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The Personal Is Political, but Is it Academic?
MARY PATRICE ERDMANS
We must learn to conceive of the present as history in the making.
—Daniel Bertaux, Biography and Society
Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.
— Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
IN THE LAST SEVERAL decades, an increasing number of scholars have begun
to appreciate the art of life-story telling found in narrative methods.
These narrative methods—oral histories, life stories, personal narratives
and autoethnographies—are used by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists,
in feminist and cultural studies, ethnic and minority histories, and postmodern
theories. They represent a critique of traditional scientific methods that
posit a duality between the subject and the object, that ignore power relations
between the researched and the researcher, and that privilege the academic
voice over the everyday voice. In contrast, these new forms blur the object/subject
divide, situate people within power relations, and try to let people speak
for themselves.
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