Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 5b
Belonging, history and memory
Thursday 9 September, 9.30 - 11am
'Telling family histories: Story-telling and interior lives' - Dr Anne-Marie Kramer (University of Warwick)
Family history is both extremely popular and pervasive in British culture. Part of its attraction is its capacity to reclaim attention for the formerly ‘unseen’, to make space for the ‘intangible’, the dead, the deliberately forgotten, the misplaced and the over-looked.
In so doing, family history centres the imagination, memory, feelings and the role of story-telling. These are the elements of social and personal life which sociological research has traditionally failed to capture, but which people find fascinating in their personal lives. In this paper I want to explore what a focus on family history can offer to our understanding of how connectedness, relatedness and affinity function to mediate and structure personal and family lives. Drawing on findings from my Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship on the cultural status of genealogical research, in particular, I will argue that focusing on family history offers the researcher access into the imagined, narrativised, and lived lives of respondents, simultaneously as individuals and as family members. Further, given that family history encourages reflection on la longue durée, I will also describe how family history allows us to explore how the self and the family is consciously situated as shifting and contingent in time and social space.
'Practices of Belonging' - Julia Bennett (University of Manchester)
How does the process of belonging to a place reveal itself? Is it possible to explicate ‘belonging’ as distinct from other feelings? Looking at the world through the intersubjective relationships which make up concrete life histories, I am exploring how families who have remained in one place for several generations embody ‘localness’, a shared ‘stock of knowledge’ passed on from one generation to the next which can be accessed through familial biographical stories along with more mundane accounts of day-to-day life.
I am specifically researching the practices inherent in being ‘a Wiganer’ through biographical interviews with multiple generations of each family, resident over several generations in the area of Wigan, in the north west of England, and photo diaries created by respondents over the course of a week to capture their everyday life.
The different life-stories over the generations highlight the family and community practices which constitute ‘localness’. Diaries record seemingly unimportant details which serve to draw out the tacit knowledge that is available to members of the community; including photos with the diaries allows a unique insight into how they view their life-world. Each picture of a familiar place has multiple stories attached to it: ‘Leigh. Looks funny when you take its photograph. This big red building used to be the Co-op and both my parents worked for the Co-op, not this one but you know the whole Co-op movement and that’s how they met.’. Each picture is a palimpsest, tangible buildings hiding intangible memories.
'Capturing everyday belongings' - Dr Vanessa May and Dr Stewart Muir (University of Manchester)
In this paper we examine ways of capturing people’s everyday belongings. In particular, we focus on the difficulties in researching an experience that is both intangible and multidimensional. A sense of belonging is central to how people construct a sense of self and how they relate to the world. Belonging is therefore a common concept that is seemingly easy to study. It is however often a ‘seen but unnoticed’ and intangible experience that people have trouble verbalising. Furthermore, a sense of belonging is multidimensional in that it can be constructed in relation to for example relational, cultural or sensory reference points. Consequently, ‘belonging’ can mean different things to different people, and the researcher might not stumble upon it easily. We examine these issues in relation to a mixed methods study on inter/generational dynamics that we are conducting with a sub-set of respondents from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. In particular, we address the creativity that is required on the part of the researcher who wishes to study belonging.
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