Brian Roberts

Andrew Sparkes

Maggie O’Neill

Rooted in a long and diverse genealogy, biographical approaches have developed from a focus upon a single story, a ‘life story’ and personal documents (e.g. diaries), to encompass (more routinely) autobiographical secondary and archival research and analysis - as well as multi-media, arts based creative multi-sensory methods. Biographical Research and practices as part of human understanding helps people to make sense of what has been and what is happening in their lives, cultures, communities and societies. Advances in Biographical Methods: Creative Applications takes up these themes: theorising, doing and applying current advances in biographical methods. It demonstrates the momentum with which they areas are developing as a field of scholarship, especially in relation to creative innovations and applications, such as in new forms of interview and other practices, and debates on its interlinking with art, performance and digital methods.

Creative Applications

Advances in Biographical Methods

Martti Silvennoinen

This book contains stories which are experienced and written by ten white, middle-class, academic men and one woman from Australia, Finland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the USA. What is it that brings authors separated by such long distances together to write stories? Why have these stories been told? All are based on autobiographical narratives stemming from the authors' own experiences or from their interpretations of stories told by other men. Many of the story-tellers are ex-athlete, so to speak, able-bodied men. But, what happens when this feeling of masculinity begins to change or even disappear? What does it mean when a familiar body becomes troublesome, disruptive, alien, or even anguished? This book opens an interesting and fresh avenue in the 'city' of gender studies. It is a rather unusual book in the field of social science - unusual in a positive sense. The book can be recommended to students and teachers working in fields engaged, whether practically or theoretically, with the living body. Take your own place as a reader. -back cover.

Talking Bodies

The text aims to provide an in-depth exploration of a range of traditions that are beginning to reshape the nature of research in physical education and the sports sciences. The chapters are all original contributions by leading scholars that bring together new data from a variety of research approaches. Each offers its own specific challenge to the orthodoxy that has dominated the field. A range of traditions are considered by the contributors who provide specific examples from their own work that include phenomenology, ethnography, life histories, discourse analysis, feminist research, curriculum history and action research. These cases are highlight for the reader the basic assumption of each approach, the significance of the understanding they develop, and their potential for the future development of research in physical education and sport. The forms of analysis provided should be of interest to a wider audience, such as students of education and the social sciences. It is aimed at physical education researchers, BEd, MEd, BSc, MSc courses on physical education and sport and teachers of sports science.

Andrew Sparkes

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