Linden West

Laura Formenti

Marianne Horsdal

This book derives from an intense collaboration among colleagues from various countries under the auspices of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) Biography and Life History Network. As is described in the opening chapter, the Network has been meeting over many years, with an especial focus on processes of adult and lifelong learning, interrogated through the lens of auto/biographical and narrative studies. The Network brings together researchers from many and diverse countries across Europe - North, South, East and West - and the wider world, as evidenced in this present collection. Auto/biographical and nar-rative methods, we suggest, generate rich and deep insights into the lived experience of learners, and encourage many and varied connections in thinking about and interpreting them. This includes an interdisciplinary imagination, and challenge to an overly cognitivist, disembodied, and dis-connected view of learners and learning. This is the third publication emanating from the Network, alongside many and diverse research collaborations. What is so important about the work is how different language communities and academic traditions combine together to challenge the solipsism and isolationism that can too often bedevil academic writing, especially when English has become the dominant language of exchange and debate; and where writing can draw on a relatively narrow, Anglo-Saxon dominated literature. This book, and ESREA more generally, is a challenge to what easily confines the intellectual imagination. There are a number of people we would like to thank in helping us with the project and the 'challenging' processes of editing: not least Helen Reynolds who has been a tower of strength in working through, with us, various draft chapters and sensitively and carefully negotiating with particular authors around questions of meaning and English usage. And there is Roselina Peneva, who helped with the formatting alongside countless others who have assisted with the organisation of various conferences, of which this work is an important expression.

Connecting Stories, Bodies, Cultures and Ecologies

Embodied Narratives

Winner of the AAACE Cyril O. Houle Award This book constructs a deepening, interdisciplinary understanding of adult learning and imaginatively reframes its transformative aspects. The authors explore the tension at the heart of current understanding of ‘transformative’ adult learning: that while it can be framed as both easy and imperative, personal transformation is in fact rooted in the context in which we live, our stories and relationships. At its core, transformation is never easy – nor always desirable – and the authors thus draw on interdisciplinary and auto/biographical inquiry to explore what it means to change our presuppositions and frames of meaning that guide our thinking. Using their linguistic, gendered, academic and cultural differences, the authors illuminate how the social, contextual, cultural, cognitive and psychological dimensions of transformation intertwine. In doing so, they emphasise the importance of transformation as a contingent struggle for meaning and recognition, social justice, fraternity, and the pursuit of truth. This engaging book will be of interest to students and scholars of transformative learning and education.

Laura Formenti

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