Personal Narratives, Relational Selves: Residential Histories in the Living and Telling

Abstract

This article is set in the context of debates about how far social identity and agency should be seen as individualised or relational concepts. It examines how people in a qualitative study in the North of England constructed personal narratives about their residential histories. These were fundamentally about identity and agency, because they centred upon 'what mattered' more widely to the narrator, and upon what had constrained or enabled action and change in their life. The narratives were characterised by contextuality, contingency and in particular by relationality. Four styles of relational narrative are explored: relational inclusion and co-presence, relational participation, relational constraint and conflict, and relational individualism. Overall, it is argued that both agency and identity need to be understood relationally, and that through their narratives people in the study were constructing relational selves. It is suggested that a misreading of personal narrative as an individualistic discursive form has fuelled the hold of the concept of individualism on popular and sociological imagination, in the face of increasingly compelling empirical evidence about the extent and nature of people's connectivity with others.

Examining the Dynamics of Energy Demand through a Biographical Lens

“…Narrative and biographical research approaches have been highlighted for the ways that they can attune to practice theoretical conceptualizations of social action and change (e.g. see Mason 2004). Building from concerns mirrored in practice theory, the biographical research tradition has generated an empirically grounded "sophisticated stock of interpretive procedures for relating the personal 6 and the social" (Wengraf et al 2002: 246) and researching in ways congruent with this conceptual tradition.…”

The Relational Approach and the Family

“…The combination of relationality with practices (Morgan 1996) challenges the idea of relationships as unalterable because genealogically given. However, it must be noted that an emphasis on relationality (Mason 2004) does not per se connote relationships as positive but refers to their influence on the daily choices of individuals.…”

‘I Can't Settle If It's Not Tidy; I Blame that on My Mum’: Exploring Women's Relational Household Work Narratives

“…In this context, individualisation can be viewed as a discourse by which people make sense of their lives in their narrative accounts, emphasising autonomy and downplaying structural aspects (Brannen and Nielson 2005). While this may influence the way in which people construct accounts in which they are 'choosing, deciding and shaping ' (Beck and Beck-Gernshiem 2002: 22-23), and which emphasise values of independence and self-sufficiency, these accounts also rely on a relational sense of agency and identity (Mason 2004). …”