, Prof Jenny Hockey and Trish Green (University of Sheffield)
This paper derives from a 3 year ESRC-funded study of the practice of natural burial which explores the diversity of interpretations of a concept which, at its initiation in 1993, was a clearly-defined commitment to the ecologically-sound disposal of the dead. Those now burying naturally in one of over 230 UK sites may choose between mortuary environments that range from corners of municipal cemeteries to the grand landscapes surrounding stately homes. Stereotypically associated with a tree planted above the corpse, in practice burying naturally occurs in many different ways. We ask how site users imagine what is to come: for the site itself, which at the time of burial may look more like a farmer’s field than ancient woodland; for the body of the deceased as it goes ‘back to nature’ in what might appear to be a relatively anonymous environment; for themselves as bereaved people. These data will be compared with interview material from owners/managers of these sites which examines the relationship between owners/managers’ occupational histories and how they anticipate their sites developing. Our focus, then, is the resources through which individual users envision a future landscape, a body decaying without the boundaries of kerb sets or cemetery walls; and their own emotional well-being as bereaved people for whom memorialisation at the grave will not be the ‘stuff’ of their future relationship with the deceased. To what extent, we ask, do these imaginings mesh with those of site owners/managers?
'Jigsaws with missing pieces: research imaginations and children’s lives' - Prof Allison James (University of Sheffield)
For the majority of social researchers the luxury of carrying out long-term fieldwork with a limited number of informants or conducting repeat intensive interviews over a long period of time is disappearing. Now, the data we collect often tends to be narrowly based and problem–focused derived from one-off interviews, with people we have just met. But despite the apparent limitations of such an approach, when compared to the riches stemming from traditional ethnography, the data produced can, nonetheless often be comparably rich and insightful. This paper argues that one of the explanations for this apparent paradox lies in the role that the imagination plays in the research process: as we listen to people accounting for particular aspects of their lives so we may enliven those accounts by filling in the missing pieces of the jig-saw. Unconsciously or consciously our imaginations intervene.
And in research with children, the inevitably of this process becomes particularly nuanced since children share in our predicament. When being interviewed about family life, for example, their knowledge may be incomplete and so, just as researchers do, they have to piece together the bits they have to hand when telling us about their families. For the researcher working with children therefore imagination may be doubly present: in the words and ideas of the children with whom we speak and in our interpretation and understanding of the words they give to us.
Untangling these relationships will be the focus of this paper.
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