Narrative analysis is an analytical method that accommodates a variety of approaches.Through these approaches, social researchers explore how people story their lives. This is also a process through which researchers understand the complexities of personal and social relations. Narrative analysis provides the researcher with useful tools to comprehend the diversity and the different levels involved in stories, rather than treating those stories simply as coherent, natural and unified entities (Andrews et al., 2004). It is this approach to narrative analysis, which we shall call the constructionist approach to narrative analysis, that we aim to explain in the chapter that follows.Constructionism has a strong recent history within social sciences (Burr, 2003; Holstein and Gubrium, 2008;Sparkes and Smith, 2008). What we describe as a constructionist approach is very often adopted, in many of its features, by contemporary narrative researchers. The approach is distinct, first, as Holstein and Gubrium (2008) suggest, because of its critical take on naturalism, and in consequence its attention to the diversity, contradictions and failures of meaning, research participants' own generations of meaning, and to the mutual constitution of meanings between participants, researchers, the research context and the wider context -where 'context' refers to many different levels and complex relations of power. However, the constructionist approach has also a great deal in common with
This article discusses the complex and multilayered notion of class in the lives of Iranian women migrant doctors in Britain. Addressing classed identities in skilled migrants' lives and professional belonging, the article first examines the construction of foreignness and the problem of belonging for a groups of doctors and dentists who lived in different cities in Britain in 2009–11. Second, drawn from the first point, it discusses the notion of “deserving to belong.” This article suggests that these highly political narratives should be read within an intersectional framework in order to understand the complex issues involved in the lives of skilled migrants.
This article analyses the political and media discourses on Roma in Hungary, Finland and the UK, in relation to both the local Roma in these countries as well as those who migrated from and to these countries following the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. To do so the authors have analysed left-wing and right of centre major newspapers in these three countries, focusing on specific case studies which were foci of public debates during the last twenty years. In addition they examined a common case study in 2013 (‘Blond Maria’) that was discussed throughout Europe. The article examines the constructions of Roma, both local and migrant, in each newspaper and how these have changed over the period studied in this research. The conclusion of the article examines the multi-layered processes of social and political borderings which dominate discourses on Roma, ‘indigenous’ and migrant, and the extent to which they constitute a coherent ‘European’ construction of ‘the Roma’
This paper analyses the pedagogical pathways of a group of first--generation Iranian migrant doctors in the UK. It explores the complex system of class production and growing up as a classed subject in Iran, a process that ties young women's educational aspirations to female independence on the one hand and to the modern feminine, heterosexual identity that sees women as part of the patriarchal family system on the other. By using Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu 1984) and Foucault's theory of surveillance (Foucault 1984), this paper analyses how migrant women's trajectories of becoming highly educated are translated into their roles as mothers. Three major aspects of pedagogical trajectories are identified in the formation of classed selves: the first is the generational surveillance within families, particularly of girls by their mothers; the second is the normalisation of pathways and the importance of destined pathways that separate certain families, practices and choices in superior positions; the third is the moralising of educational choices, which distance being a doctor from classed consciousness, giving rise to an altruistic self as opposed to a selfish one.
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