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

Researching adult learning combines the very best presentations from the Third Nordic Conference on Adult Learning. This volume covers the broad field of adult education. The contributions come from researchers in Northern Europe and include a South African perspective in the field of adult learning.

Researching Adult Learning

Communication, Collaboration and Creativity

Both interest in and understanding of narrative analysis had developed rapidly in recent years and is now a mainstream element of research across many disciplines. In the groundbreaking Telling Lives: Exploring dimensions of narratives, the author illustrates as many facets as possible of the stories people tell about their lives. She demonstrates the interconnectedness between engagements in narrative research and shows that the theoretical understanding of the nature of narrative is bound up with the methods for biographical narrative research. Through a combination of three independent, connected narrative dimensions, an embodied, a cognitive and a socio-cultural narrative, the author focuses on life story narratives as symbolic expressions where cultural constructions allow for interpersonal interaction. This book also outlines the influence cultural and social environments have upon our own unique narrative memories coupled with our own physical movements in space. The author concludes that the telling and exchanging of human narratives is the primary way of making sense and creating meaning of our own being. This book brings together neuro-physiology, philosophical perspectives and research data and methodology to formulate a new understanding of narrative analysis. It will also help you to produce and analyze your own narrative interviews and perform biographical research. Innovative and thought-provoking, this book will cut across disciplines and be of interest to all students at advanced undergraduate and post-graduate level and researchers in Education, Social Sciences and Humanities.

Marianne Horsdal

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