Storying Bourdieu

Abstract

While the conceptual system developed by Pierre Bourdieu has been sporadically employed within the context of life history research, the complexity of this task has often not been appreciated. This article offers a provisional attempt to explore how Bourdieusian sociology might approach life history material, focusing specifically on conceptual interpretation rather than data collection or the practicalities of data analysis. This article is self-consciously not forwarded as a coherent or finalized ''Bourdieusian theory of the life history''; rather, I offer a series of fragmented insights that may be useful to future scholars working in this context. In particular, I note the importance of methodological eclecticism to Bourdieu, the concept of the ''social trajectory,'' the consideration of self-narrative as strategy, the interrogation of habituated assumptions, the role of symbolic violence, and the notion of the ''cleft habitus.'' I conclude by contending for the importance of capturing the complexity of life history material using multiple, overlapping, and potentially conflicting heuristic paradigms.

The educational experiences of children in care across five decades: A new perspective on the education of looked after children in the UK

“…McAdams (2008) suggests that in early adolescence, individuals begin to construct a narrative of their lives in order to make sense of who they are and how they fit into society. This ‘storying’ of life is compatible with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (Barrett, 2015), being reminiscent of his notion of ‘social trajectory’, a consideration of positions occupied within a social space. By understanding the participants’ interview responses within the ‘fields’ in which they were recalled, i.e., the social fields of being ‘in care’, ‘in education’ and ‘a care leaver’, it was possible to focus on how education was understood by the participants themselves.…”

Doctoral theses

“…Fortunately, Bourdieu also provides a means of resolving this ambivalence. As Barrett (2015) observes, Bourdieu is consistently adamant on the requirement to resist 'any unilateral, unidimensional and monomaniacal definition of sociological practice' (Wacquant, 1989, p. 54) and instead advocates for 'reflexive considerations of any attempt to formalise understandings of social life' (Barrett, 2015, p. 3). Such considerations were facilitated within my own analysis via the framework's questions.…”

Career, Class, and Social Reproduction in the Life Stories of Outsourced Cleaners

“…By reflecting the impacts of multiple socializations performed by institutions such as the family, organizations, religion, and education, life stories situate social actors in a broader collective story (Barros & Silva, 2014), thus constituting a "non-linear access to scientific knowledge of the social system" (Bueno, 2002, p. 20). A Bourdieusian approach to life stories allows the unveiling of the generative structures present in the field and the habitus, which are conditioning factors of an unequal structure of possibilities (Barrett, 2015).…”